living myth

three conversations, three people, and the great devourer

This is not my favorite way to spend an afternoon, but my friend asked my to come, so here I am. It’s one of the last sunny days of September, warm and a little smokey. I’m in a bikini I borrowed from his little sister, bad tanlines from this summer on display, legs in the pool, head tilted back into the sunshine. Another pool party filled with the type of teenagers I try to avoid— rich, shiny, tidy, new swimsuits and expensive drugs. Everyone’s got something in their system, got some sort of high or a buzz going.

There’s a boy in front of me, square jawed, straight nosed, grinning with straight white teeth. We’ve been talking. It’s fascinating to me how two people can say words to each other and not know what the other is saying. The group around us carries their own conversations on who wore what to homecoming, who’s making the football team this year, applying to Ivy League schools.

“Are you sure that you don’t want, like, any socials? You’re such a babe, you should be an influencer,” says the boy. His pupils are so dialated I can barely see his irises, White Claw in hand. I don’t even know if he’s present, if he’s aware of what he’s saying. I take a good, long look at him— the permed hair, the shaved chest and armpits, the washboard abs, the perfectly even tan, the drugged-out, chemical happiness. It makes me feel sick.

“I’m sure,” I say. He runs a hand through his hair, pouting.

“Damn, you’re hard to get… it’s a good thing I like the chase.” He grins at me. I’m sure that if I found a Ken doll attractive, I would have swooned at it. That eerie, fanged, predatory smile.

“Do you know what a cave bear is?” I ask.

“Huh?”

“Nevermind.” I see those straight white teeth eating me alive when I try to run. Bite force of a natural predator will puncture my internal organs shatter my bones. It likes playing with its food, so I’ll pass out before I asphyxiate, and that’s when it’ll eat me. I won’t be enough so it’ll go after others, always hungry, never satisfied. This beast will never be satisfied. Chomp chomp.

Mostly, I’m sorry for him. I feel bad for this boy, this child, because we are both children and he cannot imagine a life where it isn’t be a beast or get eaten by the beast. He doesn’t realize that everyone gets eaten in the end, no matter how many followers you have, and he cannot imagine not being a part of this devouring beast.

“I’m sorry,” I say to him.

He grins, sparkly. “It’s okay,” he says. Oh, those teeth are going to devour the world. He’s still talking about my ‘nevermind’.

“No,” I say. I’m pleading at this point. Can you hear me? “I’m sorry, but I just don’t want to get eaten.”

He laughs and it’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard. “You’re so weird. Seriously, they would eat that up basically anywhere. People love that out of pocket shit.”

I could scream. He doesn’t even know that there’s a lion in the room, he’s just so used to offering up meat. He doesn’t stop long enough to wonder if the knocking is a friend or a wolf at the door.

“You don’t even think twice,” I say. I’m almost on the brink of tears.

“For real!” He says with an endless sort of cheer, draining the rest of his drink. He looks at me with those big pupils and white fangs. Like a vampire. What big teeth you have, stranger. “I’m gonna get another White Claw, you want one?”

“You don’t need more white claws.” What he stands for will tear us all apart.

“Facts, dude, I should stop drinking right now. You’re literally so smart. You should really get an Insta, I want like, a direct look inside your brain. Ha.”

If I was in a TV show, this is where I’d look into the camera. See? He doesn’t get it. And the audience would laugh, and I’d roll my eyes because sitcom characters always somehow know that the problem they’re facing isn’t real and will be solved by the end of the episode or season.

It hasn’t been real to me for a long, long time. Life hasn’t been real. But now it is. And it comes down to this: I do not want to get eaten. I do not want to become a zombie.

The boy is standing in front of me with cardboard cut out thoughts. The boy is reading from a script. He’ll have a nice life, I think— graduate with a decent GPA, go to an expensive college that his parents pay for, either kill himself or meet a cardboard girl there, get married, and have three cardboard kids and a Tesla in the driveway of a mid-century modern house. The kids will grow up feeling unfufilled and wronged, despite having a picture perfect childhood. The cardboard boy will be put into an expensive retirement home with his cardboard wife and die of a heart attack in his 90s. And his TikTok followers won’t give a shit, because they stopped following him when he hit his 30s. And his Instagram followers won’t give a shit, because they were never really his friends. And all of his cardboard bros will already be dead. People will go to his funeral and move on, and these malcontented cardboard kids will get married to other malcontented kids, and they don’t know what went wrong with their childhoods so they raise their kids the exact same. And those children will hate themselves and their parents and the world, and die young as possible in accidents and suicides.

