Hot Girl Summer, or Four Girls One Summer, So Many Guys Such Little Time, a Short Novel

Acknowledgments: for Elizabeth Van Dyke and our summers with the Korossys, you being my favorite most brilliant hot girl I ever hung out with all summer with and Maisie Hills whose gorgeousness and contempt for me terrified me; FOR MYSELF FOR BEING SUCH A FAKE REAL MAN THAT I NEARLY KILLED MYSELF JUST TRYING TO OPEN A BOTTLE OF WINE ONCE ACTUALLY—LOATHING WINE LARGELY BECAUSE I CAN’T OPEN A BOTTLE OF IT TO SAVE MY LIFE AND STILL HAVING NO GODDAMN IDEA HOW TO TIE A TIE DESPITE TERRIBLY WANTING TO WEAR TIES!!!; for myself for being exaggeratedly American by disposition; for myself for being as so many people say “English looking”—for your information apparently I’m very Scottish like eighty percent on my dad’s side and French and Irish and English on my mom’s which is why I like making war I guess as much as making love, being like a lover and fighter at the same time, FIGHTING; for Rob Muller for identifying me as a “real man” when I told him how much I enjoy a good porter and I would be drinking it every day if I could afford it, all day; for people who unsubscribe to the most fun Substack on Substack who have weak stomachs or weak nerves or weak knees and not enough imagination; for my finance bro friend Joe Robinson for saying my prose has so much “velocity”— that’s a hell of a compliment, thanks buddy, hang out soon and we’ll take another Victorian stroll, but I lost your cigar cutter, sorry, I’ll get you another, thanks again for the cigar; for myself for being my high school’s most revered class clown and disrupting class like crazy with the teachers not even wanting to stop me because they were getting such a kick out of it too; for myself in college and losing my sense of humor for years as I endured the longest most painful bout of depression I’ve ever suffered; for my friend Colby who died of laughter when he read Seducing the Therapist, who I am so happy enjoyed it because it took me forever to send it to him because I have such high regard for his extremely critical opinion; for myself for being self-deprecating to a pathological downright masochistic extreme; for my pick-up lines in the supermarket that were so funny they weren’t even good because no one could take them seriously; for everyone’s husband I cracked up too, because I am determined to stop men from hating me!; for my good friend Bernard who laughed his head off when he told me he doesn’t worry about me seducing his girlfriend, Bernard not being able to finish that sentence without laughing so hard, because indeed it’s hilarious how so many people really worry about me doing that; and so also for my friend Kevin Potente who when I ran into him with his beautiful girlfriend cracking himself up said “this one’s mine Jay!”—why can’t more men be confident and self-assured like you men for fuck’s sake?; for Katie Schubauer for being the hottest girl who ever gave me a ride anywhere; for Samantha Feher my yearslong muse and your pictures on Instagram in that dress boasting of your “hot girl summer” in front of a big pool who inspired so much of my literature I can’t even tell you—let me meet you but I don't want to date you—you’re not my type too pretty and too blonde and too adorable, not self-loathing enough—you’re too much like me, I think, I can’t tell; for authentic people and people who want to live authentically without illusions, i.e. real men and real women, the only people I write any of this garbage for; for William Gaddis for being America’s most underrated postwar writer for being a writer who even he admitted just got angrier as he got older; for Billy Joel for getting less and less angry as he grew up and how I hate the line he wrote where it says I found that “just surviving was a noble fight” What’s wrong with you?—I hope your brain thing is nothing serious; for Mike White for creating the very girl-centric White Lotus HBO series that has influenced and impressed me very much; for Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park I’m finally at the end of and for her for being Britain’s wittiest meanest satirist; for Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn that I'm rereading now and I can read over and over and over again; for my cousin John Hoopes for having the taste to declare Moby Dick his favorite American novel; for myself for deciding Huckleberry Finn is probably my favorite and the ultimate American novel; but for Moby Dick for being the most in your-face-novel openly portraying all manly activity as, in a sense, homosexual; for my dad for being a real man if only for not liking foods that are “too sweet,” and how I inherited this feature of his pathology; and for the Hot Girls in my life and in my past and everywhere and all my muses; for Devon Laffey and Liz Cronin particularly and Jaimie Schubauer particularly and how we nearly came to blows once or twice and made these girls crazy about us at one time or another or all the time; I love my rivals!; and for Jake Mulham for pressuring me to put this one up he’s dying to read it so much, Jake maybe my astutest critic who also his friends call him “rake” before I even identified him as one

Author’s Note: someone please have the generosity to make my life a little easier and go to Netflix with this; I went really out of my way here to make this one cinematic and not too difficult to read with characters delightfully hard to stomach. Edith Wharton or Henry James couldn’t do social realism better than I do it here. But it’s not even my best work. I need someone to help me and get me some kind of good like lucrative deal, so I have the freedom to be more experimental and alienate more readers.

“You knock me dead right off my feet,” John Lee Hooker, “Boom Boom”

“Why you gotta give me a fight? Just let me be.”— Kenny Loggins, “I’m Alright,” the Caddyshack theme

“It’s so funny!” my friend Colby on the phone

“I’m gonna make you girls lead me by my hand,” —Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy”

“Jay I hope you are very proud,” Colby on the phone

“Don’t make me have contempt for you,” Nietzsche in a letter to Lou Salome Europe’s most infamous nineteenth century coquettish seductress with whom the philosophical giant was madly in love, Lou Salome up there with Emma Hamilton and Lady Caroline Lamb for being Europe’s most enchanting muses

“I myself jerk off at least twice a day”— Matthew Mcconaughey in “The Wolf of Wall Street”

“My parents taught me what life was about
So I grew up the type they'd warn me about
They said my friends were just an unruly mob
And I should, get a haircut and get a real job

Get a haircut and get a real job
Clean your act up and don't be a slob
Get it together like your big brother Bob
Why don't you, get a haircut and get a real job?

I even tried that nine to five scene
I told myself that it was all a bad dream
I found a band and some good songs to play
Now I party all night, I sleep all day
I met this chick, she was my number one fan
She took me home to meet her mommy and dad
They took one look at me and said, "oh my god!
Get a haircut and get a real job!"— George Thorogood, “Get a Haircut”

“A flute with no holes is not a flute, and a doughnut with no holes is a danish.” — Chevy Chase in “Caddyshack”

“It is the miller’s daughter,

And she is grown so dear, so dear,

That I would be the jewel

That trembles at her ear:

For hid in ringlets day and night,

I’d touch her neck so warm and white.

And I would be the girdle

About her dainty, dainty waist,

And her heart would beat against me,

In sorrow and in rest:

And I should know if it beat right,

I’d clasp it round so close and tight.

And I would be the necklace,

And all day long to fall and rise

Upon her balmy bosom,

With her laughter or her sighs:

And I would lie so light, so light,

I scarce should be unclasped at night.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Miller’s Daughter”

“Give a moment or two to the angry young man,
With his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand.
He's been stabbed in the back, he's been misunderstood,
It's a comfort to know his intentions are good.
And he sits in a room with a lock on the door,
With his maps and his medals laid out on the floor
And he likes to be known as the angry young man.

I believe I've passed the age
Of consciousness and righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight.
I once believed in causes too,
I had my pointless point of view,
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right.

And there's always a place for the angry young man,
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand.
And he's never been able to learn from mistakes,
So he can't understand why his heart always breaks.
But his honor is pure and his courage as well,
And he's fair and he's true and he's boring as hell
And he'll go to the grave as an angry old man.”—Billy Joel, “Angry Young Man”

“I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.”—William Blake, “The Garden of Love”

“Aw Jay!”—Too many girls to count

“Well that guy in the sweater’s off duty

Well he’s out in front of that welfare hotel

The guy in the dress is a beauty

Go all the way, I swear you never can tell

Come on honey, and pull up your socks”— Tom Waits, “Union Square”

“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil,”— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante,” by George Romney

Hot Girl Summer, or, Four Girls One Summer, So Many Guys So Little Time, a Novel

By Sir Jay Burkett

East Hampton in July,

Chapter 1. —Now or Never

“Aren’t any of you just dying to get married?” Bella lashed out suddenly to everyone who was used to her effusions like explosions like a wind that didn’t gust but gush.

“No,” Chelsea objected with casual subdued but unaffected perfectly natural and unmitigated and immitigable revulsion, “no more than I’m dying to get murdered,” Chelsea who turned over to tan her back that was already a fine deep golden brown she couldn’t tan anymore without her becoming a black person which she wouldn’t have minded, “or I’m in a hurry to kill myself,” she added.

“I’m dying to get married,” Bella sighed and stupendously ignored the cruel spiteful interpolation she didn’t ask for but she was, sort of, asking for. However she was no provocateur. With a certain hauteur she was being rhetorical. She knew no one would sympathize with her feelings. Between these friends? And who did she think she was fancying herself a romantic in the manifestly libertine twenty-first century? With Donald Trump for president, and “Only Fans” being an almost respectable way for a girl to earn a living and pay off her student debt, the availability and proliferation of online porn and dating apps that were devoted to servicing your needs immediately? Good luck with marriage, girl, in this extremely interconnected hypersexual world, where if you didn’t get around enough it was that that was frowned upon, not if you got around too little.

Get around or not get around? That was what Hamlet should have asked. No one wants to watch a play about someone obsessed with being and existence. Sex is existence. Not thought. As that melancholy black-clad Prince of Denmark even admits there is no right and wrong; it’s only thinking that made things that way. The moral of the story? Don’t think. Just act. He should have went with his gut or listened to his Father’s ghost and just killed his uncle! Respond and act on every whim and impulse. Without any doubt or care or regard for the consequences of anything you ever did or said. Consequences were a social construct of the wounded who were weak because they were wounded meaning automatically they didn’t matter as a human being. Their feelings didn’t. Your “feelings” deserved to be shot at.

Bella’s hauteur was undetectable because she didn’t know how much she wanted to fly in her friend’s face that she was better than they were for wanting “true love,” which almost did make her a provocateur. Everyone’s a provocateur especially women. Especially girls. Especially hot ones. Especially when Love was dead.

Three or four friends, Bella Caroline Meghan and Chelsea were all fighting the urge not to drink too early in the day tremendously, heroically, but quietly none of them talking about it letting it be the elephant in the room like their horridly good looks when they were in any other place than the Hamptons, at the bored tired commencement of another tiresome Hot Girl Summer; at midday before they went out with a bunch of boys on a big fancy massive yacht later that sultry night.

