“Yeah, let’s be honest here, future lawyer’s assistant, at best,” Rose added as she put her arm around Karen. Karen gave a cheeky Cheshire Cat grin.
They made their way out to Rose’s used Civic — Stanley Civicus, they’d named it — and took off.
>< >< ><
They had a fun night. Technically, Rose violated her promises to Karen’s mother: she both drank and smoked pot, although she only had one beer — purloined from Justin’s parents — and only a couple tokes, but there was at least an hour gap between her indulgences and when she drove Karen home. Karen outdid her, smoked pot and had a couple of mixed drinks, mixing together whatever was available. Some vodka-ginger ales, why not? There were eight people there in total, and a fun time was had by all. They couldn’t stay out too late because it was a school night and they both had quasi-curfews.
Her mom would be pleased: they ordered pizza. They watched some cheesy softcore pornified horror movie and just hung out. She spent a little bit of alone time with Justin, just playful chatting, knowing flirtations. She was proud of one of her evocative lines. She told him about the book she’d just won on Goodreads, written by a supposed cat, and how she looked forward to reading from a pussy. “And maybe sometime soon you’ll enjoy eating from a pussy,” she stated dryly, no unusual intonations, both of them responding with exaggerated Oh-shit faces.
“That a promise?” he asked.
“Haha, well if it was a super promise, like no matter what, then that’d be rape my boy. Depends how I feel at the time. But, ya know, keep your calendar free, is all I’m saying.”
She came home fifteen minutes shy of her curfew, and enjoyed a deep sleep.
>< >< ><
After a drama-free day at school, guess what awaited her at home.
“Another one of your junk packages,” her mom informed her. Her mom was supportive but perplexed by her daughter’s chosen hobby. A generational thing, she thought, that she just didn’t get. She didn’t get a lot of modern things, but at least with most modern things, she could understand how someone could conceivably enjoy something, or what they were supposed to be enjoying about it. These books Karen got were just outrageous junk, attempts to shock.
“Oh shee-it!” Karen grabbed the package and noticed the return address. “Woah, this guy lives in Woonsocket. He’s next door!”
“Better give him a good review!”
“He could be huge one day! I could be launching the career of a hometown hero!” Of course, they both knew that no one got famous writing the shit that Karen reviewed.
She opened the manila packaging and, what could she say, she was impressed. The book was a handsome and hefty trade paperback. She checked the back of the book — geez, 200+ pages, although she did note the text was probably size 14 font. This couldn’t be cheap to produce.
The cover was of ....what was it, exactly? A black cartoon dildo juxtaposed next to a picture of a strange animal that looked like a wooly quadruped with a pig-like snout. The animal picture was ripped right off National Geographic website. How’d she know it was taken right off National Geographic website? At the very bottom right of the image, she could see the crunched-font copyright.
What the hell is the... ahh, this must the eponymous aardvark. The title of the collection and the author’s stupidly long nom de plume were both spelled out in the same garish, splattered-paint font.
She loved, loved, loved new trade-paperback books: the almost biomechanical smooth feel of the covers, even the smell of the pulp paper. She clutched the book and ran into her room like a dog absconding with a biscuit.
She opened the book to a random page, just exploring it. Ashton Kutcher Slaughter Dance Party, read one title. Brilliant. This book was going to be a hot tawdry mess. She updated her Goodreads page and added this book to her “Currently Reading” list and dove into the introduction.
The ASPCA states that 1.4 million cats are euthanized each year. I was supposed to be one of those cats.
Quite the lede.
Alone, abandoned, no cat mommy to call my own (my siblings ate her upon birth), all selected for adoption. Despite this rap sheet, I had one loved one in the shelter system, my cat man and main squeeze Cuddly Malone. Life is never easy: he ended up doing 25 years in the State Pen for loitering in litter boxes and aggravated rape.
With no one to fend for me, I fended for myself. I taught myself to read. To write. To feel. That’s when I was no longer just a cat. I was....A Kat, which is like a cat but with a different spelling that would impress other cats if they knew how to spell. But they don’t. Only kats can. And I’m the only Kat.
