location of every freckle and zit on my virginal face. God, it made me squirm. I never had a problem making eye contact with people until I met Knight.
Now, sixteen years later, I still catch myself talking to people’s shirts.
At first, I was pretty freaked out about hanging out with Knight alone, but I had no idea how to avoid it. With no bus, no car, no one brave enough to risk the wrath of “Skeletor the skinhead” by offering me a ride, and both my parents at work (okay, one of my parents at work and one of my parents sleeping off a hangover), he had successfully made himself my only option.
And I went along with it because, well, I didn’t know what else to do. I had never interacted with someone so, so angry, or aggressive, or powerful before. My parents were peace-loving hippie potheads, for Christ’s sake. Nobody ever raised their voices or hands in anger at my house. Hell, most of the time, my parents couldn’t even raise their eyelids all the way.
Maybe it was the paranoia talking, but one thing my parents would do, practically every time I left the house, was warn me that there were people out there who liked to kidnap cute little girls like me and do bad things to them. It was drilled into my head.
See a creepy-looking van? Run! Some skeezy guy seems to be following you? Run! Somebody put his hands on you? Stomp on his foot, and knee him in the balls!
The way I saw it, I was one wrong move away from being chained up in Knight’s basement with a steady diet of semen and floggings for the next ten to twenty, so I’d try to play it cool. I went with Knight to Peggy’s house every day to keep him happy, and basically, I did everything I could think of to keep him strictly in the friend zone.
And you know what, Journal? It worked.
There, at Peggy’s house, without anyone else around, in the idle hours we spent drinking and smoking and watching daytime TV after school, I actually became friends with Ronald McKnight.
When we were alone, Knight would become a completely different person. He was sweet and candid and chivalrous. Knight would carry my backpack and open my beers and light all my cigarettes, like a gentleman. He would tickle me until I cried, and on occasion, he’d even remove the forty-pound steel-toed boots from my feet and rub my arches in slow, deliberate circles with his callous thumbs while we talked.
It was during these unusually intimate moments that I could sometimes get Knight to open up. I learned about the stepdad he hated, the anger he harbored toward his mother, and his real father whom he hadn’t seen since he was a kid. The whole time I thought I was breaking down Knight’s walls, but in reality he was the one chipping away at mine. Making me feel special. Giving me the illusion of safety.
Then, he pounced.
Props
August 25
Dear Journal,
On one unusually warm December afternoon, I found myself at Peggy’s house, engaged in a particularly aggressive tickle fight with Knight. Well, it’d started as a tickle fight, but every time I wriggled away, that fucking ghost ninja would chase and recapture me. I made it from the couch to the floor, from the floor to the other side of the coffee table, from the other side of the coffee table to the recliner, and from the recliner to the patch of floor in front of Peggy’s 1950s era wood-paneled television set. With each successive recapture, my efforts to escape would become a little more forceful, a little more panicked. I went from tickling my way free to twisting my arm free to shoving him away and scrambling across the floor on all fours, but it only seemed to excite him more.
By the time Knight finally had me pinned on my back in front of the TV, it was clear that what had started as a flirty, fun exhilarating little chase had quickly devolved into a full contact game of cat and mouse. And now, the game was over. Other than my heaving chest and pounding heart, I was completely immobilized, ensnared by both Knight’s glacial stare and his impossibly strong arms, which were straining and pulsing against the taut sleeves of his Lonsdale T-shirt. It was in that moment that I realized just how stupid and reckless I’d been.
Knight and I weren’t friends. We were