“I’m dying to get married,” Bella murmured now looking out over the vast pool past the trim brilliant green hedges at the blue white horizon hovering over the water she was not at a vantage point to see where her train of thought disappeared running off like a ship crossing over the end of the world never to return. Where did thought go? Where did these ideas come from? Like strange ghost ships coming to port, then going back out to sea without explanation or apology like someone who doesn’t answer your text messages; ideas were not gentlemen or ladies were they?

Though Bella was certainly the most passionate of the four girls, the most boy crazy sentimental and romantic and thoroughgoingly idealistic, she was perhaps either the dumbest or the most ignorant of course. The most denying. Sentimental souls hated reality and constantly sought to change it like idiots doing the same thing and getting the same disappointing result and then getting mad at it. She was a madwoman.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged with melancholy. She was pacing indecisively back and forth on the patio now the dark Hamptons Dutch Colonial wood of the house looming passively over her head threatening with its age, and upkeep, that might certainly have been swallowed up after all these old years without the families to attend to it and keep it young and keep it pretty and traditional. The Hamptons would never die. Or it would. Everything died. But old styles die hard. Two of the girls were sitting at a table for four next to the big pool, also the house in the sun. The other two were sun bathing in wood deck chairs.

“I just want to be married soon.” She sounded bored, like she had nothing better to say and nothing else to talk about. That was probably why people got married actually; what else was there to do, not getting married? That was crazy.

“And as soon as you’re married, Bell, you’ll wanna be divorced and fast and banging the tennis pro or your trainer, or that piano tuner of yours.”

(That touched a nerve. Bella, scandalized where she stood, blushed and trembled and looked for a moment at Chelsea’s deep golden back and that golden head of languid hair adorning that vapid empty little unfeeling head of hers, and thought how she wanted to hit for her that. Bella hardly played the piano these days. She was too depressed and gloomy even for that. She thought it made her gloom worse. But nothing could make her gloom worse. And it couldn’t hurt to turn to her musical passion for kicks. But the rumor was that in her bottomed out despair and magical boredom she would hit the Chardonnay every weekend morning as soon as her parents were out golfing and shopping and seeing their friends, in the dark of her house on rainy spring mornings she would injure her piano strings and sometimes cut them entirely, so they had to call the hot piano tuner over; so Bella could swoon around him and play the siren college girl. Bella was very grave and very romantic but very naughty too, and even dirty. She blushed easily liked to drop things and act playful in a gloomy sad forlorn way and the piano tuner had nice round steel-rimmed eye glasses; he was tall without being too tall and damned skinny, and Bella liked skinny boys. He was sad and committed— committed to piano playing not into her and Bella found that very attractive about him. He was handsome but not that handsome; but he was very pleasant and lonely and somewhat dark maybe, like someone who freaked himself out easily which made him funny too. Bella liked a funny guy who wasn’t too funny not too funny to start bullying and belittling her for how romantic and ridiculous she was. Tragically though Bella made for a poor seductress, because she was a pathological romantic who didn’t have the heart to be a callous manipulator like one of her friends here on the trip Meghan Clocktower, who was ruthless reckless unscrupulous and remorseless who Bella in her hatred of her considered a narcissist and a psychopath but Meghan knew who she was, she was just a libertine who put Fucking over romance, because some people were just wired that way; and despite its self-evident madness and destructiveness, Meghan was perhaps a genius in her selfishness; Bella was painfully aware of that. So Bella made resigned half-assed attempts at seducing him twirling her underthings over his head and making him uncomfortable. He would have stopped coming here or stopped being a piano tuner if he didn’t need the money so badly. He always came in his little used car to a dark house in Salt Valley on rainy days to find her home alone with her dogs that she performatively talked to and hugged and kissed in front of him as soon as he arrived. Because perhaps if a man saw you being lovey dovey with your dogs then it would subconsciously work so that he would subconsciously want to be in the dogs’ position, and have her kiss him. He was used to this though, and it wasn’t going to work the things they do when they know you're watching all the signs and signals, the stretching and bending over and the fussing with their clothes and their hair that was all for you all display all spectacle exhibition a performance a show.)

Chelsea was just teasing, but she simultaneously knew how angry it would make Bella. Well Bella made her angry. And they were all so bored without men to make their lives more interesting. It was all they had to talk about, marriage, and so they were using each other to bash each other like punching bags until the right guys came along to rescue them from their tanned perhaps hungover selves too. Chelsea was also a pothead, hitting a dab pen all morning. That was how she sat still so serenely to tan and didn’t let life get to her or anything. But God it made her hungry and how hard it was not to eat all the guacamole and hors deurves at every party she showed up at almost too totally faded, to make her a fat hot girl a contradiction a paradox that would make her less beautiful and less disciplined; it took a lot of discipline to look good or look your best; and like all these girls here looking good was of the highest importance, much more important than being happy or finding love, because as long as you were good looking even if you were so good looking it caused you half your trouble, you could rest assured that at least you’re good looking—you can find love and be happy if you’re ugly but if you’re ugly you couldn’t change that you were ugly; you’re also young and life is getting longer all the time these days, you’re healthy you have money and you have much left to live and push for and perhaps take, and you look good now and you can look better and maybe it was going to fade so it was now or fucking never.

Chelsea was a very pretty girl and untroubled and serene. She had very good skin. She tanned the best out of all of them. Well Bella and Meghan didn’t tan well at all. And Caroline didn’t very well either. They were all too white. But Chelsea had some Spanish blood in her so she inherited despite being otherwise Irish just that pigmentation to get her nice and gold every summer to be the envy of her fair-skinned friends. Caroline actually could tan decently. She just didn’t like to or maybe she disdained to. Caroline didn’t like the sun and for all anyone knew she probably didn’t like the summer. They noticed she was happier or less of Salt Valley’s most miserable girl who was the biggest party pooper you ever met when they vacationed in Wyndham and got stoned all day long and took shots of bourbon skiing. Caroline was a winter girl. Bella was a fall girl because that was the season of romance: from October and Halloween, a chance to be someone completely different from who you really are for a change—if only every day could be like that— through Thanksgiving and the chance to tell everyone how thankful you are and grateful you are to them obnoxiously, and on to December and Christmas and the chance to give everyone gifts and to be the most annoying family member crying in tears of too much affection, and the drinking you did and Christmas parties. Chelsea was a summer girl, and Meghan was a summer girl too. They were more intelligently distantly superficial than the other girls cursed with inescapable depths; the Meghans and Chelseas of the world are its unsung heroes because they take nothing seriously or think about anything very much for very long.

(And Caroline was a winter girl, because she was too intellectual and too much of a bad girl to enjoy summer without irony, and spring gave her the most atrocious pollen allergies, and it was abysmal. Summer heat she didn’t like either. She didn’t like the salt water drying her hands out, and she was an anxiety sufferer but she told no one about it and all she thought about were rogue ATV’s running over her on the beach, getting skin or as she liked to call it to her own amusement but not anybody’s else’s “sun cancer,” and sharks! What about sharks! In that East Coast water you could hardly see in, where great whites have been spotted maybe not in Long Island sound but out in Cape Cod so they were around, and what if you get a bull shark that actually preyed in the shallows. Sharks kill people. And imagine getting bitten in half by one. How worse must the pain be because of the terror of being eaten alive by a fucking shark! Yeah and imagine getting seduced by or falling in love with a hot lifeguard for God’s sake! Or getting flattened by an ATV on the beach by a twelve year old who got hold of it or robbed or getting caught in a riptide or pickpocketed or looked at too much and just imagine the more you struggle to get to shore the quicker you seal your fate by getting pulled out and imagine if you had to watch and struggle and hope they got to you and you could see them or imagine them trying to get to you and you hoping but they weren’t going to make it not fast enough, and how it could be hours of those feelings, before you drowned and that had to be one of the worst deaths out there. And mosquitoes with zika or norovivrus? And think how the phenomenon of global warming increases the chance of sharks swimming in the shallows bull sharks migrating north. And how soon with enough pollution we’ll have TICKS that are six feet tall! What else about the summer freaked her out? All the hot guys who were all bros she abhorred. Like an intellectual man hates a girl who just wants to fuck him or alternatively he loves her. It depended on her mood. Caroline needed to know a guy before she slept with him or dated him; well she never dated; she’d had more sex than dates way way more; like a lot of people nowadays. Dating was so antiquated. Dating was for losers. And she didn’t like a hunk. Well she didn’t mind a guy who had muscles. What she didn’t like was a guy who that was all he cared about and couldn’t talk about ideas or how fucked up everything was her life her family the world society that being her favorite subject how coarse vapid vulgar and decadent American society was, needing a sweet good looking intellectual guy to comfort her it was always that way, that’s America it doesn’t take Scott Fitzgerald to see it for what it is or was or perhaps would never stop being or to articulate it so sublimely; you didn’t need Billy Joel to perceive it without illusions and then sentimentalize it; what was perhaps needed was just Faulkner or Hawthorne to give it tragic weight by transporting all the elements of Hawthorne’s New England gothic and Faulkner’s southern gothic and make Long Island spooky and creepy and gothic with sadomasochistic sex and seducers and seductresses galore and foolish romantics losing to these tragicomic fun-lovers making fun of them all the time every step of the way every damned day; Long Island’s writers were too sentimental; that was the problem with Fitzgerald and Billy Joel they were too sentimental too pessimistic too nostalgic too wistful; what you needed was a more affirmative literature to affirm Long Island positively and make it as spectacular and beautiful as it really was, someone to say ah it’s not so bad to be wealthy and powerful after all and to be a damned good for nothing sinner and a nee-er do well, the golf caddies and housewives depending on their friends and family for support and old people depending on young people; we’re not all losing here; a literature that was bizarrely sanguine and optimistic but wasn’t sentimental; Billy Joel and Fitzgerald liked it here too much; you needed writing that was funny; what you needed was someone with the courage to be like Long Island’s Twain or it’s Swift and hold a mirror up to nature and make Caddyshack out of it all, a much much better movie than The Graduate because it wasn’t so fucking serious and rather than a happy ending with a marriage you had everything breaking out into complete farce with a ridiculous golf tournament; the Falstaffian Rodney Dangerfield man who scandalizes the country club with his boorish manners, insulting and humiliating and being a slob; what was needed were guys like that in real life. Larger than life for being the ones who took life the least seriously who were only about: drinking womanizing and having a good time and being fat and not caring. Mistaking the club’s most arrogant member because he was a snob for the waiter deliberately and tipping him and tipping everybody just to show how little he gave a damn about money and maybe tipping yourself for tipping everybody. Goddamnit.)

