Short Story: Johnny Meets the Girl

I had been dating Greg for about six months before the night we stopped in at the Brine Harbor Motel. They had, for the most part, been some of the best months of my life. Not because of Greg, necessarily, but rather the freedom that came with him, an energy he seemed to generate wherever he went and one that was easy enough to feed off of. That sounds terrible and maybe it is, but in a way it was true. I loved Greg, at least I thought I did, but it was that energy I was addicted to. Even when he was a brat, he was a beacon of positivity. I probably loved him in the way that everyone loved him, that everyone couldn’t help but love him, from the guys that had cheated on their cheerleader girlfriends with him to the diner girls who always offered him a dessert on the house. It was a miracle he never cheated on me, at least not that I knew of, because the offers came just about any time he entered a room, from just about anyone he made eye contact, whether they were vocalized or not.

Which made me the shittier one of the two. Even worse because he was so far out of my league, and we both knew it. It wasn’t that I had ever actually acted on anything, but I thought about other people probably too much. And I knew that even then.

Greg was the more flamboyant of the two. It’s hard to be gay and have a bright personality and not be labeled as flamboyant by nearly everyone you meet. Which made me, Johnny, the less colorful and ultimately less interesting one, but around here that’s truly not saying much. Saying the words “my boyfriend” is in and of itself an act of flamboyance that no small amount of people will line up to tell you that you should have kept to yourself. I had even, admittedly, had girlfriends. Three, to be exact: one in high school and two in college. In college, though, everyone dates everybody for at least a week, sexuality be damned. Greg had had none, I’d asked him about it once and was even surprised by his answer. After all, it seems like every gay guy worth his stripes has at least had the middle or high school girlfriend to keep friends and family off his back. But he was a few years younger than me, and it had never much been a concern. He’d been out since he was twelve.

With me, it had been a little different. I supposed I was, as my New England relatives would say, “slow on the uptake.” Had I come out in high school, the people that mattered would not have cared, I’m sure. It just took me a little while to see the big picture. And it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy those brief relationships, either. Two of the three were beautiful, lusted over, I’d even say, and believe me I’d noticed. Abby, especially, had been what had at least felt like an infatuation. The attraction certainly hadn’t felt faked, not so I’d notice at least. I noticed her in all the ways the other guys tended to, the ones who couldn’t believe that (for three whole weeks out of the semester) she was sleeping with me instead of them. And I’ll be honest, I think I was attracted to the attention I got from them as much as anything. The attraction didn’t seem to be the problem. It was more that when we finally got down to it, it just felt empty. Incomplete. Looking at a girl versus sleeping with her, it just felt like my eyes were too big for my stomach. It’s probably not healthy to equate sexual partners to food, but it’s the best analogy I can think of. There are no shortage of gorgeous looking dishes in the world that I also know full well I have no real desire to taste. And I think it’s important to note when I think of that motel and the girl I cheated on him with on the worst night of both of our lives.

We had been driving for hours for reasons that, in retrospect, truly don’t seem worth dying for. The concert we were going to was in Worcester, Mass and we had begun our travels in Virginia. I had reminded Greg that airplanes were a thing we should take advantage of in these modern times, but he was insistent. He wanted the adventure. He always did.

He had also been insistent that we would be able to make the entire drive in a day, and on that he was very wrong. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that that was going to be impossible. By the time it got to be midnight, we started thinking about pulling off somewhere. We still hadn’t eaten and the only options were fast food, which I hated. Greg could somehow eat that shit and still look great, but I didn’t have that luxury. I gain weight quickly, always have. No matter what I do or how hard I work, some fat just sticks and that’s something I’ve come to accept and maybe—to a degree—embrace. But that doesn’t mean I’d love to add any more. “We’re gonna need to stop soon,” I’d said. “We keep driving like this all night, we’re just going to get in an accident.”

“Not if we keep switching off,” Greg said. “Come on. Both of us taking shifts and we’ll go through the morning. Get to see the sunrise through the trees, it’ll be great.”

“We’ve been taking shifts, Greg. And they’re getting shorter and shorter. We’re both tired as fuck and, between you and me, I’d rather we just own up to that before we both die.”

Greg thought about it. That scrunched face when he knew I was right about something, but didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of saying the words. “Okay,” he said. “So what do you want to do?”

