I remember reading or seeing somewhere that if you’re ever home when there are intruders and have no weapons, the lid of the tank is a great option because it’s thick and heavy. In the seconds between when the dead bolt slid open and the doorknob turned, I grabbed the lid, satisfied at feeling its weight, and turned toward the door just as it was pulled open. With all the strength my body could possibly muster—strength I didn’t know I possessed—I swung my makeshift weapon without aim as hard as I could in a direction I prayed belonged to Tony’s head.
With time simultaneously speeding up and slowing down, the tank lid connected with his skull, the momentum of the impact almost causing me to fall over. His body slammed against the wall and immediately slumped to the floor.
I didn’t wait to see if he was unconscious or not. Tossing my weapon to the floor, I jumped over his body and ran out of the bathroom as fast as my weakened body could take me. Sprinting barefoot through the basement, adrenaline pushing me forward. Not registering the pain of my scraped heels, I focused only on the exit and my path to freedom.
I took the steps two at a time, my rising hope briefly deflating when I came into contact with a locked door. Registering movement from somewhere behind me, I frantically jiggled the doorknob and attempted to push the door open, but it stubbornly remained in place. In my haste and fear, I barely noticed the three dead bolts on the door.
As I looked down the staircase, the blood in my veins turned to heavy lead as I made eye contact with a maniacal gaze. Standing at the bottom of the staircase was a bloody, furious Tony.
There wasn’t time to take in the damage I had caused, or the details of his facial expression. The second I saw him there, so close to me, so close to overpowering me, I turned back around and set all my attention on the door, ignoring the way my heart had jumped into my throat and the panic that was trying to take over my body.
Fumbling and feeling time slowly slipping away from me as heavy footsteps ascended the stairs, I slid the dead bolts open with shaking hands. Practically falling through the doorway as the door swung open, I slammed it shut behind me in a split-second decision, hoping to momentarily delay Tony and buy a couple more precious seconds.
As I collided with the front door, my hands automatically went straight to the dead bolts before turning the traditional lock and pushing the heavy door open to reveal my awaiting freedom.
Without pausing to look at where Tony was or how close he was to capturing me, I took off the second the door was open. My bare feet pounded against the hard concrete and carried me onto the road, into fresh air that I’d previously taken for granted.
The sun was setting, and there weren’t any cars driving down his street. My first instinct was to run, to put as much distance between me and Tony as I possibly could. I barely registered the cold air or my overworked lungs or the new blood escaping from the soles of my feet and mixing with the light layer of snow on the ground. I kept thinking about how I was so close, so close, to being safe.
I must have run a couple of blocks before a car drove by, the driver slamming on their brakes at seeing a disheveled, shoeless girl running at a full sprint in the middle of the road. Was it Tony, coming to recapture me? No, it wasn’t. An older woman with a soft face who was wearing a pink turtleneck stepped out of the car and rushed to my side to ask me what had happened and what my name was.
I blankly recited my name to her and she gasped and told me that she’d call the police right away. I didn’t say or do anything else. All I kept thinking was one word, which played on a continuous loop in my head.
Over.
It was over. I was safe. I could go home. At the time, I didn’t know how mistaken I was.
At the police station I told my story countless times. It was there that I first discovered my hatred for those beige chairs and the shrill sound of multiple phones ringing. The police searched Tony’s house, his neighborhood, and other places that he might be. They put out an APB on him, but he was never found; it was like he’d disappeared off of the face of the earth, like he’d never existed.
They told me that they wouldn’t stop searching for him, but for the time being I should go home, try to live normally, and give them a call if I noticed anything unusual. In other words, they sent me off with a pat on the back and good luck wishes.
I wasn’t so confident that this fight was over. They hadn’t seen Tony—they hadn’t felt his anger, they hadn’t seen the way his rage was practically controlling him. He wanted me for a reason; he wasn’t just going to let me go off on my way, happily ever after.
Starting the second my mom brought me home from the police station, and for the weeks that followed, I was paranoid, walking on pins and needles in my own house. Every noise startled me, every stranger who looked at me made me uneasy. Someone who wanted to hurt me was out there, and he wouldn’t let a little police APB or locked door stop him.
During those weeks the phone calls started. The person on the other end of the line would hang up immediately if I answered. I was getting way too many hang ups from a blocked number for it to just be coincidental—it had to be Tony. I screened my calls, only answering for my mother, but calls from the blocked caller didn’t stop.
There was never a voice mail, but I could hear him on the other end of the line—waiting, planning, plotting—a promise that he’d never forget about me. I told the police, of course, and they tried tracking the calls, but he always hung up right away, even when the police urged me to engage him in conversation.
The death threats were unnerving when they started coming in. Notes in the mail directed to me told me how I deserved to die, and how he was going to get justice, no matter what the cost to him was, by making sure I was dead, just like his daughter, Sabrina. My mom took my key to the mailbox away when she found out, but I knew they were still coming, that she was reading them.