Chelsea was rather common and typical and girls like this were sort of a dime a dozen because she wasn’t romantic or properly speaking all told passionate about anything or anybody, and she would never be and she never had been in love. She didn’t know what love was and would have bragged about not knowing what it was. She wanted not to ever know too. And she didn’t care how bad this made her; it was only men who wanted to trap you in marriage who wanted you to believe in love and because she was a rich and powerful girl, it didn’t matter to her. And she didn’t care who knew whether she did or didn’t believe in love. The damn sentimental guys who wanted her to commit and oppress her with their baggage and crap. She hated emotional possessive men. Let her be free. Let her get old, let her beauty fade and let her die alone for all she cared. Because she didn’t believe in patriarchal concepts like love. The idea that love was a patriarchal institution invented by nineteenth century men and the Catholic church Meghan Clocktower the libertine promiscuous and politically liberal or libertarian one of them imparted to her, of course Bella’s sworn instant disgust, who wrinkled her nose and scrunched up her voluptuous face with horror and revulsion her edgy edgy goddamned chagrin you couldn’t contain no one could hardly contain Bella’s revulsion with everyone who challenged the values and institutions she stubbornly clung to and never questioned because it would undermine her romantic compulsive self-identity far too much, she not believing or caring how fundamentally religious love was not interested in having as quite as good a time meaning SEX as Meghan did as Meghan needed because that was who Meghan was too lusty too sexy for romance, a dyed-in-the-wool born Men-izer. It wasn’t that Chelsea couldn’t love someone; she just couldn’t fall into it or be in love. She liked to be loose and uninhibited and natural and unfazed and relaxed like Meghan though she was not nearly as promiscuous and frisky and wild as Meghan was because no one was quite as wild a little home wrecker as Meghan Clocktower was whose reputation was so bad and well known she was dangerous to hang out with because of how much she was hated envied and despised and an enemy of polite respectable society she was and she perhaps made herself that way but perhaps she was also loved, loved by a minority and then perhaps some day by the majority too if people could just stomach her at all first. Chelsea wasn’t a passionate person; it was not how she was wired; she was an athlete once; and now she was an analyst for a bank one of those beautiful ones who when you walked into the bank smiled at you prettily and knocked you down with her white teeth and her large green eyes and her mouth and her makeup and her fine nose her chin her cheekbones she was a ravishing girl. With her dry unaffected just genuinely illusionless authentic realism, though she was the most cynical of the party here, she was still not exactly a cynic, just perhaps a cold hard noir-ish realist like a private detective in a Raymond Chandler novel who saw the world for what it was and never let it bother her, but also hardly anything did; and this was getting under Bella’s skin all the time like crazy. Well they were all under each other’s skin all the time. You couldn't even say Meghan was a cynic she was just a hard-drinking free-loving libertine. No philosopher is a cynic, and there was a studied certain philosophy and even a morality to all Meghan’s relentless sleeping around. No one denied her that. “Sex addicts” are not stupid any less than a crazy person, and you could do a lot of dumb things and dangerous things and get into all kinds of trouble, not because you weren’t “smart;” you were smarter than merely smart, smart enough to disdain to be “smart” and instead dupe everybody that you were an idiot or crazy by doing all kinds of things without a care in the world for your own welfare or well being or anybody else’s; because if you were as much of a damned genius as a Meghan Clocktower or Caroline you also were somewhat or a narcissist and a psychopath because your intelligence and tortured rationalizations and justifications for everything you did necessitated that your head would clash loudly deafeningly perhaps with your heart; to have any empathy your best hope was to imagine the consequences of imagine how it all impacted other people because intuitively you had no idea why everyone else who knew as much as you about the mind and human nature or looked like this or was as much of a celebrity with a bad reputation as she was infamous she didn’t know why everyone else didn’t embrace the same lifestyle of living creatively and living dangerously and playing fast and loose with all the guys in her life and living hard and being mad and bad because what else was a girl like her with her sexuality supposed to do with herself? Commit? Settle down? To tie me down you’re gonna have to tie me up first— she had to say to that anyone who gave her a hard time about her rampant conquering and her fantastic oversexedness. It was her firm conviction that people only gave her a hard time about it because she was female. A man wouldn’t be judged so harshly and why for Christ’s sake was that! Her favorite words were Jesus Christ. And for fuck’s Sake. And Goddamnit. And Son of a Bitch. And also Bitch and Cunt. She had a sweatshirt she wore here that said Self Harm in big bold letters as opposed to Self-Care because that was another thing she completely didn’t believe in. Another sweater she had said Toxic. A tee-shirt said Trouble. And so on. She had fancy black six hundred dollar velvet slippers with little Red Flags! sewn into them. On Instagram her bio quoted Kate Moss saying “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” just to trigger people and drive people crazy in this cult these days of “treating” and “healing” and “caring” and “empathy” and the “oppressed.” And despite her liberalism, she made known very loudly how much of a good ZIONIST she was. And she loved Trump. There was “nothing more intelligent” she said than bombing the shit out of Iran “yesterday.” Meghan was a girl who had seen it all, and she struggles with eating every now and then herself, and she still just tells this whole culture to just get up and go to hell. Middle finger in the air. That was her favorite finger. She even brushed her hair with her middle finger to make guys who had feelings for her uncomfortable. In the middle of conversation she just self-consciously deliberately either stroked, or just ran, her middle finger through her hair.

And Bella quietly hated Chelsea because Chelsea never felt strongly about anything not for one millimicrodashingdecasecond not for once in her whole life.

“I’m getting wine,” she said after giving Chelsea a look like she didn’t know who she was not after all these years, because they knew each other their whole lives from kindergarten through Salt Valley high school through college where of course Meghan went to some big school in California just for the sun and the sex, because if she weren’t New York’s sex queen then she would have certainly been LA’s most oversexed girl and Beverly Hills’s most desperate housewife, and Bella went to a small liberal arts college like Boudoin in Maine and studied English literature naturally, Chelsea went to a party school but a Catholic one she didn’t know why because she didn’t believe in anything like BC or Notre Dame or some damned place and studied something boring like banking just to do something not a bad idea to become a hot girl banker who stays single for as long as she could until maybe social mores and conventions push her into a marriage she would chafe against and almost certainly escape by divorce and take all her husband’s money in a state like New York, but he could take the kids, kids she didn’t need, there was a swimming pool somewhere with her name on it, and she wasn’t about to be a selfless mother her whole life, you can take the kids, apparently men needed companionship a lot more than women anyway, privately much less independent and self-sufficient and self-reliant than women, the only ones who did make it out alone were into all kinds of radical politics, or they sat and smoked cigars and drank whiskey all night and got ideas for crazy novels watching the cars dopplering down the road past their houses in the middle of the crazy night and being scared of ticks raccoons and drunk drivers because of how fast everyone was going and no one certainly not having had something and getting behind the wheel on summer nights, but not really caring because the whisky took that fear right out of you and made it a source of comedy even another creative idea, and Caroline barely got through college without flat out killing herself she went to the wrong school when she didn’t even want to go to school, being too much of a crazy depressed Sylvia Plath girl for it who spent all her time alone going out by herself coming back to her room by herself disdaining to join a sorority, crashing parties and taking her friends’ boyfriends sometimes because that was the only way she met boys through her friends because she never went out and it wasn’t her personality to put herself out there, too shy too inhibited too intellectual—or it was a look like she just plain didn’t know what to do with her belittling remark it was so cold and hollow shallow and unnecessary. So Bella ran impulsively into the house.

Meghan Clocktower finally— “I want to stay fucking single and not have a boyfriend—I’m done trying— for as long as this hypocritical risible world that I hate and hates me will let me.”

“I feel like before or as soon as Bella even decides on something, she’s already resolved at the same time on something else that is its antithesis.” This was Caroline. The intellectual one. Also the staunch conservative one. Caroline was rigidly establishmentarian and she hated the nonsense of radicalism. Only she was torn between whether America should just accept that because of how feckless Congress was the president was really a king and what we really had was a constitutional monarchy, or we should instead fix everything with only two amendments to the Constitution. Term limits for Congressmen. And a Balanced Budget amendment. She loved Paul Ryan. He was hot. She used to air all her political views online on Substack but then she gave up because it was either so boring no one read it or it was too blazingly unoriginal and no one was listening no matter how good a pundit she was. The boys didn’t like her because her dark brilliance of her fine profound mind scared them. Actually she was at least as dangerous as Meghan’s philosophical deliberate hypersexuality. And she didn’t like the boys either. She had contempt for everyone who was afraid of her or intimidated by her and didn’t respond to her text messages and drunken phone calls. She laughed to imagine how her ghosters believed they had the high ground. By creating this artificial scarcity. But they didn’t. And they knew it. Caroline was extremely unattractive for how in an almost masculine way how proud she was of herself and haughty. She was repulsive. Even though she didn’t know why her pride and “arrogance” was such a turn off. She on the other hand didn’t like a guy unless he was a dick and brutally frank like his words came with no consequences at all a guy who acted on impulse who picked fights and started them and ended them for you, a guy who would never hesitate to just throw his coat around you in the November cold when you weren’t warm enough because you went out with nothing on because you wanted to look as skinny as possible, a guy who liked to make an ass out of himself in chess golf and tennis with his self-conscious performances of temper tantrums replete with cursing, a man of extremes who was brash guffawed a showoff and tall dark and handsome who liked to affect that he wasn’t as jealous of you as you were of him, jealous for being less good looking or less intelligent and not having the financial security you had even though he hated financial security. For her the problem with men these days wasn’t they weren’t pompous pretentious or vainglorious enough like they used to be in the Humphrey Bogart days. The Lauren Bacall days. The Richard Burton days. Where was the guy who looked good and knew it and liked to hunt fish and curse and wear black a lot? Where’s my Bob Dylan? Where’s my Johnny Cash? She was about to punch a hole in a window if she saw another guy in a red Jeep wearing white shoes! I don’t want a boy! I want a man! Who didn’t overcompensate for anything by dieting or working out or driving a fancy car. A guy who drove a fucking motorcycle and had substance abuse issues. A Man not all these feminized boys, these do-gooders, and asskissers and kiss-ups with their vodka seltzers jewelry and tattoos who wear backwards baseball caps everywhere; no she needed a guy who only wore his hat forwards and never wore it inside anywhere let alone to dinner. She wanted a stuck-up conservative judgmental man who was at the same time an unapologetic show-off. And maybe reluctantly promiscuous. Every now and then she just slept with whoever let her cry onto his shoulder, drunk when the party she hated was over, and it was late, and she had no one talk to because she couldn’t relate to anyone who wasn’t as mad or mad at all angry with the world as she was, everyone of course judging her very harshly for not being able to be happy and a girl who drank alone half the time, well you made her that way; this shallow superficial vulgar world full of vulgar people made her that way; her favorite writer was Edith Wharton, and she felt like she was going down like Elizabeth Bennett in The House of Mirth a book that touched her deeply who was basically killed by her own circumstances for not marrying soon enough a book Edith Wharton wrote about herself of course and her life and being a New York society girl when she hated her mother and hated everybody; Edith Wharton was American literature’s most quietly angry female writer; and she was one person, because the only people she could relate to were all dead, that she felt like she could relate to because who was alive these days who wasn’t some fucking retard, all these Woke people, all these soft boys all these sad boys, all these mumble rappers, and people who wrote stupid books like that Colleen Hoover; why was everything so soft and frail and no fun?

