“Girls at Gunpoint captured perfectly the little devastations of modern collegiate living. It starts in an immediately urgent way, and then unspools all the tiniest heartbreaks layer by layer. Speaking of layers, the emotional heft of this short piece was wonderfully rendered -- underneath the deadpan affect is both dry humor and crushing sadness. What a triumph!”
—Vanessa Chan, contest judge and author of The Storm We Made

Girls at Gunpoint

by Kit Lea Cheang

Winner of the 2024 Fiction Contest

I receive an email from college security about three girls in my building getting robbed at gunpoint. Apparently, a masked man appeared in their common room at 7:59 p.m. as the girls were doing homework. He pointed a revolver at them, took their laptops, and ran away. The email describes the unnamed girls as “shaken but unscathed.” The man has yet to be found.

After the incident, I see the masked man everywhere: in the shadows tailing me as I walk back from the library, in the footsteps outside my dorm room, in the noises on my fire escape at night. Because I don’t know who the girls are, I imagine every girl in the dining hall to be one of them: the red-haired literature major always reading George Eliot, the gangly basketball player carrying a tray piled with ketchup-smothered chicken patties, the vegetarian violinist from Vietnam. I wonder if the three girls had stickers on their laptops, like I did: Fitzgerald quotes and rainbows and cats licking their furry groins. I wonder whether the gunman was curious to find out what was on the desktops of twenty-year-old girls.

When I tell my boyfriend about the incident, he is relieved it was not me. He tells me to lock my door extra tight before going to sleep, because you never know. My boyfriend and I recently started experimenting with an open relationship. He said I satisfied his emotional needs, but his physical ones could not be satisfied over distance. I said OK because I’m cool like that. He was back home, in Singapore. Across the Skype window, his room is just the same: Spielberg posters scotch-taped, handsome guitar against a wall, Bennie the border collie comatose. I can almost smell the fried chicken on his shirt, feel his humid hug, climb out of bed with him to our spot on the barrage to watch kites with tails so long I always worried they’d choke small children.

At lunch, my friends and I huddle around a dining hall table and discuss the incident. My friends are all radical feminists. Some of them are lesbians by choice, meaning that even though they are attracted to men, they reject that attraction altogether. They believe lesbianism is the most authentic way to be a feminist. The girls accepted me into their friend group because I offered “intersectionality.”

“Do you know what floor they live on, Fiora?” Emily asks me. Emily is a yogi Buddhist from Colorado who likes walking barefoot around campus.

“It’s probably the three-person dorm two floors below me,” I say, as the girls lean in. “They’re always throwing parties. They don’t lock their doors.”

“Well, maybe they deserve it,” Jessica says. Jessica, a freckled advocate for gender neutrality, is the unspoken leader of our friend group. She introduced us to the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, now our group’s unofficial bible. Solanas is most famous for attempting to shoot Andy Warhol. Her Manifesto is an eighty-paged invective on how we should eliminate all men. Of all the reasons Solanas gives, my favorite is that men are boring.

Bonnie, the youngest and the only virgin, pushes her glasses up her nose. Sal, a blonde goth with a nose piercing, nods vigorously. Sal goes on a diatribe against college party culture and calls the robbery “sweet justice.” Jo looks down at her phone under the table. She’s probably received a text from her sugar daddy trying to win her back. “Never again,” she said, after she realized that her sugar daddy had been stealing $10 notes from her wallet while she was asleep. Min’s actual daddy is a rabid cheater: he even cheats on his mistresses, sometimes with men. As the only two Asians in our group, Min and I often cook ramen together.

My dad finds out about the burglary from an email sent by our college president to all parents. He texts me: “Fiora, please stay safe.” When I first received my college acceptances, he passed me a printout that said New Haven is the most crime-ridden city in America.

“America isn’t Singapore,” he said. “People get shot there.” He didn’t want me to come. I came anyway. 

Ever since my boyfriend “opened” our relationship, I’ve started going out more. I’ve tried to enjoy frat boys moving their butts against mine at Woad’s. I’ve tried to find pleasure in their hairy upper lips and koi-fish mouths. Once I invited Ryan from my American Literature class to watch The Virgin Suicides with me. As Celia jumped out of her bedroom window on my laptop and Ryan guided my hand to his denim pants, I said it was time for me to FaceTime my mom, bye bye. I spend my nights writing essays and eating cereal, trying not to imagine what my boyfriend is doing. On moonlit walks back to my dorm, workers in luminous green vests call out to me like ranch hands heralding their stray horse. I think, good night to you too.

