One day, she turned around and it seemed that every boy and man (and man-boy) had decided it was chic again to grow hair that was long enough to put into a bun. Camille knew that these things tended to come in cycles. That what was once a sixties-era “boomer” style could make a comeback when other trends grew stale, which they inevitably did. The long-haired thing for men had an uptick in the nineties and then, once again, at the beginning of the 2010s (what would you call those—the tens?). At present, it seemed to be resurging anew. Or maybe it was always there, dormant around her, and Camille had only just now been forced to notice it once it was literally up against her own hair.

Yes, that’s right, some late twenties bloke with brittle, mop-like strands gathered into a bun had the balls (or maybe just the total lack of awareness) to rub it up against the back of her own (legitimate) bun on the train. The seats, unfortunately, were designed in back-to-back fashion; had she known this was going to happen, she would have re-thought the seat she chose entirely. Tragically, she had already selected her place before Brittle Mop Man Bun belatedly came along—one of those people who had no problem prying the doors open as they were closing so as to delay the train by a number of seconds that could create the Sliding Doors effect in the lives of others.

He then plopped down with a thudding heaviness behind Camille, so that she couldn’t help but notice this new addition to the train. At first, she naively believed that might be the extent of his vexatious tendencies. But no, he quickly revealed himself to be someone who moved with the frequency and bombast of a tweaker. While, of course, most people would have no trouble simply moving away from somebody that was making them uncomfortable, Camille was not that type. In contrast, she was painfully avoidant of such things—things she deemed to be lacking in social propriety. It instilled the fear of “God” (or some such similar, supposedly wrathful overlord) in her—that she might somehow offend the “wrong” person (i.e., man). Like, say, by making a big production of changing seats that could be read as “bitch” behavior by Brittle Mop Man Bun.

Or maybe, as most men liked to tell her, it was all in her head. Nothing she thought or feared was “real,” so much as a hyperbolic projection of everything that society had ingrained within her to be afraid of. Number one on the list being: men and their reactions. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’” Granted, changing seats in response to Brittle Mop Man Bun’s erratic movements and hair rubbings up against her own would hardly fall under the “threat” of being “too successful.” But maybe “too autonomous.” Either way, Camille didn’t want to take the risk.

The seating arrangement happened after midnight (the last train, naturally), when most unpleasant things do. Even though Chappell Roan was trying to change the narrative about that with a song called “After Midnight,” which served to deliberately negate her father telling her that, “Nothing good happens after midnight” (for creative purposes, Roan did a parent swap in the lyrics, attributing the saying to her “mama” instead). Hence, Roan insisting, “‘Cause everything good happens after midnight/I’m feeling kinda freaky, maybe it’s the moonlight.” Maybe that, too, was the case with Brittle Mop Man Bun (even if no moonlight was shining through the windows of the train). How else to explain his fitful, uneven motions that seemed purposefully designed to rattle the bench of seats affixed to his own?

Or maybe, in all his white maleness, he was truly that oblivious to how his actions resulted in equal and opposite reactions. Camille’s reaction was, to be sure, more opposite than equal, prompting her to cower and recoil every time she felt the seats shake in conjunction with the disgusting texture of his hair making contact with her silken, freshly-washed locks. In fact, she had only just gotten a blowout that morning, foolishly admiring how “show-stopping” her hair looked afterward—as it should for roughly sixty-five dollars—without foreseeing that it could be ruined in such an unexpected manner. It seemed like a waste now, knowing full well that Brittle Mop Man Bun was contaminating her tresses with his dirty, crisp ones.

In truth, Camille wouldn’t have been surprised if he had some bugs living in there. She wasn’t saying lice or anything (besides, she had once read that they were actually more attracted to clean hair), but she wasn’t ruling out that a few different varietals of insects might have died and/or laid eggs in there. It was certainly “nest-y” (and nasty) enough to do so. Realizing how much this was making her bristle with disgust, Camille tried to shove such thoughts aside, which was easy to do amid Brittle Mop Man Bun’s latest round of distracting rattling. What the fuck was he doing behind her, she wondered. But also didn’t really want to find out. To turn around would only give credence to his actions, let him know that he had gotten the attention that he wanted. Besides, she had already turned around once before to see what the commotion was, which was when she first appraised who (though, more accurately, what) she was dealing with.

All Camille could do was pray that he would get off the train soon. But she knew that wasn’t going to be the case. The universe never operated so kindly. He was likely going to be on it until the end of the line. Her stop was practically at the end of it, too—just three away from le fin. Could she really hold out that long without moving? Because now, more than just being afraid of “offending,” she felt it was a matter of principle to stay put. She was the one who had been there first. Why should she capitulate—make herself “smaller,” like Chimamanda described—for the sake of ultimately accommodating his comfort? This was supposed to be a shared public space. Which meant, per the theoretical social contract, a certain amount of compromise about what you could get away with doing. Brittle Mop Man Bun didn’t appear to grasp that, nor did most people of his gender (though, women were guilty of their own grotesque forms of behavior in a train setting, most commonly: nail filing).

So she tried to hold out a little bit longer, hoping against all hope that she wasn’t right about the fact that he was going to be riding this train for the long haul. A few more lengthy brush-ups against her hair with his brittle mop of a bun, however, and she couldn’t take it. She switched seats to the empty one across from her. Feeling the shift in weight behind him, Brittle Mop Man Bun turned ever so slightly to let her know that he had noticed. And maybe she was imagining it (what with self-doubt being the norm in women thanks to the steady stream of garden-variety gaslighting), but she could have sworn she saw a little smirk form on his face. Like he knew something that she didn’t.

As predicted, when Camille disembarked from the train just three stops from the end of the line, Brittle Mop Man Bun was still there. Maybe he only rode the train as a matter of performance, a way to pass the time—hence, being on it for this long. And as she started to walk away, she could feel something moving in her hair. Touching her hand to the part of her scalp where she felt it, her fingers came upon a raised and strangely-textured cluster of something (when later extracted, she would see that each one was about the size of an apple seed). That’s when she knew: Brittle Mop Man Bun had infected her. With none other than bed bugs.

But maybe she only had herself to blame. Because his uncouthness, his lack of concern for hygiene had only been allowed to affect her as a result of her stasis. Her refusal to react when a reaction was totally called for. Even something as simple as moving away from someone who was being generally annoying/getting too close. Alas, it was a conditioning that most women were “bequeathed” with, instructed to grin and bear uncomfortable male behavior for the larger goal of not invoking something even worse out of them. Like bed bugs.