The Society #StalkerProblems

by Ivy Smoak

  Amira turned away while I rolled over, pulling the towel up to my neck for good measure.

  "Okay, ready," I said when I was all covered.

  "Just lean back and relax." She put fresh cucumbers on my eyes and dribbled some oil on my shoulders. Then she started massaging. At first her touch made me tense, but little by little, the tension melted away... God, I was so sleepy. Vodka hangovers made it hard to sleep. But now I was finally vodka-free. I yawned. I could actually get used to getting massages. They were so relaxing…

  Suddenly, I woke up to searing pain right above my vagina. "What the fuck?!" I screamed. My eyes shot open and I tossed the cucumbers on the floor. Amira was still massaging my neck while two other women dressed in masseuse clothes stood by my legs. One of them was holding a strip of cloth covered in little red hairs. I was completely naked, and the pain was them waxing my freaking vagina. The pain was worse than the embarrassment though, and that was saying something. Ow.

  Amira pressed behind my ears to try to relax me. "It's okay," she said. "That was the most painful part. The rest is not as bad."

  I covered my breasts with one hand and my vagina with the other. "Who said you could wax me?" Oh God, how do I get out of this? Where had my towel gone? It hurts so fucking bad!

  "Part of the Society Special. Just sit back and relax."

  That was easier said than done, especially when I was bare-ass naked while two women yanked the hair off my privates with hot wax. If this was Liz's idea, this is fucking weird. And totally out of character for her. A massage would have been expensive enough, but a waxing during a facial? That must have been at least like $200. Liz would never splurge for that. Maybe it was...

  "Ow!" I yelled again as they pulled off two more strips of hair. I did a quick calculation to decide what would be less awkward. My options were to either lie there completely naked while two strangers waxed my privates or jump off the massage table and run out of the place screaming with some kind of strange half waxed hoo-ha. Somehow, lying there naked was the lesser of those two evils. And anyway, I was already in too deep. They were already half done. I decided to at least use the experience to try to get more info about the mysterious letters. I kept my hands on my breasts, even though any sense of modesty was way out the window. "Do you have a copy of the charges for today? I want to make sure my billing address is correct."

  "Sorry, I do not understand," said Amira. Her accent suddenly sounded thicker.

  "What can you tell me about the Society?"

  Amira just stared at me blankly.

  Maybe I'm dreaming, I thought. Yes, that was it. I had to be dreaming. Because no spa would put a customer to sleep and then start waxing their vag without permission. This was all just a bad dream. That explains everything.

  Yes, it was a weird dream. But whatever. There was probably a perfectly normal explanation for it. Was getting a Hollywood wax subconsciously my deepest desire? If it was, I blamed it on the trophy wives at my spin class. They were always perfectly smooth - not a stray hair to be found in that locker room.

  I didn’t think that was it, though. It was more likely that the wax was just preparing me for my real deepest desire: my stalker. Any minute now he’d walk through the door and we’d bathe together in the pool. And it would definitely be germ and centipede free. And I’d straddle him under that water and…

  "Turn over please," said Amira.

  I opened my eyes and looked down. My vag was all smooth. Well, kind of. It looked the way I imagined a chicken would look if it was freshly plucked and very sunburnt. Thank God the wax is over.

  I flipped over and eagerly awaited the arrival of my stalker in my dreamlike state. Instead, I got hot wax slathered all up in my ass. It surprisingly didn't hurt very much when they tore the strips away.

  "All done," said Amira. "See, not so bad." The women all left the room.

  Is this when my Stalker appears? Or maybe Hassan. Oh God. Not Hassan. My dream was quickly turning into a nightmare. I hopped off the table and pulled on my clothes. I’d had enough. Dream or not, I was getting the hell out of here. I needed to give this place a zero-star review. At least they never got a chance to upsell me on bath salts, because I couldn’t afford anything in this place.

  Chastity was waiting for me in the reception area.

  "How was it?" she asked, her face flushed with excitement. "If yours was half as good as mine..."

  "Let's get out of here," I said. Apparently it wasn’t a dream.

