Short story that has yet to have a title...

My name is Charlotte Burka but everyone calls me Peaches. It might have something to do with my living next to a peach orchard. But to be honest, I’m pretty sure it started with a couple of boys in fourth grade making fun of my-erm-”early development” of a womanly figure. Not exactly the kind of thing I want stuck with me all the way to highschool but whaddya gonna do.

My mother and I live in a small, two-floor house that my mom will probably be paying off for the rest of her life. But, we get as many free peaches as we want which will totally make up for it as soon as the bank starts accepting fruit instead of cash.

For as long as I can remember it had just been us. We lived with my grandparents until I was four because my mom was still going to school when she got pregnant. World’s Greatest Dad packed up and left before he ever knew so my grandparents had a really big part in raising me to be the stellar person I am today. They’ve been closely involved in our lives ever since. But mom wanted to branch out, show that she was her own adult so we hitched up our skirts and moved to the middle of nowhere. Yup, sure proved that we’re self-sufficient alright, considering there is no one else around. I guess it’s not too bad though; like I said before: all-you-can-eat peaches. The farmer guy who owns the orchard is super old and lives, like, three billion miles away so he said we can take what we like if we keep an eye on the orchard when he can’t come around.

I know I gripe a lot about being really secluded but it saved my life and I will be forever grateful for my mother’s mule-like stubborness. Stubbornity? Stubborn-you know what I mean. It all started a couple of months ago. It was a dark and stormy night...okay it was seven in the morning, but it was raining pretty hard. My mom was driving me to school and as usual, she was not very gracious to the other people on the road.

“Don’t they know we have somewhere to be? Sometimes I feels like these people know I’m in a hurry and slow down on purpose,” she said, exasperated.

“Yes, I’m sure that poor old lady you just cut off has only one purpose in life: to make sure you aren’t the first one to the copy machine in the morning.” My mom was a teacher at the same school I was forced to learn things in. What did that mean? I couldn’t get away with anything.

“Hey, if you don’t like my driving you could always ride your bike to school.”

“Ride my bike, what, seven miles? Noo thanks. I’ll take the dirty looks from other drivers. You and your aggressive driving.”

“I like to think of myself as a determined driver, not an aggressive one.”

“Sure, okay,” I replied and we both laughed.

This was pretty much how every morning went until we got to school and parted ways. Like I said, even though I don’t have her as one of my teachers, going to the same school my mom works in means any and everything that I do gets reported back to her through a complicated network of gossipy janitors and nosey faculty.

I shook out my unicorn umbrella and hurried to my locker before the starting bell rang and the teachers came out for a hall-sweep of the shamed tardy students. As I ran down the hall towards my trig class with, ugh, Mr. Meyer, I bumped into a security guard standing next to a window, watching the streets.

“Sorry!” I called breathlessly but didn’t have to time to stop.

“S’okay,” he mumbled but something about the tone of his voice made me look back.

The guy was tall, too tall but lean and young-looking. He was wearing a baseball cap and tilted it down towards his nose and shifted his shoulder to cover his face like he was hiding from me. It was definitely weird but I didn’t have time to think about creepy, but strangely familiar security guards considering the second bell had just rung and I still needed to memorize SOHCOHTOA for my trig test.

The rest of the school day ran by in kind of a blur. It was Friday which meant classes didn’t matter. I don’t think I answered a single question or wrote down more than a couple notes on Aristotle's algorithm. I wasn’t completely unproductive though; I had two whole pages worth of doodles by the end of the day. Very much worth it.

My best friend Judy caught up with me at my locker and waited for me because we had shopping plans that afternoon. “Hey hey, you’ll never guess what happened. Okay, you might guess but only ‘cause you know me so well but anyway it’s totally about Mason and it’s totally, unbelievably amazing and you’ll never guess it!” She didn’t take a single breath during her rant. Not one. I was waiting. As much as I love Judy, and that is a lot, sometimes I just tune her out until her voice comes back down from a pitch only dolphins can hear. “Yeah, so then I was like, weell you haven’t really asked me, and he was like, that’s kinda what I’m trying to do but you keep interrupting, and I was like oh my gosh sorry go ahead, and he was like, it’s okay ‘cause you’re cute and I was like, holy crap. No. Way. You’re cute and then he was like yeah that’s true too and seriously I think a little piece of me died and went to heaven and not to creep you out or anything Peaches, but that guy has been staring at you for the last ten minutes.”