“What about you Caroline?”

“What?” She said in a snobby perturbed judgmental tone, hating to have her useless train of unfulfilled and quietly enraged smoldering thought interrupted. Like Beethoven she wanted to fucking hit in the head with a hammer whoever interrupted her and make that a Constitutional amendment too. The right to hit interrupters with hammers! There were too many rules there was too much regulation and too much bureaucracy in the world and she wanted to live in the Old West as it was depicted in HBO shows like “DeadWood” and Huckleberry Finn her favorite book obviously.

“When are you getting married?”

“Oh give me a second to think or not think about how to respond to that dear and ask Chelsea first,” she liquidly snapped.

“Oh I’m never getting married,” Chelsea, unseriously. Then Chelsea not Meghan asked Caroline,

“When are you getting married C?”

“Honestly, I don’t see any special appeal to either being single or being in a relationship either way and marriage I can’t even imagine. I don’t know why anyone even the loneliest person would desire that structure the doors closed to everything you could have and do without a family, on the road like a rolling stone. It’s the definition of insanity. In dictionaries they needed to list synonyms for marriage as ‘Slavery,’ ‘Mental Illness,’ ‘Suffocation’ and then antonyms being ‘Liberty’ ‘Freedom’ ‘Independence,’ ‘Girlhood’ ‘Girl Power’ even though I always hated the phrase girl power it’s the worst vulgarism and I hate the whole feminist movement, even women’s rights you know we can probably do without just to spite people who think I needed to vote to have a good time. I don’t know why we don’t give up rights altogether and live on the frontier like in the Old West and be prostitutes and female bounty bunters like Natalie Portman in Jane Got a Gun. It’s so annoying. Democracy who needs it? Autocracy who needs that? How about bounty hunting and no government at all! Riding a horse into the sunset drinking whiskey from the bottle and no cocktails and watching public hangings with corrupt sheriffs and prospecting for gold and being tough being hard and being mean risking getting raped or shot or stabbed a lot more, hanging out in sweaty smelly saloons and being used to it.” The other day she was saying how that guy who attacked those Democrats in Minnesota could face the death penalty and what they should do was hang him publicly and hang him high naked! Teach people not to do that again. Teach people not to assassinate any lawmakers like idiots. It was the “most futile gesture assassination,” she remarked. If they survived, you emboldened them; if they died, they would become martyrs; but maybe that’s the logic of all assassins; they don’t want to really change anything; what they really wanted was to just get caught and die with the rest of us mocking them. Look at how Trump’s assailants functioned to reelect the guy. Look at how Al Qaeda got itself decimated in basically no time at all. The intelligent thing was to stubbornly or grudgingly accept if not proudly grandiosely affirm the free association and discourse and society of all the ideas and all the individuals that you simply could not change; you cannot alter history; and you cannot alter reality. Suck it up!

Caroline was a very odd girl with, like, an open death wish—well that was the problem with most of humanity, humans being the one organism with the highest capacity for suicide probably because they’re so aware that they’re going to die some day so they can’t handle mortality or they feel like they have to cut to the chase— or something and all she did was go on and on about how nothing was any fun because nothing was gritty and properly dangerous enough for her, and it drove her out of her mind with dissatisfaction, frustration angst despair and boredom. And her friends didn’t laugh at any of these hyperbolic statements of rebellion and how she considered herself like a female Byron or Johnny Depp or something, because they had heard it all before if Caroline even talked because she was so depressed half the time, she didn’t even speak, but her friends didn’t worry about her because she might struggle a lot more than any of the others, but she could take it. She could take it like a man. She could take a lot more. She was that resilient and that cold and hard and hardcore. The only porn category she could stand was “hard core.”

They made for a very interesting very fearsome foursome. Because the same way Chelsea’s dry detached or unattached realism rather clashed with Bella’s passionate romantic idealism or idealistic romanticism, Meghan despite her one-woman sexual revolution 2.0 was as typical as Caroline was atypical. The three of them even wondered whether Caroline had a personality disorder or was an alcoholic and they all considered Meghan a depraved sex addict, but that was also Meghan’s personality— sex addict. Caroline was proud and not shameless so she was always taking days off drinking to flaunt how not addicted she was in your face. Or maybe she had Aspberger’s, because she wasn’t depressed but disembodied and immersed in a sea of valueless value. They wondered if she weren’t somehow maybe a repressed lesbian too because of how little she needed or she even seemed to desire guys sometimes, or maybe she was quietly bisexual, even though she had too much contempt than either to be a libertine, or God no, “experiment” with the opposite sex (Meghan did a little of that, because she was crazy, but she never found girls gave her the same pleasure men did)—that was what everyone did nowadays which was like a flashing billboard to her as a contrarian that she would never “experiment—” experiment only with drugs like mixing Xanax and alcohol: that was her philosophy; she wasn’t modern enough for “experimenting” too old fashioned, regardless of how her sex was more disposed to homosexual behavior than the male one. Lesbians and bisexual girls were coming onto her all the time because of how masculine she was in her femininity like a faggot comes onto a pretty boy who was straight because he was straight, because gay men are all predators who are perversely more into straight men than gay men well in the paranoid experiences of all the ones who were traumatized or even looked at by gay men, especially young good looking writers, who wouldn’t be the first to bash homos in their work like Hemingway and Lawrence and Eminem later, and countless other performatively masculine showboat type writers; she was so reserved and solitary and her voice was lower pitched than the other girls.’ she wore leather jackets a lot and gave people “Kristen Stewart” vibes and this was another reason guys didn’t like her; they didn’t like all her biker girl signals she gave off in the winter. She wasn’t butch though: she was just like Joan Jett in the winter when it suited her. She was all Lily Pulitzer in the summer; provocatively preppy or provocatively biker, whatever she did and had to do to keep you guessing and entertained and interested in her and otherwise command attention. The other girls didn’t dress preppily and they weren’t preppy girls at all. Well Chelsea could be preppy sometimes. Rugby shirts and ribbons in her hair. She could go out all out. Cotton sweaters. And Meghan could if she had to, to sneak into private clubs she didn’t belong to and fuck all the men. Bella though really abhorred prep too liberal for it, Bella who was sort of leftwing disarmingly so—it was Caroline though who dressed the preppiest every summer, extravagantly so despite still giving angry quiet reserved biker I’m going to fucking kill you vibes with her long dark hair and the stillness of her deep brown eyes and her white skin and the sultry low voice that made her sound naturally combative, her assertiveness in her seat, she was like a coiled black cat or a viper soft, pretty but aggressive, and she was bad luck; she was like a stowaway woman you found on a ship hundreds of years ago; it meant you were in for storms and maybe you would never come back. She wasn’t really preppy though because she didn’t even like clothes any less than she took on the biker girl persona to make everyone think that (maybe) she was gay or something, just for fun, because sowing confusion and doubt and unsettling people was Caroline’s sort of modus vivendi. Her vocation. Her calling. Her profession. No the reason she liked to be so decadently attention-seekingly preppy was provocation, and because this was how she was brought up, which meant she saw no point in resisting; resisting was for the weak; it was cowardly it was unladylike; the women fighting for their rights when you could just provocatively flamboyantly conform and lace your words with pregnant irony and high-handed disrespect no one could put their finger on and rebel without even trying to rebel unlike Meghan Clocktower’s deliberate explicit “Sexual Revolution Two Point O;” because there was an unmistakable studied flamboyance behind her pearls and Lily Pulitzers that betrayed a sourceless profound edgy contempt that came across as a subtle threat a kind of accusation—it was a certain thing a certain presence that made everyone uncomfortable that drinking alone in her room in college she had been cultivating and perfecting for years. She simultaneously came across as polite and ladylike and vaguely judgmental and sharp-tongued and foul-mouthed, reproachful in any case. It was her career to deny men narcissistically and infuriate people with how little she ever deigned to date or even just fuck. She liked to sit and stew alone in her proud capacity for Napoleonic greatness when everybody else wanted to be “liked and loved” so badly.

“I’m just excited for another Hot Girl Summer,” she said. “Let’s change the subject. All this talk about marriage is morbid depressing and perverse and profane. “God wouldn’t be happy with us throwing our girlhoods away too soon before we fucked around some more. We’re living longer these days. That meant you can bloom later and take your time figuring your life out. There’s no hurry to get hitched. It’s actually crazy. Maybe never get hitched. Or have an open marriage. Of all of you I’m rooting for Meg.” Caroline was drinking gin before anyone else was, swinging the ice in her glass in calculated subdued outrage. She was always trying through all her gestures to get across to her friends how miserable she was who were all determined not to let it ruin their Hot Girl Summer. You want to be a sad piece of shit, C, go ahead. I’m tanning. I’m fucking. I’m falling in love. Go write a book about how unhappy you are.

She performed this shaking ice gesture at the end of what felt like every single drink, except when she was drunk when she stopped performing and could even be awkwardly frighteningly maudlin, which freaked people out and drove people away to redeem themselves of her sober, shy nasty nature by leaving her hanging and crying there leaving a drunk confessional sweet Caroline, repentant and helpless. Serves the bitch right was everyone’s attitude who didn’t love her just because she hated them. Shallow people. Stupid people. Cold and un-empathetic people. Without taste or judgment. Everyone was betraying her.

Bella never knew what to make of Caroline any more than Chelsea but she didn’t even bother. She didn’t want to bother. Caroline was the least if Meghan was the most promiscuous, and now from boredom Chelsea, because Bella was too confounded, was going to ask, “Do you not like being a hot girl Caroline?”

“Don’t you?”

This was what made Caroline or C so impossible. She was extremely evasive even as she asked for help, when you offered it, she pushed back. She needed help but did not want it. Or was incapable of asking for it. And did not like to receive it for very long either; when her strength returned, it was Don’t Worry About Me. She was evasive and somehow she got away with it, reproaching you in a vague way, being ironic and then eluding any accountability for it, or even rebelling by reproaching you for reproaching her for her reproachfulness.

