What Is Love?

by Jen Comfort

he’d run away like she’d thrust a clipboard in his face at a grocery store and asked if he could spare a minute to save endangered succubi. (Every day, toxic masculinity destroys 10,000 acres of their natural habitat!)

“Thanks, Dino, but I’ve still got my tutoring gig, remember? I mean, I don’t get paid for it, but it’s still a job. Technically.” Besides, who else was going to teach neurodiverse kids that learning didn’t have to be boring? Definitely not the public school system, which, as far as Maxine was concerned, was designed to suck children’s souls out to make space for robot parts.

There were only two warm spots in Maxine’s cold-blooded heart, and one was reserved for her sister. The other spot was for snakes, which were cool as shit.

Teddy was glowering at her from behind his thick-rimmed glasses. It made him look a little mean, like a professor who was incredibly disappointed to have caught you cheating on a test and was about to dole out some serious verbal punishment, followed by a private lesson on the scholarly ethics of getting railed in a plaid skirt and loafers.

Contestants like Maxine got it worst of all because there was a specific type of reply guy who saw her “quirky” personality as a measure of her accessibility, and after manic-pixie dreamgirling her into their waifu fantasies, they thought it made her a real “ungrateful bitch” when she didn’t fawn over their unsolicited marriage proposals or dick pics. Little did they know, Maxine was just holding out for the elusive dick pic–proposal combo meal.

She’d grown up poor, neurodivergent, and pissed off. Maxine ate challenge for breakfast and washed it down with a glass of spite. There was nothing she couldn’t do with enough embittered feminism and classist rage.

Maxine: sorry. I was licking my wounds. Tarrah: don’t be sorry. I get it. I pour alcohol on mine; it’s sterile.

“Don’t flaunt your West Coast In-N-Out privilege, it’s unbecoming.”

Disappointment built character. After all, look at her . . . more character than anyone on the dating apps knew what to do with!

But they should know her well enough to know she wasn’t romance-heroine material. She was Outrageous Friend Who Encourages the Heroine to Make Poor Choices material, at best.

Her brief childhood experience with libraries was that they smelled like old paper and older buildings, and you definitely weren’t allowed to have fun inside them. “I can’t wait to tell you about this amazing invention called the internet. You can get everything on there! Books, maps, hand-drawn pornography of Princess Kitana pegging Goro . . . you name it, they got it.”

First rule of Civ: either play as Montezuma, or get dicked over by Montezuma. (Second rule: do not let Gandhi get nukes.)

“First of all, this video game is a fictional tournament to save Earthrealm by way of gruesome violence, and gruesome violence is inherently gender neutral in the natural world. You ever seen hyenas hunt? They’re matriarchal, they’re vicious, and they can digest bones. Second, Sonya’s character is purely military-industrial complex propaganda, so you should feel absolutely no remorse helping her die valiantly for the cause when you kick a watermelon-size hole in her sternum.”

She’d run an internet search for “what to wear to visit your boyfriend’s snobby parents so they don’t think you’re a cheap floozy,” but the results had reeked of misogyny and triggered her thirst for the blood of the patriarchy. She’d have worn her “SLUT” baby tee and cut-off shorts if it weren’t still so unseasonably cold for early May.