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: : : OTHER TIMES SHE JUST GETS ANGRY. Like say now. She's waiting for her bus, drunk. Coming home after a night spent with Oliver in the bar. They'd had a good time, like their other good times, and they rode the subway part of the way together, and as his stop approached she thought these words at him: ask me. She tried to push them into his head. It must not have worked because he got up, clapped her on the shoulder in a way that communicated pal, just pal, nothing more, and he said well, I'll catch up with you on Wednesday, okay?
It hurt. And so she stands here in the warm spring wind, under the L tracks, waiting for her bus, hurting. And she feels foolish about being hurt, she had thought that she was beyond all this, she had thought that she was, you know, a Strong Independent Woman, the attention of a man shouldn't matter to her, rejection shouldn't matter to her. But here she is feeling hurt. She's hurt and on top of that she's failed to be the kind of woman she wants to be, she's no better than she was when she was fourteen, looking in the mirror and thinking I wish I was pretty, and her drunken awareness of this failure hurts even more than the rejection.
Age fourteen. That was around the age when she first started to get into punk, and soon after she ended up with her first boyfriend, Ricky, a hardcore kid who ran a cassette distro out of the basement of his parents' house, and for a long time after that she didn't have to worry about being pretty. You didn't have to be pretty to be a punk. Maybe, she thinks, maybe she could go back to that world, there are still punks, she sees them around, maybe she could still get something from that scene. But they're all so young, the punks she sees nowadays, they don't look at her with kinship, they don't even notice her. I could teach some of those boys a thing or two, she thinks. I've been around the block.
That's the point at which she just says stop. What the hell are you thinking. You don't even want this. You made a decision, remember? And she remembers: almost two years ago now, a night at the bar with Fletcher during which she swore off men, swore off women, swore off the whole useless mess of sexual relations. It felt so good to just once and for all say I'm rid of this. It felt so good to stare sex in the face and say fuck you, sex. I don't need your fake union. I'm doing just fine by myself.
And yet here she is, riding the bus the rest of the way home, alone, miserable, and miserable about being miserable. She lets her neck loosen, lets her head bang solidly against the window, as though hoping that the impact will knock the fucking sense back in.
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