The cardboard boy is grinning at me. Chomp chomp. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know.

“So,” he says.

“Yeah?” The others are listening in now, the conversations dying off around us.

“Wanna go out sometime?” The light in his eyes is chemically put there, a fake light from a temporary high.

“No,” I say. He waits for an explanation, but I don’t elaborate. The kids around us burst into nervous giggles.

“Why not?” A pout so generic it almost hurts to look at.

“Do you want a list?” I ask. It’s a genuine question, but a few of the people around us are oohing. Like I roasted him, or something.

His high is breaking. He’s getting upset, grinding his jaw— must be on ecstasy. I’m angry, too, I think. “Yeah. You know what, I do.” Someone takes their phone out.

“Put the fucking phone down,” I say, and they do. “I don’t know your name. I don’t need to, because I know who you are. You’re a slave to trends. You’re a zombie. And I don’t need reasons to turn you down.” I don’t know what’s sadder, how calm and clinical my voice is or that I’m in this situation in the first place.

“Preach!” A girl in the back yells. I could cry. She doesn’t know either. This is a spectacle to her, you can see it in her face. She’s hungry for it.

“I’m not preaching. I already told you, you know? I don’t want to get eaten.” With that, I get up and leave. Someone catcalls me with an almost cartoonish whistle. I keep walking. I don’t look back.

---

My friend is by the door. “Shit luck,” he says, hugging me.

“You need better friends,” I say, and he grimaces. “Drive me home?”

“And leave my shitty friends alone in my house?”

“Yeah, leave your shitty friends who didn’t notice you disappeared into your basement like an hour in.”

He grabs his keys. “Long way home?” He already knows the answer.

His car is as much of my baby as it is his, a 1990 Alfa Romeo Spider someone was selling for real cheap. It was cheap because it was a piece of shit, but we fixed it up a few summers ago, and she’s been a doll ever since. The top is down, and the wind makes an effort at drying my hair as he pulls onto the interstate. We’re not actually going to leave Washington today, but one day we might. It’s a tempting thought. I get away from the big nothingness at home, he gets away from the endless sports games and all the other shit his parents make him do. We could grab our boards and hit the coast, surf every day, live off takeout and pick up restaurant jobs. It’s not like either of our lives are hard, it’s just that they’re not ours. And we’ve got a fast car.

I look at him— shades on, hair back in the warm wind, tanned and shirtless. Something in me thinks that I should fall in love with him, just because he’s the beautiful boy I’m in the car with, and I’m the girl he’s giving a ride home. I won’t, though, and he won’t either. This is something that we can control. He’s the same type of curious machine that I am, and if we don’t admit something, it won’t happen. Emotional little pieces of clockwork.

“Want me to kill him?” he asks. I laugh, and the wind drags it away.

“It’s much less satistfying if you do it. And I don’t see the point in killing something that’s already dead. He could get better, he could figure out how to live his own life, but he won’t, y’know? He’s comfortable.”

The air smells like gasoline and dried grass and burnt things. Home.

“What do you think,” I start. He waits for me to finish. “What do you think would happen to me if I did get social media? Because I know people that are fine. You’re fine.”

He pauses, thinking. “You’d get popular. And you’d hate it, and lose the respect you have for yourself. I just think you’d be uncomfortable. It’s like it was back there, you know? You don’t… you’re different then those types.” He laughs. “To use your own metaphor, they’d eat you, and because you know what it feels like to be eaten, you’d resist. And they don’t like that.”

“How do you do it?”

“Get eaten?”

“Yeah.”

“We grew up different, Lee. I think I was born in the stomach, sometimes.” He’s right. His mother wore makeup to run a marathon because she wanted to be ready for the photos. Mine laughed in her face when she offered her a tube of mascara. “I’m used to it. Especially because of my parents, and the money, too, I think. It’s just expected, always has been, for me. What did you call it? Pretty, happy, busy? My mother would rather die than sit around or go somewhere with no makeup on.”

I think of my own mother. She’s out with friends for lunch right now, I think, with a bare face and denim cutoffs and an old tanktop. I look at myself— cutoffs, bikini top, shoeless, acne on my cheeks and gaptoothed. The only makeup I’m wearing is eyeliner, smudged and half-gone from the pool, no doubt. His father, a surgeon, prescribed him Acutane before he even got pimples. It’s a different life.