I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I was a shell of a girl named Thea going through the motions while living in constant fear. I started learning jujitsu, and working out to build up strength and learn some self-defense, but I was always nervous; I could never be strong enough to beat him.
The last straw came when my friend dropped me off after school to find black spray paint all over the light-pink walls of my room. I stood still, shell-shocked, in my room, silently turning around and taking in the vandalism. Everything on the surface of my four walls was covered in death threats. Black spray paint over my white furniture, over my mirror, over my posters, anything that touched the wall was included in the canvas of spreading hate.
That was when I realized that Tony was beyond your run of the mill revenge seeker. He was like a wild animal who knew he had his prey caught in his trap, and now he was just toying with his food for amusement. He was teasing me, taunting me, letting me know that I was under his mercy and he could get to me with ease, whenever he wanted. That was when I had my very first panic attack.
After I had calmed down enough, I went to my neighbor’s house, where I called my mom and the police. Of course they couldn’t find him. They couldn’t even prove that it had been him, and that was when it was decided that the best thing to do was just to relocate me. They wanted me to pick up and move to a different state, leaving all my friends, my school, and my identity behind.
The federal agents became involved because of who Tony was, and they set everything up. Apparently, he wasn’t your average father-turned-stalker, but an actual person with a criminal past. They gave me and my mom new identities, a new house, and a new car, and set her up at a new job. They continuously stressed how important it would be to keep my real identity and story a secret. If I slipped up, then Tony could find me. No social media, no posting things on the internet, and especially no telling people.
In January, I became Isabella Smith, one of the most common names in the United States. I dyed my hair blond and cut it into a short bob, wearing it straight every day instead of my natural long, brown curls. I wore thick-framed glasses that didn’t hav
e a prescription in them, and started a new life.
It was good for a while. I let my guard down, made friends, went to school events, and just lived a normal life. I got to enjoy about three months in peace, and started being hopeful about my future. Maybe Tony had given up on looking for me?
It soon became evident that he hadn’t, as suddenly that new reality came crashing down on me as the same patterns as before started happening again. The calls to my new phone number, where all I heard was heavy breathing. Then he started leaving voice mails, telling me that he’d find me and make me pay, make me suffer.
I was reassured by Agent Dylan, the man assigned to my case, that Tony couldn’t track my phone, but that didn’t comfort me at all. If he could find my phone number, then he sure as hell could find my house. After that, I was constantly paranoid, and what little sleep I was getting virtually disappeared, making me reliant on sleeping pills.
Not long after that, I came home from school and could tell that something was off. Nothing in my house was out of place, nothing was there that would have alerted me that Tony was there. But somehow, I felt the shift in the atmosphere, felt the tension and dread snaking its way through my body. Grabbing the baseball bat I kept by new habit by the front door, I slowly crept up the stairs.
I tiptoed through the house, holding my breath at every creak the floor made as I got closer and closer to my room. When I finally peered into my room, nothing was out of place, no black spray paint decorated my white walls with death threats. I sighed in relief and slumped against the door frame, placing the bat down and laughing at my own paranoia.
But then I froze—I had celebrated too soon. Something caught my attention: an object sitting innocently on my bed that I had definitely not put there. I tiptoed over to it, not daring to draw a single breath, as if it would manifest into Tony himself and fulfill the promises he’d made about revenge.
Looking at the object that was taunting me, I recoiled in horror when realization sank in. Sitting innocently on my bed was a doll, with a very real, very sharp kitchen knife stabbed through its head. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, the doll had been altered to look just like me—not Thea, but Isabella. And as if that didn’t get the point that he knew what I looked like across, stapled to the doll was a picture of me, as Isabella. It had been taken a couple of days ago, as I was leaving school, and I wasn’t aware that it had been taken. It looked like a surveillance picture, like Tony was following me and taking pictures of my whereabouts.
Tony knew where I was—he knew what Isabella looked like. He had been in my house, in my room, without anyone having the slightest clue. I dropped the doll on my bed and took a couple of steps backward, shocked by the revelation that Tony had found me, and was taking his time toying with me. Before I could decide what to do, there was a loud crash, and I instinctively ducked to the floor and threw my hands over my head as pieces of glass rained down on me.
I barely registered the glass creating tiny slices on my arms as a heavy object thumped onto the floor next to me. Once the glass stopped falling, I hesitantly looked at the object—a brick had been thrown through my window. As I rushed over to the window, I was met with the taillights of a truck speeding off into the distance.
Tony was here. He was outside, and he knew where I was.
I walked over the glass, not caring that I was only in socks, and picked up the brick. There was a note attached to it, Tony’s crude writing spelling out: “You can run Isabella, but I will always find you.”
I dropped the brick on the floor and sprinted out of my house, not stopping until a few blocks later when I got to a friend’s house. I didn’t explain anything, didn’t justify why I had shown up bleeding, breathless, and shoeless at her front door. I asked her if I could stay there for a bit until my mom arrived, lamely muttering something about how I’d lost my house keys. I called my mom from the bathroom and she took care of the rest.
