NECKBEARD

I detested everything that he stood for, everything that he was and everything that he would ever be. People can change, people can grow from nothing and become something, but those rules don’t apply to everyone, and the exceptions are easy to spot. The man with the neckbeard was one such exception.

He lived alone in a two-bedroom flat; one room reserved for his mattress, plonked on the filthy, worn-thin carpet, and his clothes, hanging from every surface like tattered curtains; the other for his collection of action figures and comic books. The aptly named living room was where he spent most of his time, from watching porn on his dusty 32-inch TV, to eating takeout and frozen meals while slouched on his vomit-colored, food-stained sofa.

The kitchen was filled with all the usual suspects, including an oven and dishwasher, but the dishes piled high in the sink and only the fridge and microwave were in use. A fish tank rested on the kitchen windowsill, but the water was jet black and the sides of the tank were covered in a thick layer of grime—fit for bacteria but not for fish. The bin overflowed with takeout boxes, plastic wrap, and food, each stacked on top of the other like a disgusting game of Jenga, daring anybody to retrieve a piece and avoid the whole shit pyramid from crashing down.

Neckbeard called it “lived in,” and a desperate real estate agent might agree, but to everyone else, it was uninhabitable, condemnable. He had spent his youth locked away in his mother’s house, tucked away in the basement where he had been free to do what he wanted when he wanted and without consequence. He could have taken a steaming dump on his pillow, pissed on his shag carpet, and ejaculated over his posters of Megan Fox and his mother would have still cleaned it up without complaint.

“Boys will be boys,” she might say if she saw the state of his apartment.

And if she wasn’t dead.

In his head, he was a stud. A rock star. The man that every woman wanted to be. He was lonely not because he looked like the runt of the Mansion family and stank like he’d been fucking a bag of ferrets, but because women were “too stupid,” “too blind,” or just didn’t know what was best for them. They were too busy running off with handsome, athletic, charming guys who, apparently, wouldn’t treat them properly, wouldn’t love them like they deserved to be loved, and didn’t appreciate them.

Because what woman in their right mind wants to have sex with a fit, handsome man who wines and dines them in fancy restaurants, hotels, and luxury villas, when they could shag a scruffy wanker around the back of KFC after being treated to a Bargain Bucket and a rant about the perils of immigration?

The mess in Neckbeard’s apartment wasn’t the only reason I decided to kill him, but it played a pivotal role. It was the icing on the cake. Because as bad as his apartment, his personal hygiene, and his sense of style were, I detested his personality even more. He was an overweight, unfit, slob of a man who spent his days trolling young women on social media, calling them “fat cows” even though they were a quarter of his size and “sluts” just because they had more sex than him.

His chat-up technique consisted of sending them crude and long-winded messages, followed by an impromptu cybersex session. His prose could make a prostitute blush and an English major despair, but to him it was poetry, and any woman who didn’t fall for it was either a prude or a lesbian. When they inevitably rejected him, his pièce de résistance was to insult them repeatedly until they blocked him.

I spent several weeks watching his activity online and studying him through the grime-covered windows in his ground-floor flat. He lived an uneventful life offline, going to work, coming home, eating, masturbating, sleeping, and repeating, with very time for friends or showers in between. Online, however, it was a different story. I struggled to contain myself as I watched him slouched on his sofa, his hand stuffed down his pants, his eyes on a small tablet screen as the TV blared indiscriminately in the background and he pestered some poor, innocent girl whose only mistake was to exist in a place he could find her. Hour after hour, day after day—his life was a perpetual cycle of monotonous misery.

“I want her young, like very young, okay?”

Neckbeard liked to mix things up every now and then. He didn’t smoke, drink, or go to many parties, but he did have one vice, and like everything else that he did, it came at the expense of someone else.

“Tell her to dress up like a schoolgirl—yes, you heard me.”

He ordered escorts like anyone else would order pizza, and he wasn’t shy about asking for extras.

“How much would it cost for anal?”

And because he saw it as a paid service, he didn’t feel the need to wash before the event. He didn’t even change his clothes.

He left reviews for the women he slept with on escort sites, picking apart their performance and their bodies and gloating when he made them climax, refusing to believe that any of them were faking it, even though there was a good chance all of them were.

“What if I wear a condom—oh, okay. Yeah, of course, I knew that.”

Everyone leaves a trail online, everyone can be tracked, but Neckbeard was easier than most. He used the same obscene username wherever he went and on everything from his social media likes, which displayed an obvious proclivity for schoolgirls in intentionally (and sometimes accidentally) suggestive poses, to his obsession for Pokémon and the comments he left on amateur porn videos asking for the names of unwitting victims of revenge porn.

Among all the insults, negativity, racism, sexism, and xenophobia, there were moments of weakness, moments where Neckbeard lamented on his inability to find Mrs. Right. If only he could find a woman who didn’t seek physical perfection; a woman who could see his inner beauty, whatever and wherever that was.

If he knew how obsessed I had been with his online activity, how much attention I had paid to his scattered prose, his insulting comments, and his disgusting home life, he might have been flattered.