Selfish

By:  Julie

"… you can call me selfish, but all I want is your love…"

 It just didn’t matter to me anymore. I was afraid to say or do anything, for fear of him walking away from me. I was afraid to go anywhere with him, to spend time with him, in fear of them finding out.

Them being those other girls, girls that would call me a bitch, call me whore, even when they didn’t know me, just because I was his girlfriend. To them, I was selfish, taking him all for myself and not letting them have a little piece of him for themselves.

But it was okay if they wanted to think that I was selfish for taking him away. I didn’t really care. All I wanted was him, to have him love me.

And then I started to see the sites dedicated to hating me on the web. The "Nataly is a bitch" sites, the ones with the pictures that I had no clue even existed. Notes that I had written to him, notes that he had left me when he had to leave early in the morning for some television show that I thought I had thrown away showed up on the sites.

I started receiving letters at home, threats. Girls would walk up to me on the street and spit in my face. I eventually received a call from his ex.

"Nataly?" she had said.

"Who is this," I remember asking.

"This is Danielle," she had replied. "Danielle Raabe. Chris’s ex-girlfriend." When I was silent, she continued. "The one that works for his company."

"I know who you are," I had finally managed.

"I was on the internet, Nataly, randomly looking at some NSYNC sites that a friend of mine had seen, that she had thought was funny," Danielle had said. "And one of the pages had a like to a site on it that sort of scared me. It was a hate page dedicated to you."

"Dani, there are all kinds of sites like that dedicated to me," I had said.

"Not like this, Nat," Dani had told me. "I’ve never seen a girlfriend hate site with pictures like this. All of them will have pictures of you and Chris together, taken by fans."

"What does that have to do with anything?" I remember asking. I was scared by this time, a little worried what this woman had to say, because I knew if she was worried about someone that was dating her ex, it had to be pretty bad.

"Nataly…" Danielle had said, taking in a deep breath, "these are pictures of just you. That means this person is following you, and not Chris. This is really dangerous Nataly. I sent the site to Chris through an e-mail, and he said that the house in those pictures was yours, and then they were rushing him out onstage and he didn’t have the chance to call you and tell you."

"Oh my god, Dani…" I had said, and I remember that I started to cry, because by this time I was terrified, between the letters and the sites, and what she was telling me and everything else.

"Nat, don’t leave the house," I think she said. "I’ll be over there as soon as I can, and you can come and stay with me until we can get you a flight to where the guys are."

Now I was terrified. Danielle and I weren’t friends, and if she was willing to do this, something was terribly wrong. I remember glass shattering as I hung up the phone, the sounds of someone breaking in.

And of course, I did the stupid thing, and instead of running outside and across the street to my aunts, I ran up the stairs and further into the house. I regretted in that moment not buying the alarm system Chris had informed me that I needed when I started getting the letters.

Of course, we all knew that I couldn’t hide from them forever, and they found me-- a pair of teenage girls, eighteen or nineteen, I’d say. They were armed.

"Oh god," I whispered. "What did I do to deserve this?" I asked, proud of myself for the way my voice held firm even though my face was streaked with tears and mascara.

"You’re a selfish bitch," the smaller of the two girls said. And I couldn’t have taken them, they were taller than me—I was just a little over five feet tall, and these two had to be closer to six—and they were definitely heavier because of the extra height, and they were armed.

"Why am I selfish!" I shouted the question at them.

"Because you took him away completely!" the other girl said. Then I took a good look at their faces. They obviously didn’t intend to let me live through this. They were both dancers on the tour, girls that had joined a while after Chris and I had began dating.

The girls weren’t vicious. They weren’t killing me for revenge, but more or less for the thrill and for the man. They shot me once, and if I hadn’t been lucky, that once would have been enough.

"Nataly?" Chris asks. He’s here beside my, while I’m lying in this hospital bed.

"Yes?" I manage to say, because my voice is hoarse from disuse and the breathing tube that had been shoved down my throat until only hours ago.

"Can you tell me what they said to you?" he asks, afraid. And then I’m crying, and I reach out for him. He takes my hands in his and rests his forehead against them.

"They called me selfish," I tell him. And he raises his head and looks at me, his eyes full of tears, because he really does love me, as he’s said a million times.

"Why?" he asks. "How are you selfish?

"They called me selfish," I tell him, "because I took you away from them."

"Oh," he says, and I can tell he’s confused, hurt, and angry all at the same because he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to do this to me.

"They called me selfish Chris," I repeat, "but all I want is your love."

"I know Nataly," he replies. "Trust me, I know baby."

The End

 

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