Like the previous time, there was no trace of Tony, no evidence of where he was or where he could’ve gone. After a few days in a hotel, during which I refused to sleep and was constantly paranoid, it was quickly arranged for us to be relocated again.
Like last time, my mother and I were given new identities in a new state, a new house, a new car, a new job, and a new school. In May of my junior year, I became Hailey Johnson, with straight, black hair and colored contacts that made my eyes blue. I thought maybe this time it would be different. Maybe as Hailey I could live comfortably and make new friends, get involved in school, and just live normally.
I didn’t know then that because I was Hailey, people would die.
For a few weeks I was constantly paranoid. I refused to take my sleeping pills, which meant I was completely sleep deprived, which only made me more paranoid, and the vicious cycle continued.
After a few weeks of nothing out of the ordinary happening, I let my guard down. I started feeling like a regular, normal teenage girl with regular, normal teenage-girl problems. I even got a part-time job at a clothing store at the mall.
Being Hailey was working out so great. Everyone was super-nice, I made lots of friends and even went out on a couple of dates. My boss was cool and I loved my job. I got to work with my new best friend, Ashley, and on our Friday-night shifts, our boss would order take-out for everyone. Even the new jujitsu gym I’d joined was bigger and better equipped than the last two. I finally felt at peace, like I was finally somewhere I could call home.
When I made it three months without receiving any odd phone calls or death threats, I cried tears of joy for ten minutes straight, then celebrated by eating an entire Nutella cheesecake all by myself and not even regretting it. But like always, my happiness didn’t last too long.
This time, the way Tony made his reappearance was different. It was like he didn’t care about toying with me and teasing me anymore—he just wanted the job done, to fulfill his own twisted sense of justice. He skipped the phone calls and death threats and break-ins, and went straight to finding me.
A couple of days after I started my senior year as Hailey Johnson, I was completely unaware of how I would never get to be Hailey again, never get to see my friends again.
It was like any other day. I drove to work, walked into the mall and waved hi to Frank, one of the security guards I’d gotten to know, and started my regular weeknight shift. The mall wasn’t too busy but I was still finding things to do to keep myself occupied. We were about to close, the mall shutting down in twenty minutes, when I took a quick break to eat my Nutella sandwich and text my friends.
Ashley stuck her head into the back room. “Hailey, there’s a guy here looking for you.”
“Is it Hunter? I told him I was still hungry and he likes to surprise me by bringing me food.”
As I stood up, Ashley shook her head, her eyes shifting to look at something behind her, something on the other side of the door that I couldn’t see, and I noticed how she was sweating despite the usual chill in the store.
“He … he told me to tell you that he’s your father. He was very adamant about that.”
I froze where I was. “Ash, you know my father is dead,” I said slowly.
I’d been best friends with Ashley for months, practically since the first day I’d moved here. I hadn’t told her how my dad died, but she knew he was gone, and by the way she was acting, she was uncomfortable with the man out there.
She nodded her head slightly but her jaw was tight, her movements stiff. Now I was positive something was wrong. All that was in the break room was a table and some chairs, a microwave, a small filing cabinet, and a bulletin board with some memos for the staff.
“Okay, I’ll be right out,” I said loud enough for the man I assumed was right behind Ashley to hear, the man who’d been hunting me for almost a year now.
Ashley, who had been working here for years and who’d gotten me this job, exaggeratedly looked back and forth between me and the small filing cabinet, telling me a story that I got immediately.
; “I’ll tell him you’ll be right out,” she said, disappearing back behind the door.
I couldn’t help myself. I peeked out the staff door and the floor practically fell out from under me. It was him. He was tapping his foot and glaring angrily at everyone who crossed his path. I didn’t even have to see his face to know who it was. I saw him every night in my nightmares. He’d found me. He just hadn’t followed his usual pattern of teasing and torturing me first.
He was anxious for the kill.
There were a few other people in the store, all oblivious to the hostage situation taking place. I felt cornered even though Tony hadn’t noticed me. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t run and risk Tony hurting people because of me. I couldn’t fight him and risk failing and having him hurt people. I didn’t want anyone, especially Ashley, to get hurt because of me. That group of preteens looking at leggings was not going to have their lives cut short because of me. That pregnant mother and her young daughter were not going to die because of me.
Swiftly moving to the filing cabinet, trying to figure out what Ashley was telling me, I opened the first drawer and found it stuffed with envelopes. I couldn’t figure out what Ashley wanted me to find here.
My breathing got heavier and my head spun. Tony was going to kill me and I had nothing to use against him except my own two hands.
As I closed the drawer with some force, a rattling drew my attention, so I opened the drawer again and shifted around the mess of envelopes. My hand connected with something solid, and I pulled it out, feeling slightly comforted by its weight. It was an envelope opener, one of those knife-shaped ones, like older people use. It was not the sharpest, but I could use it to distract him enough to get away, maybe even aim for an eye.
I mumbled a thanks to Ashley as I stuck the opener into my combat boot, my pulse speeding up as I promised myself that I was not going to die that day.
Stay With Me (A Wattpad Novel) Page 4
