At one point my boy came over to thank us for wolfing down his free food while making fun of his friends, and I was like, “Way to have only three black people at the party, David Duke.” He laughed and said, “I almost put you guys at the same table, but I thought it would have been too obvious.” It was a good thing he didn’t, because at that exact moment I glanced over to where ol’ girl and her man were waiting in the cake line and she glowered at me once again. I was like, “Who is that lady and what is her deal? Is this about her man? Because I can just go over there right now and tell her that I’m not feeling dude and she can keep her dirty looks to herself.” The last thing I ever want is a dude who is some other woman’s problem, because (1) I’m not a hater, and (2) I don’t need a bitch playing on my phone all night. Can’t we all just get along?!
The big band in the corner started playing “Cheek to Cheek” and I took that as our cue to leave. We gave daps to the frat brothers at our table and took our customized cupcakes to go. People were lingering on the lawn outside the ballroom, chatting amiably about travel hockey and hating vaccines and other white things. We made our way to the parking lot, where men with stock portfolios clapped one another on the back and compared BMW interiors. It wasn’t even dark yet, but Amy pulled her dress over her head, showering the gravel below with sequins from 1995. She shimmied into her cargo pants and a plaid shirt as I painstakingly rolled my damp, expensive shapewear down over my lumps and bumps. I tossed it on the dashboard to dry out during the ride home and was circling around to the trunk to get my flip-flops to relieve my smashed toes when I saw it: a faded Bush-Cheney sticker on the back of Jerome’s grandma’s Buick. I hobbled over and cupped my hands to peer in the window in the fading daylight. A Walgreens bag with Flamin’ Hots and a can of Olive Oil Sheen Spray sat on the back seat: HELLO, NEMESIS.
“I get it now!” I called out to Amy, who was sitting on her bumper packing a bowl for the ride home. “They’re Republicans! They hate us queers!” I wondered what the two of them had done during our intermission—enacted some legislation against impoverished children or maybe stripped some black people of their right to vote? It’s too bad they’d gotten away from us; I would have died to see their reactions back at Fort Sumter.
Amy’s engine roared to life behind me and she tapped the horn twice. “Come on, hoss! Let’s go find you a drive-thru!” I took one last look inside the car (a Tim McGraw CD, really?!) and patted the hood. I climbed awkwardly into the truck and tried to find something good on the radio. Amy placed a cigarette between her teeth and passed the bowl across the seat to me. “Should I ram it?” she nodded toward their car. I shook my head and cranked up the music, remembering a quote from fake Abraham Lincoln on this old episode of Star Trek, marathons of which I used to watch on channel nine in the summer when I was little because I didn’t have any friends and I never went outside: “There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There’s nothing good in war except its ending.”
Mavis
I had ripped the tender flesh on my finger trying to open a piece of mail that wasn’t even fucking mine, a fancy wedding invitation on creamy heavyweight card stock intended for some girl named Alicia who lived downstairs in apartment 209. Blood splattered across the velvety envelope while I raced frantically around my kitchen, sucking my finger and snatching open drawers in search of your grandma’s favorite adhesive bandages, the thick stretchy fabric kind that conform to every wrinkly crevice.
I am not OCD. I’m really not. Like, if I buy peaches? It is almost 100 percent guaranteed that a week later my kitchen will be humming with the low drone of ten thousand fruit flies. I bought this adorable fruit bowl and I put peaches in it because I like peaches, but then I probably got distracted by a gyro or some old chili and before you know it, a plague of tiny bugs is feasting on my rotten $7.98/pound Whole Foods white peaches. That would not happen to a meticulous person. I mean, really, sometimes I don’t even wipe that good. But if I have a bandage on my finger and am forced by crushing poverty and ever-mounting debt out into the real world to earn a living, I become fixated on it, watching its crisp, pristine edges wilt and dampen throughout the day, holding back vomit while handling customer credit cards and loose change speckled with influenza. I watch it grow loose and dirty throughout the day even though I changed it four times before lunch, repulsed by its fraying edge as I raise my hands to mock some dumb asshole with a well-timed air quote. It’s fucking disgusting.
—
My and Mavis’s modern romance had begun the same way as so many passionate love affairs before it: ON FUCKING TWITTER. Her initial tweet to me had read something like this: “reading your book and never wanna stop,” which is incredibly humbling and flattering and all those silly blush words. And who knows, I probably sent back a bunch of heart-with-the-arrow-through-it emojis or something. She responded, and our fledgling courtship took off, two modern girls falling in lust (or something?) one trending favorite at a time.
We moved the conversation to DM, and I really need you guys to know that it physically pains me to both have participated in something called a DM and to recount what happened in one for you now. Don’t get me wrong, I love giant computer phones and talking cars and vaccines, but hashtagging and RTs make me motherfucking #crazy. I can’t follow that shit. Dude, I still have a house phone. And one of those old-timey answering machines that goes gurgle-scramble-gargle as you rewind the tape after listening to the customer service representative at ComEd, whose tone suggests that the $42.73 I am past due came from her account personally, express her shock and disbelief that I have an actual answering machine. Mavis and I talked about dresses and my favorite brand of matte lip stains, and when I asked for book recommendations, she sent me nineteen, give or take a few. (The Book of Unknown Americans was really good, by the way.) Then she asked me to mail her a letter.