Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 14

Crash

The light at Sprinkle and Gull had been green for a long time. Although it was eleven on a Friday night, and I knew the cops would be out, and even though I was already going about five miles over the speed limit, I punched the accelerator because I was tired and just wanted to get home.

It had been a good night. I’d left rehearsal for Frozen Jr., the show I’m directing, unusually early; I tend to stay around until the last staff members are on the way out the door. Friday night, though, Rollerworld was having its soft re-opening after closing for months to install a new floor, and I put my foot down that I was going to leave rehearsal as soon as it was over so I could get there in time for 18+ Retro Skate.

At retro skate, by the way, they play stuff like Ludacris and Destiny’s Child, and I almost always leave feeling older than when I arrived. Which, technically, is accurate, anyway.

My friend Delma, one of the costumers from the show, met me at the rink later; she’d stayed behind to deal with some frustrations behind the scenes. We skated those frustrations out and practiced going backward in the beginner’s section of the floor. At one point in the night, a fast skater maneuvered around me a little too close for comfort, and I said, “I almost got in a collision!”

I’d known when I went out that I had an early morning the next day. Saturday was a scheduled “dry tech,” a day when all the set pieces needed to be placed and spiked, drops needed to be moved, and crew assignments needed to be worked out. It’s a long day, followed by the longer “tech Sunday,” and my stage manager, Delaney, had insisted on a hard nine a.m. start time.

But I’d really wanted to go roller skating.

Delma and I didn’t ride together. In fact, she didn’t know I was in the red minivan that made it through the light while she sat in the left-hand turn lane. The van is my husband’s car. Usually, I drive a beaten-up Jeep Compass with a big dent in the back from hitting the pole by the stage door at the auditorium. But it was me, rapping badly along with Megan Thee Stallion’s “Thot Shit,” going ten miles over the speed limit to make it through one of the longest lights in town.

I made the light right on the line, “I’m the shit per the recording academy.”

The next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of Gull road beside my husband’s Town & Country, screaming for help. It’s a busy area with lots of traffic, strip malls, fast-food restaurants, and lights. I might as well have been in outer space standing there, cradling my arm and clutching my chest, wondering what had just happened. It was only a few seconds, I’m sure now, but it felt like I stood there for a long time in pain, screaming for help that wasn’t coming. It was the loneliest thing I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought I’d been shot.

Then, I saw the other car.

Back at her house, Delma told her husband she’d just seen a terrible accident. An SUV blew past her going so fast it shook her car. The SUV swerved to avoid hitting another vehicle. It lost control, smashed into the back of a red minivan, and spun off into the exit area of the carwash, where it burst into flames.

No fewer than eight police cars had been in pursuit of the SUV.

She didn’t know she’d seen her friend get involved in a high-speed crash, just like I didn’t know that the man in the burning SUV was still, somehow, miraculously alive. Just like I didn’t know that the officers who came to help me had been chasing that driver. As they led me to a patrol car to wait for an ambulance to arrive, I sheepishly admitted, “I don’t want to sit in the seat. I peed my pants when he hit me and I don’t want to put my wet pants on the seat.” They assured me it wouldn’t be the worst thing that had been on that seat “tonight,” which did not reassure me. I asked them, “What about the guy who hit me?”

An officer young enough to be my son immediately assured me that the man would be held responsible. I had to clarify that I was asking if he was alive. I was going sixty when he slammed into the back of the van; he’d been going so fast, I hadn’t seen him or the lights from the police cars behind us. “He was going about a hundred when he lost control,” the officer said grimly. “He’s pretty lucky.”

Lucky would have been not getting caught, I thought, and did not say, because police make me nervous. And because I was hyperventilating and my teeth were chattering, which also makes it difficult to speak. The chattering teeth, I have now learned, were due to the massive amounts of adrenaline that also caused me to refuse medical treatment because, “I don’t feel that bad.”

If you are ever in a car accident, do not send the ambulance people away in the direct aftermath. You will almost certainly feel “that bad” later and regret that decision.

I texted Delma. “I got into a bad accident. Can you tell the group chat I won’t be there tomorrow?” And then I felt guilty for letting everyone down. Delaney messaged me, “We did insist on a hard nine a.m. start time,” to make me laugh, which I did.

Mr. Jen came to get me and took over talking with the police and arranging a tow for our vehicle. He wanted me to stay in the car but I couldn’t sit still. I went to the van and got my roller skates out, and my script, because I’ll need that this week. I took a picture of the crumpled rear of the vehicle and thought, that doesn’t look all that bad.

The next morning, Mr. Jen examined the van in the light of the day. The interior had detached from the exterior. The airbags in the headrests had deployed. The driver’s seat was broken and twisted. All of the safety features that had been engineered to protect me had done their jobs.

I’m a fan of the brand now.

I was also broken and twisted, and deeply regretting not making a trip to the emergency room. In a couple of hours, I’ll be seeing my doctor to address the throbbing pain in my head, the visual disturbances and occasional loss of clear sight in my right eye. The searing neck pain. The fact that my right boob is two cup sizes larger and a lovely lavender hue. The bruises on my abdomen and thighs. The fact that I can’t raise my arms to shoulder level or hold even a full mug of tea without becoming impossibly fatigued. I had no idea I would feel this way when I sent the ambulance away.

Don’t send the ambulance away.

I tried to go to tech Sunday for my show. It was a mistake that ended in a tearful breakdown and an early exit. I felt like a failure, though I know it’s not my fault. “I dropped the ball,” I sobbed to my co-director, Jeremy, who reminded me gently that I did not drop the ball. The guy who hit me did.

But as I sit here, my brain fully fatigued but desperate to get all of this out, half-listening to Mr. Jen on the phone to the insurance company, I wonder whose fault it really is. I was going fast, sure. But if I hadn’t made it through the light, the guy would have hit me while I was at a standstill. I know I wouldn’t be here at all if that had happened. Clearly, the person who stole the SUV in the first place made a horrible choice, and followed it up with the absolutely baffling decision to run from the police.

“I don’t know why people run from the police,” Jeremy said as we sat in the auditorium, waiting for tech Sunday to kick off. “They always get caught.”

Myself? I don’t know why the police chase anyone. It seems like someone always gets hurt. The suspect. An officer. An innocent bystander.

This time, the person who was hurt was me. I already suffer from C-PTSD. I’m already disabled. I didn’t need another traumatizing incident or more pain. And from the details I know, the chase didn’t accomplish anything other than the accident, which wrecked the stolen property, anyway. There wasn’t an abducted person in that vehicle. There wasn’t, as far as I can tell, a reason they needed to nab the criminal right at that very moment I was going through the light.

I’m glad I was driving a little irresponsibly; it’s possibly the only time it’s going to save my life. I’m thankful the driver fleeing the police didn’t die; stealing a car shouldn’t come with a death sentence. I hope very much that whoever it was will have a better life and make wiser choices after this. I hope the person whose SUV was stolen had good insurance on it and won’t face too much of a financial hardship over this. And I very much hope that the high occurrence of these incidents in Kalamazoo lately (this was the second chase in the same area in the same week) will make city and county leaders reconsider whether or not high-speed pursuits are a sensible solution to public safety.

I don’t know what I’m going to hear when I go to the doctor’s office today. Probably, “rest,” which I think we all know that I will not be doing during a show week because I can’t let these kids down. I’ll keep everyone updated. In the meantime, drive carefully and stay safe.

Surprise! It’s a new release!

Good Monday, everybody! What has Jenny Trout been up to all summer? Well, I will tell you. I was writing HER BROTHER’S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND, the hottest, filthiest, most fun, sexy contemporary romantic erotica I’ve ever written. But it was under contract with a brand new serial fiction app, so I couldn’t tell you about it until the app launched. So, now I get to tell you about the serial and the app it’s on, and I get to give you a freebie!

YONDER is a new serialized fiction app from Webtoon (yup, the Wattpad people!). They offer “Bursts of far-fetched escapism, bite-sized, binge-worthy, thrill-packed storytelling written by a new breed of writers for a new species of readers.”

In other words, you’re going to find a selection of fast-paced, high-quality stories curated by the YONDER editors (who are amazing), including brand-new content written exclusively for the YONDER app (for example, HER BROTHER’S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND, which I have been waiting to tell yous all about since frickin’ June).

Since I can gush to you about my book and how much I love it, here we go!

Sparks fly when serial flirt Charlotte meets her brother’s best friend, Matthew—a billionaire who wants to dominate her but might lose his heart to her instead.

Charlotte’s older brother, Scott, has always tried to keep her from meeting his best friend, Matthew. Charlotte is a notorious meaneater and Scott knows that Matthew, a slick billionaire who just went through a tough breakup, might not survive her. But when Charlotte and Matthew finally meet at Scott’s wedding, sparks instantly fly. Their affair feels so good—and so wrong. In order to get it out of their systems, Matthew invites Charlotte to Ascend Red, an invitation-only kink hotel that he owns, for two weeks of total submission to him. Two perfect, sexy weeks, and then they’ll part forever. But will they be able to say goodbye for good?

WARNING: This story contains explicit sexual content and BDSM, strong language, and depitctions of substance abuse that may be upsetting for some readers. Read discretion is advised.

Are you thinking to yourself, “Wow, that sounds good?” Well, believe me, it is. I’m so happy with it. Matthew and Charlotte have entered my pantheon of God-tier favorites with regard to couples I’ve written. There has been a kinky, bisexual-shaped hole in my heart since THE BOSS ended, and it is now filled and then some. Look forward to age-gap, swinging, public sex, rough sex, phone sex, merciless teasing, a lube-soaked orgy that might be the filthiest thing I’ve ever written, and anal sex in a birthday cake. The heroine isn’t perfect, the hero is going through some stuff, it’s all the ingredients for a smashing Abigail Barnette story.

So, how do you get to this treasure trove of naughtiness? You can download YONDER in the App Store or on Google Play. Right now, there are fifteen chapters of HER BROTHER’S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND available, with new chapters dropping every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, and the first eight chapters are free. But hey, speaking of free…

For a limited time, you can get free coins by using the code ABIGAIL at https://bit.ly/3EPdV71. This code is only good through November 7, 2022. The code will work once per person, and the free coins will expire after 180 days but trust me: you’ll have used them up on all the steamy goodness by then.

So, download YONDER, get your free coins, and binge HER BROTHER’S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND. You will not regret it.

The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp chapter 12

Need to catch up?

What is The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp? The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: PrologueThe Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter OneThe Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter TwoThe Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter ThreeThe Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter FourThe Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter Five The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter Six The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter SevenThe Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter Eight The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter NineNSFW! The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter TenThe Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Chapter Eleven

The crystalline dome of the Ethereal Peace Conservatory and Monument glittered like a cabochon in the twinkling setting of the city. The facets of the energy-charged quartz that enclosed the space winked like giant camera lights far above the gauntlet of actual camera flashes at the building’s entrance.

