her friend and the least I could do was say yes. Yes to Kahlúa in our iced coffee, and yes to erasing ourselves and starting over.
It did hurt a tiny bit because I was already makingmyself over and I loved the results because they made me look like Seemy. She said,
We have to have a serious talk. Promise you won’t get mad?
And then she told me I needed my own style, and then I realized I looked like her in the same way a “magic growing dinosaur” toy looks like its larger self before you drop it in water and it grows five hundred times its size. It stops being cute and starts being weird and bulbous and gross.
Seemy said I should go the other way. Away from cute. So I did what she said and I ricocheted.
Seemy puts tiny star stickers on each of her fingernails? I paint mine black with a Sharpie. Seemy buys a pair of Lolita-style oversize sunglasses in the shape of hearts? I pierce my eyebrow. And then my lip. And then my tongue.
I made myself delight in my manufactured edginess. Black clothes, black hair with rainbow stripes, platform combat boots that hiked me even taller, skull rings. It made me angry sometimes, that I was stuck being the shadow to her light. I made a T-shirt with a quote from that old band Rage Against the Machine. I tore off pieces of duct tape to make the words, and I never washed the shirt so they wouldn’t come off. A NGER IS A GIFT , the shirt said. Seemy thought it was awesome, and sometimes I wore it and felt a secret prickling of pride because she didn’t even know it was directed at her.
Cute little Seemy, and big bad me, tipsy masters of New York City.
But toward the end of our friendship, right before the Nanapocalypse, she started to get all prickly about the cute thing. Toad would say something to her, call her pixie or laugh when she said something serious, and she would lose her shit. Start screaming at him. Swearing. Which would make him laugh more. And it
was
kind of funny, because here was this tiny thing wearing a pair of bright red rain galoshes and a 1950s party dress roaring out streams of obscenities, and halfway through it’s like she would just give up, and she would keep swearing but her voice would get higher or she would curtsy or giggle or do something that dulled her edge down to nothing and then she would sigh and say, “Nobody takes me seriously,” and Toad would say, “Sure we do, pixie,” and then he’d pass her the bottle.
Once, around this time, Seemy and I were walking and she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and asked me, “Do you think I’m sexy?”
Some woman brushed by and snapped, “Very sexy, now get out of the way.”
We were in SoHo, on the way back to my apartment. It was a Saturday in spring, so the sidewalk was totallyclogged, and all I wanted was to get off Broadway and onto one of the side streets.
“Well?” Seemy asked. People streamed around us. Tourists looked as us, anxious for any kind of in-the-wild New Yorker moment. “Am I?” Seemy turned in a circle. Not a cutesy turn, but a matter-of-fact
Please be honest
turn. She was wearing a pair of high-waisted blue wool sailor’s trousers we’d found at Beacon’s Closet, a snug plain white T-shirt. It was a less adorable look than she usually went for, especially since she’d taken scissors and slit the T-shirt right down the front so the electric blue lace bra she’d stolen the other day showed through.
“You’re the sexiest thing on two legs,” I told her.
She scowled and stomped past me, groaning. “You just say that because you love me. Toad said the same thing.”
Sometimes, near the end, when I’d go to meet her in the park before going out, I’d find her talking to the guys we called randoms who hung out there sometimes. I’d see her through the gate, sitting on the back of the bench, holding court over a group of guys who made my stomach lurch in nervous anticipation.
If you took apart the way these guys looked, dissected them with one of those online
It did hurt a tiny bit because I was already makingmyself over and I loved the results because they made me look like Seemy. She said,
We have to have a serious talk. Promise you won’t get mad?
And then she told me I needed my own style, and then I realized I looked like her in the same way a “magic growing dinosaur” toy looks like its larger self before you drop it in water and it grows five hundred times its size. It stops being cute and starts being weird and bulbous and gross.
Seemy said I should go the other way. Away from cute. So I did what she said and I ricocheted.
Seemy puts tiny star stickers on each of her fingernails? I paint mine black with a Sharpie. Seemy buys a pair of Lolita-style oversize sunglasses in the shape of hearts? I pierce my eyebrow. And then my lip. And then my tongue.
I made myself delight in my manufactured edginess. Black clothes, black hair with rainbow stripes, platform combat boots that hiked me even taller, skull rings. It made me angry sometimes, that I was stuck being the shadow to her light. I made a T-shirt with a quote from that old band Rage Against the Machine. I tore off pieces of duct tape to make the words, and I never washed the shirt so they wouldn’t come off. A NGER IS A GIFT , the shirt said. Seemy thought it was awesome, and sometimes I wore it and felt a secret prickling of pride because she didn’t even know it was directed at her.
Cute little Seemy, and big bad me, tipsy masters of New York City.
But toward the end of our friendship, right before the Nanapocalypse, she started to get all prickly about the cute thing. Toad would say something to her, call her pixie or laugh when she said something serious, and she would lose her shit. Start screaming at him. Swearing. Which would make him laugh more. And it
was
kind of funny, because here was this tiny thing wearing a pair of bright red rain galoshes and a 1950s party dress roaring out streams of obscenities, and halfway through it’s like she would just give up, and she would keep swearing but her voice would get higher or she would curtsy or giggle or do something that dulled her edge down to nothing and then she would sigh and say, “Nobody takes me seriously,” and Toad would say, “Sure we do, pixie,” and then he’d pass her the bottle.
Once, around this time, Seemy and I were walking and she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and asked me, “Do you think I’m sexy?”
Some woman brushed by and snapped, “Very sexy, now get out of the way.”
We were in SoHo, on the way back to my apartment. It was a Saturday in spring, so the sidewalk was totallyclogged, and all I wanted was to get off Broadway and onto one of the side streets.
“Well?” Seemy asked. People streamed around us. Tourists looked as us, anxious for any kind of in-the-wild New Yorker moment. “Am I?” Seemy turned in a circle. Not a cutesy turn, but a matter-of-fact
Please be honest
turn. She was wearing a pair of high-waisted blue wool sailor’s trousers we’d found at Beacon’s Closet, a snug plain white T-shirt. It was a less adorable look than she usually went for, especially since she’d taken scissors and slit the T-shirt right down the front so the electric blue lace bra she’d stolen the other day showed through.
“You’re the sexiest thing on two legs,” I told her.
She scowled and stomped past me, groaning. “You just say that because you love me. Toad said the same thing.”
Sometimes, near the end, when I’d go to meet her in the park before going out, I’d find her talking to the guys we called randoms who hung out there sometimes. I’d see her through the gate, sitting on the back of the bench, holding court over a group of guys who made my stomach lurch in nervous anticipation.
If you took apart the way these guys looked, dissected them with one of those online
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