Okay then. She was used to this type of gonzo-style myth-making. How long did this introduction last? She skimmed it and felt fatigued. Jesus, fifteen pages. She skipped five pages of it and found more-of-the-same, with all the standard non-titillating attempts at titillation, violence, non sequiturs and spot-the-references that she half-feared / half-expected. Ashton Kutcher adopted the author at some point, then peed on him and returned him, with strict orders to be euthanized, that’s why he’s targeted in one story, et cetera.
She turned to the story that seemed the most promising, i.e. like an actual real idea: the story of the serial killer who only kills people who use their phones in movie theaters.
It was two lines of set-up and all “pay-off.”
It was in some super hero movie, does it even matter which one anymore? You texting whore, you don’t think this money means something to me? What kind of fucking sociopath are you? I paid for these tickets. Do you really not realize how annoying that light is? Really, is that possible? Is that humanly fucking possible? Or do you just not care? Your thug boyfriend isn’t here to protect you, he’s gone to take a shit instead of listening to the shit coming out of your mouth, I thought as the knife went through the stupid cunt’s throat, rivulets of blood flying like my future ejaculate when I’d fantasize about this later with a toaster up my ass. I crushed her dainty fingers with my free hand, breaking her stupid fucking expensive nails, too. I did a 360 around her neck with the knife like I was wrapping a Christmas present. I popped her head off like a pie top and put her beaming, blaring smart phone into the stump. Her orifices lit up like a fluorescent jack o-lantern. A jack o-lantern...of death!
She skimmed the rest of the story, sighed, then listlessly skimmed some others. They were all tiring and unengaging, all pretexts for hate-filled violence, perversions, and shoehorned wackiness. It was boring and tepid.
She put the book aside. Oh well. Non-fiction was her go-to palate cleanser, so she fired up her Kindle and returned to her book on the missing colony of Roanoke. It was well-written and informative and her mind felt lubricated, that in-the-rhythm satiety when your brain is engaged in worthwhile discourse.
>< >< ><
She thought nothing of the Kat book until two days later, when she received a message from the author on Goodreads.
Hey, it should have arrived by now. Did you get it? Let me know when you did. Is there any way I can get you to read it sooner? Any way at all......Kitty treats!
Ugh.
I got it, thanks! Might take me a while to read, but I will someday. Thanks! was her response.
>< >< ><
She hated writing bad reviews, although she did it if a book was unbearably twee or pretentious, in which case she could be scathing. Despite all the shock factor, Kat’s book was typical run-of-the-mill, boring gonzo stuff. Not very well-written, interesting or clever. In the pantheon of trashy smut, it was no Raped by the Reptar or I, Whorebot.
Karen hoped he’d just forget about it, but that wouldn’t happen. Writers — even junk writers, perhaps, especially junk writers — were incredibly egg-shelled. Realistically, she hoped to just never write anything about it and that he’d pick up on the hint. If that fails, maybe just a two-star review and just saying it wasn’t for her. Short and sweet
.
He responded the next day with an ok and she didn’t respond.
Before class started, she uploaded two new reviews, including a detailed, four-star review for the Roanoke book she spent all night reading and a three-star review for Dive Into Me, a short story smut-thriller that actually took a little time to develop its main two characters. After uploading the reviews, she tortured herself in the gratifying way she always did, by not permitting herself to check on the status updates and comments the reviews had accumulated until she returned home from school.
>< >< ><
Finally, the school day was over. She met Rose in the school’s parking lot. Rose drove her home almost every day — they had the same extracurricular schedule (meaning: they participated in no extracurricular activities), so the timing always worked. Karen’s mom was working late, so naturally they got a little bit high, shielded as they were in the cramped, fenced-in pocket of a backyard.