“I hate these types of gatherings,” Marcaeus muttered to no one in particular since he was nearly sure his companion felt the same way.

“May I please get down now?” She tugged at his shoulder as if he were simply the reins to the rest of his body. “I can’t believe you made me… ride you.”

It became funnier every time she was forced to say it.

“Why wouldn’t I carry my wife and spare her shoes?” he asked, kneeling his forelegs so she could slide to the pavement. Not a soul around them noticed or cared except for Fiona—Flicka, he quickly reminded himself. With a glamour back in place, the woman he’d spent nearly every waking moment with for the past four days was totally unrecognizable to him. And while the glamour was stunningly beautiful, so was Fiona’s actual appearance. It disturbed him to see her so smoothly perfect.

It disturbed him more that she was ashamed to be seen with him.

She walked by his side as they joined the crowd entering the wide, terraced path up to the conservatory’s entrance. The ramped walkway split in half, taking two curving paths around a handsomely landscaped garden and reflecting pool. Tonight, one of those paths was garishly illuminated and bedecked with a gaudy red carpet. Members of the press crowded around as people and astrals of note stopped for holo images and short interviews.

Fiona drifted away from him toward the other path.

In different circumstances, he might have avoided the press. But they needed to be convincing.

He reached down and put a hand on her shoulder to steer her in the right direction. “We have to do the red carpet.”

“But the cameras!” She dug her heels in, but since she wore heels, the gesture wasn’t practical. She almost toppled over. “What if they have glamour blockers?”

“Do you doubt the powers of the gods?” Mortals and their superiority complex. So tiresome. “We have used the strongest magics—”

“I’m sorry,” she said, brisk but genuine. “I should trust you.”

Marcaeus didn’t know how to respond. His first instinct was to point out how rare it was for a human to admit a fault. That seemed petty in light of the fact that she’d actually done so. “Thank you.”

They stood, locked in silence, for an interminable moment. It wasn’t a battle of wills but uncertainty as to how to proceed. Finally, he offered her his hand.

“I know you loathe the prospect, but if you sit on my back, they’ll be able to get us both in the photos,” he explained. “And it will look a bit less ridiculous.”

“And my neck will be less sore from looking up at you. What are you, eight feet tall?” She asked, relenting.

“Something like that.” He pulled her onto his back and waited until she got her balance before heading toward the red carpet.

“You remembered to face me toward the paparazzi,” she said in a playful sing-song.

Though humans were rude and destructive, this one could certainly be funny. He chuckled. “I hope your dress looks all right when you’re sitting down.”

The dress would look incredible no matter what position she put her body in.

Careful.

But how could he not have noticed? The emerald green velvet clung to her, so snugly he was surprised she hadn’t expired from lack of oxygen. Her breasts seemed balanced inside, more than contained by the top of the the dress. The tight waist enhanced the lush curves of her hips, while a long slit in the skirt revealed a hint of her thigh.

The gossip columnists would love her. More accurately, they would love Flicka Starr, the woman who didn’t exist. Which did give the evening an element of fun he hadn’t expected. Tricking mortals came as an amusing thrill.

A uniformed man met them at the beginning of the press line, one hand activating the biochip communicator behind his ear. “This way, Mr. Johnson,” the man said, ushering them directly into a field of rapidly firing camera flashes.

“Don’t move your face,” Fiona warned him. From the tightness of her words, it seemed she followed her own advice.

“I always just frown,” he replied.

“I’ve noticed.”

With a deep sigh, he forced a smile.

A reporter called out, “Mr. Johnson! Who’s your date tonight?”

“My wife,” he answered in the vague direction of the question. The flashing lights picked up speed.

“Wife? But weren’t you just named one of the city’s top thirty most eligible bachelors?” A reporter called out.

“I was number one on that list, but I no longer qualify.” That was enough, he decided. They didn’t need to know anything else, and he wanted to get away from the obnoxious lights. There simply had to be a better way to capture an image than to blind the subject of that image repeatedly. What was wrong with painting frescoes or making mosaic?

“Wait,” Fiona said as he began to move away. “They have more questions.”

“So?”

“So,” she repeated, her barely moving lips making her sound even more perturbed with him, “If you don’t tell them what they want to know, they’ll keep digging for those answers. And there aren’t any.”

Curse it all. But she was correct; mortals were nosy, always asking questions and inserting themselves into situations they needn’t be involved in. They were as bad as the Gods of Olympus on that score.

He turned back just as someone shouted, “What’s your wife’s name?”

“Flicka,” he replied, and continued walking. “Flicka Starr.”

A smattering of laughs followed them, and Fiona said, finally using her entire face to speak, “They think you’re lying.”

“I am lying,” he reminded her. “That’s not your name.”

The Grand Atrium of the conservatory was usually swarmed with tourists, audio buds plugged into their ears as they watched self-guided tours on rented holopads. Marcaeus didn’t need a guide to know what the basrelief murals depicted; he’d been there. In fact, one of the centaurs on the huge bronze slab depicting Chiron’s signing of the carbon emissions armistice looked a bit like Marcaeus. Or, so he’d always thought.

“You can let me down, now,” Fiona prompted him as he neared the sculptural fountain in the center of the atrium.

Tonight, the building held no tourists. Just the very top of mortal and astral society, all gathered to raise “awareness” and currency for a cause that no longer needed “awareness.” Everyone on the planet was “aware” of the disaster they’d almost faced.

Mortals always needed more currency, however.

No matter how much help Astrals offered—free of charge—there always seemed to be a way for a mortal to commodify it. That’s why Marcaeus had long believed that Astrals should have simply subjugated the mortals ruining the planet and forced them to bend to the will of their wiser overlords.

But that, Chiron had patiently informed him, would have been immoral.

Besides, they would have rejected it. It would have been too much change to ask them to return to a gentler, pastoral life without the ease and quickness provided by their electricity and fossil fuels.

Marcaeus knelt his forelegs and reached back to help Fiona down. She was surer in her ridiculous shoes than he expected, landing with a little hop. They followed the crowd into the main chamber of the conservatory.

Steel bands held the shimmering quartz of the roof in place; the points rested around a circular skylight of glass in the center. During the day, sunlight streamed over the monument directly below. The statue, designed by a mortal, depicted a human hand of bronze reaching up to touch a suspended hand carved of the purest, clearest amethyst.

Of course, a mortal would have envisioned the pact between themselves and the Astral world as some kind of brave rescue. Of course, a mortal would see their formerly bleak position as one of desperation from which they could not have saved themselves.

And, of course, they would commemorate it with minerals ripped from the earth with machines belching pollution into the atmosphere.

The way the mortals looked at him as he passed through the crowd only infuriated him more. They bobbed their heads, some even thanked him as though he’d supported the merging of their forces out of anything other than necessity.

If it had been possible to let their planet die without forever altering the Astral, Marcaeus would have been fine with that.

But here he was, in the middle of yet another ridiculous event praising his kind for helping the very people who would never learn their lesson. At least he had good company with him. Fiona had been born into the mortal world. She understood how to make “small talk” and when to smile. She knew how to be “polite” and “have manners” and “not offend people.”

It wasn’t a skill that came easily to many Astrals, who had spent millennia being direct in conversation and not hiding their emotions from each other. And yes, sometimes that could result in a mortal getting turned into a spider for making a goddess jealous, but it wasted far less time than chatting about the weather or asking about one’s children, who frankly never seemed that interesting, to begin with.

“Mortal life is so short,” he observed to Fiona as they drifted through the crowd. “Why do you insist on spending so much of it talking about things that mean nothing?”

“If you’re so smart, I’m sure you can figure it out,” she replied, her sweet smile a false cover for her words.

He noticed she did that often.

But she couldn’t disguise her dismay when she spotted a figure in the crowd.

“Is that my brother?” she whispered, her voice choked with fear.

I should stomp him to death right now. The thought caught Marcaeus by surprise. He hadn’t been in a battle for centuries, but just the sight of Blayde Trasket winding his way through the party incited bloodlust.

Marcaeus reached down to take Fiona’s hand out of a protective instinct he hadn’t anticipated. He certainly hadn’t anticipated her accepting the gesture, especially with their awkward height difference, but she lifted her arm, winding her clammy fingers with his.

She was terrified. Of her own brother.

“Come,” Marcaeus told her. “You can play your part to convince him, and we can leave.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice shaky.

What made humans feel better? Was it ice cream? He’d heard that expression before. When they left, he would buy her enormous quantities of ice cream to undo the damage of this encounter.

Blayde played his part well; he didn’t show the faintest recognition of his sister as they approached, and his lip twisted in a barely-concealed sneer as he said, “Johnson,” by way of greeting.

“Trasket.” Marcaeus nodded, his gaze flicking over the other two members of the disgusting man’s party. The woman on his arm was his wife; Marcaeus recognized her from her relentless media campaign and political ambitions. But the man following just a step behind him was a total unknown.

“This is my wife, Julia,” Trasket introduced the ruby-haired woman at his side before turning and gesturing to the man behind them. “And my business associate, Damon Scratch.”

Marcaeus’s hand itched to close into a fist. The name was too clever by half as if the demon was begging to be called out. A slight smile tilted Scratch’s mouth, goading Marcaeus. Say something. I dare you. Expose me for what I am right here. 

What would happen? Panic, Marcaeus assumed. The mortals had eagerly accepted the existence of fairies and mermaids. They happily ignored the implication of that existence; if fairies and mermaids were real, then so, too, were demons and monsters they never wished to meet. To find a demon walking among them undetected would give them a newsworthy fright. The tide of public opinion could turn the people against their saviors, eventually.

Marcaeus wouldn’t fall into their trap. “Scratch? I don’t believe I’ve heard that name in my circles.”

“He’s more of my circle.” Trasket’s eyes narrowed as he looked his sister over. “And who is this?”

The man was a good actor; nothing in his manner denoted recognition. He didn’t give her a sleazy once-over, either. That would have been too obvious. Instead, he viewed her with the cold calculation of a rival.

Marcaeus released Fiona’s hand to rest his on her shoulder. “My wife, Flicka.”

Amusement caught the corners of Trasket’s eyes. “You have an interesting name, Flicka. There was a book written in the twentieth century, I believe—”

“My family bred racehorses,” Fiona cut him off smoothly. “Before it was rightfully outlawed.”

“Ah. That explains it, then.” Trasket smoothly snagged a single flute of champagne from a passing server and bobbed it in an unspoken toast. “Julia, you should introduce Flicka to Daphne Merril.”

“Daphne throws all the most important parties in town,” Julia added, moving away from her husband. “Come with me and let the boys talk. It will only take a moment.”

Though protective instinct roared in protest against letting her out of his sight, Marcaeus nodded his assent. They believed Fiona was working for them. She had to maintain that ruse, no matter how disgusted he was by the idea of leaving her alone with them after what they’d done to her.

“Congratulations on your marriage,” Scratch said with an awkward laugh. “As much as congratulations from a stranger are valued.”