“Why don’t you enjoy it?” Meghan said encouraged by Chelsea. What she wanted to also say was Why don’t you enjoy anything? But she bit her tongue because Meghan wasn’t a mean girl. Only when she was stealing everyone’s dad and husband. But not even that was that mean. Hell half of them wanted it. And half the wives were apologizing to her and thanking her for spicing up their marriages by disturbing them like windows rattling in windowsills with billowing robes of Long Island wind.

Bella said it for her. “Caroline doesn’t enjoy anything,” and poured everyone wine except for Caroline.

“Hey,” Caroline said slightly offended, because she did take offense to random things. Caroline had a strange kind of extreme touchy propriety that the oddest slightest most trifling word might provoke. Which cast over her a temperamental moody irascible character.

“You don’t enjoy anything. God is any of us enjoying anything in our mad rush to fall in love fuck everyone’s dad or whatever Chelsea does?”

“Shots fired!” Chelsea pronounced relishing the prospect of best friends fighting. Because Chelsea: in her easy languor being the most at-peace girl ever, restive perpetually too tan to get mad at anybody too blonde and too gorgeous and too much the hot mid-twenties NYC bank analyst to have any time for fighting: never fought because she never felt strongly about anything and had opinions on basically nothing at all, liked to sit on the sidelines and eat popcorn in these moments, and cheer for whoever had the strongest argument. Because all of them only believed in power, the only thing that actually existed in the universe, not virtue, it pleased Chelsea to witness who would come out the most powerful in every situation.

“That’s not true.” Bella nearly spat. “I enjoy everything. I enjoy too much.”

“You don’t think about anything.”

“Yes I do and that’s your problem Caroline. Thinking is the only thing you do. You don’t date—”

“You don't fuck”—Meghan.

“You care what other people think too much.”—Chelsea

“She doesn’t care enough what other people think”—Bella.

“What about what your pussy thinks?—” Meghan

“Well as they say youth is wasted on the young. Why should I be any different? At least I’m not dying to get married at twenty-five,” giving Bella a mean relaxed look of ridicule.

“I’m not going to die of an STD,” She shot Meghan a look too.

“You can’t die of one anymore.”

“Well then I don’t have to worry about someone’s wife poisoning me.”

“They might still poison you if you don’t fuck their husbands.”

“And as for you,” talking to Chelsea’s golden back stomach-down on her pool chair, the tresses of golden hair spilling down the sides of her head face down, “at least I’m not content to be an unopinionated hot bank analyst, cruising and surfing through life like nothing matters.”

Chelsea actually got up and said in indifferent laconic outrage, “It doesn’t.” She was putting on sunblock, half the reason to smell sunblock now that their next Hot Girl Summer was finally here or they were there again with their parents out dicking around and doing God knows what puking somewhere.

Chapter 2.—STOP

“I wasn’t saying now but some day,” Bella clarified.

“Some day soon,” Caroline stressed.

Chelsea laughed.

Meghan who some considered the prettiest merely because she had the most sex appeal of them all, wide hips to carry all the babies of all the men in the world, long strong legs, a hard body that connoted stamina vim and vigor sun-bathed with her legs in the pool away from her arguing argumentative friends, though she had a tough time getting tan, it occupied her mind a lot; it wasn’t what all her friends were fighting about that got her going; she didn’t like fighting or even talking; and she didn’t like seeing anyone pick on Bella absurd though Bella was, because no one knew better than the infamous Meghan Clocktower what it’s like to believe in love, because she believed in it once before she had her heart broken by all her high school boyfriends cheating on her; experience transformed her into a loose promiscuous libertine; and as much as she wanted to punish people for believing in love, specifically seeking to induce couples in love to betray their romance for her lust for her, often taking the man and the woman at the same with her; she wasn’t just waiting for the next drink like Caroline either, though Meghan drank a lot too; and marriage was not a subject she ever thought about, because she was going to be single forever. If she ever married, she was determined not to marry a jealous man whom she considered just ridiculous. She probably would marry once or twice she expected, because everyone did; it was like going to school. Like everything else it may as well have been compulsory. But not some jealous possessive loser. She overheard everyone but was trying not to listen without success.

“Not tomorrow or tonight but sooner or later.”

“But why?” Chelsea said. “Why the impatience?”

“You just want drama,” Caroline added.

“Honestly I want a family, and you will too. I’m telling you. You guys are so cynical and crude.”

“And you want a family,” Caroline mocked.

Meghan was mouthing the words down at Caroline, STOP!

But because Caroline never obeyed or heeded anyone who tried to get in the way of her saying exactly pitilessly what was on her mind to satisfyingly hurt someone for its own sadistic sake, or enlightenment’s sake, because you deserved the truth whether you wanted it or not, she ignored Meg’s pleas; Meg didn’t even mean them anyway.

“Who doesn’t want a family?” Bella was intoxicated and hurt.

Now Meghan couldn’t resist joining in on the Bella bashing. “I have you guys and all my lovers and fuck buddies! That’s my family!” In Meghan’s opinion, Caroline just needed to have more sex to cure depression and drink less and never drink alone, and Bella just needed to stop sentimentalizing a dying way of thinking. All Meghan believed anyone needed was a lot of sex and a little religion. She never went to church and didn’t have the attention span to read the Bible or any book at all. She just fucked as much as she could and prayed God would have mercy on her soul without her ever actually praying. How did one go about doing that? And she was incapable of humbling herself or being humble. She was too hot for it. That didn’t mean that she didn’t hold out hope that religion wasn’t all a lie though. She might be rich and healthy and good looking and damn intelligent and also hilarious, the life of every party when she was invited to one or before she was thrown out for raising too much hell and scandal, but she needed religion. Desperately.

“This family business is an evasion,” Caroline relentlessly propounded. “You were talking about marriage at first. Now you’re talking about family. My question is why do you want to be hitched so soon. Forget about a family. That’s its own subject.”

Bella looked mournful and tearful, “to marry someone you love and have a big wedding?”

“No one does that anymore,” Chelsea laughed. “Hell I’m not.”

“Who needs it? I don’t.” Caroline compounded.

“I want it,” Bella said.

“I’m a libertine!” Meghan said.

“You’re a slut!” Bella shot at her, “Addicted to the political power of your hypersexuality; it’s gross! One sexual revolution is enough.”

“No it’s not,” Chelsea said under her breath.

“Have you guys ever just not tried so hard to be happy and just wanted to look into yourself all day over ten thousand drinks?” Caroline roasted.

No one was paying attention.

Am I shallow? Chelsea wondered with pangs of morbid fear and stabs of dread.

Chapter 3.— Mom, Am I Pretty?

“Who wants to go swimming?” Meghan suggested like granite. A granite kitchen countertop. She inquired like a doctor who treated all his patients with aphrodisiacs wearing afros and interrupted her own tan when she didn’t even get tan; she couldn’t she was too Irish with scattered freckles and fair skin altogether and went swimming with a lot of plashing; she wasn’t a very good swimmer; athletic when she was younger in high school, played tennis, lacrosse, and soccer all at once and competitively; that was why when she went to college she had to become a slut; she was a better partier and more of an athlete between the sheets than anywhere; she was an artist, a sculptor, a painter a poet and a writer, so she was sort of a sexual magician. She was uncomfortable with any intense or even just tense discussion actually especially tense discussions that threatened the serenity of her promiscuous lifestyle that made her feel at home in the selfish and sometimes reckless pursuit of mostly married older men that sometimes sent her home with black eyes in addition to the usual bumps and bruises, and sometimes job loss or fights with her parents, because of how people took it upon themselves to ruin her life out of resentment and spite and envy and jealousy and the stubbornness of wounded emotions wounded pride and wounded vanity like that—her lifestyle or her ethic or aesthetic whose morality deep down she was always not a little uncertain about; she was in chronic doubt but never showed it; every one of her conquests made her cry a little as she did it; she just concealed it very well.

Meghan or “Meg” or “Big Ben” as the boys called her liked to think, well she flattered and deceived herself really that she didn’t care what people think, but was she a bad girl perhaps? Which was a weird thing to worry about because she already was a bad girl and she knew it, and she also wanted to be bad—that was the whole point of her rebellion to say well who is really good anyway? What is all this stuff these institutions we call love and family really worth anyway, and how committed to them are you, is anyone?; but she wasn’t that bad; she hadn’t broken up a home or got anyone killed and no one committed suicide yet; so maybe she needed to be badder because she still wasn’t that bad; but hell she didn’t want to be too bad; she didn’t want to be downright evil; and she wasn’t evil and she could never possibly be evil because despite scoring high on “dark triad” personality traits like Machiavellianism and manipulativeness and narcissism, she scored very low to her relief in psychopathy, and she was just very high in all the other regards. She actually was painfully aware of how compassionate she was, but she intentionally repressed that part of her nature not to die of sorrow over roadkill. She would be tough like how people were in the old days who weren’t bothered by dumb things like that and who killed bugs pitilessly. And deported illegal citizens! “We should bring exile back” she believed so you could exile her for her promiscuity and she could be Napoleon on St Helena and bring her sleeping around there or like Daniel Craig in “Skyfall” when everyone thinks he died, just womanizing and drinking scotch with scorpions on your hand and being a drunk! It was fine her narcissism and grandiosity her psychiatrist said; you’re “just very intelligent.” And Meghan’s IQ was somewhere around one hundred fifty and aced her SAT’s and got perfect grades in school, even though all she did was play sports and drink and fuck whenever she got a chance, as soon as she was able to do it and some guy showed her she had this crazy thing called a vagina that gave you crazy things called orgasms. What if over time she became too bad very bad, and people got really hurt? She induced divorces, caused a murder or a suicide or incurred her own premature death somehow? What if she did die of an STD or STI got pregnant and needed an abortion or two. She was on birth control, and she made sure not to mess with any people who were crazy, but what if it got way out of hand, and she got lazy and reckless and started sleeping with the wrong people and because everyone had some kind of insane death wish, the primary thing making people different from animals, what if she started tempting fate and she became as dangerous as people were saying she was, even though now it was more of an image, more of an aesthetic? What if she became authentically dangerous? What if she started having sex with minors or having sex in public places? What if she just kept pushing it or the demands of her revolution kept pushing her? What if she became a pornstar or something? She didn’t want to be that. What if she started doing hard drugs? She had to be careful. She loved cocaine so she did her best never to do it. Some things you could love too much. What if she became an alcoholic like Caroline, what if she became a heavy drinker that bordered on alcoholism? Caroline was clearly going crazy. She could be promiscuous too. Well perhaps everyone had to worry about these things. All those girls. What if Bella lost it for Christ’s sakes! Bella was intense and wild and deep. And she was a goddamned drunk too. They all were. Maybe it was for the best if Bella stuck with being a foolish stupid naive romantic and didn’t pursue this most disreputable libertinism. Did Meghan know what danger her libertinism was doing? Even if having regular sex was considered very healthy, and she drank a lot less because she fucked a lot more. It kept her in shape. It kept her motivated to go to the gym, because you only got one body, and you were only young for so long, and she was a hot girl and like an athlete driven to the mastery of their sport or a singer and their voice, her sport and her art was making love and also the chase of getting them into bed with you, so her body was of paramount value; her health was of supreme value to maintain. She thought of sex sometimes and how she worked out and ate the right foods to do it as like training for a marathon, and studying other people. She ready every book about the human psyche and learned from experience, what made men tick and how love works, and what’s sexy; and what turns people on. She was twenty-five not long out of college and she was a real weapon such that in another life she might have made a really good spy. Apparently the CIA and espionage organizations throughout history recruited beautiful women. Imagine if she could have used her prowess to save the world on a global scale. Rather than imagine she was helping everyone’s marriage by running off with someone’s husband and staging the Second Sexual Revolution. But literally she reasoned matter of factly, if it hurt your marriage, then you married the wrong guy or the wrong woman, and all she was doing was giving you the heads up albeit self-indulgently and selfishly because it was as much about her as it was about you—well of course it was all about her; she just found a way to rationalize it and justify what she would have done or been doing regardless; maybe some people didn’t want a heads up, and what made it her business to come in and meddle? But she would have said to you she gets men coming onto her so much everywhere anyway, they would seem to have made it her business even if she didn’t make it her business. You would still have possessive jealous wives coming at her with machetes, which did happen once just because her husband who was also a friend’s dad was such a lech around her. So half the reason Meghan was such a homewrecking bitch was because it would seem people wanted her to be. So I will be she reasoned if you want me to be; don’t fear me or you’ll make it happen.

