We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

My first jobs in high school were all babysitting gigs, and let’s be 100 percent clear about what I spent that money on: many issues of Sassy magazine, Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Bjork’s Post on cassette, every brown and maroon drugstore lipstick I could get my hands on, and steel-toed Doc Martens that I would clomp around in all day every day, even during gym class. Not once did it occur to me that I should be “putting money aside” or “saving for a rainy day”; the first fifteen miserable fucking years of my life had been one great big, long-ass rainy day during which I gazed longingly at the material possessions of my classmates, scowling at their name-brand jeans and hating my broke-ass parents. As soon as I got my first envelope of twenty-dollar bills for chasing babies named Tommy and Caroline around playrooms big enough to dwarf our entire apartment, I started plotting all the dumb ways I was going to waste it, like trading my nondescript blue backpack for one from Eddie Bauer (an exercise that required two buses and much confused trudging through the “good mall”) and skipping my free cafeteria hot lunch in favor of overpriced bags of carbohydrate trash from the vending machines in the student center. I have never—and I mean ever—had a real desire to let otherwise-unaccounted-for money just chill in my bank account unmolested for more than maybe a week and a half. I barely have the willpower to leave other people’s money alone for the short time it...