“Next town has to have some kind of motel, right?”

“I guess. In theory.”

“There,” I said, pointing up at the sigh on the highway. “Lodging and food, that’s what we’re looking for.”

“It just has a picture of a motel. It doesn’t even say what it is.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s got to be better than sleeping in the car, right?”

I had him there. He thought about it again and turned on his turn signal. “Fine,” he said. “But if we die, I’m gonna kill you.”

“That’s more than fair.”

Once we pulled off the highway, the greasy burgers were easy to find. Fast food never hides. It always wants you to know exactly where it is. We both got the same thing because frankly, once you’re there, you might as well go all the way. I’m not going to pretend I’ll be health conscious and get the salad, because once you pull into that drive-thru the damage is done and I guess you might as well own up to it. Finding the motel was another story altogether. Ironically, that doesn’t seem that uncommon either. Motels and gas stations are on every fucking corner until the moment you really need to look for them.

When we finally found it, I realized we must had already driven by it at least once, because the sign wasn’t even on. The motel was clearly open, the lights were on and illuminating what a small and unappealing place it was, a little strip motel on the side of the road. Only a little bigger than the Bates, I remember thinking, but stupidly didn’t say it aloud, otherwise we probably would have packed in and drove away in a hurry. The sign, however, wasn’t on because it couldn’t be. It was hand painted and therefore almost impossible to see in the moonlight.

Greg parked and looked around, always trying to find the bright side. “There are three other cars here,” he said. “At least we’re not alone.”

“Small comfort,” I said. But in truth small was better than no comfort. Had we been the only car there, I would have been unable to sleep or do anything but think about the old motel owner coming to kill me in my bed, or poisoning me with a glass of water, glaring at me with one glazed over blind eye as he did. Or, in the classical tradition, simply sashaying into the bathroom and butchering me in the shower. Yes. To not be the only ones in the motel actually did a hell of a lot to ease my mind.

The office, however, did not. It looked exactly as I had expected it to, with old ‘70s wood paneling and wallpaper that had started to peel decades ago and clearly couldn’t stop picking at itself. The olive green color was torn away in places to reveal a somehow more unseemly off-white. We rang the bell and no one came. Had it not been for the cars out front, I probably would have immediately assumed he died years ago and no one had simply happened to notice. Eventually, though, he appeared and greeted us with a less-than-cheerful, “Yeah?”

“We’d like a room.”

“If there’s one available,” Greg joked and the manager immediately glared at him. I did, too.

Greg winced, saying sorry with his eyes, but not saying it out loud.

The manager, who was an old man as I had guessed but not blind in one eye that I could see, slid a key across the desk. “You’ll have to carry your own bags,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s fine. We don’t have any.”

The old man glanced between us, thin lips curled into a fish-like frown. “We don’t charge by the hour, you know. You gotta pay for a whole night.”

Greg smiled. “We don’t kiss and tell, how about-“

“That’s fine,” I said, and paid the man before Greg could get us in any more trouble.

“Real nice,” I said to him as we stepped outside and started walking down to our room.

Greg rolled his eyes. “What? It’s 2020. Guy has to learn about the bees and the bees sometime.”

“You could have gotten us thrown out of here. Then where would we be? Stranded in the middle of nowhere or in an accident ten miles down the highway, splattered all over the road.”

Then, before the argument could get any more heated, I saw the girl. Greg didn’t even notice her, bless his heart. She seemed to be used to that, because when she made eye contact the first thing she did was look me up and down, as if gauging whether I was really seeing her or not. She was beautiful, no doubt. Her skin was an almost luminescent pale. Vampiric was the first word that came to mind. Hair black and long, eyes deep brown pools. I think I smiled at her, but she didn’t notice. At least, she didn’t seem to. It wasn’t attraction, not sexual at least, though even I nearly mistook it for that at first. But I’m gay. It was something else entirely, something I could barely even begin to define. It sounds cliche to say “there was something different about this girl,” but I couldn’t be more literal. There was an energy to her that I’d just never seen in another human being.

“Johnny?”

I turned back to Greg. “Yeah?”

