GIRL AND FIGHTER

PUSSY BURGLAR Z: I think this will be the one where I don’t use her real name ‘cause I’m a pussy and I’ll cop to that— being a pussy— actually no, no I won’t, her name is Avery and I want you and her and God to forgive me.

Because today I thought about stealing Avery’s cat. And then you’re like Y: First, Zoey, an honest-to-God Cat Burglar?

Z: Well you know that’s not actually what Cat Burglar means ‘cause I googled it but then it’s like what do you call someone who burgles a cat?

Y: Second, do you mean her pussy?

Like, is this a metaphor ‘cause you’re a poet or whatever? Do you actually want to burgle her pussy because it’s being fucked

every night by that super cute guy you used to go out hook up with? And I’m like Z: Fuck you, I’m not even into guys anymore, and you’re like, Y (with your eyes all wide like you’re really onto something): So then you’re hot for her. (And your eyes growing even wider ‘cause they’re gonna give you the Psychoanalyst of the Century award) And actually you never really liked that guy except for you wanted to be him ‘cause he was all cool and in a band and got hot chicks.

(You’re, like, barely capable of speaking because you’re getting off on how good of an insight you’re making) And that’s why you actually want to burgle her pussy. It’s a sort of masculine dominance over

women that you’re craving but you know deep down you can never have as a woman yourself, so you’re projecting your own insecurities onto a situation you know you can’t control so ultimately their relationship is just a medium for you, in some sort of megalomaniacal streak, to use in justifying your own false castration anxiety which you probably have because of the relative absence of your mother from your childhood oh my god I’m gonna cum.

And I’m like.

Z: Ew. No. It’s because Avery’s videos won’t stop showing up on my fucking For You Page on Tik Tok and she has the exact same bathroom as me.

I mean the exact one. And she was subletting her place on Instagram a few

months ago which means she must have moved so, like, what if she moved into My Building? And what if her cat happened to get out. And you’re like.

Y: That behavior proves my point exactly. The Tik Tok algorithm forms parasocial relationships by incentivising obsession, and you’re a perfect case because you are obsessing over a popular, thin, blonde, white, attractive, interesting person that you’ve never even spoken to but have several actual social ties with in terms of physical, institutional, and artistic communities.

You have gone and allowed these factors to manifest into some nonsensical tirade about a cat when in actuality you

don’t want to deal with the gendered, racial, and sexual politics of your own existence as a Bad Artist in New York and I want to scream Z: YOU STUPID SLUT THE POLITICS OF MY OWN EXISTENCE ARE THAT IF I WAS A PRETTY WHITE BOY WHO WAS GOOD AT GUITAR ALL OF MY PROBLEMS WOULD BE SOLVED SO OF COURSE I DON’T WANT TO DEAL WITH THAT. But I can’t scream because the cat’s already out of the bag.

I forgot to mention that while you are saying that the cat jumps out of the bag that I’ve been carrying and you’re like Y: So you DID steal the cat and I’m like Z: No I BURGLED IT and then the cat, who remembers me, is like C: aren’t you that slut from like a year ago who didn’t know anything about jazz and couldn’t make conversation

to save her life?

And I look at you and you look at me and you look at the cat and you look at me— expectantly— and I’m like, Z: Okay so it’s not her cat it’s his.

Y: It’s HIS !!!!!!!

You think this proves your point.

It’s like I’ve stolen his pussy.

The pussy he gets.

And that’s when the cat says: C: What are you typing?

Z: oh it’s a short story for the zine.

C: what’s it about?

Z: some asshole psychoanalyst getting pissed at me for stalking this cool chick on the internet.

C: more like psycho-anal-likesit.

Z: nice.

C: can I be in the story?

Z: there. How’s that?

C: good. Do you want to get Taco Bell and watch Adult Swim?

Z: Sure, just let me finish this story first.

Today I thought about stealing Avery’s cat. And then I logged off Instagram and thought about something else.

THE END.

The way our four wet feet pat across the hardwood reminds me of summers at my grandmother’s house. This is one of the many things I do not tell Lauren as we make our way to the restroom of the Hollywood Hills house that the grandmother of one of those douchebags outside must have at one point owned. What I do say, squinting through a too-hot afternoon, is that those guys gave us “a whole fifteen minutes” before mandating that we change into our bikinis. She laughs. This is fun for her.

When she texted me this morning it was just past ten and just like she was seven, knocking on my door ‘cause it was a Saturday with a kickball asking me to come out and play. She said the guys thought I was cute, like it was a compliment. And she liked the way the house looked in the background of the photographs he’d sent her. She said that he’d seemed rich and now I’m realizing he is and thinking, who isn’t?

She has never been inside a house like this— one of those 1970s glamour homes, like a still from a Woody Allen film stuck on pause for 45 years; shag carpets collecting dust and a marble conversation pit domed in with refracting images of Los Feliz in low July smog. I can hear echos of bossa-nova mustard-yellow pedophilia and Industry Dinners before Industry Dinners became lunches in Calabasas, but she doesn’t know this. She’d laughed when, at the sight of a fully stocked bar, I’d demanded a whiskey sour over tequila shots and regardless of my tongue in my ever-reddening cheek she’d said it was “actually pretty good”.

