Chapter 1

It's about ten o’clock in Texas, still hot as hell. Our semester is almost over and it's been a tough one for a bunch of us. So long story short; me and the rest of the girls are heading to this little bar not too far off our campus.

I’m sat with my friend M next to me and next to her is one of our other really close friends, with a separate third having pulled up a chair between all of us and my bestie’s right across from me. Next to her, is her boyfriend Daryl (29M) and he’s kinda being quiet. I’m not really paying attention to him cause he’s…I didn’t know why at the time (I CERTAINLY FUCKIN DO NOW) but he gave me a bad vibe.

Anyway, my friend M(F19) is lonely and looking for a romantic partner so me and the other three girls are looking over at her phone as she’s swiping on Tinder. We’re over there going ‘oh he seems like a loser, she seems like she’s a gold-digger, and he’s really hot but he looks like he votes for (insert politician of your choice)’ and blah blah blah, stuff like that. J and Daryl are talking with another, not really interacting with us and at one point she had her head on his shoulder. Anyway, M sort of just clicks her tongue and says to them, “god, I wish I had something like you two had.” Which wasn’t wrong; J and Daryl were really cute together, so I didn’t blame her.

So, J starts doing these cutesy little poses after she said that, which she does a lot, one of the more likeable things about her. And Daryl just thanks her. And then there’s a beat before he announces, “I’ve loved her for four years. I would hope we’re adorable.”

Reader, we shut the fuck up right after he said that. Why, you may be asking? Because the two of them have been going out only for a year at maximum, and they only met each other last year. So, y’know, the math ain’t mathin.

We're all just staring at him like, girl, what when he drops this bombshell on us. He turns to J and says, “J, I have to confess now. I loved you from the moment I saw you on Insta, at that picture I saw of you at your sister’s birthday party.”

And J was still in shock, so she decided to state the obvious, “That was four years ago.”

“Yeah, and?”

“What do you mean, that you’ve been stalking me all this time?” J said this, she was kind of laughing when she said it but I don’t know if she thought it was because she thought Daryl was joking or whether she was so uncomfortable.

The conversation around the table started to die down as we realized just what was going down. I literally swear I stopped breathing just then. Daryl hesitated but said, “Well I wouldn’t put it that way, but I literally moved here from Wisconsin and saved up enough money to live comfortably here. I saw you went to (our state’s university) and found a place near it.

Reader, what the fuck.

I’m obviously paraphrasing a lot of this, but he more or less said what I just told you, what he originally said was a lot less straight forward and J had to pry it out of him for us to get that. As well as fact that after he moved here, he didn’t do anything too bold, y’know, he just completely memorized her schedule after seeing what her routine was like for months. What places she’d visit after class, what classes she had, where her job was. He fuckin camped out outside her apartment at one point and waited for her. How J never saw this, I have no idea, but either way she was obviously freaked.

He kept on trying to frame it as this big romantic gesture and me and everyone else were like, ‘yeah yeah, that’s normal’ and he eventually, thank god, left. I think he had work or something later that night. I have no idea.

But when he did, we were all holy fuckin shit and J was all like ohmygodohmygodohmygod. It was not hard for us to convince her to leave his ass. What became trouble was her living situation, as she no longer felt safe at her apartment.

So, she was moving apartments already and had her more important stuff, thankfully, in storage. She was preparing to move in with Daryl but yeah, that was changing. He never went with her when she was putting it in storage, so he probably wouldn’t have any idea where it was, and she asked one of us if we could stay with her after she broke up with him. "I mean come on. I don't trust him really anymore and there's a ton of the semester to go. How dangerous could he be?"

So, a bunch of us have seen a shit ton of murder, creepy stories where the ex after his stalking victim left him, would harass and possibly kill her. None of us were super happy to accept her living with us, so we drew straws (not our finest hour but whatever) and guess what unlucky fuck drew the shortest one.

If you guessed me, no shit. I was really pissed about it too, before I pulled my straw I was thinking; ‘I swear to God I better get the biggest friggin one or I swear to–’ and then I of course, got the smallest one and I of course went “FUCK.”

But anyway, J got into my car and we started heading to my apartment. The whole time we’re heading there she can tell I’m tense. And poor, poor J, she was being so sweet the whole time. She asked a few times if I was okay, said she could drive and stuff. She never offered to go room with someone else though, but whatever.

I honestly don’t know if this next bit was even her bf but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was due to what followed. That being a truck driving up to us, at first it was quite a bit aways away and I noticed it was behind us as we went down one street and then down another. Then it started getting a bit closer, and closer as we got nearer to my place. Right as we rounded the corner, maybe a block or two near my house, I realized it was literally right behind me. It was very quiet in the car at that point, J must have realized the same thing, I asked her if she knew if Daryl had a truck or anything and she told me, “I honestly don’t know if anything I know about him is true.” Which, thanks, very reassuring.

It kept on us for a good five minutes after that, I'd abandoned the hope of heading straight home, which I very much wanted to do. J was freaking out, crying at this point, I wasn’t doing much better.

We had an exchange like this;

“Is that him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” J reached for her phone in her purse.

“Should we call the cops?”

“My phone’s dead.”

“Mine is too.”

“Where’s the nearest police station?”

“Fuckin, I don’t know.”

“What do we do?” And then, again, “what the fuck do we do?!” and then, “(my name) what the fuck do we do!”

I didn’t have an answer for this.

Finally, and I for the love of god don’t know why I thought this was a good idea, But I knew there was a train track near the lake and I was praying and praying that one would be coming and maybe it could cut him off.

The entire time I was there, driving at the lake, all I could think was ‘if he crashes into us, we’re going into the water.’ and I was trying to get ahead of him but every time I sped up he did to and he stayed right behind us. I genuinely don’t think I could breathe till we got near the train tracks. And God must have answered my prayers because I saw the lights around the guardrail turn on and the rails started to lower, I sped up and I briefly heard J say, “What the FUCK are you doing.” and we crossed just before they fell. I stopped for a minute, me and J were crying and freaking out still. And then my brain went ‘what the fuck are you doing why are you stopped?’ and I drove the hell out of there and back to my apartment.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I called in sick that afternoon and, I knew it may have been a bit dramatic at the time but I got my cat, Mittens, and ordered an Uber to my mom’s house. She lived about two hours away, further then J’s parents, but fuck, I had this feeling she might be in danger. So I dropped Mittens off there and drove off.

When I called for the Uber back home, it rained. When I got back to my apartment, I noticed muddy footprints on the stairs. Muddy footprints that led up to the floor of my apartment. There, they stopped maybe two doors down. There was a note on someone’s apartment, no idea whose. An old lady lived there, I remembered. It was still super early in the morning so I knew that she probably hadn’t gotten to it yet. Either way, I took it off the door and read it.

Right after I did, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. I made a bee-line right back to my apartment, not realizing how stupid of an idea it might have been until much later.

On that paper were four words. Just four.

It read, ‘I will find her.”