Page 3 of It’s Me They Follow

Her apartment walls were once lined with books, but now they were bare.

“How can an interior designer have such an empty home?” her landlord had asked.

She’d taken all her books to her soon-to-be-bookshop, and she’d given her clients nearly everything valuable that she’d found; she tried to explain this to her landlord, who looked even more confused.

Now all she had was the bearded man’s leather-bound notebook in the middle of her bed as she dressed in layer after layer of recycled denim.

A denim shirt over a denim dress over denim jeans, all under a denim jacket.

She wore a paperboy cap, boots, and knit gloves as she searched for her favorite patchwork scarf, the one her grandmother had quilted for her when she’d moved Up North. She couldn’t find it.

Usually she struggled to leave her home because she felt the need to straighten, dust, wipe, and rearrange her books before walking out the door.

She thought books were why she was perpetually late for everything.

But now she had no reasonable excuse for her lateness.

She was going to be late to her Thursday evening writers’ group even with no books.

Her bangles clanked as she spun in circles to find her wallet and her keys and her glasses.

It should not have been so hard to find things in a near-empty home.

Beside her Philco was a small, framed photo of her, her younger sister, her parents, and her grandparents posing after breakfast in front of a Golden Corral thirty years ago.

She kept a perfectly made bed that she never slept on, so she never had to make it.

The rest of the house was filled with plants, which she spoke to by name—giant black-eyed Susans, Joe-Pye weeds, Jacob’s ladders, and Solomon’s-plumes.

She liked her place; it was filled with sunshine during the day and moonlight at night.

In her home, she had space to roam. She did not need a lot to have enough, she told her plants as she searched for her keys.

She swore the mischievous plants hid things when she wasn’t looking, but found the keys still in the door as she left.

She apologized to Susan, Joe, Jacob, and Solomon, and told them goodbye.

Her writers’ group couldn’t figure out why she’d registered for a session while she was opening a bookshop, but these were the things that The Shopkeeper did.

“I need to write,” she convinced herself as she walked downtown to the local arts university where the group met.

But it wasn’t that she needed to write; she could do that anywhere, including her empty home or her empty bookshop.

It was that she needed a writers’ group.

She needed people who spoke her language.

Connection. She needed friends who weren’t characters in stories, historical figures, or plants.

Friends who didn’t mind that she couldn’t touch them and they couldn’t touch her back, because in writers’ group, they touched one another in other ways.

Yes, she had enough on her mind with finding shelving, a cash register, and an awning, but what were the chances that there’d be another session of her writing group, at her alma mater, this time taught by the foremost neuroscientist on touch, just The Good Doctor she needed, right before she opened the doors of her bookshop?

It had to be a sign that she could be cured.

“Thank you, Ms. Harriett,” she whispered when she read about The Good Doctor in her alumni newsletter.

She wanted to believe she could be cured.

Definition

Her condition, haphephobia—sounds like “half a phobia”— is an extreme fear or dislike of touching or being touched.

It is a compound of the Ancient Greek noun “haph?” (a touch) and the combining form “-phobia” (fear), from the Ancient Greek “phóbos.” “Haph?” is a derivative of the verb “háptein” (to grasp, to sense), which is also the source of the adjective “haptic” (of or relating to touch).

People wonder if haphephobia is a physical or mental condition. It is both.

Today, the third day of the session, The Shopkeeper fumbled in, rummaging through her overstuffed tote bag, pretending to look for a pen and paper that she knew good and well she didn’t have.

The Good Doctor and twelve writers of all shapes and sizes sat around a single table, listening to the theme song from the Rocky movie, “Gonna Fly Now.” When the song was over, pens had to stop.

That’s brainwashing , The Shopkeeper thought.

No one looked up when she walked in. No one except her friend Ray, who winked at her with teary eyes before getting back to work.

Though the racket of downtown Philadelphia blared outside the window, the writers’ group remained immersed in responding to the prompt that The Good Doctor had written on the board.

Tell the story of your first kiss .

The Good Doctor was attractive, fit, and somehow always well-lit—every class, she wore the same black T-shirt, black khaki pants, black leather belt, black boots, and black scarf to complement her thick silver hair and high cheekbones.

The Shopkeeper wondered if the outfit was some sort of social experiment or if The Good Doctor dressed this way even on the weekends.

“I need a pen,” The Shopkeeper mouthed and The Good Doctor pulled a blue pen out of her pocket. The two women stood eye to eye in tense admiration. They were the same build and height. The Shopkeeper smiled to hide her suspicion of her new teacher.

“You don’t have to be suspicious of everyone.

” The Good Doctor placed the blue pen in front of her seat, stood up, and gave The Shopkeeper a place at the head of the table.

She pointed at the board and then at The Shopkeeper.

“Two more minutes,” she said aloud to the room but really to The Shopkeeper. “Two more minutes.”

The Shopkeeper could only write one sentence. She hadn’t been able to write much of anything since she’d published Conversations with Harriett years ago. She just had not been inspired.

Instead, she wrote out her to-do list:

Toilet paper

Desk

Cleaning supplies

Certificate of Occupancy

Insurance

Bleach

“One more minute.” The Good Doctor gave The Shopkeeper a nod as the song climaxed. The Shopkeeper nodded back. “One more minute,” The Good Doctor repeated slowly to the group.

The Shopkeeper continued:

Awning

Cash register

Shelves and chairs

“Okay, we have time for three people to share. Don’t all jump up at once. This is a quick write, so keep it quick.”

Books!

First to raise her hand to share was Rose.

It was always Rose, a woman in her early sixties from Germantown who wore a rose in her hair that matched the rose on her pen.

Every week, she changed the color of the rose to match her outfit, her purse, her shoes, her socks, her notebook.

Today’s color was yellow. Rose sat to the right of The Shopkeeper, beaming bright.

“Okay, Rose,” The Good Doctor said. “In this writing group, there are no apologies, excuses, or prefaces. When it’s time to read...”

“Just read,” the class said in unison.

“Okay.” Rose’s hands trembled at first—but she was faking.

Rose was not scared to read. It was a part of her storytelling.

“When I was fourteen”—she looked around at the class, then back down at her page like she was telling a deep, dark secret—“I started freshman year at Central High. Central was founded 184 years ago, in 1836. It was an all-male public school until 1975, meaning only boys were allowed. That was my year. 1975. We were the first coed class in the history of the school, and we were called so many goddamn names by people who thought we girls wanted to attend an all-boys school because we were fast little fresh pot hussies who wanted to be felt up by the football team. I never even liked jocks—” Rose interrupted her own story and looked at The Good Doctor.

The Good Doctor nodded her head in approval and pointed at the clock.

Rose held her paper steady. Her back got tall, and her pace even faster.

“But there was this one boy, Charles Handley Jr., and one day, when he walked behind my desk in chemistry class, he slipped something into my book bag. I didn’t want to look at what it was; I thought it was more bullying and that I was gonna have to put someone in their grave, if you feel me.

’Cause if there was a rotten tomato or something in my bag, I was gonna smash it right in his face during lunch.

That entire class period, I planned it. What if it was a dead rat?

A beheaded bird or a detached human thumb?

After class, I ran to the bathroom to see, and to my surprise, it was not a bloody rat or a broken thumb or a rotten tomato, but a book—a copy of a play, Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us?

I’d never heard of it, so I thought that maybe it was still some sort of threat.

But when I opened it, on the title page he’d written, ‘Dear Rose, I bet you’ll like this play so much that when you finish it, you will kiss me.

’ He drew a little yellow rose beneath that and signed, ‘Sincerely, Charlie Jr.’