my shoulder and bounced her around like a boss until she finally fell asleep. She reeked, but I didn’t care. I felt like Beth March from Little Women, which we were reading in English at the time, kinda rare and saintly, until I remembered Beth March caught scarlet fever from the babies she cared for, and I wondered why the kid’s mother had said don’t pick her up, and I started wishing my parents would hurry up because shower.
I found these visits so stressful that after a while Sherman and Shelley were fine to let me wait in the car, checking my social and texting with my best friends about when we’d start our next cleanse or whatever, as they delivered cases of water and buckets of hope. I guess at some point I accepted that I’m more of a Jo March than a Beth.
I’ve been thinking about that stupid show we watch—Hot’n’Homeless. Those screechy hosts who spaff all over their makeovers, the attractive scrubbed-up homeless people—some of them are definitely mentally ill—that they pour into designer clothes, and teach how to walk in heels, or Florsheims, and do the intentionally hilarious mock job interviews with. When the cameras stop rolling, you know those people get dumped back onto the streets, where they prolly get all their swag stolen. Fuck. Why do we watch that show? Why do I watch that show? I can’t help thinking of all of the ways I’m responsible for creating an appetite for actual shit.
Have to stop typing for a bit. Hands cramping.
Fee’s just so pale. Even in the moonlight I can see her skin has turned gray, and she’s got huge dark circles under her eyes. Question? Is it okay to describe a person’s skin color in any way, shape or form when you yourself are not a person of color? Or is it better not to mention a person’s skin color so as to make it irrelevant, even though we all know it’s totally relevant, in hopes that society will eventually become truly color-blind? Like, last year, this new girl at school was asking us to point out Brooky on the track. Zee said, “She’s the tall one.” Dee said, “She’s the one with the blue shorts.” When the new girl still didn’t see her, I said, “The black girl near the long jump pit.” The way the girl looked at me? Like, racist much? But…wha…? Is it racist to describe a black person as black? When I told Brooky what happened, she laughed. Was I supposed to say African-American? Brooky shook her head. “Too many syllables.” We really do hate syllables.
The thing is, I don’t wanna be a dick. The racism thing? The white privilege thing? The white feminist thing? I want to understand it all, and acknowledge it beyond the obvious, and I actually wanna get this shit right. Feels like there’s a wide margin for error, though.
I’ve been so worried about Shelley, but Fee’s mom, Morena, is in serious trouble too. The Internet says she might be deported to Guatemala. Fee will die when she finds out. Morena’s procit card really had just expired and she hadn’t been able to process her renewal appointment online and the phones were always busy and she’d been so swamped getting Fee ready for the chastity ball and it wasn’t her fault. There are so many pitiful clips of her crying into her hands. As if her daughter’s disappearance and all the Red Market shit isn’t enough, now she’s being sent to a place she hasn’t seen in twenty-five years, where she has no family or friends. Jesus fucking Christ.
And in other breaking news? Miles, Brooky’s brother, has been detained for questioning. Wha…? I mean, I get that they’re questioning the Hive and the parents and the witnesses from the AVB and all—but Miles? Why him? Because he’s black? Because he plays in a band? Wears his hair in dreads? What has Miles got to do with any of this?
Also? CNN did an interview with this social media expert talking about how crowdsourcing, which has been going on since cell phones, has become one of the most effective tools of law enforcement. The guy says he’s created an algorithm to determine how much longer it’ll take to find us, based on the dollar amount of the bounty, the estimated number of people actively searching, the number of people communicating on social, the amount of TV airtime devoted to us and the likely trajectory of