Welcome to Beach Reads for Goth Kids. All summer long, I’m sending out short stories that pack a haunting punch: creatures-of-the-week, adventures in adulthood, and things that go bump in the cul-de-sac. These are standalone sticky stories with summery themes, best consumed with a tiny paper umbrella.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the web, we present: if you sell your shoes online does that make you a sex worker?
The person who bought Erica’s shoes online was an 18-year-old boy named Jacob Ellis.
To buy Erica’s shoes, he used an American Express card that belonged to his mother, Helene Van Ghent Ellis, herself a direct descendant of one of the first families in Westchester. And that’s what got Erica thinking he couldn’t be real. People like that were careful with their privacy weren’t they?
Jacob Ellis was the son and grandson of millionaires. Or maybe billionaires, Erica thought as she sifted through the records of his life online. He appeared to be a handsome, tan, athletic teenager with more money than God. The packing slip provided an address that, when viewed on Google maps, looked like an Ivy League campus, not a single family’s home.
Someone was scamming her, or scamming the Ellis family. Or playing a trick on Jacob, some weird hazing ritual among the fraternity-destined youth of privilege.
Erica canceled the sale. A moment later her inbox lit up.
hi, why did you cancel? credit card works.- J
Hi, This feels fishy, I’m sorry. I’m not comfortable with the transaction. Take it up with eBay if you want.
not a scam im real. look me up on insta. please dont cancel.
What are you going to do with five pairs of women’s shoes, if you really are Jacob Ellis?
donate them
Erica closed her laptop. It wasn’t a scam. This was a kid with a burgeoning fetish, probably from spending too much time on the internet. Her own son was twenty. Thinking about it made her skin crawl.
Erica had always maintained a little illusion for herself about who her customers were and what they wanted with her shoes. But she got the most money for the worst specimens— those with blackened foot beds, flattened treads, stretched out heels and sweat stained straps— a clue that was hard to ignore. No one was buying her shoes to wear. On their feet.
Sometimes her buyers were hidden behind ambiguous avatars and screen names, but usually they didn’t even bother. No one was ashamed of themselves anymore, including Jacob Ellis.
She opened the laptop, looked at his message, a lie in black and white. Eighteen years old.
She closed the laptop again and this time she stood up, walked away from her desk. It was, as the kids say, time to touch grass.
The next day she had a new message in her eBay inbox. She didn’t click on it for a couple hours, the little bubble 1 taunting her. She told herself she wouldn’t check it. She did a load of laundry, made her bed.
Doing chores, she told herself she might get out of the used shoe business. It felt gritty in a way that was unfamiliar. She took a bath. She scrolled through her feeds.
When she finally opened the message it was purely on reflex. She forgot she was ignoring it and the notification bubble reached out to her subconscious, grabbed her finger, and opened itself.
this u?
The message from Jacob included a link to her bio at the YMCA where she managed an after school program. On that page she had posted a head shot in brilliant color, her full name, her kid’s name, a link to her LinkedIn page, and a video message about her after school program, interviewing several of the kids.
She stared at the message— this u— Jacob smirking behind his dumb grammar, showing off how easily he could find her. This was a threat.
Without responding she clicked report and contacted the eBay security team. Her heart pounded. In her head she saw her boss at the YMCA finding out she sold shoes to perverts on the internet. In her head she saw her son, finding out his mom was a sex worker.
Wait, was she a sex worker?
That night instead of sleeping she went down a Jacob Ellis rabbit hole. She told herself she wanted to know if he was dangerous. As she wound her way through the tunnels of his life she knew in her gut that he wasn’t. What she really wanted to know was, could he be trusted with her secret?
She kept clicking, backing up, searching again. He had freckles. He liked rap music. He went to prom with “the boys,” a row of lanky young men lined up like a bar graph, all wearing sneakers with suits. He spent a lot of time on boats and on snow-covered mountains. He played the drums. He got a lacrosse scholarship to Michigan, but was undecided. He wanted to take a gap year.
He was obsessed with her shoes. He was trying to find her.
She lay on her side in bed, the blue glow of her phone hiding the fact that it was nearly dawn. On Street View, the Ellis family mansion was barely visible, out of focus behind a gate and a manicured hedge. There was one window she could see, a perfect white-shuttered rectangle on the second floor, so she decided that was his room. She zoomed in until it was pixelated, hoping for a glimpse of something she could never know. She wondered what it was like in his room. Did he have piles of women’s shoes or was she his first?
