“Oh, hello there! My name is Naomi Reyes; it’s nice to meet you!” is what I would say under normal circumstances. Unfortunately these aren’t normal circumstances. In fact, I’m not really sure what kind of circumstances these would fall under, if I’m being honest. It’s not every day your whole universal view is turned upside down on its head and everything you think you know turns out to be (mostly) a lie. Okay, calling it a lie might be a bit of a stretch, as that implies that someone intentionally told you something that wasn’t true; this might be better described as learning that every single thing you thought you knew about, including the basic things, was just downright wrong. Oh, but I apologize. I’m getting ahead of myself.

  As I previously mentioned, my name is Naomi, and I’m a 22-year old girl from Charlotte, North Carolina who just recently graduated from college with degrees in English and secondary education. If you’d ask me, I’d tell you that I wasn’t that attractive; not because I was overweight or ugly or anything like that, but mainly because I just didn’t feel like I was, if that makes sense? I had friends and family that were both super supportive and always quick to reassure me that I was attractive, but I guess I just didn’t feel it. I didn’t really find much interest in the things most commonly associated with girls. Hard to believe the people telling you things when society tells you something else, you know?

  I’d say my life growing up was extremely uneventful if I’m being honest; the most exciting thing that happened was that we moved around a lot for my dad’s job. I was born in some small town in the state of North Carolina – that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of – and moved more or less every six months until I was four or five, right before I started Kindergarten. When I was 16 or so mom told me that the reason we finally stopped moving and landed up in Charlotte was because she’d threatened to take me and leave my dad if he made us move one more time because it wasn’t fair to keep uprooting my life. I’d never stopped to ask my dad’s side of the story, but since we’d suddenly stopped moving I’d always assumed there was at least some truth to it.

  Starting Kindergarten, no one really paid attention to the fact that I wasn’t interested in the things other girls were. Everyone instead just commented about how I’d get along extremely well with the other kids. I do recall getting asked about my lack of interest in traditionally feminine things as I got older, and I even got made fun of a bit for it at school, but I ignored it and continued to do my best to ensure that I got along well with everyone despite it. By the time high school started, my friend count had dwindled down significantly; that’s not to say that I no longer had any friends, but it would have been accurate to say that I’d gone from having a countless number of friends to being able to count the total on two hands. It didn’t bother me, though I could tell my mom was sometimes a little worried that I might be losing friends due to being bullied, but I reassured her that that wasn’t the case.

  Going into college, the number of friends I had dwindled even further, down to five or so, and they were all a lot like me, sans for one – I’ll talk about her in a minute. The rest of us instead opted to spend time doing things that most girls in their late teens either wouldn’t care about doing, or wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time on as we did. The majority of my friends were avid gamers, and while I didn’t care quite as much in gaming as they were, I did have a few video games that I was interested in that were all fueled by my interests in real life.

  Speaking of, my biggest interest – despite the fact that I never did any sort of competitions with it – was fencing, a skill that I’d picked up from my grandfather who had been a professional fencer in his youth. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but I don’t think he ever won anything super significant. Although, he was good enough that upon retiring he was able to open a small school and become a fencing instructor. He even offered to teach me what he knew, since I’d thought it was so cool growing up. He passed away the year before I started college, unfortunately, but I kept on training anyway as a way to keep his memory alive; plus it was rather good exercise, all things considered.

  Going back to that one outlier of a friend I mentioned earlier, her name was Amy and even back in Kindergarten the two of us had very little in common. Those differences only grew as we got older, and by the time she went off to California for college there were a myriad of differences between us, and even that might be an understatement. Still, every time she came back to visit we were able to pick up exactly where we left off as if no time had passed at all. Though her family was also extremely well off, so she could afford to fly back home for every holiday and break from school, even the short ones.

  Amy was always very invested in fashion things like the latest designs and make-up, and she always knew the hottest celebrity gossip, while I was more grounded – as she put it – in things like the local news and what limited nerdy knowledge I retained from my time spent with my gamer friends. We regularly joked about the various ‘jobs’ – as we called them – we had in each other’s lives, and while to an outsider it might have seemed strange or even looked like we had a somewhat dysfunctional relationship, we both knew we meant well.

