Jewel was singing when I felt two eyes on me, someone’s muffled voice trying to engage. “What? Sorry.” I pulled out my earbuds, still unaware that from that moment on, You Were Meant for Me would make me nauseous.
“I was asking where you play tennis,” the man repeated, this time grabbing the end of my racket, which was slung over my shoulder in its black case. I looked down at his hand on my racket, an ouroboros tattoo decorating the fleshy webbing between his thumb and index finger. I pulled the case back toward my body, inching away from him, hoping not to offend. Even then, I knew you didn’t want to set people off, especially strangers in the subway.
He was probably 35 or 36 but only a few inches taller than me, his short dark brown hair hanging just above his eyebrows. He looked like puberty hadn’t done what it was intended to do for him. His skin was too smooth for a grown man’s, his mouth too animated - pink and glistening.
“Roosevelt Island,” I said. My friend and I had a lesson under the bubble there each Sunday morning.
“Oh yeah? I’m a racquetball player,” he responded. “Where do you go to school?”
“Hunter,” I told him, immediately kicking myself for not coming up with a lie.
“Really? Me too. I go to Hunter College.” My high school was part of the city university system in New York and had a college counterpart thirty blocks south of our building on the Upper East Side. In any case, this man didn’t look like most of the twenty-something-year-old college kids who went there. “How old are you?” He asked.
“Fourteen,” I said, noticing as his eyes widen.
“I was with a fifteen-year-old once,” he told me. It was the pedophile’s version of the sales tactic I’d later learn was called the foot-in-the-door technique. Or maybe he was using the pick-up artist’s technique that guys would later explain to me as peacocking. Either way, this conversation was only getting weirder. I turned away from him, hoping some benevolent, preferably large, stranger might overhear our conversation. All I could do was hope that being with a fifteen-year-old didn’t mean exactly what I thought. “Do your parents let you date?” He asked.
“I don’t really know,” I answered, taking that as my queue to leave. I took off down the platform toward the exit - my heart pounding hard in my chest, my legs pumping fast beneath me. Terrified of the possibility he might be following me, I whipped my head around, hoping he couldn’t sense my fear. He probably got off on it - feeling powerful enough to make me run. From fifty yards away, I spotted him moving purposefully toward me, picking up speed. I took off sprinting––striding up the subway steps to the platform above, three stairs at a time. The six train doors were shutting right as I reached the top of the stairs.
If it hadn’t been for some passenger at the front end of the train wedging their body between the closing doors I would’ve been trapped - my body between his and the tracks. I was onboard, hot tears streaming down my cheeks, relieved to be on a train speeding in the opposite direction. I wanted someone to see me and take me in, to hold me close. And didn’t want to be bothered by anybody at all.
I replayed that conversation for months, recalling the exact details of what I’d revealed to him about my movements and my whereabouts - half expecting him to be standing outside my school as I left the building each day, ready to follow me home.
It wasn’t until a Tuesday evening ten years later at a bar in the West Village that I saw that face again. It was the type of place populated by regulars getting a drink just a little too late on a weeknight. He looked older, but still unsettlingly unformed. Oddly youthful still but not in an attractive way - more like he’d aged quickly but not grown old. He must’ve been nearing fifty. He sat slumped at the bar, somewhere between sober and drunk - his shoulders rounded, his face devoid of any particular expression. I got up from my stool to walk past him, resolving to confirm whether he was who I thought he was - to see if a spark of recognition might flash across his face - but nothing.
For every time I’d thought about him in the decade since - for all the times I’d avoided that particular train platform, for all the times I’d turned my body away from friendly strangers - I doubted I’d even crossed his mind. As I walked away from him, I turned my head to see whether he was once again watching me from behind, on my tail. This time though, I’d gone entirely undetected, having aged out of his demographic years ago. In the bathroom, I washed my hands under the too-hot tap water, deciding what exactly to do when I got back out. I’d slap him across the face. I’d wait until he cashed out at the bar and follow him home, revealing myself only when I was at his door, firm in the conviction that he should know that I knew where he lived. When I got back to the bar though, I froze, my body choosing instead to do none of the above.
All I could focus on was his hand, which gripped a sweaty PBR - moist with perspiration and darkened by an inky snake-like phallus penetrating its own womb.
Emma Burger is a writer and young professional working in oncology research. She splits her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan and New York City. Her debut novel, Spaghetti for Starving Girls, was released in September 2021. You can also find her work in Across the Margin, Idle Ink, and the Chamber Magazine.