She never liked the way the boys in class would look at her. She could feel it even when her eyes were on the blackboard. The feeling that someone is staring and trying to imagine what she might look like under her Lion King T-Shirt caused her so much rage that teachers would often have to pull her out of class for shouting.
“Why am I in trouble, Ben was the one being a creep!” Liza tried pulling her arm away from Mr. Anders as he yanked her off her chair and into the hallway.
“Because Liza, he wasn’t doing anything and you turned around and threw your eraser in his face and called him an asshole. That language is inappropriate for a young lady.”
“I could feel him staring through my clothes! He’s always looking at me like that!”
“Well unfortunately I can’t punish someone for looking at you Liza, you’re just going to have to learn to ignore it. And if anything, you should be flattered, he probably just likes you.”
Mr. Anders went back into the classroom to teach the well behaved boys and girls while Liza sat on the cold lime green and baby blue tiled floor. All she could do was stare at her light up Spongebob sneakers and scream in her own head. This was always happening to her in her 6th grade class at Lincoln Middle School. Boys would yank on her braids and, or throw things down her shirt while she was hunched over reading and teachers would claim they didn’t see it. The other girls would just laugh it off and pretend that they didn’t feel violated but Liza refused. She got suspended for two weeks once because a boy “accidentally” fell on her lap, squeezing her inner thigh for “support”, and she punched him in the face. Liza had to sit in the principal’s office and get lectured on the merits of respect while the boy sat there crying and his parent’s demanded her expulsion. Liza’s single mother, Cecilia, couldn’t get to Liza’s unbalanced sentencing because she worked at a high end brunch restaurant downtown and the collagen filled trophy wives needed their mind numbing mimosas. Liza spent the entire 2 hour walk home with Principal Harris’s mantra of “Boys will be Boys” echoing in her head.
Liza hated the boys in her school and she hated the girls for putting up with them. No one else ever defended her and no one but her questioned the status quo. The boys there could do no wrong but as soon as she stood up for herself, she was labeled a troubled girl. By the time high school came around Liza had been placed in three different schools, each one kicking her out for attacking some boy. Police officers were frequent visitors at Liza’s house, constantly threatening her with arrest. They had no proof that she did anything wrong, but a few of the boys that she had problems with ended up missing. The phone in the kitchen was filled with voicemails of angry mothers concerned with the trauma that Liza had caused her sons. Their boys, of course, were all angels and they only acted out because Liza antagonized them.
“What do you think is going to happen when you allow your daughter to leave the house with those shorts on!” One particularly nasty voicemail highlighted the fact that Cecilia’s 13 year old daughter should not have been able to leave the house with her pink bicycle shorts when there were boys around.
“Boys will be boys and if they see a girl dressed like a slut they are going to treat her like one.” The mother of a boy who Liza had kicked in the shins after he tried to pull her shorts down at recess exclaimed on the phone. Cecilia spent most nights crying, and most days reapplying makeup and eye drops so her tables couldn’t see how little sleep she had gotten. She didn’t know how to help Liza, Cecilia was all alone in raising her because Liza’s dad had been thrown in prison for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Cecilia couldn’t help but think that some of that anger had seeded itself inside her 5’1”, 90 pound, red haired daughter. She always believed Liza when she told her that boys were being mean to her but she just wanted Liza to ignore them and pass her classes. She just didn’t want to see Liza end up like her father, angry and in prison.
Liza stayed up late every night scribbling her thoughts in countless journals. Her mom bought her a journal for her birthday every year and diary entries that used to be about which Spice Girl Liza wanted to be, turned into angry poems about harming boys. She started to draw her male teachers and male classmates in distorted and violent poses, pages were filled with black and white depictions of revenge. Cecilia on the other hand would stay up all night looking through photo boxes of her and Liza when she was just a little girl. Her favorite pictures were from a trip the whole family took to the lake, right before Liza’s father got arrested. She held tight to one of 6 year old Liza sitting on her lap on the sandy shore, the biggest smiles on their sunburnt faces. She so desperately wanted that little girl back that she started to ignore who Liza was becoming. Eventually Cecilia unplugged the phone from the wall and stopped answering the door for the police. She was going to keep Liza safe in her own mind and in her little shoe box full of photos under her bed, and no one, not even Liza was going to penetrate her broken shelter.
Liza barely showed up to her freshman year of classes. She got the assignments done but teachers didn’t want her in her classrooms and her mom had seemed to forget that Liza even existed. Instead she would sit on benches in the park and watch all the men harass women who just wanted to be left alone, and she would walk down the street and listen as men shouted awful things from their cars.
“Lift up your skirt, let us see those legs!”
“Smile more little girl, you would be much prettier!”
“Why don’t you get in here and let daddy take you where you need to go?”