“See? You’re not even listening to me,” he said as he turned the key and stepped inside.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Greg said, collapsing onto one of the beds, wincing instinctively as if hoping it wouldn’t break underneath him. I sat down beside him. “It’s cute that you worry,” he said, sitting up and looking at me. “But I do know my limit, trust me.”

“Okay. You’re right.”

We kissed. He made it very clear he was too tired to do anything else, and I started to shift restlessly. Despite the complaining about needing to sleep, it occurred to me that I wasn’t tired at all. And I was thinking about the girl, even if I didn’t think I was. “I’m going to go get some ice,” I said, and that was when I first became aware that she was actually on my mind and that I was hoping I would run into her again.

Johnny was asleep before I even stepped out of the room. Instead of running into anyone, all I saw out there was an ice machine and a whole lot of trees. I hid my disappointment from no one in particular and carried my bucket down to the machine. I had only just started to fill it when I heard a door open behind me. My heart fluttered for a second, and there was less guilt than I hoped there would be when I turned around to see her.

“Hi,” she said, holding a bucket. “Looks like we had the same idea.”

I smiled. “Looks like.”

“You just here for the one night?”

I looked around. “I’m not sure anyone has ever stayed here for two.”

She smiled at that. It was warm and incredibly disarming, but it didn’t look effortless. It looks rehearsed, I thought, then, why would I think that? “Still,” she said, “checking in pretty late. Road trip?”

I nodded. “Bingo. Kind of an impromptu one, too. We’re on our way to a concert.” I steeled myself for the natural next question: what concert? But she skipped ahead instead, shifting her eyes ever so slightly to my room, where Greg had only just fallen asleep. “He’s cute,” she said.

“Yeah,” I caught myself saying. “Everyone thinks so.”

Her eyes nudged toward me. “Relax. I didn’t say you weren’t.”

“Right. Sorry. I guess it’s a force of habit.” Becoming aware of how pathetic I was sounding, I rapidly tried to change the subject. “I’m Johnny, by the way.”

She smiled. “That’s easy to remember. I’m Julie.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

She stepped back toward the door of her room. “I’m nice to meet.” And with that, she began to open it.

I looked back to the machine. “Don’t you want your ice?”

Julie nudged against the door as it opened, but she didn’t look away from me. “I don’t know,” she said. “Between you and me, I think I found something a little more interesting.” She let that hang there as an invitation, but to my own surprise, I didn’t take the bait.

“You do know my boyfriend’s asleep in the next room, right?”

“He’s three rooms down, actually,” she said, not stepping out of the doorway. “And if these walls were thin, this place would have zero cars in the driveway instead of three.”

I thought about it, against my better judgment, even though I knew the moment I stepped outside my room exactly what the answer was going to be. Still, there was a hesitation. It felt wrong, and not in the way I expected it to. There was a voice inside me screaming for me not to go in there and I didn’t even know why. I truly wish I could say that the voice was Greg’s, but that would be a lie.

I stepped into her room and Julie closed the door behind me. She gestured to the TV, the bathroom, giving me the incredibly short tour that covered absolutely everything in the room. And suddenly, as if only just realizing it, I found myself saying, “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

Julie blinked. Then smiled. “You’re here with your boyfriend, I can’t say I’m shocked.”

“Right, yeah.”

She fished for a couple of glasses beside the bed that looked like they’d been taken from another motel. “You looked jittery out there,” she said, pouring me a glass of bourbon. “Figured you could use a nightcap.” 

“Thanks,” I said, dumbly, and took the glass from her. 

She poured her own glass and gestured for me to take a seat on the bed beside her. “I don’t bite, I promise,” she said, and there was a gleeful spark in her eyes that I didn’t quite pick up on at the time. If I had, things probably would have gone differently. But there’s no use in pretending I can change any of that now.

Julie finished her glass, then looked at me. “Relationship’s rocky, huh?”

I almost choked. “What?”

“I can see the stress all over your face,” she said with a shrug, like it was just a natural observation. “It’s all over his, too, though I’d wager not in ways you’d probably notice. High marks of trouble in paradise.”

“What is this? I don’t even know you.”

“And then of course there’s the fact that you’re having a drink in a stranger’s motel room instead of sleeping in his arms, probably because you feel like if you don’t take so much as one break you’re just gonna have to suffocate him in his sleep.” She shrugged, pouring herself another glass. “But I’m sure the concert will be great.”

