Webs We Weave - Chapter 12

Webs We Weave



Chapter Twelve

DISCLAIMER :: This tale blends together aspects of Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy/Ghost Spider/Spider-Gwen from Marvel Comics, Marvel Television, and Marvel Studios. Fanfiction? Sort of. The world and characters are mine, but they may seem familiar.

Author's note: There is a depiction of domestic violence in this chapter. Though brief, I understand that can be triggering.

(( Chapter Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLv1Zh8NbUk ))

That morning sucked. I cannot accurately relay how many times I was scolded. My knees were knobs. My arms were noodles. My feet were sickles. Whenever I dared look in the mirror, I looked like a toddler attempting the choreography of Swan Lake. Though my body would stretch and contort into whatever shape Evelyn was showing me, the execution was more of a hot mess than another Krakatoa eruption. There was no give from my tutor. She was barking in a manner that I assume a Marine Corps drill instructor might. She and I were in that separate studio for the entire class period. She spent ninety minutes yelling at me. She made me feel small and pathetic. I think nothing would have given her more joy than me throwing in the towel and completely giving up.

My internal mantra was from one of my favorite sci-fi movies: “Never give up. Never surrender.”

When the dismissal bell rang, my body carried me out of that studio faster than I have walked in a very long time. Arriving in the ready room, someone showed me how to use the hole in the foot of the tights to roll them up to my calves. Once that was accomplished, I threw on the blue and red school-themed warmups along with my socks and tennis shoes before rushing out the door. No part of me wanted to be in there any longer. My ears picked up Matcha calling after me, but it didn’t register.

My mind didn’t even bring up the fact I should stop at my locker to pick up the textbook for Mr. Harrington’s class. I skipped it entirely. The noise of the students in the hall felt like white noise blasting from the speakers inside my head. When I arrived at my history classroom, I nearly fell into my desk and put my head down. My eyes felt hot and damp. It took a few minutes to recover. Mercifully, Mr. Harrington didn’t bother me about it. A couple of the other students whispered about my warmups and my hair, but it wasn’t to be evil so I ignored it.

The last time I could remember feeling like that had been the final argument with my father after I came home from MIT and couldn’t get a job. There I was, back in the Albany Towers of Crown Heights in Brooklyn with a Master of Science and a perfect 5.0 GPA with nothing to show for it. I couldn’t even get a job at Boston Dynamics. He screamed at me like he wasted his own money sending me off to Boston, but I had a scholarship then student loans I had taken out myself. He didn’t pay for any part of my education. It didn’t matter to him. The child who had been into science and not all that fond of sports would always be a disappointment to him. I hadn’t spoken to him since.

The aftermath of the Trail of Tears and the political situation leading up to the Civil War were the last things I was worried about. There was a plan to work on further notes for the schematics of the web shooters I was concepting, but I couldn’t even touch that. My mind was still back in that damn studio being made to feel next to worthless. That was my first time in the class. My mind could not wrap around the reason Evelyn would have been so cold and cruel about everything.

The dismissal bell for lunch couldn’t come fast enough. Unlike the previous days, I didn’t wait for the crowd to filter out the choke point. I rushed through the crowd before it really had a chance to form. Again, the noise of the halls was white noise. I moved through the sea of bodies like an icebreaker. There were a few objections to my tactics as I moved through, but I paid them no heed. I was in no mood.

Smelling the cafeteria food from the corridor reminded me that I hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning. Conflicting sensations of being famished and also having lost my appetite dominated my conscious mind for a moment. I would eat, but not much. The meal that day was country fried steak, so I wasn’t missing anything. Once again, I picked the lonely, unclaimed table and sat to barely eat my food. I was alone for a few minutes before Hailey found me and was immediately concerned about the expression on my face.

She breathed heavily as she set her tray down on the table. “Geezus, Saoirse, you look worse than you did yesterday when confronted with the idea of going into the locker room.” She gave my look a once-over. “What’s with the outfit and your hair?”

My eyes felt hot again. They didn’t meet hers. I simply stared forward and poked at what was passing for food that day. “Dance class.”

“Huh…” she exhaled. “You’re not the kind of girl I’d peg for a dancer.”

“I’m not.”

“Why are you in dance class, then?”

“Mr. Davis.”

