So basically, I started middle school, got my period, some gnarly pimples, started to see the world through my gender and to question my default Christianity. My hormones fucked with my faith.
I know I can be too much with all my opinions, and my cursing, and I’m aware that my friends aren’t always ready for or interested in my tirades about women’s rights, especially abortion, and black lives and immigrant issues, or whatever.
In seventh grade, Delaney, who’s the most tranque of us all because she takes twenty milligrams of her antidepressant every morning, called me relentless. The word had been on our vocab test. Relentless. Too true. I never shut up. I never give up. I ask too many questions. I’m a contrarian. So I started my blog, This Little Light.
I had my mother’s full support, though she did insist on reading everything before I posted. My first post was actually inspired by Shelley, and a conversation she had with Aunt Lilly about Tarana Burke, the black woman who launched the #MeToo hashtag a decade before Hollywood got woke. Aunt Lill and Shelley had agreed that you can’t talk about the oppression of women without acknowledging the spectrum of suffering of women from other cultures and races. When I said, “So this black woman started it, but the world only listened when movie stars spoke out?” Shelley clapped her hands and said, “Maybe that can be your first blog.” She helped me research, and she read it when I was done, but I wouldn’t let her edit. I needed to own my words. Still do.
I wrote the blog about skirting. I wrote a satirical blog about dress codes for boys. I wrote about how, in the interest of tearing down the patriarchy, women should consider keeping their own names—even though my mother said she’d been happy to take Miller over Frumkin. (I vow, here and now, to forever be Rory Miller.)
I wrote a blog about that black teen being pulled over for driving a red Ferrari in Calabasas. When the cops found out his dad is that Hall of Famer, they turned the near arrest into a selfie-fest.
And I wrote a long blog about abortion. At this moment, I wish I’d kept that one to myself, because right now the media and social networks are dissecting everything I’ve ever written, saying that my blogs contain dog-whistle messages to the Red Market. Oh. My. Fucking. God.
There’s all the Jewish conspiracy shit online now too. The fact of my Jewishness is trending, but the Jews don’t exactly wanna claim me. Who can blame? Jewish groups are distancing themselves by arguing that my father was unobservant, as was his father. True. And that he had a lapsed-Catholic mother. True. And that my mother’s father was also unobservant, and had married a shiksa. True again. My parents and I are admittedly Jew-removed. Jew-lite is what they called it, respectfully. But whatever Jewish is, I am still part of that.
Otherness. Our subtle otherness is what bound me and Fee. From the start, it was always the two of us, indivisible within the Hive. But lately Fee and I have been keeping secrets from each other. I mean, Fee kept a pretty huge secret from me about something that happened when she went to visit her abuela in Cerritos. And I didn’t tell her about Jinny Hutsall. I also didn’t tell her that I’m pretty sure that what I saw Jinny do is the reason we’re in all this trouble. When she wakes up, I’ve gotta tell Fee the truth. Everything.
I mean, maybe not all at once.
So, my confession? I spied on Jinny Hutsall in her bedroom. I’ve been doing it since the night she arrived. From my side window, overlooking the patio, I have a clear view into her bedroom next door. I didn’t just spy on her, hiding behind my curtains—I videotaped her. It was wrong, and I know that, but you have to understand, and I hope Fee understands, that I was gathering evidence, because Jinny Hutsall is the real criminal in all of this.
The reason we’re here? I think—I mean, I still don’t know for sure, but I think it’s because she knows about the footage on my palm-cam, which is in my room, behind my big dresser, where I dropped it yesterday. And I think she told Jagger Jonze. And the two of them wanted me shut down.
Was that seriously only yesterday? It feels like a thousand