“OK, that’s enough.” I got up to leave, flustered with anger but Julie rolled her eyes and set the drink back down and for some reason, I stayed.

“Alright, I’m sorry. I’ve been on the road a while too. Kind of have to get back in the hang of being friendly. The point I was trying to make is, you know, we could both use a drink.” She raised her glass and handed it over to me. “Let’s pretend this one’s our first.”

I nodded, took it and finished it. But what she’d said was already weighing on me. Being here didn’t feel right. I had to get back to Greg. “Can I use your bathroom?” I said, and Julie nodded with a small smile. 

“Four feet that way,” she said. “Can barely miss it.”

I crossed over to the bathroom. She barely looked at me or noticed as I did, lying back on the bed as I turned on the light and turned to close the door. Then I looked back into the mirror and felt a scream start to rise in my throat.

There was a dead woman in the bathtub.

She wasn’t just dead, either. That would be selling it short. She was butchered. There was a hand draped over the basin of the tub missing three fingers. The naked old woman had been stabbed over forty times, including in both of her eyes. I clamped a hand over my mouth because I knew exactly who had done the deed and where they were, and I didn’t want to make a sound. But then it occurred to me that she knew exactly where I was. She had sent me in here and had surely known what I was going to see in here and how I was going to react to it.

That was when it clicked for me. Julie. Julie Harper. I knew who she was. Hell, most everybody did. The girl had killed her a bunch of people in her home town when she was in high school and had been sent away before she busted out and never got caught again. Around certain parts of the country, she had become the Man with the Hook Hand, just a local legend to scare kids out of hooking up. Sure, the Man With the Hook, or Michael Myers. I had even seen her picture before. If I had been thinking, I probably would have made the connection. But I didn’t, so here we were.

I stood there dumb and limp in a frozen panic. I didn’t know what else to do. The dead woman with no eyes was staring at me and the girl that had killed her was waiting just outside the door.

“You okay in there?” Her voice was so casual, so natural, that I wanted to throw up.

How long could I play along? Did she want me to play along? We both knew what I’d seen. “F-fine,” I found myself saying. But I stuttered and I’m sure she caught it. I could hear her footsteps approaching the door. She started tapping against the door, almost playfully.

“You sure you don’t want to come out?”

“No,” I said too quickly. “I mean, yes, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” she said again. “You just going to stay in that bathroom all night, then?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, but she took it as a yes, which it certainly was.

“Suit yourself,” she said in that same calm voice. “But we both know you’re not going to like it. Mrs. Dearborn is going to be much company to anybody. Plus, you’re gonna have an awful smell to deal with.” I could hear her laugh under her breath at that and it sent a shiver through my whole body. “And that smell will come quick,” she said. “It always does. Trust me, I’ve done this a lot and I’m going to do it a lot more after you. She shit herself when I stabbed her, you know. I don’t know if you saw that, but she did.”

I hadn’t seen it, but I took her word for it. I didn’t think anything could make me look at that body again. She waited for me outside the door, but did nothing, and tapped on the door as she grew impatient again.

“Fine,” Julie said after a second. “If you’re just planning to wait in there until I come get you, I’ll see if your boyfriend is any more fun.”

I heard her go to the door and open it. Greg! Oh shit! Even my inner voice sounded so distant. Finally, I kicked my ass into moving. I looked around the bathroom for something to use as a weapon, finding only one option: the knife still buried in poor Mrs. Dearborn’s back. I tried my best to keep from throwing up as I grabbed it, but the moment I heard the noise of metal pulling out of dead flesh, I failed and vomited right onto the dead woman’s head. My own half-digested fast food dinner was dripping off of her hair when I pulled together the courage to open the door.

The room was empty. Julie had already left to kill my boyfriend. Bloody knife in hand, I ran out into the cold night. It seemed to take forever to run three doors down and by the time I got there, the door was already open.

Julie was inside. At first I thought she was waiting for me, leaving the door open and standing at the foot of Greg’s bed, watching him sleep. But as soon as I stepped into the room, she rolled her eyes. “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Is it so much to ask for a quiet night?”

“There’s a dead woman in your bathtub. You planned to kill me. You call that a quiet night?”