  "That bad, huh? Next time you'll have to get Hassan. Hey, what happened to your arm?"

  "My arm?"

  "Yeah." Chastity pointed at my arm. There was a Band-Aid on the inside of my elbow with a little dot of blood right in the center. It looked like I had gotten a shot. Or given blood.

  What the hell did they do to me while I was asleep?

  Chapter 7 - Literally Dying

  Thursday

  "Okay, weirdo, let's say they did inject you with something. What are your symptoms?" asked Chastity.

  I lay back on my couch and put a pillow over my eyes. I was too young to die. There were still so many smoothie flavors I had to try. "My head hurts. And my teeth. I think I have a cavity."

  "Which tooth?"

  I pushed my tongue against my front teeth. "My front ones."

  "What?” Chastity pulled the pillow away from my face. “How would you even get a cavity in your front teeth?"

  "I don't know. Maybe that's a side effect of being injected with embalming fluid."

  "They definitely did not do that." Chastity plopped onto the couch next to me as she scrolled through more articles on WebMD. "You'd be dead."

  "I wish I was dead. It would be better than suffering through this slow, painful torture. What else would cause head and tooth aches?"

  "I don't know. You look it up." She tossed me her phone.

  I bobbled it like a hot potato and sent it flying back at her. "I can't."

  She just stared at me. "It's pretty simple. You just go to the symptom checker..."

  "Oh no, I definitely know how. I'm just not allowed."

  "Says who?"

  "My mom. Sophomore year I had a mole on my head. I looked it up on WebMD. The next day I had scheduled appointments with a dermatologist, oncologist, gynecologist, and podiatrist."

  "Podiatrist?" asked Chastity, sounding more shocked than I’d expected. "Aren't those people that molest children?"

  No. That’s a pedophile. "I guess if a kid with a foot fetish went to one it could get a little sketchy, but generally, no. Anyway, who knows what would have happened if my mom hadn't stepped in. I think I would have just made them amputate."

  "Your head?"

  I shrugged. "I was convinced it was the only option." And it still might need to be done. My hand wandered up to the little bump on the back of my head. The dermatologist had assured me it was just a normal mole, but I had a feeling she was lying. It was definitely skin cancer. And it had been haunting me for years.

  "Alrighty then," said Chastity. "Maybe it's best if we log out of WebMD for a bit and attack this from a different angle. What possible reason could they have had for injecting you with something?"

  "To murder me. God, I should have listened to my gut. Creepy letters that keep showing up unexpectedly have serial killer written all over them." My stalker was definitely involved in this. I hadn’t been in my normal spot on Tuesday, so he must have freaked out and gone full serial killer on me. I knew he was nuts.

  "Okay, that's one option. What else?"

  "To kidnap me. Redheads are probably a hot commodity in the human slave trade in Casablanca."

  Chastity shook her head. "Unlikely. Highly unlikely. With over 14 million Berbers in Morocco, redheads are actually quite common there. I'd put my money on natural blondes being worth the most."

  "Since when do you know about the demographics of Morocco?"

  "I mean, it's kind of impossible to fully grasp the geopolitical climate of Northern Africa without studyi
ng the Berbers."

  Where the hell is this coming from?

  "And I’ve heard the Berbers have really big dicks."

  I nodded. Now it all makes sense. "Back to the topic of my impending death. What if they're using me as a guinea pig for some new drug? Any minute now it'll probably kick in and I'll suddenly think I'm an orange and start peeling myself." Actually, now that I think about it...I kind of do feel like an orange. I pulled on a strand of my hair and looked at it. Orange! I let go and blew it out of my face.

  "If you were their lab rat, they'd need some way of following up. As far as I can tell, they have no way of getting you to ever come back. Especially now that you're pissed at them for injecting you."

  "Maybe they just didn't think it all the way through."

  "So they didn’t consider basic things like that, but they took the time to make elaborate letters and envelopes? That doesn't make sense."

  "Okay then, genius," I said. "What do you propose they injected me with?"

  "Maybe it was some sort of relaxing serum. For all we know that's a perfectly normal part of a Moroccan massage."

  "Shouldn't you know that, Miss Berber Facts?"