“No kindness is without value,” Marcaeus answered flatly. “If you’ll excuse me.”

He walked away without a further word, moving through the crowd in a cautious circle. At his height, he could follow the movement of the two women’s heads through the crowd, but he wanted to be close to the exit nearest them in case Julia or someone else tried to take Fiona outside. At a distance, he wouldn’t be as likely to attack “Damon Scratch.”

Just being in the presence of an Infernal disgusted Marcaeus. Being in the presence of the demon that had put the mark on Fiona, though, had uncovered an even deeper level of abhorrence, one that made the astral rope binding Marcaeus to Fiona burn on his forearm. He rubbed his sleeve absently. The bond wouldn’t even be there if not for Scratch. If not for Trasket.

The lights dimmed slightly; some mortal celebrity Marcaeus didn’t recognize took to a dais near the tacky hand sculpture. The crowd’s attention diverted; for the flicker of an eyelash, his attention diverted, as well.

He looked back to Fiona. He couldn’t find her.

He turned in the direction he’d started from.

Damon Scratch was nowhere to be seen, either.

Jealous Haters Book Club: Crave, chapter 14, “Knock, Knock, Knocking on Death’s Door”

As it turns out, this chapter’s title does have something to do with the text! The downside is, this chapter is only five pages long, so the recap will be short.

It’s weird, I start to feel guilty that I’m not pumping out these recaps as fast as I possibly can, and then I read the chapter and go, “Well, that wasn’t long. At all. Why didn’t we get this done before?”

The answer is that Abigail Barnette came out of retirement to great demand and I have projects I wish I could tell you more about, but I can’t yet. Just trust and believe that while I want to keep the content rolling here, Abigail suddenly started paying my bills.

So, back to whatever school this is, I forgot the name. We’ll call it Sexy Hogwarts for now. Grace is still suffering from her “altitude sickness,” which we all know was caused by Lia poisoning her. Look, the girl was in a secret room chanting in a strange language. Something’s going on with her.

The altitude sickness has gone on long enough, and the nausea has been severe enough that Macy wants to involve the school nurse, but Grace is insistent upon doing nothing that might cause further attention. Grace promises that if the sickness lasts for another twenty-four hours, she’ll do something about it.

I ride it out, trying to ignore how much I wish my mom were here to baby me a little, and eventually fall into a fitful sleep, one I don’t wake from until an alarm blares at six thirty the next morning.

I very much like how Wolff refers back to Grace missing her parents when it comes to little, non-trauma-related things. Remember when we read Apollonia and the only time we really heard about the dead mom was during PTSD flashbacks to her actual death? It really made it difficult to connect with the character as a whole, entire person, because the loss of her mother only seemed to be important to the character if it was employed at moments of high drama so the reader would think, “Oh, this poor woman, she’s so broken and special.” Grace being sick to her stomach and wanting her mother there to comfort her is more natural, regardless of the trauma involved in losing her parents. She’s thinking about her mother not just when the trauma can be deployed to maximum dramatic effect, and this makes Grace seem like more of a person than…

I can’t even remember that character’s name from Apollonia. Because she was never a person.

Grace does some dry-heaving and ends up achy, but the effects of the altitude sickness have worn off. She’s still not going to go to class, though, even when Macy gets up.

The first thing she does is slap at her alarm until it stops again—something I am eternally grateful for, considering she picked the most grating, annoying sound ever created to wake up to—but it takes her only a second to climb out of bed and come over to me.

If this were basically any other YA genre fiction, we’d hear all about how terrible and annoying Macy is for constantly hovering. It’s so nice to finally read a book in this book club that wasn’t written by a selfish asshole.

Grace tells Macy that she’s fine, but really sore.

“Yuck. That’s probably dehydration.” She crosses to the fridge in the corner of the room and pulls out a pitcher of water.

What the shit? Before, Macy was getting bottled water out of there. Now, she’s got a pitcher, too? How much water does she need?

Oh my god.

Is Macy a mermaid? Are these clues?

Macy tells Grace she’ll come back and check on her between classes, but doesn’t insist on Grace going to class. In fact, she insists that Grace takes it easy:

“Good, then you can consider this a mental health day, of the Holy crap, I just moved to Alaska! variety.”

“There’s an actual mental health day for that?” I tease, moving around until I’m sitting up with my back against the wall.

Macy snorts. “There are whole mental health months for that. Alaska’s not easy.”

And do you know what doesn’t happen? Grace doesn’t think about how much harder she’s had it than everyone and how much tougher she is because she doesn’t need mental health days. She’s like, yeah, that makes sense. And she doesn’t try to prove anything.

Macy tells Grace to stay put, watch tv, eat junk food now that her stomach isn’t upset anymore, and just chill until she feels up to starting classes. Grace is concerned that her uncle won’t be as understanding. There’s a knock at the door, which Macy assumes is Uncle Finn, but it’s not.

Except it’s not Uncle Finn at all. It’s Flint, who takes one look at Macy in her tiny nightshirt and me in last night’s dress and smeared makeup and starts grinning like a dork.

“Looking good, ladies.” He gives a low whistle. “Guess you decided to take the tea party up a notch or four last night, huh?”

Tea party? That has to be intentional. That has to be a reference to the tea thing in Lia’s room, right? Because they weren’t at a tea party with Flint. And it would be weird if the tea in Lia’s room, the sudden nausea, and this comment weren’t connected in some way. Please, please, please, don’t let me down, first actually readable book we’ve done here.

Macy goes to the bathroom and Flint asks Grace why she left the party and where she went.

Because telling him the whole reason involves trying to explain my bizarre reaction to Jaxon—not to mention everything that came after—I settle for part of the truth. “The altitude really started getting to me. I felt like I was going to throw up, so I came back to the room.”

I have this feeling that Flint knows she saw Lia and is stopping by to see if she’ll say, “I saw this weird girl last night and I think she poisoned me.” And I feel that way because of the tea party comment and the fact that we’re seeing Grace actively withhold that information.

But I’m more concerned with the fact that we’ve spent more time with hot, kind, non-love interest Flint and we’re still supposed to be super hung up on and invested in the sexiness of Jaxon. Is this going to end up being a Team Edward/Team Jacob thing? Because if it does, we know she’s not going to pick the guy who isn’t white. That’s the formula for Twilight-esque romance love triangles: she will always pick the white guy.

Flint is glad to hear that Grace feels better now, because he wants to invite her to a snowball fight. It takes some cajoling, because Grace is like, yeah, uh, I don’t know how to make a snowball. He insists that it’ll be fine, it’s not hard to be in a snowball fight, and Macy says:

“Careful, Grace.” Macy comes out of the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel. “Never trust a…” She trails off when Flint turns to her, brows raised.

Excuseth me? Never trust a what, Macy? Because while I’m aware that she was about to say “Never trust a dragon,” and stopped herself, we’re talking about a white character saying this about a Black character and trailing off. Never trust a what, Macy?

I find it weirder still that Grace doesn’t think, “Never trust a what, Macy?” San Diego is arguably more diverse than an Alaskan mountain. Grace is going to know about racism and, since she doesn’t know about supernatural creatures yet, why isn’t she thinking, “Holy shit, is my cousin a racist?”

It’s a weird remark to overlook.

Grace figures that since she needs more friends at the school, she might as well participate in this giant, planned snowball war. Which I find disappointing, from a real world standpoint. Everybody knows that spontaneous snowball fights are more fun.

After he convinces Grace to participate, Flint gives her a kiss on the cheek and leaves.

I’m left with a wide-eyed, openmouthed Macy, who is all but clapping her hands in delight over one little peck. And the sad knowledge that no matter how adorable Flint is, he doesn’t make me feel anything close to what Jaxon does.

I mean, on the one hand, Flint is kind of treating her like fresh meat. That can’t be very flattering. But I would rather read about Grace thinking along those lines, about being the new girl and fresh and interesting (the way Bella was soured on the boys in Forks) and how it will wear off than the mindset of, jeez, this guy is so super nice, too bad I’m into the guy who treats me like shit and has been treating me like shit since the moment I walked through the door.

But that’s the end of the chapter. I’m left continually wondering if the chapters are this short because they were intended to be released in serial form. Like, did Entangled think about getting into the Radish/Wattpad/Kiss app game and change direction? There are sixty-five chapters here. That sounds like three seasons of a Radish serial, is all I’m saying. Was Entangled flirting with a serialized app of their own? Or did Wolff just write it this way? The short chapters don’t exactly keep the story moving; remember, we’re on chapter fourteen and it’s only been like thirty hours of story. And the next chapter picks up exactly where the last one left off; we’ve gone through every single moment of Grace being at Katmere. So far, there hasn’t been enough story to support this amount of text.

But hey, at least this chapter title can accurately describe the contents of the chapter. I’ll take it.

Monster: The Ryan Murphy Story

As a true crime fan, I’ve heard all the arguments as to why consuming true crime content is problematic. It exploits the victims, it glorifies and celebrates violence, it cashes in on the real life suffering of the victims and families. There are some criticisms I agree with and some I don’t. And while I’m leery about fictionalized portrayals of serial killers and family anihilators, I wouldn’t automatically discount them as universally exploitative and awful. That, and the fact that Ryan Murphy, who’d created both the excellent American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson and American Crime Story: Impeachment, convinced me to give the unweildly-titled Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story a try.

What I saw was okay television and a macabre lack of morals on the part of the series writers and its creators, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan*

The Jeffrey Dahmer case is the first true crime story I followed, mostly because it was impossible not to. I was eleven when the story broke and the news was everywhere. The case held a particular fascination for me at the time; my paternal grandparents lived in Milwuakee when I was very young, and we often visited my uncle there. My ears would perk up to hear “Milwaukee” and “cannibal” in the same sentence, and I devoured every issue of People that made it into our house. I poured over the details and paid particular attention when his name came up on the news (which we usually watched at dinner time). Jeffrey Dahmer became the boogieman in my mind and the minds of my young peers. I don’t think anyone understood at the time that children have open ears and were hearing these terrible things. In a coincidence that burned into my brain, it was revealed that Dahmer murdered victim Oliver Lacy on my eleventh birthday. I obsessed over every visit I’d ever made to Milwaukee, terrified that we’d walked past him on the street, shopped beside him at the store. After overhearing dinner table talk about Konerak Sinthasomphone and his grisly, totally avoidable death, I had recurring nightmares that my ears were coming off and the police wouldn’t help me. Dahmer was the talk of the playground and the lunchroom; I blame the media attention to case for the millennial/gen x obsession with monetizing true crime.

I only learned later in life about the truly insidious nature of Dahmer’s murders. Strip away the drill, the acid, the cannibalism, and what you have left is a white man who very specifically hunted marginalized men, mostly gay Black men, and the systemic racism that allowed that white man to get away with it for thirteen years. Jeffrey Dahmer weilded the weapons, but the Milwaukee police department is the reason those Black men are dead. That same racism is the reason that we don’t often hear about Dahmer’s victims, beyond the fate of their earthly remains. They become a collection of grisly trophies, torsos in barrels, heads in refrigerators, with no real identity in mainstream memory. They’re largely forgotten by a world more comfortable with Black body parts than Black people.

