You Are Not Alone

by Greer Hendricks

She knew what the other women in the group were capable of, and the punishments they had inflicted, even against people they’d never met—like the parents who’d never bothered to visit their teenaged son as he lay in a medically induced coma after they threw him out of their house because he was gay. The women had waited for months, biding their time until late on a Saturday night after the lights in the parents’ house on Long Island were turned off. Then they uncoiled the garden hose in the front yard. They slipped it through the mail slot and twisted the metal knob to turn it on. Thousands of gallons of water pumped into the main level while the parents slept—saturating the wood floors, seeping through rugs, leaking into the basement, and damaging the home’s structure. “Let’s see how they like being homeless,” Valerie had whispered to the others as they’d crept away from the house. And slipping a bit of syrup of ipecac into the drink of the ex-husband who’d left Beth when she was diagnosed with cancer wasn’t enough of a punishment for him, the group decided, even though they’d enjoyed viewing the footage Stacey had recorded of his disastrous event. He’d rushed off the stage just minutes into his poetry reading—but not quickly enough to make it to the bathroom. They’d also created a GIF of him throwing up on the café floor and uploaded it to YouTube, linked to his name, so it could live on in perpetuity. “That GIF will show up anytime his name is googled,” Cassandra had sa...