With a wicker dressing table between us she watches me unsexily squirm out of my tank top and take off the glasses that I don’t need to see. I think, if those assholes have slipped something in her drink I will kill them. I think, if those assholes try anything with her I will kill them. I think, is it wrong that I want to kill?

And when I notice her tall frame reclining against the wall with a soft disaffection that I decide to mistake for a sophisticated boredom, I kiss her harder and more suddenly than I suppose I had intended to, if I’d intended anything. She laughs. This is fun for her.

I notice a sunburn on her nose and I think it’s cute and I don’t mention it. What I do not notice until jerkwad-dee and jerkwad-dumm point it out is the hickey I must have given her last night — a purple florette in the shape of my lips just above her right collarbone. The Men are laughing the Men are laughing and Lauren is blushing so her beautiful red sunburn is lost in her red shame and shame, I think is not something she should feel. This

innocent girl, presently turning away like she doesn’t know what to say, no, not her. And I can’t believe shame is something she gets to have and at once something these twenty-seven-year-old shit-for-brains Industry Bros who prey on nineteen-year-old girls know nothing of.

“Whichever boy left you that,” starts one of the Men, and my ears ring in the tone of I Wonder if the Copy is Correct on the Headline: MAN FOUND DEAD IN OWN SWIMMING POOL. MAN FOUND DEAD IN HIS OWN SWIMMING POOL. MAN FOUND DEAD IN POOL, HOLLYWOOD HILLS. When we’re back in the car and I can finally breathe Lauren looks at me and says that was anticlimactic and I say they were douchebags, obviously, and maybe for the first time ever she’s witnessing a real-life Angry Dyke Rant, beginning to know that I’m not the same person I was in high school; considering with an amount of horror and repulsion this monstrous Other Thing beside her. What did New York do to me and why aren’t I fun anymore. But then she’s looking past me with this terrible hunger like You Think I Didn’t Know They Were Douchebags? We are seeing on the melting black dashboard that there is something she can’t make in the same way there is something I can’t kill. We’re both pretty pissed about it, I think, and I want to save her, best I can, ‘cause I’m already gone. So I say, do you know you were on my sister’s soccer team in eighth grade? That’s how I first saw you, you were such a great runner, and how I first recognized you— you were the girl from the soccer team who’d pierced her nose so her parents sent her to Catholic School. It was the scandal of the dinner table that night, my sister saying it and my father saying how if we ever put safety pins through our noses it’d be worse than Catholic School and looking straight at me and not my sister and my sister saying But We’re Jewish.

She doesn’t say anything and I feel like crying. I ask her if she still has her uniform in a way I thought would be sexy but obviously was not. I even thought about her in that uniform at that dinner table, I realize, and I also realize that she’s not really a woman and I’m not really a Man or anything like that. We are girls. Girls in string bikinis, girls who fool around, girls who tease. Girls who lie to their parents, girls at the end of a summer about to turn twenty. There is nothing romantic about this. Not with my bare ass sticking to the sweaty seat of this car, not with me realizing that no matter what we will always be stupid, stupid girls who love and love and love despite ourselves.

Will Toledo Gender Envy

I heard that when boys get upset they don’t even cry.

One time I was at the library and there was a kid with a Car Seat Headrest sticker on his laptop and I said I like that sticker on your laptop and he said You listen to Car Seat Headrest?

And I wanted to say Yeah ‘cause on the inside I’m not what you see now (pretty and put-together in lipstick and a somehow permanently illfitting blazer) and actually a lanky 22-year-old boy with mild roadrage and no real plan in life driving his mom’s Kia to a houseshow and poorly explaining the plot of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension to my bored, bisexual girlfriend who could definitely do better.

But I was sick of feeling like I’m always accidentally pretending to be something I’m not so I said Yeah I’m in love with Will Toledo.

He gave me this look like What the hell, no you’re not, Will Toledo’s a total sexless twink, and then I was silent ‘cause it would’ve been embarrassing to admit the truth: I want to be Will Toledo.

What is it to aspire to the unimpressive? Is it a form of aspiring to the unmarked? Will Toledo is screaming in my headphones right now— I have a right to be depressed— and it’s like, of course you do. That’s what I want.

I wanna be shitty at guitar and yell into a microphone and for that to be charming somehow. Those

guys, at the house shows, they’ve always got these girlfriends who are so much more attractive than them.

How? I don’t know but what I know is Feed Me Whatever They’re Feeding Will Fucking Toledo.

Did you know that when boys get upset they don’t even cry? They yell and scream and make a big fuss and sometimes it’s art but mostly it just seems fun.

How do you think I’d look in a real skinny tie? I know it’s supposed to be cool and feminist to hate Holden Caufield but that kid walked into so many Manhattan bars and ordered cocktails and smoked inside. I don’t need all that. All I want is for someone’s Dad to be at all concerned over whether I’m a Nice Young Man or a Little Fruity and try unsuccessfully to instill something in me via Firm Handshake. But instead I am a young woman whith a college scholarship who is headed places, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, and maybe I just need to calm down and take a bath, but right now there’s ONE thing that sounds better than a cigarette or a fuck or cocaine or even a cigarette and it’s being the world’s most unremarkable skinny white boy standing in the corner of someone’s parents’ basement in Philly holding a lukewarm PBR and being confused for Matt or Steven or Sean, who is actually the drummer and I’m not him and, finally, I’m Not Anybody.