Mean

We act mean to defend ourselves from boredom and from those who would chop off our breasts. We act mean to defend our clubs and institutions. We act mean because we like to laugh. Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being rude to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being a bitch is more exhilarating. Being a bitch is spectacular.

Guilt is a ghost. Guilt interrupts narratives. It does so impolitely. Ghosts have no etiquette. What do they need it for? There is no Emily Post for ghosts.

You never predict that rapists are lurking in the sun, sky, and trees. In other words, humans are as they seem. Seeming is real. After a stranger ambushes you and assails your private parts, everything becomes new. Everything is reborn. Everything takes on a new hue, the color of rape. You look at the world through rape-tinted glasses.

Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition. Like the man who gave my gay cousin HIV, or like my grandfather, who gave my grandmother the clap. You can “get” schizophrenia or bipolar in the genetic sense. You might inherit genes that predispose you toward hearing voices or intense fluctuation of mood. In that sense, these conditions are “given” to you. But they aren’t given to you in the same way watching your father cut off your mother’s head on Christmas gives you PTSD.

A possessive part of me wants to hoard this story. I want to chipmunk or squirrel away the memory of this event, place it in a tree trunk with the memories of all the other rapes, attempted rapes, and gropes, memories that will never be released or consumed. When a man asks, "What did he do to you?" he's asking to eat one of these traumatic acorns. Girls never ask for these seeds. They know what it's like to be degraded and fucked by this world, to be made a big-time bottom by life. They don't need the details of my particular shame to construct empathy.

When was the last time you were mean for fun? When was the last time you were mean in the name of politics? Have you ever been mean for Jesus? When was the last time you tried to kill someone rather than let him into your club? When was the last time you wanted to kill someone but chose to be a bitch instead of a murderer? Have you been called a bitch?

It’s not fair that I’ve had so much privilege. And by privilege I mean life.

Every pretty woman who lives a long life gets to perform an art project called “watch my beauty disintegrate.” It’s not revolutionary. It just happens.

Art is one way to work out touch gone wrong.

This guilt was an invisible but heavy albatross hanging around my neck. (That’s a reference to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.) I wear that bird like Björk wore her swan dress. I wave from a red carpet leading to hell.

I’d slipped on a black blouse, black skirt, and black shoes. My hair color did not require alteration. Neither did the color of my soul.

To get rid of him, I pretended to read. Boys hate that shit.

Why does public school furniture have to hurt?

Montessori school ruined me for normal school and life in general. It made me only want to do things I care about or am curious about.

We nodded to show Ashley that we believed deaf Miss America had cunt breath. That’s what you do when you’re in high school and someone is your friend. You agree that other girls are cunts to prove your fealty to the girls you love.

Some ghosts listen to the radio through the bodies of the living. They use us to conduct pain

She enjoys music through me. She enjoys food through me. She enjoys sunsets through me. She enjoys the smell of certain flowers through me. It's OK for ghosts to exist through me. It has to be.

Of course an elderly white dude taught anthropology. Who better to explain all the cultures and peoples of the world than he who is in charge of them?

Amy screamed, “Ida loves wetbacks!” Ida screamed back, “Fuck your mother in the tit!

I hoped Steve would injure himself and die so that I wouldn’t have to let him into my club. That had been my strategy. To give his sex an insurmountable initiation. Like the literacy tests given to black folks in the American South before the Voting Rights Act passed.

I could not believe her nerve. She was blackmailing me and I had done her a gigantic favor by eating her casserole, whose nationality was a lie.

Mom's bone structure put the white mom's to shame. Her cheekbones were so there and lushly sculpted that they made the white mom's face look like mashed potatoes from a box. Not that the white mom was ugly. Her face just didn't exude the foreign-lady sexiness the way Mom's did. The white mom's face exuded Puritanism. Margarine. Thrift. The absence of fun.

Cliché and romanticism form the backbone of modern memory.

The rest of us jogged with the intensity of overcooked spaghetti.

a bookworm ho with a fading Mexican complexion. Young people of color are supposed to enjoy looting and eating trans fats, not sustained silent reading, but I found a way to reconcile my assigned stereotype with my passions. I microwaved nachos and ate them while reading Jackie Collins paperbacks I stole from my mother—trans fats, looting, and literature.