A few weeks ago, my Writing About Film instructor Jason pulled me aside after class. He told me that he was “rather impressed” by my first assignment. Jason is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the English Department who specializes in robots depicted in literature and film. Apparently, my writing is “edgy” and my “active” voice on the page an “exciting” contrast to my “pensiveness” in class. Jason said I should visit him in his office so we can talk more about writing and film. 

Amid stale turkey patties, lectures where boys in front of me stream Reddit videos of “funny painful accidents,” and library sessions where girls giggle over Facebook profiles of floppy-haired jocks, office hours with Jason are a refuge. As his eucalyptus breathes in its pot beside me, I tell him how I made a game out of counting how many “How Are You’s” I heard in a day: if it was more than twenty I’d treat myself to a blackberry chocolate waffle cone. Whenever I mention the latest contraption my physics-enthusiast brother built back home, or make a snide remark about my boyfriend’s new girlfriends, Jason would nod three times, as if I’d said something clever.

Whenever I visit Jason, he tells me to leave his office door slightly ajar. I like to sit on his couch facing away from the southwest wall, so that I can pretend the portrait of his wife isn’t there. Her silk floral dress hangs over her butterfly carcass body; she is spidery-thin except for her cantaloupe belly. “She’s six months in,” Jason says, behind his desk. I put on a smile.

Jason and I start a habit of sitting side-by-side on the couch, watching movies from his laptop on the coffee table. After Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Jason asks me what The Room would reveal to me: what I think my deepest desires are. I cough so hard I choke. As Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system in Her, I notice Jason’s hands: cowboy-strong, like they could lasso cattle, easy. As Jesse Eisenberg kisses Kristen Stewart on a bridge in Central Park, I feel Jason’s hand rest on my thigh, just for a second. But maybe I imagined it.

Three weeks after the robbery, Jason and I watch Elle, the French movie starring Isabelle Huppert that won a bunch of awards. A masked man breaks into Elle’s house and rapes her. Her cat watches the whole event. Elle does not report her rape but begins to search for her rapist by herself.

After the movie ends, Jason pats me on the back and tells me to stay safe. I want to nuzzle my face into his care. For a moment I am the fleshy bun in his wife’s womb. Jason thinks about me every night. He waits for me to take my first breath so that, crying, he can welcome me into his world.

That night, I send an email to Jason:

Dear Jason,

I put a knife under my bed. I’ve imagined the mechanics of this to a T, and even figured out a) which knife is the best for this purpose, b) which is the best spot to put the knife. I chose a medium-sharp one, which I use to slice chicken or tear open packaging. It is slender enough to pierce skin, but not so sharp it will cause instant death. My knife is at the northeast corner of my bed, right below my left ear when I sleep on my side. I decided against placing it on my bedside table: too visible and risks me slicing my fingertip off when reaching for my phone.

Safely, 

Fiora

Jason laughs when he finds out about my knife. Do you think, he says, that a man determined to break in would care about a small knife? I laugh with him and munch on the brownies his wife baked. Jason brushes a crumb away from the corner of my lips. 

That night, I dream of a masked figure smashing open my window with his gun’s barrel. Glass shards pierce my stomach and wake my dream-self. Without my glasses, I blink a man’s face into focus: hair in a bun and veiny forearms. Jason reaches under my bed: he knows exactly where the knife is. He throws it across the room. He tucks his gun in his back pocket and moves on top of me. A thousand gunshots explode inside my head.

When I wake, thighs scorching, I reach under my bed. The blade is exactly where I left it. I pick it up and tuck it into my pillowcase.

In my first few weeks here, my boyfriend and I had four active email chains: one discussing books and movies (I watched Liv & Ingmar today, a documentary about Bergman’s relationship with Ullman / You see, monogamous relationships are destructive), one with funny variations of “a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim walk into a bar” jokes, one to share our days (today I ate pepper rice at Cineleisure and thought of you / today Arin from North Carolina asked me what it’s like to live in a “totalitarian regime” and I almost punched her), and one for sexy photos, mostly of me for him.