  While Amy went off to some fancy prep college where she was able to figure out what she wanted to do at her leisure, I attended a local university on a scholarship. As I already mentioned, I graduated with a degree in English and secondary education, but I wasn’t entirely sure if my heart was still in it, especially given how frequently my friends reminded me about how crazy it was to want to be a teacher in the current political and educational climate. As a kid it had been my dream job, but now I wasn’t so sure, and I was actually worried that I might struggle to get a job out of school with all the rumors of budget cuts and the like. Luckily for me, I managed to find a job teaching at the high-school that I’d gone to growing up and despite everything I was excited to have my first real job lined up after college. My parents even offered to take me out to dinner to celebrate and I foolishly agreed, not realizing that my mom had ulterior motives.

  You see, my mom has a history of pestering me about my love life, or rather, my lack thereof. She was really great about making a big deal about the fact that all throughout my time in school I’d never once dated. Any time it had been brought up, I’d managed to rationalize myself out of the conversation, effectively buying myself a few more years before she’d eventually bring it up again. This time, however, it seemed like I was no longer able to avoid the topic, likely due to the fact that I’d graduated college and gotten a job. It’s not that my mom wasn’t the kind of person to shame me for wanting to put my career first, nor do I think she was really in a rush for me to provide her with grandchildren despite being an only child. I genuinely did believe her when she’d tell me she just was worried that I’d end up lonely and single forever. She even offered to help pay for my first year on whatever dating app I decided to use to ‘help me get out there,’ as she put it. I suspect that, if I’d asked, she’d have been willing to pay for multiple subscriptions given how eager she was, but I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of managing a single dating app, let alone multiple, so there was no way I was going to willingly put myself in that situation.

  Amy proved to be super helpful with setting up my online dating profile, further cementing her role as the ultimate life saver in this effort, as if I’d had to set up my profile on my own it would have taken days, whereas she managed to get it set up in less than an hour. I was a little skeptical that she already had ideas for what to put on my profile and which app to use before I’d even told her about the conversation with my mom and if I didn’t know any better I’d say that she’d worked with my mom behind my back to get me dating. Anyway, before I knew it, Naomi Reyes was, as my mom put it, ‘single and looking to mingle.’ Sigh.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Online dating was, surprisingly, not anything like I’d thought it would be. Growing up I’d heard so many stories from people online about how men were super big creeps, or that they were stupid sex crazed jerks; there was even the occasional nightmare horror story about people going on dates only to end up kidnapped and murdered. Thankfully, my online experience was nothing like that, though a part of me wasn’t really sure if I should have felt relieved or cheated out of a potentially funny memory to tell my future kids. It was also possible that Amy was just that good at setting up my online profile that I was able to avoid the online creeps thanks to her experience. All I did know was that the dates I went on were all with guys that I’d say were pretty chill dudes; although none of them were necessarily someone I saw myself spending the rest of my life with, they at least weren’t giving off murder hobo vibes.

  My uneventful dating adventures carried me through to the end of summer. I’d try to space them out so that I wasn’t constantly out socializing with random men – a thought that even now sounds absolutely exhausting – and would regularly try and meet with Amy a day or two after a date to discuss how things went, kind of like a post mortem meeting. This cycle continued until two weeks before I was supposed to start my job. I was considering calling it quits – much to Amy and my mom’s displeasure – to focus on my first semester of teaching, when I matched with a guy named Devin who I immediately could tell was different from the rest.

  Amy was quick to point out all the physical signs that made him a good match; he had a cute face, nice smile, all surface level things that would make for a good husband down the road, but they were all things I didn’t weigh as heavily as she did. Sure, those were nice, but looks faded with time, so I had been looking for someone who could make me laugh and had interests that were similar to mine. Devin immediately stood out to me as someone who was willing and open to trying new things, and we’d even gone to the same university, although he’d graduated two years before I had. He was also a software engineer, and Amy was quick to point out that they get paid very well, which made me roll my eyes. I hated to admit it, but the thought of being a stay at home wife at some point in my life did sound somewhat appealing, and I guess I would have been lying if I said that he wasn’t cute, too.

  With nothing to lose, and only a small amount of hope that Devin would be the first one to get a second date, I decided to give him a shot before officially embracing my semester hiatus from online dating. For whatever reason this time I didn’t feel like rushing things, so instead of immediately setting up a first date, we just spent the first week talking through the app, something that Amy reassured me was actually rather common when I told her how weird it felt to be moving so much slower than my other dates. Six days before I was supposed to start my first teacher work day, we finally agreed that we felt like it was time for our first date, and he suggested that we do breakfast the next day at a restaurant he was fond of.

