Trashley: Thirty-Seven

Out of the closet

Headlights illuminated the snow as Ashley pulled into the driveway. My body shifted into survival mode as the crunch of footsteps got louder and closer to the front door. What was supposed to be our last hurrah, our quiet, peaceful trip to the woods, had turned into a gay horror movie, the one where I was trapped in a cabin with an angry, lying lesbian. I was exhausted. I’d barely slept the last few nights because I had to keep an eye on Ashley in case she tried to stab me in the heart with an iron poke in my sleep. 

Big Bear don't care.

My head pounded in places I didn’t even know existed after learning about the horrible things Ashley had done to Michelle. I felt terrible for her. She lost over a year of her life dating someone who didn’t exist, except for in Ashley’s fantasy world. I also couldn’t help but feel sad for Ashley because, for some reason, she thought she had to lie and manipulate women into dating her.

I wish Ashley had come with a warning label, “Beware: Catfish inside. Dangerous when pressed. Because I never would have dated her if I had known she had a history as a catfish. If I had found out she was a bank robber, maybe it’d be a different story because that’s a victimless crime. But catfishing is one of the lowest things you can do to another person. I couldn’t understand the allure. 

Did Ashley get off on tricking women into relationships? Did she feel a sense of power when she manipulated them? What was in it for her? How many other women had she catfished? How far and wide did this stretch? What other lies has she told me?

I felt like one of those idiots who bought tickets to the Fyre Festival. I thought dating Ashley would be this fun and luxurious experience, but it was more like Lord of the Flies.

Ashley opened the front door, and before she could slam it shut, I said, “I reached out to Michelle.”

“Good,” Ashley said as she took off her coat, “Did you get her address so I can send a cease and desist?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said firmly. “She sent me proof that you catfished her for more than a year, pretending to be a British man named Duncan. You knew exactly who she was, so why did you lie to me? Why did you say you didn’t know her?”

I waited for a response.

Ashley slid down the door frame and landed on the floor. She put her arms over her knees and buried her head.

“It was a long time ago,” she said.

“Why didn’t you just tell me that you did something stupid when you were younger?”

“Because it’s embarrassing,” she said. “I’ve changed.”

“Have you, though?” I asked. “Because you killed off Luca to Michelle and your grandparents to me,” I waited for a beat. “And to Gina.”

She looked up at me at the mention of Gina’s name.

“That doesn’t sound like a changed person to me,” I said.

She put her head back down.

“Did you ever apologize to Michelle? Do you even feel bad for what you did to her?” 

“Oh please,” Ashley said, now sounding cocky, “She’s not exactly innocent, you know.”

“She was innocent, though,” I said. “You tricked her into thinking she was dating a British man who lived in San Francisco and worked in marketing. Kind of like how you tricked me into thinking you were a Physicist who went to MIT.”

“I AM A PHYSICIST!” she screamed.

“Okay, Ashley. Whatever you say.”

“I can’t keep paying for this for the rest of my life.” She said, “I already apologized to you for my grandparents. What else do you want from me?”

“I don’t want an apology. I just want the truth. You denied knowing Michelle after you told me you would never lie to me again. Just fucking own it. Instead of threatening to send a cease and desist, how about sending her an email apologizing for what you did to her?”

“I am owning it!” she screamed. “Please don’t break up with me. I’ve spent a year away from my children for you. I can’t lose you now.”

“You chose that, Ashley,” I said. “I never would’ve asked anyone to choose me over their kids. I didn’t even know you had kids until four months into the relationship. And Michelle says you’re still married to Cecelia.”

“No, I’m not!” she insisted, “We’ve been divorced for years!”

“Whatever, Ashley,” I said, “you’ve lied to me so many times I don’t trust anything that comes out of your mouth.”

“I have never lied to you. Other than my grandparents. Everything you know about me is true, I swear. And I will never lie to you again. Never. Please don’t break up with me. I won’t be able to handle it.”

Ashley’s inability to control her rage was terrifying, so I knew I had to ease off a little.

“I have a lot of thinking to do,” I said.

“So you’re not breaking up with me?”

“I said I have a lot of thinking to do. So, give me time to process all of this, okay? It’s a lot,” I said.

Of course, I was going to break up with her, but I had to play it cool because I didn’t want her to cause a scene at my apartment when we returned to LA. So, I came up with a game plan. Ashley was leaving for Minnesota in a few days for her monthly visit to see her kids. While she was gone, I would pack her things into her Tesla so that when she came back, I could just send her on her way to Bakersfield. 

Bye, bitch, don’t let the door kill you on the way out.

We checked out of the Airbnb and drove home in silence. I had to laugh; it was one thing to listen to Sweet Bobby on the way there, and another to have Sweet Bobby in the passenger seat of my car on the way back. Big Bear was the worst vacation I’ve ever had, and that’s saying a lot because my car caught on fire in Costa Rica while I was driving down a mountain, and the manager at the hostel stole all of my underwear. I didn’t think a vacation could get much worse than that. But this was all part of the Ashley Experience ™.

Back home in LA, where everyone pretended things were good.

When we got back to my apartment, I didn’t tell anybody what I had learned about Ashley, even though I wanted to scream it into a megaphone from the top of the Griffith Park Observatory. 

“Attention park-goers, hikers, and residents of Los Angeles, I just found out my girlfriend is a catfish!” 

Keeping this information a secret felt like I was holding my breath underwater. I had to wait for Ashley to leave before I could breathe and let it out.

I dropped Ashley off at the airport, still pretending that we were okay and I just needed time to think. As soon as I got on the 105 Freeway, I made my first phone call. There was one person who deserved to know that Ashley was a catfish before anyone else: Kirsten.