Julie shrugged and smiled. “It is for me.”

I raised the knife. “I won’t let you do this.”

She laughed a little, causing Greg to start to stir awake. “Oh, now you care?”

Greg looked up at her in total bewilderment. “Who the hell is this girl? Johnny? What the fuck’s going on?”

Julie groaned. “You know I was going to do this while he was still asleep. As a favor to you. But now,” she pulled a small knife from her back pocket. “Things have to get messy. Again.”

Greg stared at her. “What the fuck?”

“Please,” I stammered. “You want to do me a favor, just let me go. Let both of us go. We won’t say a thing, not to anyone.”

“Will somebody please tell me what the fuck is going on?” Greg, in his confusion, was nearly hysterical.

“Greg, honey,” I said as calmly as possible. “Please keep your voice down.”

“Not until someone explains something to me, goddamn it!”

“You’ll tell,” Julie said. “Don’t pull that with me. Of course you will.”

“We won’t,” I said again, and that time she seemed to consider it.

Julie looked down at the floor. “You know, I really do like you guys. You’re cute together, unfaithful as you might be.”

Oh no.

Greg looked confused again. “What, I’ve never,” it took him less than a second to realize. “Is that what this is? You had a random motel hookup on me?” Then, with even more anger: “With her? You asshole!”

“Did you know he squeaks when he comes?” Julie said with a grin. “I guess you must, right? It’s pathetic, but kind of cute. A little like a guinea pig.” Off Greg’s blank stare, her smile grew even wider. 

From the look in his eyes, Greg clearly believed it enough.

“Greg, she’s lying.”

“You asshole!”

“Greg, come on. Think about it.” 

“You’ve had girlfriends before, Johnny. It’s not outside the realm of possibility and also what the fuck is she doing here?”

Julie flashed a smile. “He’s got a point there.”

“Please!” I pressed again. “I am begging you, please. Just stop. Just let us go. We won’t say anything to anyone about you. I don’t care. Just let us go and we’ll be on our way. We’ll never mention we were here, hell, we were never even supposed to be here. Motels…” I sighed as I spoke, feeling myself sinking as I started to bargain. “Motels like this see accidents all the time. I don’t care about the dead woman, just let us go.”

“There’s a dead woman?” Greg said weakly.

“How can I know?” Julie asked. I didn’t understand and she clearly saw it in my face, so she asked me again. “How can I know you won’t tell? Your word isn’t enough for me. I can’t let you just walk out of here without something in return. You have to pay.”

“Pay what?”

“The toll,” she said. “You want to live, you pay the toll.”

“Take all our money, I don’t care. You can have whatever you want.”

“Please,” Julie said. “I can get money. Money’s not an issue for me. It’s no fun. I need a little more than that, if I’m going to just let one of you walk out of here.”

I felt a pit growing in my stomach. “One of us?”

“Well,” she said. “I guess you’re not quite as slow on the uptake as your hunk here. Yes. I can, when the mood strikes, let someone live. But someone is not two people. We all have our limits and I guess that’s mine. So one of you has to die. Them’s the breaks.”

“You can’t be serious,” Greg said.

“Greg,” I said it sternly, even coldly. I had seen enough to know she was telling the truth and I wanted to make sure he knew that before he dug himself any deeper.

He made eye contact with me and nodded. He understood.

“You choose,” Julie said to me.

“What?”

“Well, frankly, I’ve gotten to know you a whole lot better than him,” she said, and I distantly noticed Greg look away in disgust as she did. “It would be a little awkward to start making a connection with him now, wouldn’t it? So the choice is yours, Johnny. It always was. What’s it going to be?”

I swallowed. After all the shitty things I had done, the choice came shockingly easy. There was no hesitation, there was no second guessing. I deserved this. “Take me,” I said. “Let Greg go, let him just get in his car and get the fuck out of here, and take me.”

Julie flashed those eyes at me. What at first had seemed like brown pools now looked more like dark, empty pits. I don’t know how I’d been fooled before. “I’m impressed,” she said, and her voice sounded somehow genuine. “That’s very selfless of you, making a choice like that. And I’ll be true to my word. I’ll let one of you go.” She raised her knife and readied to drive it down into Greg’s throat. “But I already made up my mind about who. I did happen to lie about that.”