Karen and her mother lived in a single-family detached cottage-style home, typical for their neighborhood. She called the neighborhood homes Snugsies, each a small cute little house for a small cute little family in the smallest, cutest state in the country. If either of her neighbors ever saw her sneaking in a little reefer with her friend, they never said anything to her mom about it, so she was thankful for that. She was respectful enough to be discreet about it, though. She had that going for her.
Nice and pleasantly-baked — well-done, they called it — Karen and Rose moseyed in from outside, through the Snugsie little kitchen, up the stairs, into her bedroom, the snuggiest room in the whole snuggy house.
“Snuggles,” Karen said aloud, in reverie.
“What?” Rose asked, eyes dimmed, feeling pleasure in nothing more than the act of speaking, the pleasure of existing.
“Check this out!” Karen pulled up her Goodreads account.
Rose checked it out. “Ahh … too … many … comments … cannot … process.”
Karen alighted both hands in victory. “Oh shee-it.” She’d racked up a bunch of comments and likes on her last review. She opened her inbox. Somehow, the message from KatMandu was the one that jumped out at her.
I take it no progress on the book yet. BTW are you rich?
Karen groaned loudly.
“Hah I guess his book failed to deliver.”
Karen reached for the book in a stupor and tossed it over to Rose. “Take it, you can ghost-review it for me.”
Rose strained to read in Karen’s half-lit room.
She read aloud from a passage: “And I made sure to use the edge of my sharpened blade to pop out the clit, the juiciest and most delectable morsel. All was well, as I just ordered in a new shipment of cocktail sauce. Clits: the successful man’s oysters.”
“And that is eeee-nuff of that,” Karen said in a sing-songy cadence.
“Yeah, definitely. Yikes. Fail. I mean, I don’t think a cat could even use a knife?”
“I know, that’s the real problem with it, right? Why else do cats have claws? But seriously, it’s all like that. True fail.”
Karen fired off a reply, saying something like: I’m the richest girl in my entire rich town, shoving my riches in everyone’s face. I mean, who isn’t jealous of the daughter of the overworked single mother who is always afraid of getting laid off from the hospital. I feed off that shit. Cower before me mortals! Serve me my hamburger helper. And no I didn’t finish your book, sorry, I just can’t now. Best of luck, go Bruins, Go Sox (the Rhode Island ones).
She turned off the computer and chilled with her friend, which was all she could ask for.
>< >< ><
She woke up the next day fully-rested. She changed most of her clothes but kept on the same black cat socks, just ‘cause.
It wasn’t until she checked Goodreads that she officially woke up. She was excited. She had eight messages.
Except all but one were from you-know-who.
Okay that’s fine I don’t think you had to give me an attitude, I just felt like you had a rich girl attitude is all. I think it’s rude to accept a book and not review it as soon as possible but it’s ok, just do it whenever.
The other messages all tended toward indignation.
Btw I paid to send you that book out of my own pocket not to make you feel bad but it’s the truth, I don’t make any money doing this, i do it for the fans and for the love of it. People think its all a joke but its not, I take this very seriously.
How do you respond in the face of seven messages, most of them sent between midnight and 4 am? Answer: You don’t. Ignore, bye bye!
It never even occurred to her to conduct a deep-dive of his profile page on Goodreads. The background of his profile page was overlaid with the same tabby cat as before, with the same gash-of-a-Photoshop style smile. She scrolled down to see some of the recent posts.
Another bitch ignored me, whatcha gonna do, back under the kat house.
Going out for the evening, started another post. Under the heading was a picture, shoulders visible, of him wearing a brown paper bag on his head that looked tightly soldered on. The bag reminded her of when she had to wrap textbooks in brown paper when she was in elementary school. There were drawn-on angular black-marker triangles for cat’s ears and a roughly-drawn black circle — a mini-head for his head mask — with black rows of triangles, presumably to resemble chomping teeth, if you were a lenient parent of a particularly lazy and artistically untalented child. He was raising his arms and, from the color and appearance of his hands, she pictured a lean, wiry white man in his thirties.