Obviously, the perfect choice to helm a project about such a subject is… Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan.

In an interview with Netflix Queue, series star Evan Peters explained, “We had one rule going into this from Ryan [Murphy] that it would never be told from Dahmer’s point of view.” The article notes that Murphy “consulted with Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a nonprofit civil rights advocacy organization, to ensure that the victim’s stories were front and center in the writing and production of the project.” But after all this careful consideration, Murphy and Brennan…

Well, they went ahead and did the opposite.

Our first experience with Peters’s Dhamer is the night his killing spree came to an end. After picking up victim Tracy Edwards (Shaun J. Brown) from a gay bar with flirting and promises of payment for nude photos, Dahmer holds Edwards hostage until Edwards attempts to seduce Dahmer as a distraction. While the scene mines Edwards’s real-life court testimony for touches of authenticity like which VHS movie Dahmer watched during the ordeal and Edwards’s impression of the infamous blue drum, so much of the scene is just wrong. Under oath, Edwards identified as a straight man, who’d had no intention of having sex with Dahmer. They didn’t meet at a gay bar, though Dahmer did meet other victims at bars and bathhouses. Murphy and Brennan (who co-wrote the episode) seemingly took Edwards’s experience and dressed it in the experiences of other victims. With so many fine details taken from Edwards’s testimony (which is available on YouTube, of all places), there is no denying that turning Edwards into an amalgamation of all Dahmers’s victims was a conscious choice that contradicts the writers’ statements about the importance of the victims’ stories.

Despite Murphy’s insistence that the story is never told from Dahmer’s point of view, the series is mostly told from Dahmer’s point of view. Murphy is one of those creators who seems to believe that if he states something about his work, it is objectively true. For example, he would probably not come straight out and say, “This series was always intended as a vehicle for Evan Peters to play a murderer again,” but let’s not kid ourselves. I’m not sure I ever believed that Dahmer would be told from the victims’ point of view. If that had ever been the case, we would have seen bigger names in those roles. I’m sure they would have put Sarah Paulson in some kind of prosthetic suit. And we would have seen the victims in the trailers, not barely-on-screen Molly Ringwald. For all that the production allegedly strove to center the victims, we see an awful lot of Peters alone on screen. Here’s Dahmer’s fantasy about a jogger. Here’s Dahmer, upset and rejected at seeing his photo has been removed from the yearbook. Here’s Dahmer afraid of his parents fighting, struggling with his homosexuality, his alcoholism, his murderous compulsions. The script begs you to understand what led to making him a monster and to consider the wounded little boy inside of him.

That’s not to say that Peters does a bad job. He fights an uphill battle against the sympathetic treatment Dahmer gets from the script and he did succeed in making me think, “So?” every time he remarked on his loneliness and unhappiness. And his Wisconsin accent is perfect; too many people overdo Midwest accents until they sound like an Arizona-based community theater production of Escanaba in da Moonlight. But his performance isn’t enough to overshadow the way this show insults the victims and survivors in an effort to make the audience empathize with the man who victimized them. I cannot fathom the callous disregard required to make the absurd and frankly cruel narrative choice to portray Dahmer victim Tony Hughes in a touching romantic relationship with his killer. Hughes, a non-speaking Deaf man, is shown falling for Dahmer, who bashfully attempts to learn sign language to woo his new crush. In fact, Dahmer himself said he’d never met Hughes before he killed him, though witnesses contradicted that statement. Still, there’s no evidence that any romance occurred between them; why on Earth would someone try to spin one? For God’s sake, we’re talking about Jeffrey Dahmer here.

If there was one good thing to come out of this series, it would be the story of Glenda Cleveland, played by Niecy Nash-Betts.** Note, I said “if.” Because just like with Tracy Edwards, Murphy and Brennan decided to take the harrowing, true story of people involved in the Dahmer tragedy and squish them into one for added drama. Glenda Cleveland’s story gets told-ish, merged with that of Pamela Bass, who was actually Dahmer’s next door neighbor and who had been offered and possibly consumed human remains in sandwiches. Cleveland’s story is already horrifying; she knew Dahmer was killing and was repeatedly ignored by law enforcement. She tried to rescue one of his victims, only to be brushed off by the homophobic police officers who returned Konerak Sinthasomphone to Dahmer’s apartment. Bass’s story is also terrifying on its own: she confronted Dahmer about his suspicious behavior and the odors coming from his apartment and lived just footsteps from some of the most notorious murders of the twentieth century while they were occurring. Yes, it’s common practice to cut and combine historical characters for the sake of the narrative, but it’s yet another choice antithetical to Murphy’s stated goal of focusing on the victims instead of Dahmer. If it were a matter of time limitations, surely one of the multiple scenes of Dahmer lifting weights or bonding with his dad could have been cut.

What’s particularly galling about Murphy’s claim regarding concern for the victims is that neither of the show’s creators reached out to surviving loved ones. Instead, Murphy consulted a civil rights organization for advice on presenting fictionalized versions of history while living witnesses were still available. If he’d consulted the families, maybe he would have realized how many of them would be traumatized all over again. Maybe it would have caused the production to truly shift focus, to stay true to the lives of the men and boys who were slaughtered, rather than once again reducing them to their body parts. Maybe they would have decided to leave certain moments on the cutting room floor or out of the script entirely, based on the wishes of the people who are entitled to share them or keep them, because they lived them. Maybe someone would have realized that while the story of racial injustice that led to violence and rape in the gay community and the murder of men and boys of color is deeply important, the creators of fucking Glee, for Christ’s sake, are not qualified to tell them. Certainly, not while the only people qualified to tell them are still alive and actively protesting the series.

Dahmer isn’t bad television. Sometimes the writing gets clunky and expository in a deeply Sorkinesque way, every now and then some of the shots feel indulgent, but at least it doesn’t smack you in the face with quirky exploitation like The Thing About Pam. It’s on the good end of the Murphy scale, largely due to the phenomenal acting. And it will appeal to viewers who love podcasts about murder that begin with jokes and giggling and “Have we got an awesome one today, guys.” But fans of the show must stop kidding themselves that what they’re watching is an important tribute to forgotten victims. If any one scene refutes that concept entirely, it’s the one in which a teen Dahmer is pulled over for drunk driving. The camera focuses on the approaching officer, the nervous tension as Dahmer wonders whether he’ll be caught for his crimes and his relief when he’s let go with a warning. This is a part of eighteen-year-old Stephen Hicks’s story, allegedly told from his point of view.

He spends the scene in several garbage bags in Dahmer’s backseat.

*”[…] fantastic television with a macabre lack of morals” can also be applied to Murphy and Brennan’s earlier collaboration, Glee.

**She deserves a Golden Globe and an Emmy for her performance, as well as medical treatment for injuries sustained in her carrying of this series.

What going promo-only after a decade on Twitter has taught me

CW: Basically everything people talk about with CW on Twitter

It’s been about two months since I stopped using Twitter for anything other than promotional purposes (and one snarky weigh-in that I couldn’t resist). I’ll continue to use it for promotion, but my absence has not made the heart grow fonder. It’s made me look back and go, “Jesus Christ, what was I thinking, staying so long?”

Full disclosure: I had been toying with the idea of leaving Twitter for a while before the events of A Twitter Story. I felt like I couldn’t. After all, my entire brand was “chronically online,” and I had so many people on the platform who were important to me, either as friends or as people I looked to for interpretations of what the heck is going on in the world. I thought if I walked away, I would lose touch with everyone. I also thought that my career opportunities would tank; all anyone talks about with regards to “becoming” a writer anymore is how you have to build your platform on Twitter, first, and you need some magical number of followers for a publisher to even glance at your manuscript. Since I’d been on Twitter for most of my career (my first book came out in 2006, my twitter account goes all the way back to 2009, I believe), I figured that must be true. So, every day, I would log into Twitter, my heart in my throat, knowing that I was guaranteed to read plenty of doom and gloom, be scolded for not tailoring my words to specifically target every single person on the entire god damn planet individually, and be called a cunt before nine in the morning.

Now that I’ve stopped my daily doom-scrolls, I’ve come to the unscientific and in no way medically-sound opinion that Twitter is toxic and damaging to our brains.

Oh my gosh, can you believe it? I must be the first person to posit that people get addicted to social media. I demand a parade.

Obviously, we’ve all heard the fearmongering headlines about how social media changes your brain and the claims that you can become addicted. But I always rolled my eyes at it, the way I roll my eyes at every shiny new thing being labeled “addictive,” because I’m a firm believer that if something is interesting enough to scare people, there’s a way to make money off that fear. You can convince people to buy your app that blocks social media from your kids’ phones if those people are seeing news stories every day about how social media is going to make their kids do drugs or have sex. And yes, the people buying that app to block social media saw those news stories on their own Facebook account that they check twenty-seven times a day but that’s different. I have a difficult time jumping on every scare bandwagon because they’re all so, frankly, ridiculous. Nyquil chicken? Tide Pod Challenge? Lipstick parties? No one had heard of these things until local news outlets identified them as ubiquitous dangers. I’m almost convinced that local newsrooms have a big hat full of slips of paper with random nouns on them. They just Mad-Lib these “dangerous trends” in their time off from being official police department publicity representatives/stenographers: “There’s a dangerous new trend called… nailpolish… lamping that’s sweeping the country and your child is going to die. Find out how at six.”

I don’t believe social media is psychologically addictive in the way that cigarettes can be, where long after the physiological upheaval of quitting has happened, one still needs something to do with one’s hands. I believe that it’s more like a toxic relationship, throwing out nasty threats to stop you from leaving, or to make you return. If you rely on publicity to make your career go vroom? You can’t leave! Look at all those followers! That’s money on the table! If you use the platform to check in on world events? What if something is happening right now? You wouldn’t know about it because you’re reading this post. You’re not on Twitter. Better get back there and make sure there’s not a new war in a country you couldn’t point to on a map. You’ll need to obsess about it for the next thirteen months. What if a friend gets a new cat? What if a friend has a hard day and needs to see pictures of your cat? What if things are happening on Twitter, right now, and you aren’t seeing them happen? What if things are happening and you’re not a part of them?

If Canada invaded Greenland right now, I wouldn’t know about it until Mr. Jen gets home from work. And that’s only if he listens to NPR on the way home. I could go days without learning about Canada’s bloody attack on the shores of Greenland. Two months ago, a thought like that would have been horrifying. Now, it’s comforting. I can’t do anything to help Greenland fight off the hypothetical relentless onslaught of Canadian artillery. Nothing Canada does to Greenland is going to have an immediate, material effect on me, either. If Canada nukes Greenland, the resultant fallout will later explain why my thyroid needs to be removed, but if I went my entire life never knowing that Canada nuked Greenland, it wouldn’t matter. It’s just a situation that I have no control over. My lack of knowledge about it wouldn’t have changed the outcome in any way. Jenny Trout knowing about the Canada-Greenland Conflict will never factor into historical record. If Jenny Trout were the king of Greenland, it would be a different issue, but in this scenario, even the king of Greenland isn’t using Twitter for daily briefings.

