The flyers appeared on the university noticeboard on a Monday morning: a photo of me from the winter fun-run, my number scrawled beneath it, and a caption that called me exactly what you’d expect, a word men use for a woman they’ve decided is for sale, dressed up as a joke. By lunchtime someone had posted the photo online with the same caption, tagged to half the town.
The calls started that afternoon. Some were silent. Some were not. By evening I had unplugged the landline and turned my mobile to silent, sitting at my kitchen table shaking with a violation I had no name for, while messages piled up from numbers I didn’t recognise, boys and men who thought a printed flyer was an invitation.
Noah came home from school the next day with a torn sleeve and refused to say why. It took me twenty minutes of gentle questioning to learn that three older boys had shoved him into a locker, laughing, repeating a word about his mother that no six-year-old should have to carry home.
I knew, with a certainty that made me sick, exactly who had started it. I did not yet know how far she was willing to take it.
It didn’t stop at the flyers. Two of my regular spin class members quietly cancelled their memberships that week, and Priya told me, apologetically, that the gym owner had “had some concerns raised” and wanted a word. I lost three private training clients in four days, all of them citing scheduling conflicts that hadn’t existed a fortnight earlier. At the supermarket, a woman I’d known for years steered her trolley the long way round the cereal aisle rather than pass me, and I stood there with a loaf of bread in my hand and understood, all at once, exactly how small a small town could make a person feel.