A sneaked out of bed and peered into the hall.
“I slowly cracked open the door and looked out, but the hall was dark. I could see a sliver of light coming from the bathroom, though. My boyfriend was inside, talking.”
Her boyfriend had gotten up in the middle of the night to spend a considerable amount of time talking in the bathroom. He had to be on the phone. Already suspicious, A decided to find out who he was talking to.
She crept down the dark hallway and pressed her ear against the bathroom door.
“He kept apologizing. Stuff like ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘I can’t do that,’ and ‘Please forgive me.’ I assumed he’d gotten involved with some horrible woman who was trying to make him break up with me.”
Hearing his pitiful voice, she felt her feelings for him chill.
“I figured, whatever. There’s no point in dating a guy like that. But at the same time, I was really mad. If we were going to split up, I wanted proof he was cheating, so I could confront him and break things off myself.”
A returned to bed, but her boyfriend stayed in the bathroom all night. That morning, she left his apartment like nothing had happened.
Exactly one week later, A went over to his place again to spend the night.
“I was on a mission. I was determined to find proof that he was cheating.”
She figured his phone would provide the best evidence. Thankfully, she had accidentally seen him enter his password while they were out one time, and she still remembered it.
After they went to bed that night, A waited until her boyfriend had started snoring before snatching his phone and sneaking out of bed.
“I didn’t want to be in the same room if she happened to call him, so I went to the bathroom, just like he had the time before.”
Slinking down the dark hallway, she crept into the bathroom and unlocked his phone.
First, she opened the messenger app and checked the names. But she only found wholly normal exchanges with their mutual friends from the club.
She was sure the name of whoever he’d been talking to would be in his call history, at least. But she couldn’t find any record of a call at that time of night. She checked his other applications that included chat functions but found nothing.
“If he’d deleted his call history, then he was definitely up to no good. No one goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night to talk to themselves. So I kept digging.”
His photos folder didn’t produce anything, either. She’d just about given up, when something occurred to her.
What about the account that had been liking his social media posts?
They might be communicating through the app’s messenger function. She launched the program and checked his DMs.
“That was when I found it. He’d been exchanging DMs with that account. But it wasn’t what I’d expected.”
The screen displayed a long list of messages from her boyfriend.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
“There wasn’t a single response from the other person, just him sending ‘I’m sorry’ over and over. There were so many messages that I couldn’t check them all. It must have been several weeks’ worth. It seemed like he was sending dozens every day.”
A found this extremely bizarre. She gave up on finding evidence he’d cheated and decided to just ask him about it directly.
Still holding his phone, she opened the bathroom door and found her boyfriend standing in the middle of the dark hallway.
“It was too dark to see his face, but I could tell something was off. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there watching me. We looked at each other in silence for about thirty seconds. Then he lurched forward and grabbed my arm.”
She reflexively apologized, scared that her boyfriend might lash out in anger. But he just wordlessly yanked her by the arm into the living room.
“He would get carried away sometimes, but he’d never been violent. I was absolutely terrified. I begged him to let me go, but he wouldn’t.”
Fearing that he might start hitting her, A struggled wildly, trying to wrest her arm free.
At last, she thought he had let go. But then he abruptly shoved her away.
A fell, hitting her head on the corner of a low table. She stayed there for a while, unable to move.
“I was dazed. I just laid there on the floor, watching him walk back down the hall.”
He returned to the living room holding a pair of scissors.
That was when she saw his face clearly for the first time.
She said he was smiling really wide but crying at the same time. A stared hazily at his tear-streaked grin.
He approached A, took a handful of her long hair, and cut it clean off with the scissors.
“I couldn’t hear him all that well, but he kept muttering weird things, like ‘This will do for now’ and ‘The doll will replace you.’”
Still holding her hair, he walked over to the bed and picked up a stuffed animal.
They had won it from an arcade claw machine on a date, back when times were better.
He feverishly wrapped her hair around it.
Then he walked past A and left the apartment, still clutching the hair-wrapped stuffed animal.
“That was it. As soon as I could move again, I left. I never saw him again after that, and I don’t want to. I went to the hospital, and they told me I’d only suffered a slight concussion, nothing more. But he had chopped off my hair… I went to a hair salon to have them even it up, but it wound up much shorter than I like.”
When she told the other club members what had happened, they could hardly believe it, and they were deeply angry.
Some people wanted to confront A’s boyfriend on her behalf, but he stopped showing up to club events. He even stopped going to school and vacated his apartment.
“At first, I was shocked, sad, and upset. My feelings were all over the place. But now that I can think back on it with a calmer mind, I realize how strange it all was.”
Then A seemed to mutter something to herself.
“But what was he cheating on me with? And what was he apologizing to?”