  Chastity rolled her eyes. "Berbers are nomads, not wax techs."

  "Okay, then you'll have to trust me. Injections are definitely not part of a Moroccan massage. They lured me there for a reason..."

  Chastity snapped her fingers. "That's it!"

  "What?"

  "The letters. The Society. It all goes back to that. If we can find information on the Society, then we'll know what they're up to."

  That was actually a good idea. I ran over to my laptop and googled the Society.

  The first result was for something called The Society International, which the website claimed was a brotherhood created by a New York Times bestselling author. The site was fairly vague, so at first I thought it might be it, but then I noticed that the branding didn't match the letters. The font wasn’t the same, and there was no sign of the logo that had been pressed into the wax. And there was nothing about injecting innocent women with random drugs.

  The next link went to the homepage for a branch of the Church of England.

  "I think that's them!" said Chastity.

  "The Church of England?"

  "Yeah. They lured you to the spa so they could molest you. Those filthy podiatrists."

  I stifled a laugh. "First, that's Catholics. Second, podiatrists deal with feet."

  Chastity scrunched up her nose. "Ew. I knew they molested little boys, but I didn't realize they were foot freaks. That's just sick. Jesus would not approve."

  "It's good to know that Jesus draws the line at foot fetishism. Moving on..." I clicked back to Google and went to the third result, which brought me to the website for some hoity-toity NYC modeling agency. Forcing women to get bikini waxes was most certainly something they did, but I doubted it would be performed in a seedy Moroccan spa. Their models probably got waxed while sipping on Mimosas in a penthouse. More importantly, I was me. I was awkward, short, and had a big ass. Not exactly model material, even if I did believe I could rock it on the runway in my yoga pants and sneakers.

  I scrolled through a few more pages of results and then kicked my chair back from my desk. "It really would have been helpful if they’d picked a more specific name than the Society."

  Chastity tossed her phone on the couch. "Yeah, I didn't find anything either. I think that's kind of what they were hoping for."

  “What else do you know about the Society?”

  “I’ve just heard rumors. Some say that it’s a secret sex club at the top of a skyscraper.”

  “One57?”

  Chastity shrugged. “Other people claim that the Society rents out places to have wild sex parties. And some people even claim it’s an international organization. Really, the only thing that’s clear is that it’s super exclusive and super secretive.”

  A lot of help that is. "I need to call my doctor." I hated doctors. But the situation was dire. They could have given me Ebola. Blood could start pouring out of my orifices at any moment. Do people ever confuse Ebola with having their periods? I felt like I was going to be sick.

  "Are you okay?" asked Chastity. "Oh no, do you think you're an orange? Whatever you do, do not peel yourself." She jumped up and grabbed a coat out of the closet. "Where's the duct tape?"

  "Why do you need duct tape?"

  "I'm making an emergency straitjacket. Just sit tight..."

  If I hadn't been freaking out about the Ebola coursing through my veins, I would have giggled at her unintentional pun. "I'm not going to peel myself. I was just thinking about Ebola and periods."

  "Oh thank God. I mean, that's a horrible comparison. But I'm glad you're not going to peel yourself."

  "Right. Back to doctor calling." I looked down at my phone and was about to scroll through the contacts when I saw the time. 7:30. "Shit!"

  "What's wrong now?" asked Chastity. She had found the duct tape and looked to be about halfway through making a definitely-not-functional straitjacket with my winter coat. "I promise your front teeth can't get cavities."

  "I'm going to miss my stalk...spin class."

  "Did you say stalk? Oh no. You think your Jack and the Bean Stalk fantasy is finally coming true. It's not. I repeat: do not climb out the window. There is no magic beanstalk." She frantically taped the second sleeve shut.

  "Chastity, I appreciate your concern, but I'm fine. Some spinning is just what I need to clear my head." Really I need my stalker. I bet he would know exactly how to handle this situation. Especially since he was probably the one behind the injection. Dirty stalker. He was probably waiting for me to appear tonight at 8 o’clock so he could kidnap me. And the injection was some kind of slow-release sedative. God, he was seriously deranged. He was definitely going to cut me up into little pieces as soon as he got me back to his lair.

