Never Steal My Life Twice

The girl living directly above me is an online thirst-trap streamer. To squeeze more yachts and rockets out of her number-one tipper, she promised to hand over her home address. What I never imagined was that she gave him mine. What neither of us expected was that her top fan was a full-blown psychopath. In the dead of night, he scaled the wall and slipped right through my bedroom window. In a blind panic, I fought for my life—only to be strangled to death beneath my own sheets. When I opened my eyes again, I was back. Right to the day she gave away the address on live stream. 1 “Thank you so much to my number-one tipper for the Super Yacht and the Mega Rocket! Bambi loves you, baby!” My eyes snapped open. I bolted upright in bed, my chest heaving, air tearing through my throat in ragged, burning gasps. My fingers instantly flew to my neck. My skin was cold and clammy, but intact. Just a second ago—in another breath, another lifetime—thick, calloused fingers had been crushing my windpipe against the headboard, suffocating the life out of me while the pale moonlight illuminated a sweaty, sneering face. I looked around. The familiar morning sunlight filtered through the sheer curtains of my bedroom. The digital desk clock read Tuesday, the twelfth. I had been dragged back. Three days before the night I died. I lived in Unit 602 of a pre-war, mid-rise apartment complex in the city. Right above me, in Unit 702, lived Brittany Scott. Online, she went by “Bambi”—a minor influencer who made a living doing suggestive livestreams, thirst-trap dances, and teasing desperate men on screen. Around our building, though, nobody could stand her. The persona she projected on camera was all sweet giggles and breathless innocence; in reality, she was foul-mouthed, abrasive, and had a habit of openly flirting with every attached man in the lobby, whether they were married or engaged. Her reputation was in the gutter. Most of the tenants gave her a wide berth, and the property manager’s inbox was permanently flooded with noise complaints about her late-night music. Being her downstairs neighbor, I ran into her in the elevator occasionally, but we rarely exchanged more than a stiff nod. Recently, her viewership had plummeted. To keep the algorithm feeding her and the cash flowing, she had dialed up the vulgarity. She began dancing in sheer bodysuits, dropping brazen promises to her viewers: anyone who gifted her ten Mega Rockets and Super Yachts in a single stream would get her private phone number—and an exclusive, in-person dinner date. It was an unsubtle invitation, dripping with transactional promises. I knew it was a scam. She had a boyfriend who drove a silver Porsche, and she despised her audience. One afternoon, while I was watering the succulents on my balcony, I had overheard her voice drifting down from her open terrace as she talked on speakerphone. “Babe, it’s just business,” she had whined into the receiver. “Those losers are disgusting incels. Just looking at their avatars makes me want to gag. I tell them I’ll meet up just to drain their wallets. As if I’d ever let one of those freaks touch me in real life.” I had rolled my eyes back then, disgusted by her cynicism, but resolved to simply stay out of her orbit. What I hadn't known was the lengths she would go to protect herself. When her top tipper demanded the address for their private rendezvous, she didn’t give him a fake street name that would expose her lie immediately. She gave him my unit number. Apartment 602. Her top fan was a deranged, obsessive stalker. He had driven into the city, climbed the exterior fire escape, and slipped through my open bedroom window in the dead of night. When I woke up and opened my mouth to scream, he pinned me down. In the dark, he realized I wasn’t Brittany, but panic seized him. Terrified that I would call the cops and send him to prison, he simply squeezed my throat until my vision went black and my pulse stopped. A wave of cold, sharp fury washed over me, obliterating the lingering phantom pain in my neck. Fate had handed me a second chance. And I wasn’t going to spend it waiting to be collateral damage in Brittany Scott’s grift. I reached for my phone on the nightstand, opened the streaming app, and searched for her handle. On the screen, Brittany was gyrating around a newly installed brass pole in her living room, her voice sickly sweet: “Come on, big guy, you’re so close! Just one more yacht and Bambi is all yours for the weekend…” The building’s construction was terrible; the floor joists between our units were thin and creaky. Every bass drop and