…face.” I didn’t open the door. I locked myself in the bathroom with my cat and called 911. While I waited, my headset pinged again. This time it wasn’t a call. It was a text message from his game account. “Are you okay? Someone logged into my account an hour ago from Oregon. I just got the alert. I’m in Columbus. Whoever’s messaging you, it isn’t me.”
The police arrived in six minutes. There was nobody at the door. But my neighbor’s camera had caught a man in a parked car across the street, watching my window. He drove away when he saw the patrol car. They traced his license plate the next morning.
He wasn’t my friend from the game. He was a stranger who had hacked the game’s voice-chat servers years ago and downloaded thousands of recordings. He’d been listening to mine for four years. My cat’s name. My childhood street. The night I cried about my dad. He’d pieced together my whole life from things I’d said to someone I trusted.
Detectives found recordings of nineteen other women on his computer. Some of them had been getting “gifts” too. He was charged with stalking, computer intrusion, and identity theft. The game company sent all of us a letter and a lot of apologies.
My real friend, Marcus, flew out from Ohio a month later. We’d played together for four years and never seen each other’s faces. When he got off the plane, he was holding a pizza box. Empty. “I figured we needed to replace the bad memory,” he said, and he looked so nervous that I laughed until I cried.
We got pizza that night. We paid for it ourselves. I still play the game, but with voice chat off. Marcus and I talk on the phone instead. He calls every Sunday, and the first thing he asks, every time, is whether my door is locked.