“Wait, what?” I snapped back to attention when Judy said my name. “What guy?” I looked in the direction of Judy’s stare but didn’t see anyone out of the ordinary. Well, I saw a lot of people out of the ordinary but that’s highschool. No creepy peepers though. Anyway I was used to being stared at. All my life I’ve had someone following me.

At my elementary school, we always put on these musical performances for open houses or for holiday celebrations. All the kids’ parents would come and film their sons and daughters and we would put on our best show for them. Since my mom was a teacher and the shows were always in the middle of the day she had to work during them and could never come. I couldn’t look into the audience, searching for the one grinning face that I knew was watching only me. I put on a darn good show alright, but I did it for myself. I didn’t blame my mom. I never blamed her. I never thought to blame her. It was just the way things were.

Sometimes I’d look out and meet someone’s gaze. Usually it wouldn’t register until later that the man had been looking at me first. He was very tall, you could tell even when he was sitting because his head poked out from the sea of heads around him. His skin was dark and his head was shaved. I could feel the intensity of his dark brown eyes even from the spotlighted stage.

It turned into a game; look for the tall man, see that his eyes never leave mine. And it didn’t end with the school shows. I’d see him standing on a street corner when riding in the car with my mom. I’d see him browsing through the aisles at the grocery store. I used to try to point him out to my mom but somehow he’d disappear before she looked around. She put it off as a kid having an imaginary friend until I was getting too old to have one without being insane so I stopped bringing it up. He became my secret. Secret stalker, sure, but I didn’t realize there was a name for it back then. We’d never interacted, never came anywhere close to each other. But I watched him watching me. Sometimes I wondered if the man even knew that I was keeping as close tabs on him that he was on me.

“Weird, he was just there. Oh well. So MegaMall or Downy County Strip?”

“Huh? Oh, Downy Strip for sure.” I closed my locker and we headed to the school parking lot. All thoughts of classes and anything else even remotely school related hid in a dark closet in my mind and all I thought about was new clothes and late night movies with my best friend. I was so ready for this weekend.

After satisfying our teenage girl need for shopping, Judy and I left the Downy County Strip mall and headed to my house for some good ol’ fashioned chick flicks. Judy’s cute little bright-blue buggy was turning in a major intersection when the lingering yellow light finally turned red.

“Ju, you should’ve stopped. You’re totally getting a ticket for that-” Just as I was making fun of the pout on Judy’s face, the car behind us that would’ve been stuck at the light revved its engines and raced forward to make the turn, narrowly missing a bumper to bumper collision with cars coming the other way.

“Woah. Someone’s in a hurry,” Judy said sarcastically.

“Yeah.” I peered into the rearview mirror, trying to get a better look at the maniac driver. I could only see a dark face with a set jaw through the now pouring rain but I knew instantly who it was. This time was different though. He wasn’t sitting in a seat somewhere, watching me sing with the rest of my classmates or pretending to decide on different detergents while looking at me and my mother from the corners of his eyes. This time he was close, he was following me and I was scared.

“Hey, Ju, let’s not go straight to my house, actually. I totally forgot that I wanted to pick up-something from the gas station.” My voice wavered.

“Sure,” my best friend said hesitantly. “Are you okay? You’re sweating like a pig.”

“Yeah, it’s hot in here isn’t it?” Ju was looking over at me worriedly, not at all focused on the cars in front of her, and glanced at the temperature reader on the dashboard.

“Babe, it’s sixty three degrees. Do you need me to pull over? Are you gonna throw up? Please, God, don’t throw up. At least not in the car. Are you gonna throw up, because I can pull over.” Judy didn’t wait for me to answer and parked the buggy on the side of the road, ignoring the honking of indignant drivers she swerved in front of.

I unbuckled my seatbelt immediately and hopped out of the car before Judy had even pulled the keys out of ignition. The car that was tailing us didn’t have time to stop with us thanks to Judy’s lack of turn signals. It was a red-ish Toyota Camry. Right, because white vans were too mainstream. I watched it drive a little further down the road and stop at a small corner store. The driver didn’t get out nor did the engine stop running.