While I didn’t leave Twitter to avoid caring about the world, it very much helps me to care within reasonable limitations. None of us, not even the most politically conscious Tweeter among us, was built to withstand an onslaught of every single bad thing currently, formerly, potentially, and eventually happening all at once and still function as a human being. There is a reason our eyes can only see so far, why our brains only process a fraction of the information our senses take in. We cannot perpetually scroll through terror after terror, feeling utterly helpless, while thousands of other people on the same app point fingers at us for not caring enough, and expect it to not have a mental and emotional consequence. It’s interesting how often we’re reminded that people on the internet are real people, with real feelings, when the topic is online bullying, but all of that goes out the window when we see that a stranger has tweeted four times today about their shopping trip and not once, not once, about the breaking news out of the Ukraine. And hey, there doesn’t even need to be a particular target for that shame. You can just tweet out a broad condemnation of anyone who isn’t obsessing over an event that happened entire minutes ago. If they cared, they would have already been tweeting about it.

Each of us knows that we can’t bear all the causes and traumas of the world on our own. Why, then, do we get on Twitter and demand everyone else suffer this impossible labor? Why do we imply that our personal safety and security are imperiled if Janice from Provo doesn’t speak out against the actions of the Chinese government? That Janice is imperiling our personal safety and security on purpose, out of hatred for us and implicit support of the Chinese government? Janice’s voice would add nothing but noise, especially if Janice doesn’t have an informed opinion.

About five years ago, I tweeted a truth to explain why I was “silent” (read: callously indifferent) on the subject of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I can’t remember exactly how I phrased it, but the general theme was, “I’m not saying anything because I don’t know enough about it to offer anything that much smarter, better-informed people can say, and I know people on both sides of the conflict and don’t want to hurt those people with ignorant remarks.” I felt like this was a reasonable position to take; I really have no clue what is going in Israel or Palestine. In my country, the issue has been synthesized into domestic politics through the insidious, fascistic creep of evangelical Christianity, so I don’t believe I’m ever receiving truly unbiased coverage from any media outlets. I graduated high school with a 2.0 GPA and never finished community college. I recognize that I do not have the background or knowledge to come out strongly in favor of either side. But acknowledgment of my lack of expertise and my unwillingness to engage in geopolitical strife as a far-away spectator spewing my uninformed opinion was interpreted as a whimsical “IDC LOL” in the face of atrocities rather than an answer to “We see your silence.”

“So, you agree with this!” people responded, with gory photos or news stories about heinous acts committed by both countries. It wasn’t enough for me to look at a photo of Palestinians in front of their seized homes, now occupied by their enemies, or injured Israeli children cradled in their parents’ arms following an attack and say, “Those acts of violence are unspeakbly horrific, I wish they hadn’t happened to these people and it wasn’t right that it did.” I had to somehow renounce both countries, support both countries, and claim to know enough to do either, despite admitting to my lack of knowledge and the fact that, frankly, it’s not my American business to denounce any other country for criminal acts. In saying that I wasn’t uncaring about the suffering of others, just uninformed and trying to avoid further harm, in the eyes of Twitter I was admitting to a host of contradictory opinions that I never actually stated.

Even if you do know something, it doesn’t matter. The words you type will be rewritten for you by people with their own agendas. I tweeted that modern diet culture has its roots in the eugenics movement. That’s an irrefutable fact, coming from someone who lives very close to the epicenter of the birth of diet culture. I’ve lived my life going to places like the W.K. Kellogg Bird Sanctuary. I trespassed and skinny-dipped at the Kellogg mansion. I drive my child to voice lessons: we pass Johnn Kellogg’s sanitarium and park just footsteps from W.K. Kellogg’s house. More than one school, including some I attended, bears the Kellogg name. There are two school districts named after them. The Kelloggs were “wellness” pioneers on a scale that Gwyneth Paltrow can only dream of, and being a fat person living where I live, I’ve done a lot of research into them and into how John Kellogg’s interest in eugenics shaped his belief in an ideal body. Modern diet culture’s ancestor is eugenics and religious fanaticism. The information is freely available. Anyone with an ounce of deductive reasoning could look at it and say, “modern diet culture has its roots in the eugenics movement,” and go, “Yeah, looks like.”

Twitter reduced the statement to, “Diets are eugenics.” And my mentions were loaded with replies ranging from “so you’re saying if you’re on a diet, you’re a eugenicist” to “everything a liberal doesn’t like is eugenics,” to “look up what eugenics means, fatty.” There was no reason to ask them to re-read the text on their screens, to see that I never said, “Diets are eugenics.” That was what they wanted me to have said, so that was what I said. Case closed.

“Silence” on Twitter is the threat that keeps you there. If you’re unavailable to weigh in on every new issue or scuffle, you are deliberately and actively perpetuating harm. “I notice you don’t have anything to say about [thing]. Interesting.” Well, yeah. It would be interesting if, say, a white RWA member suddenly isn’t following industry news when another white RWA member pulls some racist bullshit, but they’re online for seven hours straight talking about favorite book boyfriends while all of their mutuals are engaged in discussions about the incident all around them. Or actively tweeting at them, “uh, did you know this was going on?” That is interesting. It’s suspicious behavior. But if refugees from the Canada-Greenland conflict are facing opposition from U.S. border officials and someone on Twitter had a stroke and hasn’t been online for weeks tweeting about it… it’s not suspicious. It’s an implication that life continues outside of the confines of Twitter, a concept that has been tragically lost to the mindless hours of doom-scrolling and awareness-spreading. The phrase “silence is violence” means it’s not enough to acknowledge systemic oppression, you have to actively speak out against it and work to change it. I’m pretty sure it was never meant to apply to, “I noticed there was a twenty-four hour period during Occupy Wallstreet where you only tweeted about your broken leg and not about the evils perpetrated by capitalism.”

It was around 2014 that I started noticing my “brand” leaning toward social justice and away from being a random internet weirdo with an axe to grind. I blame the Fifty Shades recap for that. There was no way to critically review that book without mentioning intimate partner violence. When I followed that up with a silly story about my bathing suit and it went viral, I became classified as a fat activist. But social justice as a brand is exhausting, especially on Twitter. If I wanted to just be weird and high and say a random thing, I had to be careful. If I expressed my Michigander affection for Jeff Daniels, unfollow; he worked with Woody Allen and didn’t come out hard enough against him. Clearly, I don’t believe survivors. I support predators. If I mentioned I really wanted a candy bar, I’d receive links about the slave trade on the Ivory Coast. Nothing I said was innocuous, and because I threw my support behind various movements and individuals, I was no longer allowed the luxury of experiencing the world without a veil of suffering.

This seems to be a universal experience held by users who get pigeon-holed as full-time activists, regardless of their occupation or activism outside of Twitter. One evening, a Black woman I was mutuals with tweeted a photo of some ducks she’d seen in a park. Usually, this individual tweeted about social issues and things going on in the news in the United States. But between days and days of those tweets, she chose to tweet about ducks.

Another user, also one of my mutuals (and who, ironically, posted many, many pictures of ducks herself), responded by implying that not only was it harmful to the world as a whole that this other user interrupted her high volume of tweets about racism, homelessness, prison reform, gay rights, etc. with a whimsical photo, but had also directly harmed the mental health of the offended party by doing so. The incident blew up, with followers of both parties weighing in and arguing in the replies. One argument was that the original poster was responsible for the dogpile against the offended party, who was a white transgender woman. The “dogpile” was mostly people pointing out that white women, no matter their marginalizations, are not owed the intellectual labor of Black women. They were simply pointing out the objective truth: the offended party had no right to demand that the original poster curate their own timeline to the specific tastes of the offended party.

Because I did like the offended party and had fun engaging with her on the platform, I wondered if she would listen to me, a fellow white queer she’d had positive interactions with, when she seemed intent on not listening to Black people saying the same thing.

I was very, very wrong.

In responses that came with Swimfan speed, she informed me that I was contributing to and responsible for the mental health crisis the original poster had caused for the offended party, and that I had crossed a boundary by asking her to view her actions from someone else’s perspective. I was contributing to the allegedly transphobic attack on her, the person more marginalized than the original poster.

The entire debate, at this point, had become about who was more marginalized, the Black cis woman or the white trans woman. Not whether or not the white trans woman had made an unreasonable demand of the Black cis woman, which was the true heart of the issue. I knew my opinion on the matter, and after six messages about what a terrible person I was and how I was responsible for whether or not the offended party committed acts of self-harm, I set my own boundary. I blocked her.

She came back with a sock puppet account that she’d been following me with, as well, to go on a tirade about why setting that boundary was a violent act. Having been a victim of internet stalking incidents, the revelation of this secondary account was frightening. I began to wonder how many people I was chatting with daily were really just the same person pretending to be someone else or simply not disclosing that they were the same person.

Do you remember how this whole experience started? Someone who was not me posted a photo of a duck. It ended with someone demanding access to me to lay the responsibility for her life and death on my conscience.

This a domino effect caused by Main Character Syndrome. This is a toxic trait that every Twitter user develops. Every single one, myself included. Yes, you as well. It’s a sickness in which we log on, see the words on the screen, and feel immediately attacked and forgotten when other people with experiences different from our own neglect to describe us, specifically. There are times these might be valid observations; for example, trans men and enbies asking cis women not to use explicitly gendered language in discussions of reproductive rights, or Black USians reminding white USians that not everyone came to this country as an immigrant or colonizer. That’s not Main Character Syndrome. That’s combating actual erasure. Main Character Syndrome is the impulse that rears its head when we see someone say, “I had a great time at Disney World,” and we respond by QTing it and saying, “tell me you’re abled and have money without telling me you’re abled and have money.” Objecting when someone posts a photo of their new baby on their own TL because, “You didn’t CW this for people who have fertility struggles.” Replying to someone’s cancer recovery with, “Must be nice. Please don’t forget about the millions who aren’t as lucky as you are.”

That last one isn’t hypothetical. It’s been burned into my brain ever since I tragically read it with my own eyes.

Just as our human brains aren’t equipped with the resources to handle, to quote Bo Burnham, “a little bit of everything all of the time,” they’re definitely not equipped to translate the words of a tweet into the concept of an actual human being who wrote those words. Humans aren’t as empathetic as we try to convince ourselves. I don’t believe any of us are capable of true empathy, and I think that’s a defense mechanism. Imagine if we could truly and honestly put ourselves in the shoes of every person we meet. Every waking moment would be pure agony. So, when we get on social media and engage with people with whom we haven’t forged a deeper connection (like a penpal or someone you befriended on LiveJournal at the turn of the century), our brains are probably not seeing people, but words on a screen, giving us input we can either accept or reject. I care about Canada’s annexation of Greenland. Why don’t you? I reject your duck picture and accuse of you of silence on the topic and harboring problematic sympathies.