She spoke low and breathy. “No he didn’t…”

Another tray was set on the table as Matcha appeared out of nowhere. “Seda, you good, girl?”

Hailey turned to him with her voice low and protective. “Uh… who are you and who is this Seda person?”

Matcha sucked in a ‘tsk’ toward her. “Mind your business.” He returned his attention to me. He reached out and laid a hand on my arm. “Seriously, Seda, you good?”

My eyes stayed on my tray. “Nope.”

Matcha settled in the seat next to me, opposite Hailey. She was facing her own confusion. “Somebody gonna get me up to speed, here? I’m genuinely confused.”

Matcha kept his hand on my arm while he spoke to her. “I’m Matcha, okay? You probably heard of me. I’ve got all the tea.” He pointed at me. “This is Seda, our soft and delicate newbie. She’s stronger than she knows, sometimes.” He finally turned to me. “Did Flashdance go full Abby Lee Miller on you or somethin’?”

My focus was rattled and I turned to glance at him. Hailey and I chorused, “Who?!”

Matcha’s eyes darted between us. “Abby Lee Miller. The psycho fat bitch from Pittsburgh that practically tortured a bunch of really talented little girls on national TV for money? Dance Moms?”

“I don’t do reality TV. I have no idea who that is.” Hailey admitted. “When was it on TV? Is it still on the air?”

Matcha shook his head. “It was a 2011 to 2019 thing. I think they’re trying to bring it back, but most people are over the reality TV thing by now. Besides, all the girls grew up and are doing their own thing now. Good for them, too.”

“Okay, cool story, bro, but what’s that got to do with Saoirse and whatever happened this morning?”

Matcha slumped to the side and chuckled to himself. “A’ight, look, a lot of it was played for the cameras, but the show wouldn’t have happened if Abby wasn’t the kind of dance teacher that she was. It was played like she was real concerned about technique, but she would make everyone but her favorite student feel like they was gutter trash. She was all about hammerin’ on the negative reinforcement and almost never said anything positive. At least, that’s what the cameras showed. It was pure brainrot. Those girls that weren’t the twinkle in Abby’s eyes was cooked from the start. One of ‘em even sued Abby over the abuse that happened on the show, prompted by the producers, probably.”

Returning to poking at my food and randomly shoving small morsels in my face, I didn’t see Hailey’s facial reaction but the disgusted tone in her voice told me everything. “That’s horrible! People actually watch that shit?”

“A show about a deranged dance studio owner and mid choreographer having verbal throw-downs with white, middle class moms and taking it out on their kids? Yea, that shit was on fire when we was in kindergarten. Bored housewives gotta have somethin’ to distract them from their borin’ ass lives.”

“Adults are fucking stupid.” Hailey scoffed and rolled her eyes.

“Preach.” Matcha finally turned to me. “So, was that what happened to you this mornin’, Seda?”

Once again, I poked the food on my plate. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“So, dat a big ‘yes’ and a big yikes. That ain’t cool, Seda. What she done to you in that room this mornin’ ain’t cool. I’m gonna have some words with Miss Kyle and—”

My hand dropped the fork, reached over, and grabbed his forearm. “Don’t.”

He squirmed under my grip. “Uh… ow? No need to grip like that, damn.” He breathed out a sigh as I loosened my grip. “A’ight, I won’t talk to Miss Kyle about it. I’m sure Maven’s got somethin’ fo’ the floors that we can practice with. We can work on shit at the house. I been part of the class since freshman year. I didn’t have any dance experience at the start, either. I wanna be a damn good drag queen and dance’ll do that for me. Maybe it can help you work out some shit.”

“Fine.” Standing, I grabbed my tray that had some barely-touched food on it and moved toward the garbage receptacles.

The rest of the day was much of the same. The interaction with Evelyn clouded my mind the entire time. Her harsh tone echoed in my ears and forceful corrections felt burned onto my skin. The day before, I was starting to believe that I might be able to manage the whole idea of returning to high school and that I could possibly enjoy the things I’d missed out on the first time around. After that morning, I wasn’t so sure.

My numbness through Spanish alerted Jefa and Lowkey as well. Señora Silva’s stern enforcement of our behavior in class was a saving grace to me. The last thing I wanted to do was discuss what was going through my head. My potential fluency in the language suffered that day. I couldn’t be bothered to care, though. It didn’t get any better by the time I got to the LTC, either. Everything inside me was counting down the minutes until the final dismissal bell of the day. That only made it happen much slower.