He continues. “You were born far enough away from it that you could see the teeth, and you walked away. You cut your own hair, you think your own thoughts, you have your own taste and opinions. You could do well, be one of those tastemakers or whatever, but you shouldn’t. Because if you’re smart enough to tell the beast to fuck off, you deserve it leaving you alone.” Pauses. “I really do value that about you, you know. You’re good for me. Like a reality check. You’re the only one I know that takes me out of the circus like that.”

“You’re a good boy, you know that?” I ask.

“But I can always be better.”

“Everyone can be better.”

He’s got some rock radio station on, and I laugh when the Offspring come on.

“It’s fucking with your head, isn’t it?” he asks.

“What is?”

“The zombies.”

“They always do.” I sigh, and he waits. “I don’t like. I don’t see myself as anything, you know? Like I don’t really percieve myself as anything other than existing in the world. What I think about myself is more instinct then actual thoughts. And it’s just odd to me that people think about me, and people have opinions on how I act and what I say and do, and that people think I could be cool.”

“They do think you’re cool. I think you’re cool,” he says.

“But you know me. They don’t.” It’s still summer, even though it’s September.

“You know, when I went to go return my library books last year— this was in June, so I’d already been out of school for like three-ish months— three people asked me out. And there was this guy, and I didn’t know much about him aside from him being on the football team, still don’t. And you know what he says to me?” He looks at me, eyebrow raised. “He’d gladly let me hit him with a semituck. And I told him that he didn’t even know me, and to that he asks me if anyone does.”

“Do you think people know you?” He asks.

“Sometimes. But I don’t think that anyone knows me, purely because nobody can really know anybody, y’know? I mean, my best friend can finish my sentences and my thoughts like we share a brain, but I don’t think she knows everything about me. The people on Tumblr, who I love dearly, don’t really know that much about me. You can never know exactly what someone would think or do in response to something.”

“You want it to be like that movie you showed me. With the twins.”

“Dead Ringers.”

“Yeah. Conjoined.”

“I don’t know, because I also really like that nobody can know me like that. I like having a few secrets.”

“And that’s why you can’t have social media. You have to be transparent or a different person, and there’s only one you. And she’s opaque,” he says.

The tires whir beneath us.

“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe you’re right.”

---

The next day, it’s another baby blue afternoon— the sky opens up above my best friend and I like a dome of stained glass, trapping us and the mountains surrounding our city into a sunny snowglobe. We’re in her car. We’re always in her car, really, but right now we’re not going anywhere, just sitting in the trunk in the parking lot of the mall, queueing songs up. Glimpse of Us by JOJI (her song) is playing. My phone sporadically buzzes, and she giggles every time it does.

“It’s wigging out,” I say, watching the screen glitch. I dropped it in the kitchen sink yesterday and water got into the cracks in the screen, and it hasn’t been working out ever since. “I think it’s time I get a flip phone.”

“Oh, of course,” she says. “That totally fits your vibe.”

“I have a vibe?”

Coffee and TV by Blur (my song) starts playing. She laughs. “Oh yeah. Like, you’re… cool. I don’t know. I’d see you on the bus or in the hallway or something and I’d never forget you.”

“Because I’m cool,” I repeat.

“Yeah, totally. I mean, I don’t even know who this is.” She gestures to her phone. “You have taste that isn’t whatever’s popular or what’s on TikTok or whatever. That makes you cool.”

“It’s Blur. And fuck TikTok,” I say.

“Which makes you cool! I don’t know. You don’t need validation or like, other people. You play bass. You can sing, you read poetry for fun and tape poems onto your walls, you got a 1250 on the PSAT without studying, you’re a dancer, you’re pretty, I’ve never seen you wear anything off the rack, y’know, you alter literally everything…” She trails off. “I don’t know. You like yourself and you don’t care if people don’t like you.”

“Well, I am skinny. D’you think I’d get a slow motion shot of me walking down the hallway if we were in a shitty teen movie?” I joke.

“Absolutely,” she says, dead serious.

“Huh. I could do Jennifer Check, I think.”

“Who?”

“I’ll put it on our watchlist.”

“Perf.”

I take a sip of my boba tea. The ice is mostly melted, dulling the sweetness. “It’s funny. I mean, I don’t think I’m that cool.”

“What do you think?”

