Lesbian Zoomer Ghost Neighbors

fiction: a Halloween story

When we first moved here, the apartment felt palatial. Jack and me’d just spent three years in a mouse-infested studio in a pre-war building. The slum lord who owned the building did all the repairs himself—our electrical wiring was faulty, and my then-fiancé (who had just joined the team of an early-stage start-up) became increasingly unmoored from reality after one of his computers got fried.

One night, the old Irishman upstairs shorted the power, and I came back from a shift at the lab at 5 am and found Jack hunched and seething in front of the fridge, cord in his hand. He’d unplugged everything. I asked what happened, and he mumbled something about magnets and waves and specters.

“You don’t get it. We’ve got to throw everything out,” he said gravely, some remote turbulence coursing through him.

And so we had to move.

That was 2017, and he was making more money, and I had just cancelled myself on Twitter, so we could afford to move a few miles west, further from the el and the square and all the clubs that Maggie Lakin and I used to go to.

We started renting a 2-bedroom, 1.5-bath unit above a mostly quiet dive bar. A walk-up next to the Mexican grocery—not the good one, just the okay one. Old building, but the appliances are new. Full gut rehab. Dishwasher. A/C.

We only had enough furniture to fill half the apartment. The dining room became a home gym. We bought a 4K TV for our cavernous new living room and that night, I turned the thermostat down to 74 and rolled one up, and I called Kristin Kavanaugh and told her to get on the Amtrak and come to Chi.

“I live in luxury now, bitch.”

But the years have dulled my enthusiasm. Our bathroom fixtures are cheap nickel, and the kitchen tiles crack. The HVAC breaks annually, and the door on the half-bath doesn’t close right. On Saturday nights, a Latin biker gang uses the stretch of road outside our bedroom window for their weekly meet-and-greet.

Nobody ever lives in the garden unit for long either. New neighbors each fall, and I haven’t liked any of them since that sexy vegan chick who does expensive tats on yuppies moved out. One year, three gross hippies moved in and kept a shoe rack and several bikes and an entire table in the landing, and they also broke the washing machine in the basement trying to steal quarters from it. During the pandemic, the boys who lived there called me a “fucking Karen” when I asked them to turn down the subwoofer on their home theater system when they play video games after midnight. They only knocked it off after I helped them find their lost cat.

The unit stayed empty all summer until the girls moved in. I didn’t really get a good look at them until I saw them returning from a party early on a Sunday morning, finicking with the stove, trying to put the kettle on. They piled out of an Uber together, and I gave them a wave, and they waved back. These were no spray-tanned gentrifier thotianas, but pallid art school girls. One dressed like a middle school schlub, the other in combat boots and a flimsy nightgown. I found it tender, the way the tomboy one held out her hand, helping the other girl step over a grimy puddle.

Lesbians? I wondered this as I tried and failed to unclog the kitchen sink. I got my answer a few nights later when Jack updated my MacBook and I had to reconnect to the wi-fi, and the name of their network popped up before ours: Lesbians.

Not, mind you, queer women, that term now voguish among married ladies who were Katy Perry bi in 2009. Old school lesbians, butch & femme, though they neither looked north of 25. Were these the famed Zoomer radfems? Did they make TikToks about protecting the integrity of women’s sports? But, more importantly, would they be interested in making friends with an aging reactionary hipster who pretends to be a tradwife and has almost 150 substack subscribers? These were the questions I asked myself as I sopped up rusty water leaking from the skylight. It’s always something around here.

I get my answer yesterday morning, returning from a jog as the waif is heading out. Long black flares with a silk top, dressed like a party girl from 1999 at 9 o’clock on a Wednesday. She holds out her hand; her smile is pearly, and she introduces herself. Even her extraversion is vintage.

“We’re having a Halloween party. You should come. Ladies only.” Pretty voice, but she sounds far away, and she glides through the doorway, and I feel a chill despite the Indian summer.

Tonight, I’ll dress up in some fetishishy Halloween costume and make bread and soup and hot cider, and we’ll watch Jennifer’s Body, starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, until the power snaps out. Outside the window, every light will still be on, pizzeria sign blinking steadfastly. And Jack will go to the fuse box, and I’ll open the door to the hall, look down the stairs. Tomboy’s on the landing, blonde hair whiter than ever. Is she a zombie? Her white clothes will be ripped, bleached flesh shining through.

She’ll shrug out an apology. “Our furnace is out,” she’ll say, “so we plugged in a couple space heaters.”

I’ll forget it’s 60 outdoors, and I’ll tell her about how water sometimes gets in ‘em over the summer and to call maintenance, and I’ll get halfway through a lecture about how using two electric heaters at once is a really dangerous idea before I’ll remember that I’m standing in a stairwell in lingerie and cat ears like a pervert. And then the building will buzz back to life, and I’ll look down, and she’ll be gone.

When I get back to our apartment, my husband will be glowering at the snowcrash, at the early demise of our LG screen at the hands of those careless lesbian zoomettes.

“We need to leave,” he’ll say, and it won’t be a question. “This is what happened last time. They moved in, and everything went to hell.”

“Don’t be homophobic. It’s 2024.”

“You don’t get it. Those aren’t girls. They’re ghosts.”¹

1. credit to my downstairs neighbors, the leaky roof, and (most importantly) @estvm aka Chekhov’s Gone for inspiring this piece