The rage boiled inside of her until she could feel her fingertips tingle. She began to feed off of their perversions and found energy in her hatred. Liza passed her freshman year despite the fact that the school kept having to close because of the disappearance of 4 of her classmates. Parents suspected Liza but they had no proof. Cecilia had gone so deep into her own mind that she seemed confused when a 15 year old girl would walk into her house. She looked like her 6 year old Liza, but she couldn’t be. Liza lived under her bed, in pictures. She was afraid of the imposter and stayed hidden in her bedroom. Cecilia stopped going to work and Liza had to fend for herself. She gained an affinity for picking pockets at bars and she started going to more and more dangerous places for money and to feed off the threatening male energy. She looked just like a young Cecilia so she would steal her mother’s ID to get into bars, even though half the time the bouncers didn’t check it because they wanted to stare at her ass as she walked into the bar. Liza would sit in the back and watch as drunk men slobbered over uncomfortable women. She could feel their sickness filling her up with a manic energy that she didn’t quite understand until one day when her true nature pushed through her tiny 15 year old frame.
Liza was at a local college campus bar that was known as “the hunting grounds” for the young and horny frat boys. “No” may have been a word that was uttered in this bar but it was rarely heard. Liza couldn’t understand why women continued to drink here considering the reputation had gotten so out of control that local police had threatened to shut it down. Nothing came of these threats of course, not when the bar served as an institution and almost right of passage for the dangerously accomplished alumni. There were other bars these women could drink at, yet every Friday night they chose to sit in this bar and fight off entitled and well connected men. It made Liza sick but the energy she absorbed from watching the disturbing dance made her feel stronger than she ever had. She would normally just watch as men brought women perfectly curated drinks, whipped up by the bartender to guarantee a successful night. Liza gained a special energy from watching the prowling nature of the men on the dance floor, with a floor so black she often imagined it opening up and swallowing them all. She never interfered unless she saw something especially heinous. As soon as she looked up and saw her mother walk through the door, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sit still tonight. Her mother’s mind had reverted back to when Liza was 6 so in Cecilia’s eyes she was that 22 year old woman, in a 31 year old’s body, who didn’t get to go to college because she had to raise a little girl.
Cecilia sat at the bar in a dress dug out from the back of her closet while Liza watched on in horror. Her fingers started to tingle as she saw a young college aged man dressed head to toe in attention grabbing clothing, begin to approach her unsuspecting and unstable mother. Liza’s mind began to spin as the lights in the bar started flickering and she snapped when she saw him put something in the drink and place it in front of Cecilia. Liza stood up and the light fixtures started shaking, the music started skipping and glasses around her started shattering. People began to panic and run out of the bar. Cecilia looked around confused and saw the drink in front of her but she didn’t see who put it there. Liza stomped her foot and the lights crashed to the ground sending glass flying everywhere. She snapped out of her own trance and ran to her mother, stepping over crying college girls looking around for their nowhere to be seen dance partners. Cecilia was still sitting at the bar in a confused daze, she started to reach for the drink but Liza slapped it out of her hand. Glass bottles were still shattering behind the empty bar, and girls were running past the mother and daughter with fear and confusion shining through their heavily made up faces.
“You look just like my daughter, I left her at home, sleeping under the bed” Cecilia said as Liza put her mother’s arm over her shoulder and carried her out of the broken glass filled bar. There were at least 50 young women standing outside the bar, calling their boyfriends with no answers. Girls were crying and screaming out names, searching for their friends and classmates. Liza was confused because she didn’t see any of the boys leave the bar and she couldn’t feel their energy anymore. Cecilia was just mumbling about taking Liza to the lake. Police showed up and started taking statements and Liza knew she had to get out of there before they recognized her. She pulled her mother around back of the bar and managed to flag down a taxi. They got home and Liza tucked her mother into bed. Cecilia was in a haze and kept pushing Liza off of her and claiming that she was trying to rob her. Liza finally got her to lie down and she closed the door and went downstairs. She turned the TV on and watched as the News claimed that 67 young men, including 3 bartenders, had gone missing from the bar after what seemed to be an electrical explosion. Liza knew the empty yet satisfied feeling she had, she remembered it from middle school when those boys went missing. She knew what had happened but she was terrified to admit it. The masculine energy she absorbed turned into a toxic power to be used against its own energy source. She felt full and exhausted, she turned off the news and went to write in her journal.
3 years later Liza moved her and her mother to a small cabin on the same lake her mother stared at in the pictures of her childhood (paid for by the loose pockets of rich old men). Liza would slip away to visit the local town so she could feed, but she made sure to be careful because too many missing men would cause suspicion. Something started to happen in the town where all these men were going missing, women started to fill the positions of the men, they started running for office, and getting seats on the school board. Little girls, just like Liza used to be, were believed when they said that boys were bothering them. Boys started behaving better because they didn’t want to end up like the men that disappeared, they all had reputations of being “creepy”. Liza’s anger began to fade away as she realized that she had done some distorted version of good in the world. The less angry she felt the weaker her hunger got until one day she felt no anger and all the women in the town were happy. Liza and her mother stayed in that cabin on the lake where Cecilia could relive the happiest moments of her young life for the rest of her days.
Inherent Fear 