  No. Bad fantasy. I tried again, convincing myself he could help me instead of hurt me. He probably had a private doctor at his beck and call. Or maybe he had a fancy medical pod like in those sci-fi movies. He'd just tell me to lie down in the pod and it would scan my body and know exactly what was wrong.

  There was no time to daydream about that, though. I was going to be late! Just the thought of it made my front-tooth cavity flare-up.

  I ran into my room and grabbed my gym bag. As I sprinted back towards the door, Chastity popped out from behind the sofa and tried to bag me like a nematode, but instead of a microfiber blanket like one would use in a traditional nematode bagging, she used her makeshift straitjacket. We rolled around on the ground. Somehow she managed to get both my arms into the sleeves. I laughed to myself, knowing that the tape wouldn't hold up against any amount of force. But my amusement came to an abrupt end when I tried to burst free and found that I was wrapped up tighter than Jason Momoa in size-small Spanx.

  "Let me out!" I yelled.

  "Can't do that," said Chastity as she wrapped more duct tape around me. "You'll thank me later."

  I tensed my whole body and tried to get free. All it did was make me sweat.

  "Oh no, you're turning all red. How do you feel?"

  "Trapped."

  Chastity grabbed her phone. It was still open to WebMD. "When you say trapped...do you mean tightness in your chest? That coupled with your excessive sweating might signal that you're having a heart attack."

  "Or it might mean my best friend duct-taped me into a winter coat. And let's cool it with calling it 'excessive.' This is a perfectly normal amount of sweat." I glanced at the time on my DVR. 7:35. Shit shit shit! Triple shit! There was only one way I was going to make it on time. "Have I told you about the hot guy I always pass on the way to spin class?"

  Chastity's eyes lit up.

  Gotcha, bitch. "He walks out of One57 every Tuesday and Thursday at 8 pm on the dot. If we leave now, we can still catch him."

  "How hot are we talking? Like a classic New York ten, or...?"

  "Picture if Zac E
fron and Chris Hemsworth had a baby. I mean, don't picture the actual birth. Or the gay sex. Just picture the full-grown male result of their DNA combining."

  "Say no more." Chastity jumped on me and tore into the duct tape with the strength of an adrenaline-filled mama bear lifting a Ford F150 off her child.

  Twenty minutes later, we were standing outside One57 just in time for my biweekly viewing of my stalker. My heart was pounding out of my chest. I just needed to see him. Seeing him staring at me would make me feel so much better.

  "Is that him?" asked Chastity, pointing to some schlup in normal slacks with an average haircut.

  "Does that look like the lovechild of Zac and Chris?"

  "No."

  "Then it's not him. Believe me, you'll know him when you see him." But you better keep your hands off him. Oh God...was it a mistake bringing her here? A horrible thought took hold of me. What if he stared at Chastity instead of me? I pulled out my phone and adjusted my hair in my mirror app. I still looked like a sweaty mess. Crap.

  Suddenly I didn't want him to come at all. I looked longingly at the alleyway with the dumpster. I didn’t want to dumpster dive twice in one week. Please don't come, I wished.

  And…he didn't.

  We waited a few minutes past 8, but neither he nor his Rolls Royce or little butler man made an appearance. I was relieved that he didn’t get to see me in my messy state. But I couldn’t seem to make myself move. It was 8 o’clock. He was supposed to be stalking me right now. Where was he?

  Was he upset that he caught me with binoculars the other day? Or just the fact that I hadn’t been on my viewing bench? Had he met someone new? Was he lurking in my apartment right this second waiting to finish the deed?

  "I should have known you were lying just to get out of that straitjacket," said Chastity. She sounded crestfallen.

  "I really wasn't. Let's just give him...wait! There he is!" I pointed at the next guy to walk out of One57. He was about 5'8, half bald, and had a rockin' dad bod. He was most definitely not my stalker. At the closest, he was my stalker's accountant. Not even the head accountant though. More like some sort of junior accountant. Or an accountant's assistant. Or the dude who polishes their transparent green visors after hours.