Would Duck Picture Objector have approached Duck Picture Poster on the street and demanded she stop noticing small joys in the world around her, for Duck Picture Objector’s own comfort? I doubt it. Because at that point, Duck Picture Objector would have seen Duck Picture Poster as a human being, not a strip of text entries down the center of her screen. Duck Picture Objector’s demands only seemed reasonable and rational to her because Duck Picture Poster’s brain, like every other human brain, could not conceptualize text on the screen as a person.

Some readers will already have classified this post as Old Man Yells At Cloud or a rant against social justice warriors. I’m sure there will be concern expressed somewhere that this is a sign that I’m leaning into far right white conservatism of the Tucker Carlson variety. But it’s not. I won’t be able to convince someone that it isn’t if they decide that’s what it is, but I’ve stopped actively participating in an online space I’ve inhabited for over a decade. I have feelings about my experiences there and do feel that I’ve had a wide enough range of engagement there (from making some of my best friends to receiving picturtes of my face photoshopped onto Holocaust victims) that I can speak accurately and specifically about the culture there. I just couldn’t see that culture while I was still an active, daily user.

As I stated before, I’ll keep using Twitter for promotion. Some of you got here from Twitter. But now that I’m gone from the platform, I don’t miss it. I don’t miss getting called a cunt or being asked if I could sum up six hours of on-going, rapid-fire industry drama I have no interest in. I don’t miss my joys being QTed with glum, woe-is-me entreaties to think about how a stranger feels at that expression of joy. I don’t miss my real-life experiences being dissected and misrepresented. I don’t miss the scolding, the akshully (as target and dispenser), the oneupmanship of misery a la “Must be nice…”. I don’t miss seeing elected members of my country’s government tweeting furiously about how something “must be done” about one of the many issues they were elected to deal with. I don’t miss “BREAKING: My opinion on why this near-inconsequential White House press conference means we’re going to nuclear war with Canada.” I don’t miss quirky posts about how depressed everyone is or reminders about when everyone should go to bed or drink water (in fact, since I stopped using Twitter, I’ve actually gotten better about doing those things without a reminder, because my brain doesn’t feel permanently severed from my body). I just don’t miss Twitter. I don’t like the person it makes me. And it feels exactly how I don’t miss exes who cheated on me. Because everyone on Twitter is engaged in some type of toxic, self-esteem damaging friendship with the medium that makes us behave in ways we don’t always like to behave, and makes us targets of behavior no one would want directed at them.

As for the threat that cutting off active engagement from Twitter will hurt an author’s career? I don’t find that to be the case. I’ve got great things coming up (maddeningly under NDAs), and none of the conversations surrounding those opportunities have mentioned Twitter. I would say that perhaps the only way Twitter is useful for a writer, aside from promotion, would be the pitch contests. Sure, networking is important, but not something I’m personally in a position to endorse; my networking experiences were soured greatly when colleagues openly discussed committing acts of violence against me. You’re probably better off sitting alone in your little home office like a goblin, smoking weed and watching CourtTV on YouTube.

If someone you’re friends with on Twitter really wants to be your friend, they’ll contact you through other means (of course, you have to provide those means). If someone is interested in what you have to say, they’ll go somewhere they can see you say it. And if the end result is that nobody contacts you and nobody follows you, do you know what happens in the real world? Absolutley nothing. In fact, you might take up roller skating and not feel like you now suddenly have to represent all disabled roller skaters on a public stage.

Now excuse me, I’m about to hit publish and automatically post this to Twitter.

What a difference a schedule makes

CW: self-harm

Through most of my childhood, my mom worked third shift. I think she got her first nursing job just before I started Kindergarten. We still lived with my grandparents, so not a lot changed for me at the time. But then she decided to buy the house down the hill. It was so exciting to have our own house but… I was never really there. I got off the bus there, sometimes had dinner there, played with my toys a little bit, but when it was bed time, I went back up the hill to my grandma’s house.

It was a really weird thing for me to process. I got a dog, but it wasn’t allowed to sleep at my grandma’s. After the dog got hit by a car and died, I had other pets, and I would sit at my grandma’s wondering if they were okay down at my house. Sometimes, I could look out the window of the bedroom I slept in at and see the lights on, because obviously, I had to go to bed before mom left for work at ten-thirty. I would imagine my mom getting ready to go to work and I would think, you know, it’s so unfair that other moms and kids got to stay home and sleep at their houses in the night, every night.

The house never ended up feeling like my house. Once, when my grandmother tried to drop me off with mom after an outing with my cousins, I screamed and grabbed at anything I could to try and stay in the car. My cousins were all going to grandma’s, and that was where I slept, so why couldn’t I spend the night, too? Why couldn’t I go home? I’ll never forget that desperate, sick feeling as I chased the car down the driveway, pleading to just be allowed to go home.

But it was my mom’s night off, so I had to stay at the house that was small and boring and dark and dirty and which didn’t even have a flushable toilet most of the time because the plumbing was shoddy. And I had to sleep in my bed that used to be at my grandmas but which now felt totally different.

I could never understand when the house was my house and when the house was my mom’s house. Sometimes, I was at my grandma’s and I knew my mom was home, but I wasn’t allowed to go there because mom was sleeping during the day. There was only one bedroom in the house, so mom slept on the couch. That meant no TV in the living room, and I could play outside, but if I was inside I had to be very quiet.

There were times that my grandma up the hill might be out of town or getting back from something late, and on those nights, I would have to stay at my Baba and Papa’s house. Those were the worst nights because Baba and Papa were kind of the fun, stay-the-night-on-the-weekened house, so having to get up and get on a school bus in the morning just felt weird. Plus, it’s always strange to ride a different bus than you’re used to. For years, the bus driver from the route past Baba and Papa’s house would say that I was such a good kid and “quiet as a church mouse.” It wasn’t that I was good, I was just extremely terrified of her and out of my element.

Eventually, we moved into the main part of town, to a house I could walk home from school to, but I still had to take the bus from my grandmother’s house in the mornings. That was fine by me. I was twelve at that point and used to not sleeping in my own bed. I liked being in our new house because the toilet reliably flushed and we weren’t so far out in the country that we couldn’t get cable. In fact, I started to hate having to go to my grandma’s house for the night because I couldn’t watch MTV there.

In rural communities, two miles can be decades apart, technologically.

When I started high school, it was at a private Catholic school in the city. The neighbors across the street had kids who went there, so during my freshman year, I rode with them. On nights my mom didn’t work, I just walked across the street and got in their car, but they were nice enough to pick me up from my grandma’s house on all the other mornings. My sophomore year, the family moved to Japan. My mom drove me on her days off, my uncle (newly home from the Army and in a kind of unemployed holding pattern) drove me. There was always someone to get me places I needed to go to, play rehearsals, tutoring, skating lessons, mom always had someone lined up for all of that, if she couldn’t do it.

When I got my driver’s license, that’s when things started to really change. Mom was offered a job that would give her three days off per week if she worked four twelve-hour shifts. That meant she had to be to work at seven in the evening and she’d get out at seven in the morning. I was worried this would mean I would have to go to my grandma’s house even earlier, but Mom decided that since I could drive myself to school, I could stay home at nights alone. So, from age sixteen, I was staying home alone at night and getting myself to school in the morning.

The problem with the new schedule was, I got up and went to school before my mom got home. And because her new schedule would cut into time spent with her boyfriend, she often left for work early to see him. When I was younger and staying with my grandma, it wasn’t a big deal, because I had to be in bed by eight (nine on Tuesdays, so I could watch Roseanne, the The Cosby Show for white trash families). So, if my mom left early, it didn’t really cut into the time we had together. On her new schedule, it did. If I had skating or rehearsal after school, I would race home, frantic at every red light, praying I could get there in time to see my mom, even in passing.

There were a lot of days when I didn’t make it home in time. Sometimes, those days would stack up and I would come home to an empty house several days in a row. There would be a pit of dread in my stomach when I’d see her car missing because I knew it meant I wouldn’t see another human in person until the next day at school. It was lonely in the worst ways, so the relief and joy I would feel when I’d get home before she left were basically regulating my brain chemistry. Once, I came home to find my mom’s car in the driveway, but she wasn’t in the house. I felt tricked and disappointed, and it resulted in a huge meltdown. I clawed up my face and arms, smashed up our glass kitchen table, punched holes in a door, slammed my bedroom door so hard the hinges ripped out of the wall… and my mom was just at the neighbors’. She ran home when she heard me screaming my head off and found the house destroyed.

It didn’t change anything. She never replaced the kitchen table because, “we don’t eat dinners anyway.”

I’ve spent a lot of time since then wondering why, upon entering the house and finding her kid in a mess of broken doors and shattered glass, with a bleeding face and knuckles, that she didn’t just say, wow. I need to put my kid first and maybe my boyfriend/career second? Maybe that was some kind of signal that a sixteen-year-old couldn’t handle being alone for days? Or even just a vague sign that something was very wrong for me?

Many years later, after I had kids of my own, Mr. Jen’s schedule changed to night shifts. It would be fine, I figured, because my mom had been on third shift and I understood how everything worked. Except, I didn’t. I didn’t understand that it would be very much a single-parenting situation most of the time. I got the kids up and off to school before Mr. Jen got home. He usually got up after they went to bed. And the parent they got stuck with was snappy, shouty, and downright mean due to being overwhelmed. The house was not clean. The house was not nice. Homework turned into screaming and punishment, then didn’t get done at all. I was a terrible mother. My brain was constantly racing, I was always on the verge of tears, always ready to scream at even the smallest change to our schedules. I regret so deeply how I treated my children during that time, and I’m furious at Past Jenny for not getting help and antidepressants and anxiety meds that she desperately needed.

Then, Mr. Jen got on a different schedule, and things became easier. I was more productive and focused, I was able to write a book that got us out of our poverty. Things in generally just got better. It didn’t erase the horrible years, but to me, it felt like they were over.

And then they asked him to switch back to thirds. This was in 2018, so this time, things would be different. Our kids were older, they were being homeschooled, and I was more chilled out. My career was in a better place, and taking third shift again would put Mr. Jen’s career in a better place, too, so I agreed that it was a good move. Still, I didn’t like it. Something about it felt wrong to me. When his boss promised Mr. Jen that the switch would only be for a year, I laughed in his face. “You’re never coming off thirds,” I told him. But he insisted it was only for a year, and took the new position.

September 2019 rolled around, the time that he should have been moved back to a day shift. But the holidays were coming up, his boss pointed out. Training someone to do retail management in a new department, on a new shift, in September? Just wait until after the holidays, they said.

We all know what happened in 2020. Obviously, they couldn’t change his job during a pandemic. Or in 2021. Pandemic was still going.