When she swam even though she wasn’t a great swimmer or even a great dancer she looked brilliant and she was probably if not definitely the prettiest the hottest of all these very pretty very sexy very clever, too clever girls—all the guys loved Meghan and she had a box full of love letters, partly because her personality was perhaps the boldest and the biggest and she was the most sexually uninhibited and loose and she was extremely raunchy and ribald, and she loved and lived for the pleasure of men. Sex was her favorite subject. Sex jokes were all her favorite jokes. She was the warmest of these friends, the easiest to talk to if you weren’t too afraid on account either of her reputation or how seductive she was or how damned cute she was. She was the most accessible. She was open and fun and daring and had the spunkiest most ludicrous and slapstick and vulgar and downright crude sense of humor laden with disagreeable and disgraceful puns too, and she was in a way kind of uncomplicated. But she was by no means simple. She had a certain depth. She just kept that depth on the surface, so you didn’t see how shallow she was, but it didn’t mean that she was not in her unique original way deep, very deep for being shallow for choosing to be shallow, not to drown in the depths of overthinking and overanalyzing like Caroline or C and failing to enjoy and be happy by willing endless dangerous sexual joys and enjoying oneself one’s youth one’s body and taking pride in one’s prowess like it were worthy of a Nobel like through simple legendary fucking she might some day be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. How do you sweeten a deal? Cure cancer and end war poverty, hunger and disease? Fuck as soon as you can. She could imagine herself giving a speech like this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck.

Meghan was cool, she was the ultimate cool girl, and she was fun, and she was funny and very sexy, all the boys loved her and all the girls hated her but she really was a little dangerous with the potential if she was not careful to become very dangerous and get people hurt and hurt herself—if she was not careful, very careful, very cautious, but not too cautious because you had to enjoy life, and you can wind up in worse trouble and be a lot less happy by living too cautiously too safely too prudently too moderately. Her seeming easy and free and stupid and frivolous and her apparent gullibility and how she affected to see the best in people which she never really saw was the deception that got you and when it got you, it got you good. She came across as sympathetic and like a good friend, who when she gets into trouble means well, but she was trouble, a lot of trouble. Meghan Clocktower was the girl you had to worry about with all your boyfriends and husbands, because she was loose and fast and she didn’t care. And her friends didn’t know it but she had sex with Caroline’s dad, Chelsea’s and Bella’s dad at one time or another, or it was a gangbang all of them all at once. And their brothers too. All of them. Meghan had long brown hair light green eyes white skin that barely tanned and she looked as Irish and adorable as she genuinely was, hard-bodied and slim, and she was very casual and fun and lived life completely on her own terms despite depending on her parents literally for everything for now, until she met the elder husband of her dreams like fifteen years her senior who when he got too old she would start dating down cheating on him. She was born to make a great big mess and a great big terrible embarrassing sexy splash in the godforsaken pool of life, like a canon ball or a can opener or a back flip or a fucking nose dive like a plane doing a tailspin crashing to earth and burning; and she was infuriating to abide and endure; but her friends envied her spriteliness and God, her friends were all just as loathsome in their own distinct and inimitable ways.

Chapter 4.—Hurricanes

“You can’t always get what you want,” Chelsea said like a hurricane. If hurricanes could talk that was how Chelsea was in her inscrutable irascible infinitesimal dryness. That was how she spoke. She was unbearable.

“And what you want is never what is,” Caroline commented in a savage attempt to destroy if not just injure Bella’s romantic ambitions, because did she want to marry for love like Anna Karenina only to have Vronsky cheat on her and throw herself in front of a train? Romantic love was for fools. Sooner be a lifelong slut like Meghan who read a damn lot of Nietzsche to look down on everyone who wasn’t as promiscuous as herself.

Bella had full lips unlike Meghan and was soft-bodied, youthful fleshier arms and legs like a baby. She had a great body and she didn’t have one extra pound, but she exuded a pudginess. It seemed to embody who she was as a person’s character personifies the body they were given. Because if Meghan or Caroline were hard-asses and mean spirits, it was explicable by the fact that they had hard bodies. Her hair was dark brown too. Her eyes were big beautiful large and blue, baby blue clear and deep. And Bella was small. She had great big tits, and she had a big ass. She was less than five foot five when Caroline was five foot eight, and Meghan was five foot seven, and the both of them had no butts and small tits, and they ruled by being less outwardly voluptuous. They were sexy by the radical destructive force of just being supremely pretty. One is sexier by not being directly voluptuous. And a girl who was as voluptuous as Bella was invariably interminably very romantic, to a sickening degree.

Chelsea still was blonde, she had fine deep green eyes despite her shallow superficiality (perhaps the most superficial of all these girls), and she had a perfect body, and she looked literally like gold. She was very sexy but so noncommittal and dryly realistic she was an intractable spoiled lazy waste.

All the hope for the salvation of the world and the next generation probably lay quietly between and in the hands of Caroline and Meghan.

Chapter 5.—A Bad Thing

“You say Hot Girl Summer in a tone like it’s a bad thing,” Bella said.

“It’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing,” Caroline corrected inscrutably and unmistakably unremittingly, relentless. And unrelenting. Ruthless. Toothless. Fiery. Icy. Chill. But hot. Icy hot. Hot as hell. Cold as heaven without pretty women.

“But what do you mean by that? Do you hate it? Is it by describing it as a mere thing alone are you saying you hate it or you can’t stand it? Do you hate me do you hate all of us or do you hate yourself? Is that the truth? Caroline everyone says you hate the whole world is that true? I don’t want to be hated. I’m a romantic so I’m looking for love.”

“I don’t think you or anyone goddamn knows what they really want, because it all depends doesn’t it?”

“How could you say that!”

Chapter Six—A Commentary on Good and Evil

On the great big fancy yacht they were all on like everybody in the world every rich and famous person that stupid goddamn night after all day fiending for a damn drink almost more than guys— guys who cared more about drinking than women who couldn’t relate to them and couldn’t stand them crying or drinking too much or their self-absorption, and girls who believed hilariously that just because a guy was damn mad he was therefore violent—girls who were downright retarded—the girl they sometimes called simply “C” simply cried into the nearest hot guy’s cheap sweet intellectual shoulder, and she sobbed over how dreadfully bored and tired she was, bored with everyone, bored with her friends, bored with boys, and the Hot Guy held her in his arms, and he gazed over the side of the ship into the black night water, and he said, “the world’s as boring as God made it, then God Himself struggled with boredom, which was why he was such a temperamental piece of shit and a bastard from hell.” Adding, “You just need to cut down on the drinking honey and come to bed with me.”

“Really?”— Caroline. “Sometimes I wonder if my friend Meghan has got it all figured out.”

“You don’t mean Meghan Clocktower do you? I hate that girl she’s completely crazy. Fucked my dad and my brother, and all my cousins, and she considers it the moral righteous thing to do. To act on sexual impulse. I look down on her.”

“She’s downright evil. Sure. But she’s good. At the same time. Not as great or as good as I am for refusing myself the self-indulgence but…she’s fundamentally good and pure, just free-spirited.”

Chapter 7.—Let the Games Begin

When C woke up in the boy’s room he was gone gone to who knows where but he left a note, a note to the effect that there was a big party he would be at later, and they should hang out there, because he hated everyone there, and he was just like her, and hated everybody, and because all his friends hated him, and the only thing he lived to do was live in hate and contempt. You could thank God for that. “There’s nothing I want to do more than get breakfast lunch and goddamn dinner,” and then he gave her his account number to the club, and Caroline smiled through tears and she took a shot of Tito’s she doesn’t remember getting, next to her (their) bed. Would wake her up and cure a hangover.

She was still on the yacht in a little very nice little room like a hotel room, dark with the lights off, with light filtering through from the professionally refracting water because it was a very sunny runny day, and the sunlight was really like a punctured egg yolk spilling everywhere like jizz, and the sun was just a giant hot penis, the world the sun’s vagina—penetrate it as much and for as long as you can. And she was still all dressed ignominiously and incorrigibly up, but her panties were on the bed, and the room smelled reeking of stinking staunch raunchy sex that she doesn’t remember having. She often either didn’t or she did vaguely. It could be a damn blur even if she wasn’t drunk. The sex she had was not memorable. It was like how after two drinks she could forget how many she had had. She used it for escape and release and because she didn’t love any of the guys—how could she? How could you love anybody in the world these days? There not being much to love with how everybody had become a spineless coward; it was for the most part implacably empty and utterly joyless; though, a part of her did genuinely love every guy she ever freakin’ slept with, because she was lucky; Caroline was a girl men treated well and were very good to, despite or because of how little she respected all of them. They could tell and it strangely fueled their desire to take better and better care of her.