One other image actually made her do a double-take. Most of his face wrapped in sheer saran wrap, with him making a malevolent O-face with just his front top and bottom teeth visible. The saran wrap added an alien viscosity to his appearance that was, given the intensity of his look, pretty damn frightening. She could see his brown eyes, his brown, longish hair, his thin brown eyebrows, his other dominating masculine features: slightly protruding forehead, long neck and pronounced Adam’s apple. He was white and in shape. His face was even kind of cute, if taken out of all other context.
With a free hand, he was pulling a tuft of his brown hair. Viciously. The angle, his face, his partially-closed eyes, all made the distress plain to see. This was, uhhhh, suffering for his art?
Someone I really respected gave me a shitty review. Fucking all. Feel like shit now. Need to suffer through it and keep going, read another post, which had some “likes” and semi-literate comments encouraging him not to get too down and to keep “persvering.”
She didn’t like looking at other reviews before she did her own, but since there was frankly no chance in hell she’d be reviewing this guy’s book anytime soon, she allowed her curiosity to get the better of her. Shocking — largely confused and irritated 1-and-2 star reviews, with some surprisingly eloquent five-star defenders lambasting the masses for not getting the satire or being too politically correct and squeamish.
How can you not love a story where a dog-version of Zoe Deschanel is the bad guy who goes by Zoey Daschundelle? Seriously, people? Get a sense of humor. It’s satire. It’s making fun of your superficiality, your obsession with celebrities and taking it to its most outrageous extreme. So it’s ok to commodify female sexuality, to pretend to be a nation that hates violence but glorifies bad-asses and superheroes? Well, this collection is brave enough to take it all to the extreme, to throw it right in your face. You can’t look away. This is the underside of America, all the concealed psychosis laid out for all to see. Nowhere to hide. This is your principal furtively masturbating to the high school yearbook. This is your beloved father figure taking bribes. This is genius.
Karen made one last attempt: she read — all twenty goddamn pages — of the above-referenced story, and, no no no no no, not for her. Or anyone. But particularly not for her.
She perused the rest of his profile abs
ent-mindedly, eager to log off. One other picture stuck with her. An open refrigerator, top shelf full of Narragansett Coffee Stouts. God bless Rhode Island and fuck all the haters, only Nassets and Argonauts, straight from the source, can inspire my mind, read the caption. So, claiming he was from Rhode Island wasn’t just fronting — as low-stakes as Goodreads seemed, sometimes authors pretended to have something in common with a reviewer to try and curry favor.
He did live in Rhode Island, apparently.
Unfortunately.
The last of his eight messages read:
Fine, actually I tell you not to read it, you aren’t worthy of it or you are not the right audience for it. Or, in other words, fuck you rich girl! Stupid whores I don’t mean literally whores but people like you just goddamnit fuck it if you aren’t going to be supportive then fuck it. I’ll always have Scarlett Johannson and Gillian Anderson and a million other beautiful woman to inspire me. Kats get all the pussy you know. Sorry if that was harsh but I need to be honest.
Her response wrapped up her feelings nicely:
Please do not ever contact me again.
Already a little jittery with nervous energy, she sent out a text to Justin, inviting him to come over on Friday night from around “10 p.m. to ?” The (?) was to add to the mystery, but really he had to be gone by 2 a.m., because that’s when her mom’s double shift ended and he’d have to high-tail it out of there way before she got home.
Might as well transfer her nervous energy into something productive, she figured.
It took Justin a while to respond — playing it cool, she figured, although cool was the last word she’d use to describe him (and that was a compliment), but he accepted the invitation amidst a flurry of coy emoticons
They were on (like Donkey Kong, she added unconsciously in Rose’s voice, as if they were linked up telepathically, get out of my mind!). Two days away. Yeah. I’ll make sure to shower that day! she texted him when he confirmed that he’d come over. Ewwwwww, he responded, but even if you don’t you know I still WUB you. She sent back a blushing emoticon. They never said anything about love; maybe that’s why he went instead for the satiric misspelling. If she responded positively, maybe he’d work his way up to “luv” and more and more permutations until he got to the real thing.
With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer Page 15