Once the bell did ring, I left Salty in the dust while rushing out the door. Once again, the crowd was white noise as I made my way out of the building. I hadn’t made a single trip to my locker or even changed clothes since that morning. I wasn’t about to start. My feet carried me in some kind of rushed speed walk from the school building to the subway. I made no effort to meet with the others. I didn’t want the questions I didn’t want to answer and I didn’t want to feel the heat of my eyes tearing up again. My earbuds were slipped into my ears and the noise of the world disappeared. It was replaced by the voices of Gerard Way, Hayley Williams, Tyson Ritter, Jenna McDougall, Pierre Bouvier, Ariel Bloomer, and Ronnie Winter while backed by their respective bands.

After getting off at 4th & Washington Square, it was a quick trip back to Tír na nÓg. With my earbuds in and music streaming from my old phone via Bluetooth, I didn’t hear anything Maven said when I came in the door. I moved through the building straight up to my room, depositing the dance bag and my backpack. Without skipping a beat, I spun around and headed for the roof. Through the door and onto the roof, I jumped toward the sheer brick surface of the neighboring building and climbed a little ways to the top. The afternoon sun hit me from behind and I closed my eyes, breathing in my zen.

For a few minutes, I allowed myself to stand still and simply breathe. The morning with Evelyn had really rattled me in ways I had not anticipated. It shook my very foundations. I’d spent years building defenses against people like Evelyn. Bullies had been a part of my life since I was in elementary school and that carried on through the first round of high school. It started because of the wavy ginger hair that my mom allowed me to wear a little long when I was younger. It carried through when I had to wear glasses until the healthcare at MIT allowed me to get lasik. Once people found out my dad was a cop, it just got worse. Why did a sixteen-year-old rich girl yelling at me about my lack of technique in a dance class and intermittently calling me “Siri” rattle me so much?

Even a mind that could handle advanced calculus equations couldn’t produce a solution. Instead, it decided to engage in an activity that brought joy. Returning to my room for only a moment to deposit the earbuds and my phone, I returned to the roof and began my exercises. It had been proven that vigorous exercise can contribute to dopamine release in the brain, improving mood. My case might be an isolated variable, but I would argue that engaging in such exercise while also possessing super powers increases that dopamine release by a factor of ten. After a single leap across Jones Street, the parkour exercises began.

That evening, I decided to expand my area of operation. There weren’t any surprises in my usual area anymore, so I expanded to the rooftops between Christopher Street to the north, Hudson Street to the west, W Houston Street to the south, and 6th Avenue to the east. Looking on a map, one might see the area as the closest quadrangle to a square one could manage with the crazy grid that was the West Village. So long as I stayed out of the sightlines from the parks, I would be fine. The range of building heights came in handy and the varied architecture was always fascinating. With all the running, jumping, leaping, turning, and general experimentation, three hours passed before I even realized it. The sun's position was nearly approaching “Golden Hour” where the whole city seemed to sparkle.

A tingling sensation shot up my spine and spread around my skull.

“STOP! PLEASE!” echoed around the nearby buildings. It sounded like a crying and pleading sort of scream from the lungs of a woman.

My brain went into overdrive. Multiple calculations of wind speed, barometric pressure, building materials, the speed at which sound travels, the azimuth of the sound waves, and the decibel of the sound were locked in to determine which building and approximately what floor the sound originated from. Once located, I moved without hesitation. As I got closer, sounds of a struggle echoed from the fourth floor of a 6-story tenement. The small, open kitchen window allowed the sound to travel unhindered. What I saw through that window would haunt me for a long time: a grown man grabbing a younger woman by her hair and slamming her against whatever he could reach in the kitchen.

My eyes located a point on a nearby building that I could feasibly swing from to propel myself through the open window. The dimensions of the window, even from a couple buildings away, would be sufficient to get my body through. The swing angle and potential energy to get me into that kitchen would work. The math was mathing. My chest filled with hope that my web would cooperate. I hadn’t used it as of yet, so it should have been fine. Taking in a deep breath and praying to whatever deity would listen, I pulled up my sleeves a little and launched myself toward the building.