Dimly she resolved to go to the beach by herself and meet another guy another dude maybe, and she smiled at the idea.

Let the Hot Girl Summer begin.

Chapter 8—No Rest for the Wicked

“Do you think anyone even marries for love?” One Hot Guy said to a friend who was another Hot Guy. Muscled and tattooed men. Little tattoos. Young guys with skin like babies had. Guys who took care of themselves and were in fraternities and did dumb things for a living at the behest of their parents. Conformists. Who went with whatever the mob was doing and were quietly religious not to have too uncomfortable or unpleasant let alone a nasty dangerous fearful life, or not to have it too bad in the next life either. Whatever you told them to do guys like this did it. They completely lacked any integrity lied to everyone they knew, but most of all they lied to themselves that they were good people and not the pieces of shit that they were. They projected all their problems onto other people, and any guy who had it any better than they did they wasted no time not to push him around and try and make him feel less than as good and heroic and honest, truthful bold and frank as he was which was threatening to them in their delusions. They didn’t like independent men. They made them feel dependent and retarded like faggots. They didn’t like men who were too homophobic either who might criticize them for hanging out in groups a lot incapable or unwilling to drink alone like a real man and think about suicide every now and then and ponder whether satan was not in fact in his way the hero of the Bible and wonder whether Jesus was as “good” as everyone believed he was. The devil was either a good character or not as bad as you thought he was, because he would have the courage to mock hypocrites, similar to Jesus. You know what probably God the devil and Jesus were all the same thing no better and no worse than the humanity that wrote the Bible in their desperate efforts to escape themselves and their natures that they were all so afraid of, greed, envy, vanity, lust?—All those things were considered “bad” just because they motivated us. Where the hell would the human race be right now if we listened to everything the church said and we all despised power and each other and lived in convents and seminaries? We’d be fucking extinct.

“No of course not,” the smartest Hot Guy was happy to rejoice and interject. This guy wasn’t like his friends. He hid nothing from himself; and whatever was on his mind he fearlessly said it, and he never let you hear the end of how much better than you he was; and if you called him “arrogant,” he liked to identify with it because there was nothing more hideous or repulsive or hypocritical than a humble or a meek or a modest hypothetical of a man, not a real one. Women only like arrogant cocky men anyway who were proud of their abilities gloried in their looks or their wealth, who didn’t have some people-pleasing need to feel any shame or any guilt; because they were who they were. Even a modest guy loves an arrogant man in private; he just can’t show it. A girl loves a cocky guy because they have a good steel pair of balls and spectacles; he would defend her in battle from sheer indomitable pride and then boast of having acquired her. The only reason anyone is humble or modest is not to offend the vanity of everybody else which made the modest and the meek the people who were the truly arrogant and the true hypocrites. You just weren’t allowed to say it. People believed falsely all hell would break out if people only had the courage to start being themselves rather than what you parents and the state and your therapist wanted you to be or think like. No one is honest.

Like staring into the abyss your whole life and facing yourself every single day ever didn’t help anyone who had the wherewithal and the grit and creativity to face the cold hard facts and be better off and become a screenplay writer if you couldn’t become a mob boss or a spy.

“Not most people. What they do is meet someone in their late twenties or early thirties after they planned their whole lives out as if life,” he took a break to laugh his good looking manly full head of hair off, “as if life were a game of strategy or something and not the fucking unpredictable wilderness which is what we all know it really is and planning anything is clinically insane and degenerate decadent, or they see what every one else is doing because they’re all dying just to be told what to fucking do all the time, and they just conform out of fear and dread and stupidity, and they decide Oh I guess this one’s good enough, and with a good measure of having no self-respect and with a little self-deception, they deceive the other he or she ‘loves’ her or him quote unquote without most people knowing or even experiencing ever what love even is, and they deceive themselves of this fundamental nonfact too that they know quite what it is. People mistakenly and misguidedly think that if they can subscribe to the fiction that they sentimentally love each other the foundations are strong enough by themselves for having a family which is namely responding to arguably natural impulses and conforming and doing what everyone else is doing blindly and keeping up with the Joneses most of all—”

“Will you stop it? This is so depressing! No one wants to hear this!” The sensitive emotional fragile wan and pallid fake man but nevertheless Hot Guy frenetically interrupted, an interesting guy who didn’t want to question himself or anybody else. A guy who was not courageous enough to talk about ideas with.

“You interrupted me,” the philosophical one observed coldly. “And you know what I do to anyone who interrupts me—”

“You’re depressing and morbid sick and gross.”

“Who cares how it makes you feel? It’s the truth. If it’s the truth that hurts then let the truth cause cancer and hurt like nothing else ever hurt you in your life. It should keep you up at night what Voltaire Socrates and De Sade would all think of you, not what your stupid friends think or girls. And you know you can lie your way through life but there’s no escaping the truth that every day you block out catches up with you more rapidly, the harder you try to repress and deny or project an idea the harder it comes back. Just warning you. There ain’t no rest for the wicked.”

“What could be depressing about facts? This guy has the best nuggets of anyone I’ve ever met! And to hell with our Western religion of love and the sanctity of marriage anyway! Who needs it! The truth helps you to live better.”

“If everyone were as honest as you,” he threatened the smart one, “the world would be a lawless scene out of the Wild West.”

“No. The West wasn’t as wild as you would imagine either. As soon as you committed a crime you were hanged immediately for it. Nowadays in blue cities the criminals are rewarded with benefits, and there’s no bail. I would feel more safe in a lawless West with a six shooter and just a fistful of dollars and a bottle of whiskey and nerves to scare the shit out of a lion coming at you than I would feel anywhere nowadays. People don’t hang and shoot people like they used to. People only kill people out of cowardice nowadays. That’s why every shooter shoots himself. In the old days they killed and they killed without compunction and they did it for a reason; then they went proudly to the gallows for it. But anyway as Thomas Hobbes writes in Leviathan central authority predates organized civilized society. No anarchy is ever going to threaten man’s basic instincts for law and order. So you don’t have to worry about anarchy breaking out. Well except on the local level like in blue cities and overcrowded bars and Walmarts with stampedes. I’m agoraphobic because I know it’s the small stuff a man’s gotta worry about. The big picture? The apocalypse? I’m completely unworried. Either the robots are going to kill us. Or we’re going to kill them. It’s all gonna go to hell in a hand basket with China state surveillance AI girlfriends who are too hot to resist or nuclear armageddon. Frankly every year that goes by I’m shocked we’re all still here. When I look at my messages I’m shocked and appalled in a way that no one’s nuked anybody yet. I mean thank God but wow. Are we really not that stupid that we’ve held it together without going crazy thus far for so long? Either AI’s going to cure cancer and we’re colonizing Mars or life is over. It’s getting through every day without dying of drunkenness or dying in a car accident or losing my mind altogether that concerns me; the little things as they say. I’m someone who really cares about the little things. A girlfriend who’s not completely nuts. A little tobacco and a little whiskey—”

“Will you shut up! What you say may be true for you, but for people like me I don’t have the heart the spirit the personality the energy the rigor the sexuality the lust for life to face the facts. I’m not cold enough not hard enough not heartless enough or compassionate enough. Not sure enough or tough enough.”

“How do you know? Did you know that in the space of two hours a nuclear exchange could burn like the whole planet? I can’t remember what I read in Annie Jacobson’s book but man it’s not pretty. Did you know that some AI guys don’t expect we’ll get through the next few years without AI logically destroying us all? If you knew what I knew you’d live a lot more creatively and a lot more hurriedly I’m telling you and you wouldn’t be so angry with guys like me.”

“Guys,” another Hot Guy interrupted. “There’s one of the foursome. I think her name is Chelsea. She’s on the beach by herself. You see?”

They were on an inflatable raft adrift like a big tube in the water in the sun vaping, drinking White Claws and hating themselves with how little lady action they were getting so far. Every day after every night was new grounds for disappointment that you didn’t end up with her and instead she went off with him; it all sucked!

The smart undaunted Hot Guy though was merrily enjoying like his six thousandth cigar of the day though and perhaps his one millionth glass of whiskey. They didn’t like to hang out with him or not for very long because of how “arrogant” and “haughty” and domineering he was, and how “dark” “deep” and weirdly happy he was because of how he was completely unafraid to be absolutely miserable. A man society believed mistakenly Can’t Be Like That. He insulted and humiliated and scandalized them all with his looks his vocabulary and his syntax and diction and his erudition and his ferocious irony and demonically dry and sardonic sense of humor and his unforgiving and unremitting unrelenting cynicism and flare and panache. He was very pleased with himself, and they had never met anyone who was as happy with himself and vainglorious as Mozart. They had never met Mozart, so a guy like this just made no sense. He wouldn’t physically hurt a fly but he could be as mean or almost meaner than Eminem but no meaner than Mark Twain. He was sadistically torturing people verbally for their unrepressed envy and jealousy because he considered those some of the basest ignoblest of man’s instincts, and he found them just laugh-out-loud funny. He was one of the most desirable Hot Guys here too because he didn’t even need sex, and he was the antithesis of desperate. They hung out with him anyway because they profited from just a little bit more than they resented his wide knowledge and close reading of everything and everyone, because he made everyone more like him, and they were better off for knowing him though you wanted to kill him at first; they admired him and respected him, as much as they disliked and envied and really hated him; they loved him maybe too much.

“I like the one,” he said, “that doesn’t talk.”

“What the one with the microscopic nonexistent invisible ass who judges all of us?”

Another Hot Guy said, “of course Jowl, of course you love her; I have better sense though than to be perversely attracted to a girl because she hates me. Or has absolutely no ass. I’m not a masochist and I like a big caboose.”

“Like sense has any control over your attraction. But I was kidding. Who I really like is the slutty one that fucks all the dads? What’s her name Meghan something? The judgmental one is too much like me. Being an intellectual drunken rake, I don’t need and I’m not looking for someone else who’s miserable to grow up and get old and die with. I just want a companion to not talk too much about depressing ideas with I can bang all the time. I want a free spirit. I want a loose fun girl who’s damn horny to just have sex with whenever I please, so I can return to my studies without remorse or obligation or apology or any responsibility.”

“Well you’re an esthete. I’m not,” the romantic Hot Guy said.

“I’m a drunk and a rake is what I am.”

“What am I?” The hypersensitive emotional one said his nerves about to crack and abandon him completely, the highest strung guy ever.

“Gay!” A Hot Guy condemned him.

“Retarded!” Someone else jumped in.