rhythmic heel-strike on her floor vibrated directly through my ceiling plaster. Whenever my ceiling began to hum, I knew she was live. Her next-door neighbor had threatened to call the police on her multiple times, but Brittany had simply laughed in their faces. I had always been too non-confrontational to make a fuss, which had only emboldened her. As her voice cooed through my phone speakers, an animated cruise ship glided across the screen accompanied by flashing neon fireworks. Brittany shrieked with delight, clapping her hands. “Oh my God! Thank you, baby! Check your DMs right now—I’m sending you my address!” A bitter, chilling laugh slipped past my lips. According to my past life, she had just sent him the address to my front door. The live comments rolled by in a frenzy of jealousy, heart emojis, and bitter complaints about how easy it was for cam girls to hustle money. Within seconds, the top tipper’s badge disappeared from the viewer list. He had gone straight to private messages. I wasn’t going to sit around like a lamb waiting for the slaughter. They had agreed to meet in three days. I tapped on the top tipper’s profile—handle ApexHunter99—and switched to a throwaway male burner account I used for market research. I sent him a direct message: Hey man, congrats on landing the date. When you see her in person, hook a brother up with a couple of unfiltered leg pics. Gotta share the wealth, right? It was crude, designed specifically to bait an insecure ego. Within ten seconds, ApexHunter99 fired back: Get lost, loser. Bambi belongs to me. I smirked and typed: Whatever you say, dude. Everyone knows these e-girls use five layers of beauty filters. For all you know, she’s a forty-year-old catfish living in a dump. He immediately launched into an angry paragraph defending her beauty, his typing furious and erratic. The hook was in. I typed back deliberately: Look, man, you spent enough on those gifts to put a down payment on a car. If I dropped that kind of cash, I’d scout the place a day early just to make sure I wasn’t getting played for a fool. The screen showed Typing… for nearly two minutes, but no message came through. He had stopped typing. The seed of paranoia was planted. The next morning, I called in sick to work. I pulled a low armchair onto my balcony, shielded by the potted ficus trees, and kept watch over the main gate of the complex. By two in the afternoon, a heavy-set man in an oversized hoodie and faded jeans appeared near the pedestrian entrance. He lingered nervously by the perimeter hedges, his bulky frame impossible to hide behind the thin boxwoods. He kept checking his phone, looking up at our brick building with a mixture of lust and anxiety. It was him. I took a deep breath, grabbed a large cardboard box from my closet, filled it with old household clutter, and hurried down the stairs. I pushed open the lobby doors and walked briskly toward the gate, raising my voice in loud, theatrical exasperation as if talking on a call: “I swear to God, if that bitch Brittany orders another heavy package under my apartment number, I’m throwing it in the dumpster! Just because she streams in her underwear all day doesn’t mean I’m her personal doorman!” The man by the hedge froze. His beady eyes locked onto me instantly. I stopped abruptly, glaring at him with raw hostility. “What are you staring at? You one of Brittany’s internet simps too?” He flinched, shrinking back slightly, before forcing an oily, awkward smile across his red face. “I—no, I’m… I’m a friend of hers.” “Great. Then take her damn package up to her yourself,” I snapped, shoving the heavy box into his arms. “And tell her to get it through her thick skull: she lives in Unit 702, on the top floor, not 602! I’m sick of delivery guys knocking on my door on the sixth floor and making me haul her junk up the stairs!” I hammered the apartment numbers with clear, sharp enunciation, watching his face closely. For a split second, I saw the stark confusion flicker across his eyes. The dots were connecting in his mind—the address she had given him in the DMs was 602. Before he could process the discrepancy or ask a question, I turned on my heel and marched back into the building. Two nights later, I lay awake in my bed, fully dressed under the covers, listening to the silence of the night. Past midnight, the faint, metallic scraping of someone climbing the exterior fire escape echoed outside the brick wall. The heavy footsteps brushed past my bedroom window, continuing upward toward the floor above. Five minutes later, a piercing, bloodcurdling shriek shattered the midnight quiet of the entire complex.