Less Obvious Monsters

The ones walking among us

"Has anything bad like that ever happened to you?" 

I feel my lips curl in a tight smile and my eyes soften. I look at her hair cascading in golden waves over both shoulders; her round, hooded eyes staring a hole into me. I don't know why it never occurred to me that my daughter might ask me this question.

"Actually, I don't want to know." 

My moment of silence must have triggered her panic button. "Someday we'll talk about it when you're older. Just always know that you can come to me with anything and I will help you, no matter what." At fourteen, she is just two years younger than I was when it all started. I try to picture her in my shoes and a ball of nausea fills my stomach. Impossible.

My face flushes. The anger I feel is a testament to the way time changes us. At sixteen, I was an overachiever; a goody two-shoes who took honors classes, won awards for choir, band, visual art, and writing. I didn't go to parties where kids smoked or drank. I wasn't "in with the wrong crowd." The truth was, I wasn't in with any crowd. I struggled to connect with my peers. I remember when American Online became common across the country. The race after school to get home, unplug the house phone and connect the landline to the desktop family computer. The crackles and low drone as you waited in anticipation for the pitch to change, signaling connection, hoping a little yellow envelope appeared in the blue pixelated mailbox on the screen. You've got mail. 

The ability to connect with like-minded people when you feel like an outcast in your small town is one of the important joys of technology. It can also be a dangerous trap. And in the earliest days, before the normalization of dating apps or age verification, it was like the wild west. 

It's easy for everyone to hate celebrities who are taken down for bad behavior. Jeffrey Epstein, Diddy, Harvey Weinstein. The amount of money and power people like this have magnifies their actions and allows their perverseness to corrupt in ways less obvious monsters will never have access to. They feel so far away from our everyday lives. The court of public opinion also rallies against them when a story breaks because if their victims are in the dozens or hundreds it feels like a bigger win when they're taken down. And they should be taken down. But is a victim any less vulnerable or traumatized if they were the only target of the person who hurt them? No one is all good or bad, but where does the line get drawn? At what point do we collectively say, "Anyone who could do "x" is a bad person?" How bad does someone have to be, or maybe more importantly, how much do individuals, or a whole community, benefit if they continue to look the other way?

I think about New Year's Eve, 1997. I was going out with a friend, but we also both had dates. We agreed, for safety, that we would double-date. It was my first date ever. I was sixteen and, as I stated earlier, didn’t have the easiest time connecting to my peers. I sang in the local opera chorus and had a job at the B. Daltons in the mall. My friend thought I was fabulous. He was new to the district and hadn’t come out yet to his mother (although I think she sort of knew). We were both clean-cut, good students; the type people didn’t worry about. The type who didn’t get caught.

My date that night was a thirty-four-year-old man I met in an America Online chatroom. We had been chatting for several months. It started with discussions of opera and a shared appreciation of poetry. He was driving five hours to take me to dinner and give me my first kiss at midnight. He was tall and mysterious and wore French cologne. We ordered appetizers and dessert. There were actual fireworks over the river as the new year rang in. It seemed sophisticated and glamorous. The truth is that I was a teenager in a small town that I couldn’t wait to get out of. Almost anything could seem glamorous through my eyes back then.

That evening changed me. I thought I had met my true love and hated that life had made me so much younger. It seemed so cruel of fate to do that (ah, youth).

Years later, I found out that after I had returned home from my life-altering “magical” night, he met up with two strippers and brought them back to his hotel room. Physically, nothing outside of that midnight kiss happened that night with me. It would be a much longer game with lasting ramifications.