“About myself? Nothing. As cliche as it is, I’m just existing in this world, y’know? My life is happening and I’m mostly here. I might as well enjoy it, and I don’t really get that much joy from relentless self analysis. I just don’t think that content people do that.”

“Which means you’re cool,” she says as the song switches to august by Taylor Swift (her song).

“I think you’re cool, and you’re really into all that self-discovery and self-help stuff,” I say. I mean it. She’s the coolest person ever, in my eyes. I’ve never met anyone as compassionate or with a better work ethic than her.

“Yeah, but I’m like, the girl next door. I’m sweet, I know that, but I’m not cool,” she says.

“You’re a teenage dirtbag. You’re Noelle,” I say.

“What the fuck does that mean,” she says, laughing.

“No way you’ve never heard Teenage Dirtbag,” I say. “The Wheatus song. One Direction covered it.”

“This is why you’re cool,” she says. “You know, like, every song ever.”

“That’s a fucking lie, and this is an incredibly popular song,” I shoot back, adding Teenage Dirtbag to the queue. “Also, you’ve totally heard the 1D cover, trust me. Anyways, the song’s about like— well, it’s from the perspective of this nerd guy who has a crush on this girl, Noelle. And he’s like, ‘oh, I’m such a dirtbag—”

She starts laughing. I carry on.

“And I listen to Iron Maiden like the dirtbag I am, and she’s so out of my league’. But then at the end of the song she comes up to him at prom and is like, ‘I love Iron Maiden and I’ve got two tickets. I’m also a dirtbag, let’s be dirtbags together.’ And then it ends, but whatever, the point is that you’re like everybody else but you’re pretty and sweet and super nice and that makes you next level, y’know?”

“No,” she giggles. “That’s you, but you’re like, cool and not super nice. Well you’re nice, but you don’t let people walk all over you like I do. And you’d never go up to anybody because everybody comes up to you first.”

“I don’t like the people that come up to me,” I say. Day Dreaming by Aretha Franklin (my song) starts playing. “Oh, I love this song.”

She checks her phone. “Who the fuck actually listens to Aretha Franklin that’s not like, I Say A Little Prayer or Respect?”

“I do! Literally tons of people do!”

“Okay, you fucking cool girl,” she says, snorting.

“I’m not cool,” I say. “I’m just strange.”

“Which makes you cool,” she says. I laugh. “A social media hating, stylish, talented, smart, pretty, ex-fighter, tragically cool girl.”

“Tragically cool?”

“You look like that one guy from that show you like. The one that looks like he just got told terrible news. Well, you look nothing alike, but you have the same facial expression when you think people aren’t looking at you,” she says.

“Kendall Roy,” I supply.

“Yeah.” She slurps her boba obnoxiously, and we both laugh.

“He’s like, the most cringefail one in the show, dude,” I say. “Saying I’m like him doesn’t help the ‘I’m cool’ case.”

“You’re not like him, you just both look like you killed someone and the guilt is like, totally killing you,” she protests.

“I thought you didn’t watch Succession.”

“For real? He actually did that. Oh my god,” she says, both of us laughing. “That’s so fucking funny.” I start laughing harder. “Fuck, no it’s not funny. Jesus. It’s— whatever!”

Despite the lighthearted back and forth, I think about it well into the night. I dragged my mattress onto the floor so I could listen to CDs. My best friend would call that cool, my insistence on physical media. Jeff Buckley’s Grace is on. Is this considered ‘obscure’? I take my meds. Is it cool to feel like you’re being martyred every time you move?

The thing is, if there was a single thing different about me, I wouldn’t be considered cool. If I was fat. If I wasn’t school smart. If I had social media. I’m cool because I’m untouchable. I’m cool because I’m the ultimate fantasy— wanted, but never had. I’m cool because I’m seventeen and trapped in a tower, like a heroine. Like Juliet.

I’m cool because I could kill myself and people would blame the world. You don’t get that privilege once you’re older than 26. Then, you just have depression.

Youth is a big cool factor, I think. I’m teenage girl. You don’t have to respect my authority or rationality or my opinions, but you can get away with looking at me and trying to dress like me and wanting me. Wanting to fuck me. Wanting to be me. Wanting to kill me. It’s all okay. I’m your slow motion shot. I’m your nice view.

This box, this cage around me, is more clear than ever. I can see the pedestal it sits on.

And I’m fucking angry.