OK second stalker story:

I had been living in Austin for a year. I met this woman somehow. She was really fun to be around. I liked being her friend. I liked her because she was always Down For Stuff. She was definitely kind of crazy, and she was a mess, but it was endearing and didn’t seem to be the dangerous kind of crazy mess. She was going to school in San Antonio but was from Austin, and so she would come home on the weekends. We would go out with my roommate and have us a good old time. Usually we’d find a couch in the back of Cheer Up Charlie’s and sit there with some Lone Star tall boys and talk about THIS and THAT.

Then I began to realize that she was a drunk. Like the kind of drunk where you have to wrestle their car keys away from them and make a bed for them on the couch and calm them down and plead with them to please just go the hell to sleep. She would just randomly show up at my house drunk off her ass. And I’m talking at 6 or 7 p.m. she was knocking on my door, falling over, asking me to go downtown with her. I’d look outside and her car would be parked halfway in my front yard with the headlights and the windshield wipers on—that sort of thing.

It started to get pretty weird. We would be driving in her car, and she’d be swerving all over the place, and drinking from a flask. And I’d say, “Holy hell! Pull over and let me drive!” and she’d slap me really hard in the face and tell me she was fine. We got pulled over in Westfield one time because she was drunk as hell and cutting over into the other lane and driving on the shoulder. It was incredible how she talked her way out of it. She completely came off as sober and the cop let us go. She called me a week later and told me she’d totaled her car, and that she already had a new one! (I think her parents were rich.)

She started doing this thing that made me uncomfortable, which was . . . she tracked down my friends and started hanging out with them without me. I knew these two girls and she’d met them once or twice and pretty soon she was at their apartment every day. They told me she was collecting information about me! “So tell me what you know about Ryan. . . .” Ruh-roh!

One day she randomly appeared at my house and told me she was dropping out of school and moving back to Austin. She said, “. . . but it’s not because of you or anything.” It had not and would not have ever crossed my mind that she was dropping out of school for me. This freaked me the heck out! I thought, well, why did she have to even say that?

She would come over and take my computer, and blast really awful music, and I would say, “All right, man. I can’t take any more of this shit. Also: I, uh, was working on something before you showed up and I really got to get on with it.” I would reach for my computer and she would slap me and punch me (hard!) and laugh in a sort of terrifying way.

We’d go to Cheer Up Charlie’s, and she’d try to hold my hand. And I’d say, “Dude! I have a girlfriend! C’mon!”

The last time I ever hung out with her, she was the drunkest I’d ever seen a human. I tried to get her to go to sleep on the couch so she wouldn’t drive home. She fought me! I begged and pleaded with her not to drive her car and to wait until morning. She calmed down and said she was going to sleep. I turned off the light and went into my room. Thirty seconds later I heard the front door open and slam shut. I went after her. She had one shoe on and was walking down the middle of the street. It was four in the morning. I offered to drive her back to her house in her own car, and I would just walk home or something, but she slapped me away and kept walking. The next morning her car was gone!

Uh, and here’s the strangest part: for months after this I would see her drive by my house. She didn’t live anywhere near me. She would drive back and forth on my street and then gun it and disappear. I saw her do this four or five times. My roommate saw her do it a few times too.

And you know what, if you take away all the weird stalker-y / drunk stuff, she was actually a really cool person. I liked her a lot! Just, man, too bad she was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

I hope she’s doing all right.