Reaching the apoapsis of the jump, I bit my lower lip and extended my arm. THWIP. Someone listened. The line attached and my hand gripped said line. My body had become a pendulum. There was a slight, expected stretch of the line as I came to the base of the swing. The line was taut with potential energy waiting to be turned into kinetic energy. My eyes were watering from the amount of air I was quickly displacing. For a moment, I doubted I’d even make the window. Letting go of the line, I pointed my feet and crossed my arms across my chest. My body slipped through like a blood cell in a capillary. I landed against the opposite wall with feet flat, legs bent, one hand against the wall, and one hand extended outward. Tom Holland could never.

The two occupants of the apartment seemed frozen in time with astonished and confused expressions on their faces. My head slowly lifted, my brows crumpled together, and my eyes narrowed on the man. He appeared to be a balding, overweight, unkempt man in his mid-thirties. His fingers were still dug into the woman’s hair with his hand balled into a fist. The woman appeared to be about ten years younger and much more slender. Her hands were on either side of his fist trying to get him to let her go. She was wearing a simple t-shirt and loungewear shorts. She had a few bruises I could see on the exposed skin of her arms and legs. There were more on her face and blood trickled from a split in her lower lip. My anger was immeasurable.

“Let. Her. Go.” I attempted to growl. It might not have come off as intimidating as I had intended with the increase in the vocal range.

He didn’t comply. His voice came out almost comically stereotypical of a New York accent. “Who da fuck are you and what da fuck you doin’ in my house?!”

My eyes fell on the woman. When he spoke, the fear, pain, and a hint of relief played across her face. “Are you okay?”

“Hey! I’m talkin’ ta you! Who da fuck—” He shouted louder.

Releasing myself from the wall, I moved my hand ever so slightly and shot a glob at his face. It smacked into his lips, gumming them up for a minute. He released her hair to deal with the situation. “Zip it. The adults are talking.” My attention returned to the woman. “He did this to you?”

She nodded and tears flowed down her cheeks. She was petrified. I encouraged her to approach me, which prompted her to do so. I placed myself between the two of them, standing guard over the woman. In a moment, the man was done pulling the glob off his face and gritted his teeth at me.

“Get a kick out of beating women, do you? Why don’t you try that with me, tough guy?” I taunted him. “I’ll warn you, though: I hit back.”

He grinned. “I don’t care.” He coiled his fist and pulled his arm back, textbook telegraphing. I didn’t need my spine and cranium tingling to tell me he wanted to hit me. “What’s some little girl gonna do to me, anyway?”

I let him hit me. Yes, it fucking hurt. His fist hit me right in the jaw near my mouth. He even followed through in an effort to hurt me more. I bent backward and he stumbled into me.

“My turn.”

Placing my hands on his ribs, I righted myself and pushed him back. He flew across the room and impacted the wall. The drywall buckled under the stress, leaving a hole in the wall the size of his body. He angrily scurried to his feet and came at me again. I dodged his punch to the side and kicked him with the full length of my leg in the abdomen. He stumbled back and I clocked him in the jaw. He was almost a full head taller than me, so it didn’t exactly land as I had planned. His head snapped toward the ceiling before he fell over with a loud thud. He didn’t seem to be conscious. Part of me was disappointed and wanted to hit him again.

“Jesus Christ, you knocked him out!” The woman protested behind me.

I spun around and gave her a look of disbelief. “Well… yea, I did. I told him I was gonna hit him back.”

“You didn’t have to hit him that hard.” She lifted herself to her feet using a chair.

My eyes widened even further. “Really?! He was bouncing your head off the cupboards and the refrigerator like it was the worst game of pinball I’ve ever seen!”

She started to cry. “He gets angry when he drinks.”

“Don’t make excuses for behavior like that!” Tears started forming in my eyes. “No one deserves that kind of treatment!” My inhaled breath wavered like a sob. “He went to town on your face! It could have been a lot worse!”

“What do you know? You’re just some high school kid.”

That got me. “How do you know I’m in high school?”

“The back of your jacket. It’s got ‘MHS’ on it. For a second, I saw you do that landing thing while wearing the blue and red. I thought you were Spider-Man’s little sister or something.”