  I texted Amy immediately and was super excited for the rest of the day… Until I tried to go to bed that night and the excitement was replaced with anxiety, nerves, and a sense of dread. I struggled to fall asleep that night and was actually considering chickening out and cancelling the date out of fear that it would end up being just like the rest, but a late night phone call with Amy talked me out of it. We ended our phone call with me promising to text her after the date before quickly falling asleep.

  Despite the poor sleep the night before, I woke up early the next morning and quickly went about getting ready for the date. I decided that I was going to wear the only dress that I owned, a pink summer dress – that, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure Amy left at my place after spending the night one night and refused to take back when I’d told her about it – and a little makeup, something I also didn’t do much of. The morning blurred by pretty quickly after deciding on my outfit, and before I knew it I was standing outside the restaurant on a surprisingly brisk summer morning waiting to meet Devin. The restaurant had been super easy to find, though my fear of being late had me arrive with plenty of time to spare so I wasn’t surprised that I’d gotten here before him.

  It wasn’t until five minutes after the time we’d agreed on meeting that I began to think I might have been stood up. I checked my phone to see if I’d missed a message or call from him, but there was nothing. I checked with one of the employees to see if there might have been another location, thinking maybe I’d gone to the wrong one somehow, but this was the only one in town. After ten minutes, I was quickly losing hope that Devin was going to actually show up, and I was starting to get annoyed at the looks the employees were giving me. After an additional thirty minutes of waiting, I decided he wasn’t going to show up and that I was done waiting. I politely informed the employee who’d been waiting to serve me that I was leaving and made sure to tip them for the time spent at the table before getting up and leaving.

  I walked back to my car in silence, debating if I should reach out to him or not when I heard the sound of footsteps behind me. I turned to see who it was, only to find myself alone in the parking garage I’d parked in. Frowning, I turned and walked faster. A second or two later I heard the sound of footsteps resume and I practically broke into a sprint to my car. I managed to get there, but because my life had suddenly taken a dramatic turn into a horror film, I of course managed to drop my keys while trying to unlock my car. I swore silently to myself about how stupid I was for not getting the keys out of my pocket before getting to my car, and that’s when my assailant struck.

  My head hit the window of my car and bounced off it as I fell to the ground. I looked up at my attacker while trying to shuffle away from them, only for my eyes to be unable to focus on them. They grabbed me by the hair and lifted me up, and I screamed, only for them to just toss me down onto the ground again. “Shut up,” I heard them say, or I think I did. I’m still not entirely sure, given that my heart was beating a mile a minute and my eyes were still seeing stars.

  “What do you want?” I asked, only to feel myself getting grabbed by my dress and lifted off the ground. I was surprised by that, as I wasn’t exactly the shortest person at 5 feet 8 inches, though I was a little on the skinny side. I kicked my feet at my attacker, only to find them make contact with nothing before my head once again made contact with the driver’s side window of my car. “Ow…” I whimpered.

  “Nothing personal, kid,” I heard the voice say as they held me pinned to the car. I heard what sounded like a metallic click and my heart flew into my chest. I struggled helplessly as I felt cold metal press against my back before there was an intense pressure in my chest that made it impossible to breathe. There was also a loud ringing in my ears that I couldn’t seem to get rid of.

  I collapsed to the ground with a thud that I felt like I should have been able to feel and hear, but I don’t actually remember experiencing either of those sensations. I don’t even think I managed to process the fact that my face was pressed against the cold metal of the car door before I slumped back onto the warmth of the parking garage’s floor. I do remember a wet sensation running down my chest and I couldn’t help but think about how I was never going to get Amy to take this dress back if I bled all over it.

  Despite my ears still ringing, I heard the sound of more gunshots off in the distance, but I quickly forgot about those as things began to get cold and fuzzy. My brain was beginning to play tricks on me and I wasn’t even sure if I was lying on the ground or in a giant freezer. Everything was just so cold…

  My eyes began to feel like they were made of lead and the world began to fade to static like you’d see on those old TVs. I told myself I just needed to close my eyes for a second and that when I’d open them again that everything would be better, that I’d be in a hospital or an ambulance or something. That’s how these things played out on TV, right?

  The last thing I remembered hearing was someone’s voice overhead. I wasn’t able to make out what he said, but my brain definitely had enough processing power to register that the voice was definitely male. Unfortunately for me, my body hit its limit shortly after that and I could no longer resist it. I closed my eyes, letting the darkness consume me.

  03/02 - 0900, 1200, 1500, 1800

  03/03 - 0900, 1200, 1500

  03/04 - 0900, 1200, 1500

  03/05 - 0900, 1200

  03/06 - 0900, 1200

  Discord Server, too!