Lately, only the last email chain has been active. 

Lately, I’ve thought a lot about the fifteen thousand kilometers between us. My body can be so many things in my imagination. But there are only so many ways a girl can capture herself on an iPhone camera.

My iPhone photo library has 648 unsent selfies. Many of them are variations of the same poses. In one nineteen-photo series, I am in my pink bra on my pink sheets, my phone positioned above me. In another, I am staring into my bathroom mirror stained with toothpaste splatters, noticing as if for the first time I have eyes, a flat nose, chapped lips, small breasts, spindly arms, neck-folds.

After my boyfriend does not reply to a photo for two days, I call him. He does not pick up. I call his house phone. After seven rings, a girl with a jingle-voice answers.

“Hey, Bryan is in the bathroom. Who is this?” 

Her voice makes me think of my boyfriend’s neighborhood café barista. Or the ice cream scooper at Holland Village’s Häagen-Dazs. Or my junior college biology teacher who was young and pretty. Or my boyfriend’s fitness-obsessed colleague whom I met once at his office party.  

“Hello?” She says. “Who is this?”

He does not have a sister. I hang up.

I scroll through Facebook, liking every post I see. I slam my laptop shut. I scroll through Instagram and delete a selfie of my boyfriend and me at Changi Point, the sun setting behind us. I walk to my bathroom and stare at myself. I re-open my laptop, look at the photo I sent to my boyfriend—me, topless, with kitten ears (my Halloween costume) and black underwear—and dig my nails into my wrist, crescent moons. I scrutinize the photo and ask myself questions about myself. I type in Jason’s email and hit “forward.”

The half-moon outside is dark red against the city’s light. It scorns me.

The next day, Jason tells me to meet him in his office. As I walk in, he reminds me to leave his door ajar. His eucalyptus inhales sharply.

“We should stop doing this movie thing,” he says. 

“In fact, you’re doing fine in class. So we don’t even need to meet about work,” he says.

“And the emails,” he says. “Let’s keep them professional.”

I stare at the viper plant on his window ledge. It blinks in and out of focus.

“I have to be fair to my other students, he says. And my wife is pregnant.”

On my walk home, a driver rolls down his window and calls out to me, “Go back to China!” The elms lining the road bow their necks and shrug leaves off their heads. Mascara-smeared, I think about how gross I look. I call my dad. He picks up. “What’s up?” I hear a printer buzzing and his colleagues talking about something important. “Nothing, Dad, I just missed you.”

I cry in the shower and wonder what it’d be like to watch myself crying. I step out of my body for a moment. I see my jutting collarbones and slight shoulders heaving. I see the color in my skin. I imagine the masked man breaking in through my open window, and upon seeing me crying, stalling awkwardly, thinking, all I wanted was to steal her laptop and now she’s a mess, goddammit.

I lie in bed thinking of Jason and his pregnant wife and their cottage home. There, he presses his ear against her engorged belly; she greases pans to bake pear pies for him. Her wardrobe bursts with the $300 floral dresses he buys her. They are so soft against her skin. I imagine them against my skin and my body breaks into two.

I tell the girls everything: from how Jason invited me to his office to our movies together to the portrait of his wife. I leave out the part about how I sent him a photo meant for my boyfriend, and included the bit about how Jason is an asshole and how I’m dropping his class. I also mention how he put his hand on my thigh for a split second when we watched Elle. 

“You’re obviously going to report it, right?” Jessica asks.

“Did you kind of like it?” Jo asks. 

“Did you tell him that was not OK?” Emily asks.

Sal calls me: “Security just caught the masked man breaking into your building again.” I rush to join the crowd on the grass outside. As he is escorted in handcuffs, he turns. For a second, our eyes lock. His features blend into a mass of nose and eyes and skin and teeth. And then they come into focus.

I almost recognize him. It’s as if he’s the construction worker and the hot barista and Jason and my boyfriend and Ryan from seminar and the guy in the car and Jason’s unborn son all at once. As I look, my body bends and contorts into a hundred different things: a butterfly carcass, a welcome home mat, a pixelated image on someone else’s screen, a screen on which an entire universe unfolds, a plastic coffee cup, a tail of a kite caught around someone’s neck, a silk gown, an overdue library book, and a metal object that points and shoots.

Published August 11th, 2024