I had forgotten about the warmups. The school’s navy and crimson color scheme with “MHS” screenprinted on the back was a dead giveaway. “Shit. Forgot about that.”

“You didn’t even think before you came in here?”

“Not enough, I guess. I heard your scream, saw what he was doing, and couldn’t just stand by and watch it happen.”

“You’re either dumb as a box of rocks or…” She turned her teary eyes to me with a small smile. “...braver than any kid your age or my good-for-nothing neighbors.”

My mind was starting to work again. “You need to call the cops. Please don’t mention me. Say you knocked him out with a rolling pin. You know and I know that he needs to go to jail for what he’s done to you.”

“He might think twice knowing some little girl in dancewear came through the window and knocked him out cold.”

“Or… he’ll get worse and you’ll be dead. I’m not kidding. Call the cops. Forget you even saw me. Let the cops think he’s crazy for insisting a five-foot-four ginger with a bun beat his ass.”

“What’s your name, kid?”

The tingle ran through me. Danger. “No names. I wasn’t even here, remember?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. You keep your secret. You should probably get a mask if you’re gonna do this kind of thing, though.”

I moved toward the window I’d come through moments before. “I mean it: call the cops.” My eyes detected a cellphone on the table. “Pick up that phone and call.”

“I will.”

“I’m not leaving until you do. Please call.”

She sighed, turned, picked up the phone, and dialed 911. They picked up in seconds and she started telling them what had transpired. Thankfully, she left out the details about me coming through the window and knocking her husband out in a single punch. Letting her speak to them, I climbed out the window and up the wall. Upon reaching the roof, I rubbed the area of my jaw that had been punched. It was still sore. I couldn’t tell if it would bruise or not.

She wasn’t wrong about my need for a mask, though. I made my way back to the house while sirens approached the building.

The sleep was easy and restful that night. Of course, I had to change out of the dancewear and into some pajamas, first, but I made it into bed rather early that evening. I had finally landed on a suitable enough design for my web shooters. I dreamt that night of high-pitched jubilant calls echoing off the buildings of Manhattan.

The next morning, I checked the mirror. My jaw wasn’t sore and there was no bruising. It was safe to assume that I had some sort of regenerative healing factor working in the background. That tracked with the hypothesis of having all the powers of the cordial area male arachnid. My shower and dressing routine went well as I jammed out to my “happy times” playlist. I might have to check in on the woman from time to time, but I felt like I’d done a good thing for her the previous evening.

That day at school came and went like it hadn’t really happened. Before I knew it, the dismissal bell echoed through the gym after the co-ed gym class had run laps for half the class period. There was a shared hypothesis that Coach Vic might be training us for a mile run at the end of the year. The idea didn’t spark joy.

On the walk home with the others, it was noted that I was in a better mood than I had been the day prior. I passed it off as if I’d slept really well and had a good dream. It wasn’t too far off the truth to be a lie. On the train, Chispa and I whispered back and forth about the designs I’d completed in CAD the night before. We would have to utilize the space she usually claimed for herself to do the fabrication, but I’m glad she welcomed me into the space. Salty told this really good joke on the way from the subway station and all of us ended up in a line with our arms linked doing can-can kicks while singing “I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts” down Jones Street.

Maven called us all goofballs before excusing us to either do homework or work on personal projects. Chispa and I didn’t have any homework, yet again, so we told the others we’d help if they needed some tutoring. All the while, we headed down to the basement. Our feet carried us to what was usually Chispa’s space, exclusively. She showed me all the different machines she had squirreled away over the two years she had been living at Tír na nÓg. Maven had donated a couple, but Chispa had custom made a few as well. The girl was nothing if not resourceful.

With a quick stop upstairs to grab my laptop and find some bib overalls, Chispa and I reviewed the schematics. Like me, the math came easily to her. She offered a little insight and helped make a few adjustments before we began the fabrication process. We put on some eye and ear protection before we began. Safety first. Over time, each piece was designated and either fabricated or salvaged from existing pieces Chispa had already gathered. There were a lot of quite small moving parts, so the process was relatively arduous. Little by little, the devices that would make my webbing more dependable were coming together. Chispa even put on some music while we worked. Her zen music was a bit different from mine, but I was starting to appreciate Bad Bunny, Karol G, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish. The Paramore surprised me, but made me smile.