Meanwhile, I was miserable. But so was everyone else. It was a pandemic, baby! Everybody’s mental health was in the toilet. I would get up in the morning when Mr.Jen got home, stay awake until he went to bed, then go back to bed myself and sleep until the evening. I struggled to get any work done at all. If I wrote five hundred words in a single day, that was an epic feat and it took all my mental energy. I was deeply unhappy all of the time, self-harming more than ever before, and Mr. Jen’s bosses kept dangling vague promises of getting off third shift in front of him. Theses never panned out, but my hopes went through the roof every time. When I would hear that it wouldn’t work out, he would still be on third shift, I didn’t give a shit about his disappointment. I would throw “I told you,” in his face every time. I told you that they were lying. I told you it wouldn’t be just a year. I told you, I told you, I told you. I was a megabitch, angry at everyone and everything.

And I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see that the feelings of rage and hurt I had every time we found out he wouldn’t be getting a position on a day shift were the exact same feelings I would have as a high schooler pulling into an empty driveway. That they were the same feelings I felt when I was trying to hang on to my grandmother’s car, wanting to go home and not understanding why it wasn’t my home anymore, even if I slept there nightly. I’d never connected those things in my mind.

A few months ago, Mr. Jen started in a new position, on day shift. On his first day of work, I wrote two thousand words in one sitting for the first time in years. The career I’d envisioned sliding away was suddenly back on track. It didn’t make any sense; all that had changed was Mr. Jen’s work schedule.

All that had changed… was Mr. Jen’s work schedule.

In all my years of being miserable and mean, it never once occurred to me that no matter how much time I spent with Mr. Jen, no matter how many vacations and outings we carved out of his weird schedule, I’d never realized that my brain immediately heard “third shift” as “abandoned and lonely, like the worst time of your childhood.” If I’d ever made that connection, would I have been a better mother? A better partner to my husband? Would I have been happier, if I could have reframed it not as that original feeling of instability and abandonment, but as a totally different life event involving totally different people and an added sense of my own adult agency?

I was in middle school when my mother casually mentioned that she had been offered a position on a day shift. My hopes soared. Her next sentence was, “I didn’t take it. I prefer nights.” When I graduated high school and moved out, my mother did change her schedule.

Her new boyfriend didn’t like that she worked third shift.

State of the Trout: New Jealous Patrons selection, Discord, Twitter, and secrets…

I have so much good news lately. So much. And… I can’t share the two biggest things.

Of course.

Secrets:

What I can share, right off the bat, is that I’ve signed a contract for a new Abigail Barnette book. I cannot tell you with who yet. I cannot tell you much about it at all except to say that it’s another contemporary erotica with an age-gap M/F pairing, pansexual leads, and a ton of kink. Like… a ton. Like, there is a sex resort. When I showed my editor the first 30,000 words, I thought they would come back with, “Um… you need to tone this down. Like… way, way down.” That was not the response I got, so the brakes are off, blueberries! It’s going to be the hottest thing I’ve ever written, with a couple I love to pieces.

The other thing, which I cannot share yet, is that I have gotten another great theater job. I can’t tell you what I’m doing or where it’s at until the contract is signed, but trust me, you’ll be hearing about it. And maybe keeping a show diary on here for this one won’t be bad luck. Either way, the thought that people will pay me money to do theater is shocking to me. That’s like, something out of high school Jenny’s wildest dreams.

Jealous Patrons Book Club selection:

We reached the end of the Jealous Patrons recap of A Court of Thorns and Roses, a book that I hated possibly more than Fifty Shades of Grey or Beautiful Disaster. It was that awful. The results of the Jealous Patrons poll is in, and we’ll be reading BookTok sensation Zodiac Academy: The Awakening for our next selection. Patrons can access the full recaps at the $5 and up tier, the Jealous Patrons Book Club Book Club at the $1 and up tier. If you’re not a patron of Trout Nation and you’d like to be, you can pledge support here. If you sign up and you have a Discord account linked to your Patreon, you’ll automatically be added to the Trout Nation server, where you’ll have a snazzy orange name and access to the Jealous Patrons channel.

Speaking of Discord…

By popular suggestion, there is now a Trout Nation Discord server that’s open to everyone, not just Patreon supporters. If you long for the days of AOL chat rooms, Discord is the place for you. And we’re pretty active over there. You can join the conversation here. It’s lots of fun and so much easier for me to interact with yous all!

A reminder about Twitter:

Just a quick reminder: I’m no longer actively using Twitter on a daily basis. So, I won’t see DMs or replies. It’s a strictly updates-only, promo-only account these days. Frankly, it was disheartening to witness the constant build ’em up, tear ’em down nature of the beast. There’s a weird culture cropping up where anyone with 50k followers gets treated like a celebrity (in the bad way), and accounts with a large number of followers are automatically presumed to be privileged somehow. I don’t have anything productive to add to an environment that’s sliding in that direction. A nice side effect has been that I’m not seeing every single news story as it develops, constantly barraging me with doom, and therefore I can wake up in the morning and not feel like someone has beaten my optimism in with a crowbar.

A final note:

I recently sneezed with my head turned and I’m forty-two years old, so I’m currently in physical therapy for the next three months. I know content has been slow here for a while and I had so many plans to correct that now that I’m in a much better headspace than I’ve been in for a while. I appreciate your patience as I continue to juggle this blog, my Patreon, and the deadlines I’ve been facing for my awesome, awesome books.

Jealous Haters Book Club: Crave, chapter 13 “Just Bite Me”

Once again, the chapter title has absolutely zero to do with the chapter’s content. No mention of vampires, biting, nobody tells anybody off, there’s no reason for this to be the chapter title. That’s really starting to get on my nerves.

I know it’s been a minute since we did a recap of this (mea culpa) so to jump back in, Grace has met a girl named Lia and they’re in her room now. At the end of chapter twelve, Lia had just told Grace that everyone at the school is lying about “everything” and it’s the big hook that gets you to turn the page. When you do, you get this:

I have no idea how to respond to that. I mean, what am I supposed to say? What am I supposed to think?

“Don’t look so scandalized,” she tells me after a few seconds of awkward silence. “I’m just teasing, Grace.”

Look, I think we all can agree that this is far from the worst thing we’ve ever read together. But these hooks are lazy. They’re asking the reader to accept that something really high stakes is about to happen in order to keep them reading, only to have the rug pulled out from under them immediately. Oh, you thought something cool was about to happen? Some of your questions were going to be answered? SIKE. And it wouldn’t be this annoying if it didn’t keep happening.

Grace chooses to laugh along with the joke, though.

Still, it doesn’t feel right. Maybe because of how serious she looked when she told me that she lies about everything. Or maybe because I can’t help wondering if that was the truth and these are just lies… Either way, there’s not much else for me to do but shrug and say, “I figured you were just messing with me.”

I like the way Grace is rationalizing this huge red flag away because it’s something I do all the time. It’s the whole “if someone tells you who they are, believe them,” mindset that has completely skipped past me. Someone can make a super shady first impression and I’ll still mak twenty-six excuses as to why the problem is me and they’re probably very cool and harmless.

It has never served me well, and I’m pretty sure that’s going to be the case with Grace here.

Lia and Grace talk about the language Lia had been speaking and I run into a little “whut?” moment:

“Akkadian. It’s the language that evolved from ancient Sumerian.”

I’m not sure this is correct. It gave me a brain screech, and I had to go look it up because that didn’t sound right. It sounds like Lia has confused languages occurring in the same region with similar features and alphabets as one continuous development line. Or, she’s confusing Akkadian with Aramaic, the latter having evolved from the former. It just seems like it’s more appropriate to say that Akkadian eventually replaced Sumerian in most respects. Any linguists around?

It’s a good thing she’s still doing research, is all I’m saying.

Grace’s phone interrupts them.

Sure enough, my home screen is a series of texts from my cousin, each one a little more frantic than the one before it.

Grace texts back that she’s fine and in Lia’s room, then tells Lia, hey, I gotta go, my cousin is looking for me.

“At least stay a couple more minutes, finish your drink.” She looks half amused, half disappointed as she continues. “You don’t want your cousin to think she can boss you around.”

Whoop, there’s another red flag! Don’t let Macy boss you around, Grace. Let me boss you around. Lia even says that Grace is “right” about Macy being “the hysterical type,” which is a thing that Grace never said nor implied.

In case we were wondering who the inevitable “mean girl” would be in this book. But it sounds like she’s actually mean and not just, you know. Mean for zero reasons.

Macy comes to Lia’s room and something stuck out at me that I’m pretty sure the author wants us to keep in mind:

“Don’t worry about washing the cup,” she says, taking it from my hands. “Just go show Macy that you’re not crying your eyes out. And that I didn’t murder you.”

Hmmm. First of all, why would Macy assume that her living cousin has been murdered but prequel, why doesn’t Lia want the cup washed? I watch way too many crime documentaries, thanks. You don’t leave DNA with the cops, you take the water bottle with you when you leave the station, friend. RED FLAG.

In fairness to Lia, Macy is fairly rattled when she shows up at Lia’s door. Like, out of proportion freaked out. Grace is all, what do you think was going to happen to me during the middle of a party, and Macy is super cagey. Lia says that Macy was probably concerned that Grace would have gone outside in her skimpy dress.

“Yes, exactly!” Macy looks like she’s seized on the excuse. “I didn’t want you to freeze to death before your first full day in Alaska is over.” It’s a strange answer, especially considering she knows what almost happened to me last night and that I was terrified of being thrown outside for just that reason.

It’s also strange because you’re not a toddler who would wander away in a diaper in an ice storm or something. You’re nearly an adult, and you’ve got two people here assuming you wouldn’t realize that it’s cold outside in Alaska.

Lia tells Grace to come by again, and they’ll do mani-pedis and facials, and Macy is like… wait, what?

Lia rolls her eyes. “Obviously, you’re invited, too.” And then she closes the door in our faces.

Which…let’s be honest, seems weird, considering how friendly she’s been all night. Then again, the second Macy showed up, everything about Lia got a lot sharper. Maybe her abrupt good night has more to do with my cousin than it does with me.

While I feel like this chapter is super rushed, I appreciate how Wolff is showing us Lia’s obvious dislike for Macy before telling us that she doesn’t like Macy. And I like how it’s not over-the-top, calling Macy a bitch or something. Just coldness.

Meanwhile, Macy is stunned that Grace made friends with Lia that fast.

She doesn’t sound jealous, just confused. Like it’s the strangest thing in the world for Lia and me to have something in common.

Yes! Again, very good hint-dropping here. And the writing in this chapter is so much better than in the library chapter. I feel like I’m getting whiplash here. I’m still thrown by the idea that Grace is such an obsessive lover of books and obscure languages, and it never came up until chapter twelve, though. That’s gonna stick with me a while.

Grace says that Lia seems nice, and Macy is quick to correct that notion.