“NO!” I screamed. I dove on the knife and felt a sensation course through my body, hot, then cold, then nothing but searing pain as the blade struck into my shoulder.

Greg had seemed almost entranced by the motion, but stood up and snapped out of it.

“Run!” I screamed at him.

He tried to, but Julie was on him like a lion on a gazelle. Thankfully, though, I still had her weapon buried behind my arm. She threw herself at Greg before he could open the door. He was strong and athletic and fought her off as easily as any normal person would. But this girl was far from normal and we both knew it. She clawed at him and forced her hands around his throat, but Greg summoned every bit of strength he had to kick her off.

I picked myself up before she did, still in a world of pain. Julie was thrown back onto the floor and as soon as I saw her lying there I acted as quickly as I could and pushed the old, out-of-date motel TV down onto her head. There was a smashing sound and I didn’t stay to see the rest. Greg and I were already running back to the car. He opened the door for me as if I hadn’t just cheated on him with the woman who tried to murder us, probably only because I was wounded. As he started the car, I looked back in the rear-view mirror and there was Julie, stepping out of the motel room. She saw us.

She did not try to chase us. In fact, as she stood in the moonlight, caked in blood (some of which was hers, but most of which was mine) she made no movement at all except to simply wave us goodbye. Sometimes I still see her waving in my dreams, the ones where I wake myself up screaming. Other times, all I have to do is close my eyes.

We did not make it to the concert, thanks to my shoulder injury. At the hospital, we both said it was a mugging. That’s a fairly common occurrence, so no one ever really pressed us any further. We never told anyone about the dead woman, nor that we had ever even been at the Brine Harbor Motel at all. Our names were never written down on the registry and we paid in cash. I never risked breaking my promise to Julie, even though she had tried like hell to break hers. In some ways, that brings me the most pain at all. After all was said and done, I had cheated on him just by walking into her room, betraying his trust, and nearly costing him his life. And it was the woman I had cheated on Greg with that I wound up staying faithful to.

He, as far as I know, never told anyone either, though I can’t really say as we haven’t spoken in a long time. We never loved each other again, not after that night, though we stayed together for an entire year afterward. I think that had more to do with a shared fear than anything else. We’ve both been looking over our shoulder ever since that night. At first it was a shared thing, but it became unbearable for both of us, and now I suspect we do it separately.

The body of Mrs. Dearborn was discovered, even made the national news as murders like that tend to do, for a few hours at least. It was eventually decided that it was just one of many murders across the United States that will simply never be solved. And that was apparently that. I wish I could say I felt guilt about not coming forward, about not sharing that information, to ease the family’s mind if nothing else. I did what I needed to survive. I thought that then and still think that now. Which would probably make you wonder why I’m even writing this down.

By setting pen to paper and forming this confession, I am breaking a silent promise made to a murderer in a motel room, the price of which is my own life. I do hope that the family of the slaughtered old woman will find some peace of mind, if they even believe who did it. They might, in truth, even suspect me. That doesn’t bother me as much as it should, because I know how this is going to play out. I have since the night it happened.

Maybe Julie knew it too. It scares the hell out of me to think that she knew I’d eventually spill the beans, and that she’d just bide her time and wait—doing God knows what else to God knows who else—until I finally did. Scares the hell out of me, but it doesn’t surprise me. I’ll be seeing her again soon. I know that. And I am as okay with that as a person can be. The paranoia has consumed too much of my life and I want more than anything for it to be over.

Sometimes in my darker moments I think about how much I wish I had listened to Greg, how much I wish we had never pulled into that motel and just kept on pushing on down the road. I know in my heart that we would have gotten into an accident if we had. But I think, in truth, we did. No matter what, we signed our death warrants. We got into a hell of an accident and we’ve been on life support ever since. You can think of this as a suicide note, I don’t care. I don’t want to run anymore. And sometimes I think that even if I write this down, she won’t come. That she’ll let me live to a tender old age, build a family and watch them grow, and on the day I’m old and happiest and feeling most accomplished, I’ll see a pretty girl with dark hair and I’ll know my time is up. And that scares me most of all.

So I write everything I have left to tell, and now as it comes to an end, I’ll just sit here awhile. And wait. And hope.

For the best.