“Hey, are you home?” I asked.

“Yeah, Andy and I are having wine by the fire. What’s up?”

“You guys are gonna need another bottle. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

Kirsten had launched her own investigation into Ashley early in our relationship, and I knew she would be thrilled with my news.

Kirsten's investigation.

When I got to Kirsten’s place, she had a glass of cabernet waiting for me.

“Kirsten, before I tell you what I’m about to tell you, I need you to agree to something,” I said.

“Okay, what’s that?” 

“You only get ten I told you so’s, and that’s it, for the rest of your life. So use them wisely. Do you agree?”

“Ooh, I hope this is about your lying girlfriend,” she said.

“It is. Do you agree?”

“Yes! Oh my god, tell me!”

I took a big gulp of wine. Kirsten leaned in, staring intensely at my mouth, eager to hear what was coming.

“A woman named Michelle sent me a message on Twitter the other day saying Ashley catfished her for a year by pretending to be a British man named Duncan. I asked for proof, and she sent a file filled with evidence, including recordings of Ashley speaking into a voice changer with a British accent.”

I paused to see Kirsten’s face. It was glowing.

“Then Ashley found some guy on YouTube and told him she was a producer, and she got him to send all these photos and videos so she could send them to Michelle.” 

Kirsten started wiggling in her seat like a dog who knew its owner was about to take it to the park. 

“And that’s not all. She catfished several other women. And she’s a pathological liar.”

Kirsten rose to her feet, “Alexa, play M.C. Hammer’s You Can’t Touch This!” Music blasted through the house, and Kirsten started shuffling back and forth across her living room as if she was in the music video. She twerked against her fiddle leaf fig like Tina from Bob’s Burgers. Then she ran through the house high-fiving inanimate objects, “I. FUCKING. TOLD. YOU! YES, BITCH, YES!” 

“That’s one. You only get nine more.”

“I fucking told you so from the very beginning! Oh my god, I’m so good!”

“And that’s two.”

After Kirsten’s victory dance ended, I continued speaking.

“So Ashley just left for Minnesota. She’ll be there for a week. In the meantime, I’m gonna pack up all her things and put them in her car for when she gets back.”

“This calls for a celebration!” Kirsten said, “Let’s order Din Tai Fung, it’s on me!”

I played the voice recordings of Ashley speaking as Duncan while we waited for our food. This was the best day of Kirsten’s life.

After going to town on some Xiao Long Bao, I went home and began packing up Ashley’s belongings. I had given her a big chunk of my closet, and I was really excited to have the whole thing back.

I took her clothes off the hangars and neatly folded them up before putting them in a suitcase. I took down several boxes and put them on my bed. She had a bunch of MIT gear, a Physics Textbook, and some notebooks she said were filled with standard notation, whatever that meant.

Three and a half grueling pages of standard notations.

I opened a notebook, and the first few pages contained math scribblings. The last time I used math was never, so I texted my neighbor Gabby, who is a mathematician, asking if she knew what this meant.

“Lauren,” she responded, “That’s sixth-grade math. It’s nothing.”

Interesting. It felt like Ashley googled “Algebra” and wrote down the results on a few sheets of paper, and then got lazy and stopped.

I took down the last box. It was filled with mail, a bunch of papers, and several iPhones. That was weird. Who needs three additional iPhones?

Whatever. 

Then I start sorting the papers. I had never gone through Ashley’s things before. I had never even thought about it. All of these papers had just been sitting on a shelf in my closet. And since I had just found out Ashley was a catfish and a liar, I couldn’t resist.

 I looked at the first piece of paper. It was a defaulted Affirm loan for a mattress. Then another letter from Affirm, a loan approval under her wife’s name, dated from October, when we were in New York. I remembered seeing that on her computer. Did she take out a loan in Cecelia’s name to fund our relationship?

Then, I found a finance agreement for the Jeep she had just purchased in Minnesota. She had told me she outright bought the Jeep with cash so she wouldn’t have to pay interest on it, but this statement said her monthly payments were three hundred fifty dollars, and one hundred ten dollars of that sum was in interest alone. God, her credit score must be a wreck. I remembered her comment to me about buying a house together, “Between both of our incomes and our perfect credit scores…” It was starting to look like only one of us had perfect credit, and it sure as hell wasn’t her.

The next stack of papers I went through I had already seen when I had her car cleaned last fall. She had stopped paying the mortgage on her house in Minnesota, where her wife and children lived. God, were they at risk of losing the home?

I started to feel sick.

Next there was a statement from a CarMax in Minnesota for the sale of a Subaru. She never mentioned having or selling a Subaru. I looked at the date. It was from last May when she went with her sister and mom to “settle her dead grandparents' estate in Missouri.” They went to Minnesota instead. Why lie about that?

I found a bank statement saying Ashley had defaulted on her Tesla loan, which was sent back due to a lack of funds. Underneath that was a letter from the IRS saying she owed more than forty-thousand dollars in back taxes.

What in the actual fuck, this was mental. She pretended to be rich, and she owed so much money to so many different places.

Underneath that are the legal papers she was delivered by the Process Server last May when we were in Bakersfield. I'd never known what those papers were about, but I saw it now: Cecelia had sent a legal separation request, meaning they were definitely still married when we started dating. Holy fuck. I was the other woman.

Going broke while pretending to be rich. Congratulations, you played yourself.

I called Kirsten, “I’m packing up Ashley’s things. You won’t believe what I found.”

By the time I hung up, Kirsten was already standing in my bedroom.

I showed her the stack of papers.

“She is so financially fucked. She lied about everything.”

“I fucking told you.” Kirsten said, “And I’m saving my last one for my deathbed because those will be my final words- I fucking told you.”