We were in the midst of work when Maven seemed to appear out of nowhere. There was a tingle that ascended my spine when she came down the stairs, but I mostly ignored it and kept working. It was Chispa that stopped first. The room fell silent beyond the sound of the dremel I was working with. Feeling awkward, I stopped as well. Maven had been silent while all this took place.

“There’s been a development. Saoirse, come with me, please,” she spoke almost monotonally.

“Am I in trouble or something?” I earnestly wanted to know.

She shook her head. “No. Not particularly. Why do you ask? Did something happen at school I should be made aware of?”

I set down the dremel, then removed the eye shields and ear protection. “Not particularly.”

Maven motioned with her hand for me to follow her. Glancing back to Chispa, she simply shrugged. We made our way out of the basement and through to Maven’s office. She had me sit in the chill space in the corner. With the press of a button on a remote, a television sprang to life and a well-dressed news anchor appeared on the screen.

“Our top story tonight is breaking news out of Chicago: the Superman is real and he is American. SkyCam footage that went viral on social media shows a blur that moves across the screen at amazing speed. Experts have confirmed the footage is real and confirm the figure is human, but unidentifiable. Take a look.” The footage began and ended quickly. It was there and gone in under five frames. What struck me wasn’t the footage but the fact that downtown Chicago wasn’t a mess of glass blown out of skyscrapers and a lot of pissed off car alarms. “If we go frame by frame, you can see this object streak across the sky at incredible speed. It’s a mess of blue, red, and yellow color with this white cone around it. Based on the size of that cone, experts have been able to determine the object is the size of a human traveling at incredible speed. It’s that color scheme and speed that has people talking. Is this a publicity stunt orchestrated by DC Studios in anticipation of the release of James Gunn’s Superman this summer? We’ll keep on this and let you know.”

Meanwhile, my brain was experiencing a Blue Screen of Death. Based on the rough angle of the Prandtl-Glauert singularity and length of the laminar flow anomaly on the screen, I could roughly work out the object was moving at roughly six hundred meters per second or Mach 1.74. Anything traveling at that velocity through a fluid should be displacing that fluid at an incredible rate. There should be a trail of devastation in the wake of the object and there was not. The tidal displacement in the lake should be as high as the highest rogue wave ever recorded but there was nothing beyond the wake a small watercraft might leave. The math was not mathing. What the hell was I seeing?

There was only one answer that surfaced and it should have been theoretically impossible. Though, given the evidence of my own abilities and existence, it was indeed possible. The newscaster was correct: only Superman could do something like that.

There was something bugging me. I requested the remote from Maven. “This is a recording, yes? I can actually rewind this?”

“Yes, it’s a video you can rewind.”

Remote in hand, I got back to the point where they showed the video and paused it. There was a lot of information in a single frame and I was analyzing all of it. From a single frame with the reference of the size of skyscraper windows, I was able to deduce the size of the object was approximately five feet and ten inches tall. From a pixel analysis of the lighter and darker pixels in the frame as well as where the cone appeared on the body, I was able to determine the person flying through downtown Chicago wasn’t a man at all.

“They’re wrong,” I finally vocalized.

“Pardon?” Maven wondered.

“What we’re seeing on the screen is a human female approximately 1.78 meters tall and traveling at 600 meters per second. What I can’t figure out is why downtown Chicago isn’t a wasteland as a result of the concussive force from the pressure wave that should be following behind her. The newscaster was right to call out Superman because the only beings capable of that have been Kryptonians, but they’re fictional. Aren’t they?”

“If you’re inquiring about the existence of extraterrestrial beings, I know as much as you do. I have seen beings fly before, but I do not believe any of them could do what we just saw.”

“You’ve seen beings fly?! Have you seen them defy physics like what we just saw?!”

“I do not possess the same knowledge of the sciences that you do. It was not something I was interested in. As for seeing beings fly, I have seen it many times. I have known a northman who calls himself Týr since his people invaded the coast and Dublin was built shortly afterward.”

My brain broke again. “You know a Norse god. Personally. This day keeps getting weirder.”

“I did inform you that there would likely be more of you after the event last week, did I not? You were not prepared to know what I could tell you at the time. There were many that surfaced after the event that made me what I am. It is safe to assume you weren’t an isolated incident.”

“Good god… I’m not the only one.”