Hours later, finally dozing, she received a voicemail. Jacob’s voice was husky and his tone formal. It surprised her.
“Hello, this is Jacob Ellis calling for Erica. I am your customer on eBay. I found your phone number on Facebook— you are really easy to find online. I’m hoping you will complete our transaction on eBay without too much more trouble.”
Erica was sweating. She dropped her phone like it was hot.
She had heard him breathe before the line cut. A sound like a sigh. Not scared or ashamed, he was annoyed. And she was easy to find online.
The way he said “our transaction” made her feel complicit in something bad. But she wasn’t. She had canceled the sale as soon as she found out he was a teenager. She wasn’t complicit. She wasn’t.
But the question nagged at her: If you sell your shoes online to fetishists, does that make you a sex worker?
She downloaded a private search engine on her laptop and typed it in. Surely someone had faced this before. There were hundreds of articles, Reddit posts, even a Quora page telling women how easy and lucrative it was to sell your old shoes online. But no one would answer her question. Was she a sex worker?
The women online had no time for philosophy. Instead, they talked endlessly about security measures. They had PO boxes, sometimes entire towns away. They used fake names to set up fake accounts and accepted payments in online banks and crypto currency. They had two step security systems and password generators, VPNs and Tor browsers and encrypted chats, none of which she had ever heard of.
Erica opened her plain old Bank of America account with her eyes blurring under a curtain of tears. Every deposit from eBay was a stone monument to her sins, a permanent etching that the bank knew about and stored in a file somewhere. There were probably bank workers who laughed at her on their lunch break, or worse. She wondered if they had flagged her to the IRS. Suspected money launderer. Suspected sex worker.
Her real name, her real address. Her avatar a stupid selfie she specifically chose because she looked trustworthy in it.
Now, a new terror: What were the myriad ways for an 18-year-old billionaire with bad judgment, a sense of entitlement, and the acumen of an internet native to upset her life? What resources might the Van Ghent-Ellis family bring to bear on a single, 50-year-old woman in a blue collar town on Long Island who was maybe accidentally a sex worker ruining their perfect son?
Jacob could tell her own son she was a pervert who sold shoes to horny men online. It would be so easy to find Joey through any one of their social media connections.
He could tell her boss at the Y. Parents would flee from the program. She might have to register on a list.
He could buy a billboard across the street from the Y, put up a picture of her— easily found on the internet— and destroy her that way.
In a frenzy she deleted her eBay account, her Facebook account, her Venmo account. She set her Instagram to private, and archived all the pictures that showed her face, leaving a grid of hundreds of glasses of wine, beach views, her cat, and her breakfast. She unfriended her son. Her hands left sweaty smudges on the screen.
***
The next afternoon she arrived for her shift at the Y on the verge of vomiting. She put her hair in a ponytail and buttoned the top button on her shirt. Her supervisor Alice was the most rigidly conservative woman she had ever met. She tried to act normal but Alice caught her eye.
“Good afternoon, Erica. Do you know someone named Jacob Ellis?”
Her mouth went dry. “Jacob…who? Hmm. I don’t think so.”
“Oh?” Alice frowned, her Botox resisting the expression. “Well someone named Jacob Ellis left a voicemail for you at the main desk. He asked for you by name. He said you would know how to reach him.” The last sentence was a dare.
The blood drained from Erica’s face, her fingers numbed.
“Maybe,” her voice cracked. She cleared her throat and started again. “Maybe, um, he’s a friend of Joey’s from school? I’ll ask.”
“A friend of Joey’s? Why would your son’s friend call you at work?”
Erica felt like she was disintegrating. She could have just told Alice that Jacob was her HOA president or the propane guy. But now Alice knew he was a kid. And she knew Erica was lying.
***
When she got home, Erica threw the shoes in a bag and drove to the dumpster behind the CVS, where she hurled them in. She stared up at the parking lot surveillance camera for a second before getting in her car. She put a hand over her eyes, but it was too late. She was on video throwing away evidence.
She called Verizon and requested a new number. She called her son and left a voicemail. She hoped he wouldn’t ask questions.
Late that night, her phone pinged and it was a hand around her throat. A message on Pinterest. An app she hadn’t used in years, buried so deep in her phone she didn’t even remember to delete it. She pressed her thumb on the P app icon until it shook, then clicked the little x, deleting the app. She poured a glass of wine, tried to sift through her physical mail.