“‘Nice’ isn’t the adjective I would normally use to describe her,” Macy answers as we start down the hall. “She’s the most popular girl in school and normally takes great pains to remind people of that. Although lately, she’s been really reclusive.”

Hmm. Is this gonna become a Quinn Fabray/Rachel Berry thing? Like, Lia is gonna think that because she’s the most popular girl and Jaxxon is the most popular boy, they belong together and then this turns into that Taylor Swift song? I would be so disappointed at the wasted potential.

Grace just says that Lia losing her boyfriend is probably the reason she’s stand-offish, and Macy is shocked that Lia told Grace about it. The entire school was affected by the guy dying and oh my god his name is Hudson. Finn Hudson. That was the name of the kid on Glee.

The prophecy is unfolding.

And Hudson apparently died after he graduated. THE PROPHECY.

Macy asks Grace if she’s hungry and UH-OH:

I start to say yes—I haven’t eaten since the bowl of Frosted Flakes Macy poured me this morning from her stash—but the altitude sickness must be back, because the mention of food has my stomach rumbling, and not in a good way. “You know, I think I’m just going to go to bed. I’m not feeling so great.”

I bet she’s been poisoned. Poisoned or dosed with something. Or like, it’s a magic potion and Lia didn’t want her to wash the cup so she could control Grace or something.

We make it to our room, and Macy unlocks the door with a flourish. Just in time, too, because my stomach revolts about two seconds after I walk in the door. I barely make it to the bathroom before I throw up a noxious combination of tea and Dr Pepper.

Looks like Alaska really is trying to kill me after all.

LIA! I THINK LIA IS TRYING TO KILL YOU!

But it still doesn’t explain the chapter title.

A Twitter Story

About a month ago, a friend of mine made a noncontroversial statement on Twitter about the potential dangers of a common over-the-counter pain medication. People, including one uniquely obsessed doctor, harassed this person for days. Round the clock, non-stop QTing and long threads about why this commonly known fact—that Tylenol can damage your liver—is wrong, dangerous misinformation of the worst kind, and how the person who made the claim is an anti-vaxer.

The resulting pile-on had nothing to do with the individual being transgender (which xie is) or an anti-vaxer (which xie is not). It was just because of the extreme anti-vaccine position xie hadn’t taken, which was harming everyone. The pile-on was for the greater good.

A little while later, the same individual tweeted that some writers have sensory processing difficulties or developmental disorders that make reading for pleasure difficult and that commonly-dispensed wisdom about how much a writer should read could be construed as coming from an ableist viewpoint. Like with the Tylenol tweets, people were eager to jump on this individual.

But not because xie is trans.

In both cases, simple tweets became “the discourse,” and with the discourse came the distortion. “Did you see the YA author who said Tylenol is poison and your doctors are lying to you?” “Did you see the YA author who said reading is ableist?” That the person in question was not a YA author and had never said anything of the sort didn’t matter. This individual became the “main character” of Twitter over wholly uncontroversial statements that were made controversial by Twitter users with a bone-deep need to be furious about the things this person never said.

It had nothing to do with this individual being transgender.

Except for when it did, of course. Like months ago, when this individual painstakingly reviewed an advanced copy of an outrageously transphobic book. That’s when author and real-life Veruca Salt, Lauren Hough, stepped in and did what Lauren Hough does best: made everything about herself. This all concluded with Hough insisting that a prestigious literary award had been snatched away from her, despite never having been nominated for it in the first place.

The pile-on my friend faced only got worse, aided by mainstream media, who picked up the story of Hough’s “revoked nomination” without mentioning that Hough had simply assumed she would be handed this prize by default (Hough is the author who, some time ago, threw a days-long tantrum because people dared to give her books four stars instead of five). My friend, who isn’t a YA author, was branded a YA author at this time—a Twitter code word for someone who is the worst kind of hysterical drama seeker, a person who should be avoided and derided at all costs. The brigade rode in, eager to scream about freedom of speech, Nazi book bans, and to question whether this “YA author” had even read the offending book (which xie had, in a detailed Twitter thread and blog post, which became tragically invisible to anyone who disagreed with xer).

The fact that the individual in question is transgender was superfluous to the conversation, of course, and if the resulting widespread internet attention from the media caused an increase in harassment of this individual, that was a punishment well-deserved. It was the principle of the thing. A person who reviews a book is a person who wants to ban a book, and anyone who reviews a book is only doing so in an attempt to ruin the careers and lives of worthy, non-YA writing authors.

Nobody was simply using a silly reason to justify their own transphobia. Xie is a danger to the written word and freedom of speech.

Last night, I opened Twitter and found that Lockheed Martin was trending. With my friend’s name under it. It was the top trending topic in my country.

As it turned out, this individual works for Lockheed Martin. Making drones that kill children. Specifically, xie writes code to increase the lethality of drones targeting children in the Middle East. And xie makes upwards of $400,000 annually doing this work for the military-industrial complex while lying about xer financial situation to scam people with crowdfunding. Even worse, xer job slaughtering innocent babes in their mothers’ arms was the result of nepotism, as xer entire family works for Lockheed Martin in highly paid executive positions. And this awful person, this YA author, has been lying about it for years.

At least, that’s what Twitter would have you believe. Because in reality, this non-YA author works ten hours a week from home keeping software licenses up-to-date. A job this non-YA author can do from home as a disabled person, a job xie got through family connections, probably offered by a relative concerned about this person’s well-being and ability to live independently (and, at the time, xer’s ability to care for a disabled family member). A job that only pays the astronomical $400,000 annually because people on Twitter decided their lie about it was fact; a simple Google search reveals that the highest paid non-executives at Lockheed Martin make a quarter of that figure working full-time.

But does that matter when a person some find annoying on Twitter is outed as being, in the words of one gleeful user, “literally a cop”?

No. Because there are reasons this person needs to be punished. None of these reasons have to do with a particular website that routinely targets and doxes transgender people. Sure, the information currently circulating came from their site. Sure, they’ve targeted this person specifically because xie is transgender and uses neopronouns and tweets “cringe.” And yes, the people on that disgusting forum are currently celebrating that a trans man might commit suicide due to their doxing efforts. But this is about integrity. This is about making the truth known.

On Twitter, making the truth known always involves bending and shaping that truth to fit around whatever narrative has been embraced, but always for the greater good. “This person works in an extremely limited position dealing with software licenses for a company with defense contracts” isn’t bad enough. You have to streamline it. You have to remove all context—the availability of work for disabled people, the hurdles to employment faced by transgender people, the notoriously hostile state the individual lives in, and what the individual’s job entails—for the greater good. This person is bad. Unredeamable. And they must be punished. Whatever lies and exaggerations made to pursue that goal are immaterial as long as that goal is reached. For the greater good.

Critics of this individual were more than enthusiastic about their campaign for justice. They’d always known that their personal opinion of this individual was right. They just could never put into words what made this person so thoroughly evil. Maybe it was because xie was the ringleader of the crusade against Isabel Fall, a claim that lacks evidence but sounds incredibly good when justifying one’s behavior over the past sixteen hours. Or because xie’s outrageous censorship campaign caused Lauren Hough to have that prize she hadn’t won yanked from her hands by a blood-thirsty social justice mob. Xie was always crowdfunding; something about that is just annoying, right? Plus, xie was a “woke scold,” a person who obnoxiously and audaciously suggests that marginalized people deserve human rights. And get this: xie calls xer spouse “kissmate.” That’s just cringe. Far too precious and cute. That’s certainly harming the human race in some vile way.

There were so many reasons—none of them transphobic!—that doxing this person, accusing xer of lying, and driving xer off Twitter wasn’t just justified. It was righteous. And definitely not transphobic! Plus, finding out how horrible xer’s job is retroactively makes all the past harassment okay!

The way Twitter reckons it, securing software licenses for a defense contractor’s offices is no different than pushing the big red button to detonate a city block full of innocent civilians. Sure, some of these people work for companies that are arguably just as evil as Lockheed Martin, albeit in other ways. Some spend their time online defending members of the United States government from attacks by the right-wing mobs. Some of them have or had jobs or internships working for the United States government themselves. But without xer keeping all those software licenses in line, the United States would be wholly incapable of committing war crimes. And if xie is forced off Twitter and hopefully driven to suicide, world peace will be restored. There is no need for, nor room for, nuance in this discussion. Xie is, after all, making millions of dollars being, in the words of that astonishingly rational thinker I quoted above, “literally a cop.”

Which leaves me to wonder… if xer working for Lockheed Martin part-time means xie is directly responsible for every death caused by the U.S. government’s imperial crimes, what are the people aligning themselves with Kiwi Farms guilty of by association?

Hmm? What was that? Oh, Kiwi Farms? Probably time to note that the persistent backlash against this individual has been driven since 2016 by a website that defended its connection to the mass shooting in Christchurch, NZ (a “shithole country” with “faggot laws”) and whose members have been linked to at least three online harassment campaigns that ended in the death by suicide of their targets. The entire site exists to mock, harass, and dox people, especially transgender, autistic, and fat people, but simply being ugly or annoying can serve as reason enough to target someone and harass them, ideally to death.

While I would never doubt the righteousness of people who have turned away from the war criminal in question, I do wonder what some of them would say if they saw how their actions were being viewed by the forum that composed the jaunty tune they’re all dancing to.

“RIP Bozo, puffin on that enby war criminal pack […] maybe anna will commit unalive in roblox and kiwi farms can take credit.”

“I didn’t know anything about Ana until earlier today when all of the other trannies started shrieking for his head as a war criminal and ganged up on him until he left Twitter. The fact this happened due to information gleaned from a Kiwifarms doxing, the site they claim makes you a fascist if you even dare to peek, is perhaps the most hilarious thing I have seen all month.”

“All the YA twitter lefties are ignoring the fact that we’re the ones who got the dox lol. They always do when it conveniences them. Is KF le evil nazi forum or not, guys? Pick a side. Lockheed Martin tho”

“I saw the screeching on twitter and knew exactly where they had gotten their deets. I love how KF lays these little mines on the internet, they stay silent for years just ready to explode whenever the woke mob decide is time to eat their own.”

Phew. It’s a good thing that none of this outsized fury, public mockery, gleeful celebration of doxing, and vicious harassment had anything to do with a years-long hate campaign run by a website known for its body count. Because that might mean the outrage was driven by something other than righteousness and the shining moral purity of everyone involved. It might mean that this time, the Twitter rage machine was driven by, if not transphobia, the desperate need to have one’s own biases confirmed.

If you participated, don’t worry. Those doubts you’re having about whether or not you’re a fool who’s been led into a targeted harassment campaign by your own easily fed ego? Let them go. I mean, you’re just firmly aligned with a web forum full of people who pat themselves on the back for the suicides they’ve directly caused. It’s not like you have an extremely limited part-time job working from home for Lockheed Martin. You’re not a monster.

The @Jenny_Trout Twitter account is now updates only. You can follow it to keep up with release dates and new blog posts. You can also join me on Discord.