Worry

by Alexandra Tanner

“Memes don’t matter, Poppy,” I shout. Now I’m crying. Of course memes matter.

“Will you or will you not eat a pear in the next three to four days?” she tries again. “I can’t know that about myself,” I say.

These women’s houses were poorly heated, since I’d observed that the greatest characters across classic and contemporary fiction alike were always cold.

I know my mom will call Poppy next and tell Poppy what I’ve said, and then Poppy will scream at me, and then I’ll suffer for days under her ire. No matter what I do, I’m always angering one of them, pushing one of them away to feel closer to the other for a bright minute.

“I’m always telling people: ‘I want to be her when I grow up,’ ” Katie says, somehow spreading her lips farther back from her teeth than they already are. I hate that I’ve had the same thought. “Her or Ottessa Moshfegh.” I’ve had this thought, too.

me and grace fr

I just wanted an excuse to feel like the way I looked at the Internet was different than the way everyone else looked at the Internet; like the way I wasted my time was special. There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian. I’m a consumer. I’ll never blossom into the woman of ideas I like to imagine myself as late at night. It’s not that art is dead. It’s just that I’m not going to be one of the ones who makes it.

“And I’m into crypto now,” he adds. “No,” Poppy and I both groan. “It’s— No, listen, it’s very lucrative,

At a Pilates class, I struggle through a routine everyone around me seems to know well. One woman is so confident and experienced that she’s chewing gum. During an exercise involving a bar and some springs, the instructor comes up to me and touches my back. He says, “Imagine your spine is a sleeve of Oreos. Now imagine those Oreos slowly becoming Double Stuf Oreos. Lengthen.

“March Girls,” she says, and smiles. The smile is real. “Do you really think I’m Jo?” I feel nothing when it comes to Little Women, but if I had to pick a little woman to be, I’d be Jo. And Poppy, obviously, would be Beth. But I pretend I don’t think this, and I smile, too, and I nod, and I tell her what a Jo I think she is.