It was 11:23 on Tax Day, and she'd been broke as a joke off her feet on the labor market for years but nonetheless as ill as anybody could feel then. Usually it's the ceiling which collapses, but in her case it was the pelvic floor. For over a year she'd whined and moaned to family and total strangers about the injury she'd taken once, again, and then repeatedly to the utter indifference of one and all as if the bad cliche females were going to war with already in the 1980s at 'take back the night rallies,' you're asking for it, held purchase with them.
Other than the injury, and the credit card debt she'd accumulated trying to treat it which could never be sorted by bankers or lawmakers with medical expenses, she might be fine. The Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities had phoned to say they found her secondhand Hermes scarf, and a dance company in the suburbs would reportedly entertain her wish to join them as a performer. But the pain was staggering, and outside the air was thick with smoke particles and fuel exhaust. There was nothing she could do but beg.
In a way, her adulthood had been making peace with that prospect. Her father, a digital animator hired to be the software instructor at a firm called Computer Solutions, was the one who brought Windows into their living room. That's how she came to log into America Online for meeting classmates on Instant Messenger after dinner most nights, and then eventually set an alarm to wake up at night while her parents were asleep to surf the Internet, which was not where she found out about sex.
That was rather in the printed pages of her father's stacks of Men's Health and the paperback copies of young adult fiction such as Judy Blume's "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" she found in the library and acquired in bookstores they visited with her mother. I can't remember how she ended up on those Yahoo Geocities websites exposing the BDSM scene which must have been hiding in plain sight on Sundays when her parents brought her along to their academic brunches on Диван Street in Chicago, around the corner from a shuttered synagogue that had become the Leather Archives & Museum for community-engaged research on romance after Freud. She felt stunned by seeing fetish images of amputations displayed with war photography in effect challenging the Holocaust as a familiar narrative; perhaps another child would have reported it to a parent, but she felt implicated by looking.
All that had happened to her in elementary school was acceleration. Brilliant answers to standardized tests and classroom lessons had called on her to skip a grade in math, but the first assignments she submitted to Michael Tavill earned Cs, which cost her at home until she was delivering As again. The following year, after entering classrooms boasting computers of their own, she started experimenting; one semester she didn't turn in homework for weeks or months despite performing well in class until the teacher admitted she needed that paperwork to square her marking. Then came junior high school.
Mario Garcia is the husband of a vegetarian living in the suburbs with two daughters he sired. She encountered him in the 6th grade, and remained under his observation until graduating for high school. At a party one night, she took a call telling her to turn on the news, where she his mugshot displayed announcing an arrest for rape of a minor. A familiar network of student blogs disclosed her identity as a soccer player, to say he was playing coach. That was the last the system asked her to know about him before she had to go looking for answers herself.
For whatever reason, a lone photograph from that party had been posted online like a thumbnail just large enough to make her out in drawstring grey lounge pants. It was only one out of countless parties she'd attended as a virgin before her cohort scattered on assignment out of town, and she with them in New York City.