The doestalker

So I promised you my stalker story, and I guess this is as good a time as any to give it. As I said, it's not nearly as dramatic as you'd see on a Lifetime movie, but it has the advantage of being real. During my sophomore year at UND, I began to get a lot of phone calls with nobody on the end of the line. At first this didn't shock me too much. At that time we were still on party lines with the people next door, and everyone knew I didn't answer the phone unless they weren't home. So if somebody called for one of them and I answered, it figured that they would just hang up, right?

But after a while I began to notice that there was somebody on the other end of the line listening to me say "Hello" multiple times but not saying anything back to me. I knew this because I could often hear a television or radio in the background. And although my nerves are pretty strong, after a while it started to really creep me out. I mean, it's normal for someone to chicken out about talking to you after they dial your number the first time, right? But eventually, if their intentions are pure, they need to make them known. Also, it seemed like these calls came either right when I got home or right before I was about to leave, as if the person was just checking up on me to make sure I was there.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of any actual evidence (save that these were always on-campus calls), I came up with somebody that I suspected based on circumstantial evidence. There was a boy that I particularly liked, and who had shown signs of liking me at first but had moved on to greener pastures. He had a dorky best friend who was always tagging along at his heels and acting generally suspicious. I could tell that this friend kind of liked me, and after a while I decided it must be him, especially because I had often seen him right before these calls came.

All my friends knew about this, but I never told anyone in a position of authority. This was partly because I felt there was nothing to be done (since no actual threats had been made), and partly because I was sure I knew who it was and found him to be, while creepy, mostly harmless.

This went on for the whole spring semester. One of the scariest moments of my life occurred when I was walking home alone from the writer's conference one night after dark and met this boy that I suspected coming in the opposite direction on a deserted street. When he didn't grab me and drag me off by the hair, I felt some horrible fate had been averted!

Towards the end of the semester, it was announced that this dorky boy had been appointed to a position of some authority in student government, and coincidentally or not, on that day my mysterious phone calls ceased and never started up again. (Of course, I had also announced to all my friends that I knew the calls were going to stop for that very reason, so if anyone had heard of that, they might have realized it was a good time to stop.)

The epilogue to the story is that two years later, during my senior year, I walked into my Chaucer class and there was Dorky Boy. I had never had a class with him before, and I was sure that upon seeing me, he would start things up again. But that never happened, and he paid no attention to me at all during the class. Of course, I was always looking at him suspiciously, so if anything, he probably thought I was stalking him! And over the course of the semester I began to realize that it probably wasn't him after all, and he had probably been a victim of circumstantial evidence.

I've had plenty of time over the last ten years to think about this, and I've come up with a couple of ideas of who my stalker actually might have been.

1. One of my male friends, when given my latest stalker update, always said very defensively, "Well, it's not me!" And I always thought he was completely nuts to even say that, because I would never have suspected him in a million years. But now I can't help wondering if it was a case of "Methinks he doth protest too much."
2. Another suspect with the benefit of hindsight is one of my professors, who would go on to openly harass me in my junior year. (The subject, I think, for yet another post at some future date.) So in retrospect he seems like the perfect suspect. But at the time he had never been anything but a gentleman to me, so I had no reason on earth to suspect him.
3. Just recently while I was thinking of this, I realized it was an act of 90's heterocentrism to assume that my stalker absolutely had to be a male. There was a very strange girl who hung around the periphery of our group, and she was a known stalker of a semi-famous UND hockey player. On more than one occasion she made to me what others interpreted as a romantic gesture, but I always innocently said, "But of course she didn't mean it like that. She's a girl!" Could she have been my stalker after all?

I don't really know what morals can be drawn from this whole business, except that it proves the doctrine of "this too shall pass," and also that it reminds me not to jump to conclusions as quickly as I like to.