Minutes later she kicked herself. Stupid Erica, deleting an app does not delete your account. Ugh. She wanted to throw her phone in the ocean. She wished for a solar flare to knock out communications networks worldwide. She wished she could have a small stroke and end up in the hospital for a few days.
She spent 15 minutes trying to recover her Pinterest password, reviving a long-dormant Yahoo account in the process, dropping new internet breadcrumbs just as she had swept the others away.
where are u size 7?
stop deleting ur accounts erica. just take my money and stop wasting time. i could be a great customer for u. i have money.
Erica flushed. She wondered if she should call the police, report him as a stalker. But the shame of her shoes and the intimacy of Jacob calling her size 7 pressed her lips shut.
Jacob had no Pinterest boards. He had seemingly created the account just to find her. He could find her wherever she went.
That she could find him seemed completely unimportant. His whole life was lived in public. He was in the school newspaper, the town newspaper. He was in his brother’s wedding, and the wedding was in Vanity Fair. He was in a battle of the bands on YouTube. He was a featured success story for his orthodontist. He was playing lacrosse, sometimes shirtless but never vulnerable, on every website in the whole world.
Erica zoomed in on his face in picture after picture, searching for a clue to understand him. How he wore his confidence like a suit of armor and charged into life without pause. His green eyes were flecked with gold. He had a tiny round scar on the bridge of his nose. His teeth were not perfect, but they were very white. Running her tongue across her own teeth, she wondered if imperfect was desirable now.
When she slept that night, she dreamed of an angry, brutal Jacob kicking in her front door, his freckles glittering like stars. He was a soldier armed with a flame thrower, and he lit her house on fire.
***
That weekend, Erica sat in a rented mini van outside the Scarsdale lacrosse field, under a beautiful shady tree, drinking a Diet Coke. She wore a baseball cap and oversized glasses.
Actually, if you asked the car rental place, the woman in the car was named Tracy. How easy it had been to slip into the identity of her sister, using only a secretly borrowed ID that she would give back in a couple days.
A purposefully dumb phone was in the cup holder, doing nothing but existing. Not tracking her location, not recommending anything or helping find her way. On the passenger seat was spread a huge, wrinkled, dumb paper map.
At 3:02 p.m. the senior boys’ lacrosse team ran onto the field, a gradient of brown calves and floppy hair. But they spread out into individuals and she picked him out. Number 8, Jacob Ellis. Tall and strong. A leader on the field as she knew he would be.
She pulled down the sun visor and watched her stalker from the shadows. The sun crossed his face in glowing beams. She drank him in, the 3D version of him, running and yelling and fist bumping his teammates. Happy, powerful and oblivious.
One he was thoroughly engaged in the game, Erica found his car a few spots over, one of many featured in his Instagram posts. An olive green jeep with windows and roof open, more evidence of Jacob’s unerring confidence that the world was his. She leaned in and inhaled a whisper of cologne in the hot air of the jeep, citrus and ocean water, Jacob on a boat.
So, the internet belonged to Jacob and his kind. They could have it. She understood now she didn’t belong there. But the real world was still hers, she had survived it for 52 years. In her world, Jacob Ellis was just a babe.
She slipped the wrecked, sweaty Birkenstocks off her feet and dropped them into the driver’s seat one by one. Dried mud flaked onto the tan leather. The bumpy gravel parking lot dug into her bare feet hot and sharp and she savored the discomfort of it. They both had to face themselves in the wild.
If he was as comfortable with himself as he projected, then he could have his precious dirty shoes. Maybe when he held them in his hands he would think of her, the internet ghost he would not find again.
She touched the headrest where Jacob’s hair would be.
“Why are you obsessed with me, Jacob,” she asked him under her breath.
Holy moly. This is so good. And it’s DEFINITELY horror, the mind-bendy, too-real kind. Stunning.
“'What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them. My address is care of B.F.——'
I didn’t hear the rest of the name, because I hung up the receiver."
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
Another Long Island setting with privileged characters terrorizing the working class around them? More tennis shoes?
Absolutely fantastic buildup of tension and creepiness, EJ. Class-war undertones plus creepy sex vibes giving an excellent texture of fear. Was just talking with a friend recently about near-horror, how in some ways it can be more effective than overt horror. This story is textbook.