"Johnny, hey. Hold up a sec." It was my neighbor, Ms. Richards. She was parking in her driveway just as I walked by and I hadn't really expected any acknowledgement from her. I was friends with her son David all through school, and never understood why she had a progression of shittier and shittier boyfriends the entire time I had known her. She was sweet as hell, and conventionally beautiful, and should have been pulling catches by the netful. Short, but classically proportioned, with perfect legs even if they weren't long. I had always harbored a crush on her, and as far as physical beauty went, she stayed a benchmark I kept for other women for years.
When I was a teen, she had mostly been stand-offish with me and back then I tended to take it as a rejection. I was invisible to this beautiful woman, and honestly it fed into some insecurity about interacting with women in general. In hindsight, and measured on my own experiences, I get it. When you're 40, and a significantly younger person has an obvious crush on you, the normal response is to not do anything to encourage it.
In the simulation though, she called out to me as soon as she got the car door open.
She was wearing a tight, sleeveless, purple velour dress, with sheer black stockings and black pumps. One leg swung out of the car, and the dress rode up enough to expose some bare flesh at the top of her thigh highs. My mouth went dry. I would have written this off as another place the simulation was airbrushing my memory, but that really was how she dressed every day. There were times I had seen thigh highs on their bathroom floor as a teen, and I had never seen her in pants or flats once.
As soon as her car drove past me on the walk to my mom's house I knew what the simulation was doing. It found an experience I had used to fuel some insecurity and was giving me a better version of it. There was a tinge of guilt about playing along given how the better version of the situation with my girlfriend's mom went, but in the end, none of this was real. This wasn't any worse than thinking of her while masturbating, and I had already done that countless times in my life.
"Hey, Ms. Richards. What's up?"
After taking a moment to pull the hem of her dress back where it was supposed to be she walked toward me, heels clicking off the pavement. "Hey, uh. Linda, please." She smiled at me, and remembering how much my teenaged self wanted that smile, my heart melted. She pushed her shoulder length hair behind an ear and said, "I have a couple things I need moved around and can't get them myself. I'd ask David, but he's already back at college. You think you could give me a hand this week? I can pay you a little."
"Sure. I uh. I don't know what I'm working this week yet, can I check and let you know?"
"Of course. Number's the same as before. I'm home around now every day."
"Okay, I'll let you know."
"Thanks, Johnny." She turned to walk back toward the house, and I shamelessly stared at her ass while she walked away. Her stockings had seams up the back, and her pantylines and garter clips were visible under her dress.
"You're welcome, Ms.... Linda." Her first name felt weird in my mouth.
At the top of the driveway, she bent over to get her purse out of the car, her dress riding up just enough to expose the top of a stocking and the clip of a garter. She looked back over her shoulder and caught me staring but gave no reaction.
When I left the Carter's, I didn't really know what to do. The normal level of blissed out after the sex was layered in confusion and panic. I had the smallest grasp on what the simulation was doing, taking memories I was insecure about as a teen and making them, "better," but I also knew it was malfunctioning somehow and I was stuck in it. It was only supposed to be 10 minutes in the simulation, and it had already been several hours.
I had wandered in the general direction of my mom's house until I ran into Ms. Richards, taking in the details of the simulation. It was pulling the neighborhood entirely from my memory, but at the same time it got details right that I don't think I could have remembered on my own. The right cars in the right driveways, phone booths in the right places. It was a perfect recreation. And if it wasn't, I didn't remember well enough to tell.
My mother's house was dim and grey inside. Nobody was home, and probably wouldn't be. My mom took a job at a hospital in the next town over my last year in school, and it was too far to commute daily. A couple of years after I finished school I was there alone except for every other weekend. She took the job in desperation more than anything, but it worked out for us. I got to have some real-world experience before moving out, and my mom got to ease into the empty nest.
I got in the fridge and drank some orange juice from the carton while I read my work schedule. My watch said it was Sunday, January 8
th
, 1992. I worked tonight in about an hour, then off tomorrow. Did the simulation really need to make me go to work? I picked up the cordless, and dialed The Richards' house from memory even though there's no way I could have remembered what it was.
As it rang I walked to my room to look for a work polo. Linda answered, sounding as if she had run for it. "Hello?"
I walked past my mother's room, and saw that the blinds were open, there was a clear view of the Richards' house from there. I approached the window instead of going to my room and said, "Hey, Linda." Sometimes when David and I talked I would stand there so we could see each other. Linda wasn't standing in a window waving like David would, but I did catch her walking through their kitchen.
"Oh, Johnny. That was fast." She appeared in the living room window, where she lingered, taking off her shoes.