“You know what, I’m fine now,” I said and flashed Judy my most convincing smile. “In fact, I’ll drive.”

“Are you sure?” Judy looked reluctantly towards her pristine, tan leather seats. “You’re sure you’re not gonna hurl?”

“Don’t worry,” I laughed. “We’ll drive with the windows down since I’m pretty sure it was the smell of your hairspray that was suffocating me. I’ll try to resist the urge to throw my head outside the window and let my tongue flap in the wind.

Judy chuckled at my usual idiocy and we got back in the bright blue car and started on our way. Just as we passed the maroon two-door it turned its wheels and raced down the road behind us. Not this time, sucker. I turned the steering wheel nearly full circle to make an unexpected right turn and then again for a quick left turn. It was a little sharp and I wasn't anticipating the tow sign poking out into the street so the ear splitting scrape of metal against bright blue metal was gut-wrenching. Judy looked back and forth between the car door and my determined face incredulously. She was speechless for three whole minutes which I think must be a record. But I didn't stop the car, I didn't even slow down. I was gonna lose this stalker if it killed me.

“Peach, you’re going to total my buggy! What are you doing?” Alright, so maybe it would kill me.

  After maybe five minutes of narrowly avoiding grisly accidents and Ju screaming in my ear threatening to call the police, I pulled the car to a stop and stared intently into the rearview mirror. Finally, I was satisfied by the absence of the maroon Toyota of stalkerish death on our tail.

I was so focused on checking if the coast was clear that I hadn't realized Judy was talking to me until she used my real name.

"Charlotte! I'm gonna call the police! I am! You're freaking crazy!"

"You don't have to; we're going to the police station right now. This is the last time I'm letting that guy follow me around."

"You know what? I'm calling your mom. Maybe she can figure out what vein popped in your brain."

"Judy. Shut. Up. Just for one minute of your life."

But she didn't shut up. I put the car in drive and proceeded towards the police station while Judy tapped indignantly on her cell phone and did exactly as she said.

"Ms. Burka? Yeah, hi, it's Judy. Oh I'm fine actually, no thanks to your daughter. 'What happened?' What didn't happen? First Peach nearly threw up on my vintage leather seats and then she decided she didn't feel like following basic traffic laws and whipped us through the crowded streets of our beloved city. Oh, you want to talk to her? Peach, your mother wants to talk to you. She sounds serious." I glanced over at her, annoyed, and shook my head. "Hm, Peach says she's busy trying to kill us again. I'll you back later Mama Burka. That is if I'm still alive. If' you don't hear from me in ten minutes please call the police and tell them they can either find my body and arrest your daughter, or they can arrest me because I strangled her to death. Ciao!" Judy hung up on my confused mother and sighed loudly.

"Are you satisfied?" I asked, only half expecting her to actually reply.

"Can you just tell me what's going on? Can you just give me that? Because I'm trying my hardest not to freak out, here-"

"Not that hard.."
"Charlotte!"
"Sorry, sorry. Okay. There's this guy that's been following me around since I was a kid. At first, I thought maybe he just lived somewhere near me because I saw him everywhere I went but no one lives near me. He's always kept his distance, I'd only notice him if I was looking. For a while I thought I'd made him up because I was lonely or something. But the last few weeks have been worse; he's been closer, in the same gas stations, corner stores, here inside the school building, once he even followed me to a set of port-o-potties at a forest reserve. I think the only thing that stopped him from hopping into one with me was the group of tourists taking pictures of everything. That was him in the car behind us and I flipped a little bit and drove like we were in the Indy 500 because I was trying to lose him. Him following me around and watching me all the time used to be kind of reassuring, flattering even, like I was worthy of being stalked. But now I realize how demented that is and it's scary and twisted and I'm done being some grown man's walking TV set." Man, that was two times in one day that I'd left Judy speechless. There must have been a disturbance in the universe.
"I don't even know what to say to that. I'd say you were lying except that was probably the most normal thing you've said today." Judy turned away from me and frowned. "Okay, let's skip past the part where I freak out some more and then get mad because my best friend has been keeping a colossal secret from me.