"Yeah, I just had to check my schedule on the fridge." She turned to face away from me and cradling the phone against her shoulder reached behind herself with both hands, unzipping the dress. I swallowed hard and said, "I work tonight but can come help tomorrow whenever you're home." She dropped the dress to the floor and stepped out of it. Her panties were bright red with lacy trim at the waist, and on over a black garter. She wasn't wearing a bra. The massive cock the simulation had given me was back at full mast in my pants, I thought it might rip its way out.
"Oh, that should work great." Her hands grabbed at the band of her panties and pushed them down off her hips. They slid all the way down her perfect legs to the floor leaving her just in her garter and stockings. She had the tiniest triangle of a tanline just below the dimples on her back, faint lines over her hips and no evidence on her back that she had been wearing a top when she got that tan. "Should I call when I get home, or will you be watching me?" She bent over at the waist to pick up her dress. It was only 20 or 30 feet away, and I could clearly see every detail of her pussy. "I mean, watching FOR me. Watching me? Jeez, not like you're some creep staring in my window or something."
"Uhm." I took a deep breath. "I'll just come over around 5."
"Sounds good. See you then." She hung up and abruptly turned around, making no effort to cover up. There was no acknowledgement on her face that I was there, but she was looking right at me. Her pubic hair was trimmed into an inch wide strip, with a similarly tiny tanline to the back framing it. Her stomach was flat, showing no signs of a pregnancy 20 years earlier, and her breasts stood firm and round in defiance of her age. Her body was the result of the simulation airbrushing again, but I had to admit, it was basically how imagined she looked when I was a teen.
"Fuck." I just stood there with the phone to my ear well after she walked out of the window.
I hurried out of the house to work, a video store connected to a small grocer's and gas station. The town had a bigger grocery store, and a better gas station, but no other place to rent movies that weren't porn. The day shift had left me an inventory list, and I set to getting on it as soon as I could. Navigating the POS menus came right back to me just like Ms. Richards' phone number had, a trick of the simulation for sure. I looked up at the movie playing on thew wall of TVs for a moment, and back down at the green and black of the POS monitor.
My inventory list was gone, replaced with flashing text, "JOHN PLEASE SEE THIS. We're working on a fix but keep running into a problem. Whatever you do make sure you don't..."
"Hey, Johnny," someone nearby said my name with a smile in their voice.
I looked up, and smiled back, suddenly knowing why the simulation wanted me to go to work. "Hey, Pam. How are you?" My eyes snapped right back to the POS and my inventory sheet was back. The note from the lab had disappeared again the second I was distracted. I almost shouted, "DON'T WHAT??" but kept it under my breath.
Pam, like Ms. Richards, was one of the many older women I had a crush on as a teen, but unlike the others, Pam and I had what I saw as a decent rapport. She came in to rent movies several times a week, and picked mostly horror and martial arts, both things I could have talked about endlessly back then. A few years later though, I came to understand it was flirting and I was just too dense or insecure to pick it up at the time. Pam was in her mid to late 30's and had a typical 90's rocker-chick aesthetic. Her hair was dyed black with a red streak and Bettie Paige bangs. She wore glasses with thick black frames, low-rise jeans and chunky boots, a skintight strappy tank top that didn't even come close to covering her bra, and a red and black plaid flannel shirt tied around her waist. There was also something about her I didn't really think of as weird at the time, but once I was out in the world, I learned it was a pretty uncommon sight. Pam had a slight frame, and huge, probably fake breasts. I was never really a boob guy in the way most guys seem to be, but I had a hard time not staring at Pam's with how much they stood out, and how little she covered them.
Looking at the tv wall, she said, "You got the good Indy on, I see." And gestured at me like she was going to tear my heart out. "Kali MA..."
Still irritated about the note disappearing, I halfheartedly said, "Most gore I can play here without getting fired."
"It's good shit." She was carrying a basket from the grocery with a frozen pizza and a cheap magnum of red wine while she browsed the aisles. After a couple minutes of looking, she said the thing I remembered most about our interactions. It was a frequent visitor on late nights when my brain wanted to reflect on regrets without my consent, and something I remembered every detail of how she said it. "My roommate is out of town tonight, so I get to watch whatever I want for the first time in forever."
She didn't have a roommate, she had a husband. The second part was coming though. After setting a copy of Burnt Offerings on the counter, she asked, "You work pretty late?"
I knew this didn't happen the same day as the talk with girlfriend's mom. The simulation was playing fast and loose with chronology, tossing everything it could at me regardless of when it happened.
"10." That was the exact same thing I had said in real life. Then I left it there and rang her up, she went home to an empty house after a breakup, and I went to read the new issue of Fangoria. This was not real life. "You want some company?" It came out smooth, like I'd been practicing saying it in this exact situation for two decades.