Why was it that the victims of bullying were always in some way asking for it? Don’t kiss ass and you won’t get bullied. You can be a bully if you make everyone kiss your ass. And in a world of masters and slaves strong men and herd men, it’s definitely superior to be the bully, well unless you liked being bullied, and you’re ready to throw away your mistaken worldview that nature and the real world are not a fucking free for all and an orgy of people seeking dominance all the time and oppressing weaker natures.

Why are people so nasty?

It’s called life.

Chapter 9.—Babies

Chelsea Wickaugh with her beautiful golden blonde hair and her beautifully lusciously brassily bronzed body was sun-bathing and enjoying nothing. That was the kind of girl she was one who spared herself no enjoyment, but she enjoyed nothing. She knew it too—she knew she was a kind of nihilist—but she didn’t care. It didn’t bother her that she wasn’t anything like her moral friends with their views of marriage and Meghan’s wild idea about using sex to save marriage by legitimizing unfaithful monogamy as a venerable institution, Meghan’s idea that we’re headed for our Regency period of open marriages with bold women and feminine men, and she was just feeling the moment, God was Meghan wacko, and Caroline fighting the good fight all the time, she was relentless, what’s the use in trying to save the world so much? Was it even worth saving? Why didn’t Caroline ever question whether she asked too many questions and had too many answers? She never listened. Her nihilism or cynical realism would make her friends a little less unhappy if she could impart it to them, and isn’t that what matters? Happiness. Tranquility. Inner peace. Not all this unrest and rebellion. And Bella and her highflown ideals and hopes and dreams, all that pining all that yearning. Dear God. She was never going to meet a man who was as good as she demanded, and she had no right to expect perfection. Men real men the only ones worth having were all ugly and imperfect, flawed gross and despicable. So Bella would either have to settle for mediocrity or lower her standards, or the world would bludgeon her with experience so the world would do it for her. Chels’s knowledge of herself as a complete cynic and a realist didn’t bother her in the biting nipping slightest.

Who wanted to get married and who cared? And who needed kids too? God. Chelsea Wickaugh never liked babies. She liked kids only when they reached around eleven or twelve when they started cursing rebelling against authority and going nuts and they were just learning to masturbate for the first time authentically, wondering whatever the hell it even was and worrying whether they would go to hell for it. An age when you could cautiously corrupt them into exuberance and adventure and the fine things in life. Little kids were Ok, but babies? Damnit. They looked all like aliens, and she didn’t care if she was a hideously fertile awfully pregnable and marriageable at some point soon girl who hated babies.

Who are those guys staring at me? She turned over to give them her butt to gaze at though she didn’t have much of one any more than Caroline or Meghan did.

Chapter 10. Motherfuckers

Well there’s a hot vulnerable dad.

Meghan Clocktower went right up to an oblivious guy in his forties, trying desperately to get his golf cart to start again.

“Hey,” she said quietly, sitting down next to him. “Can I help?”

Perhaps she was too provocative. Sometimes she was too bold. Her lust for older married dads was killing her. The power of inducing them to cheat. Meghan lived for the power of home-wrecking or destabilizing or upsetting or unsettling. Even if she got married, she was resolved in the mean time to try and wreck a home. For all the people who couldn’t tolerate a little fun with a little girl on the side. Their wives she would vindictively punish for their insecurities veiled as morality.

She was giving this guy long looks with her eyes and paused and opened her mouth sensually parted her thin lips like the tongue of a venomous snake sticking out and withdrawing back into its mouth, and she opened her fair white legs a little. Her favorite thing to do was spread her legs and look a little possessed by someone’s hot dad. This guy fortunately for her loved fair-skinned brunettes with a lot of sex appeal.

“I’m not that kind of guy,” this one reacted.

“What do you mean? I was just asking if I could help. Can I call someone?”

“No I can handle it all by myself. And I know what you’re up to. I have to deal with girls like you all the time. Think I can’t see it coming?”

“It doesn’t look like you can handle it,” she said derisively and vaped blowing smoke in his face.

He stopped fiddling with the finicky ignition and looked at her full in her pretty face, until now he had not looked at her. She was beautiful. Completely gorgeous. He almost couldn’t stand it. No wonder some guys hit women violently; they were too pretty. Some of them. And with a mouth like the one on this bitch? A smack in the head would do her some good. He had all this time this Hot Dad just been putting the key in the ignition, turning the key, watching and feeling the cart start, then it would jolt forward and stall again. It was like a lame dick.

Then a bunch of young big muscled Hot Guys tore past them in golf carts and someone called out shirtless and tattooed a lot of facial hair, “Hey is that Meghan Clocktower? Yo wassup Big Ben!” He almost couldn’t speak through all his facial hair.

Meghan stuck up her middle finger happy that someone who knew her recognized her in public, but this was a part of a plan she had hatched over text a couple minutes ago too.

“You’re so hot! What are you doing tonight?” Their golf carts receding into the trees and distance in the setting sun.

“It’s getting dark,” she said quietly and put her hand on the Hot Dad’s leg. “Answer his question. What am I doing tonight?”

Chapter 11.

“What do you think that girl is doing?”

“Meghan? She’s trying to seduce that guy!”

“Seduce him?”

“Yeah,” he was smoking a cigar.

“He’s like fifty years old that guy.”

“Is he? I didn’t see.” Trying to smoke the cigar and drive a little drunk at the same time. Another golf cart came plummeting down at them, another drunk golf carter. Probably one of those guys who needs to have like six hundred drinks just to be able to have the confidence to drive. As they just in the fricking fracking nick of time swerved out of the way, they accidentally rode down and tragically accidentally perhaps killed an elderly golfer. Well whatever. He was no ubermensch and one less guy we had to pay taxes to keep on social security. Serves em’ right!

“Bro you gotta slow down and make sure that guy’s ok.”

“No I don’t.”

“That guy was an old man.”

“But that’s Meghan Clocktower we were talking about. They call her Big Ben because you can literally tell the time by all the dads she seduces and fucks old married men and dads. It’s a power trip thing.”

“Oh my God.”

“We set this up. She’s emasculating him. She scheduled me to roar past her to tell him he’s not a man like I am for not being able to start his goddamn golf cart. Serves that bastard right too, because that guy slept with my older and younger sisters and even my grandmother, who died of the orgasm, so he’s also my grandmother’s murderer. Meghan’s going to screw his whole life up. Wooooh!”

Chapter 12. Icarus Was a Realist

I hate guys who look at me. I love guys who look at me. Chelsea Wickaugh laughed at and to herself, rolled over on her beach chair with her rump to the water where those big horny stupid jock dudes except for that funny looking intellectual one with all the whiskey watching her from that big dumb inflatable tube thing—what were they doing in there? Jerking each other off?—and no doubt commenting all over her— “yo guys,” she could almost hear them in her imagination “that’s Chelsea Wickaugh. She’s hot.”

Who would ever get married? Why did people even date? Why didn’t you just lie in the sun until you died in it?”

An image arose in her mind of herself levitating off the ground descending upwards towards the sun to be engulfed at last in its fire.

Chapter 13. —Oh my God it’s Jason Bourne

“How do I know her? She’s Meghan Clocktower. Who doesn’t know her! She fucks everyone’s dad! She’s the most promiscuous girl in New York State, and she has a terrible fondness for older men; she’s crazy but I love her.”

“How could you?”

“How can’t you? She’s irresistible; she lives for guys. Like a real man lives for girls. Meghan lives for boys!”

Chapter 14.—

Meghan Clocktower. Meghan Clocktower. Big Ben. Big Ben. Big Ben. Pig Pen. She was a filthy slut and a whore. a Harlot. a Tramp. The smart Hot Guy was under his swim shorts on the beach without a shirt lying in the sand and the shade of some beach trees and in the terrors of his anxiety he was hoping no one would catch him while he made love to his favorite muse, the filthiest, sluttiest most conflicted sexual revolutionary, affirming everyone’s marriage for them, saving marriages ironically heroically unpredictably incredibly ineluctably. His friends got so annoyed with him and how insufferable and self-absorbed and longwinded he was they threw him finally thank God off their gay tube, and he had to swim to shore. He was also obsessed with Meghan such that he couldn’t and wouldn’t stop and could never stop thinking about her. He loved her. He loved the unattainable girl, because he could not obtain her or contain her lust.

Meanwhile he pitied and he felt very sorry for the other one that people disliked perhaps even more than Meghan. Meghan was very lovable. The Caroline was repellant and loathsome. Too dark. Too deep. Too miserable. Too depressed. Too alcoholic. She needed to take lessons from Meghan or him. But that was also Caroline’s siren appeal she was one of those unreachable uncatchable untouchable kinds of girls like Machiavelli’s Prince in the flesh or Milton’s Prince of Darkness. Easily the most masculine hyperfeminine girl he’d ever seen or heard of with her confidence her pomposity her complete lack of empathy and grandiose narcissism. He liked and admired her too. She needed to drink less and have more sex and stop moping around and judging all of us. Damnit maybe I hate her too he thought. Why did people hate and revile her though to such intense extremes? What was it about a remarkable individual who held others up to the light of scrutiny that made other people so afraid? Weaker people. Did you have something to hide or felt guilty about that made you fear an observer and a straight-talker? A straight shooter. Damned straight. Straight as the straightest line ever. Sharp as a knife. Thin as a rake. A rake. The rake. It was like everyone who feared his own rakishness. Why did people hate him and Johnny Depp so much? Why was that Amber girl so crazy? Maybe he liked them like that. Probably.

Oh wait. Right. Here was the reason everybody was afraid of a critic. Now I remember— EVERYBODY’S A FUCKING HYPOCRITE A COWARD A LOSER AND A VILLAIN A SELF-DELUDING SCOUNDREL A LIAR A FAKE A FRAUD AND A PHONY. AND A COUNTERFEIT. EVERYONE. EVEN YOURSELF. NOT JUST EVERYONE. YOU ARE YOUR OWN ENEMY. YOU ARE YOUR WORST ENEMY. YOUR WORST!

Chapter 13. Can I Have Your Number?

Bella was swimming by herself in the pool. At the Dutch colonial. She didn’t want to go to the beach like Chelsea or with Chelsea. She was feeling too romantic too idealistic to want to hang out with a cold-hearted cynic and all the people who were libertines nowadays like Meghan Clocktower who disappointed her. She hated Caroline a lot, but she detested Meghan. No one sympathizes with me. I want love. True love. I want love like a Disney princess. Like they write about in Fitzgerald novels and Johnny Cash music. I don’t want to be a shameless libertine with moral courage and psychological gritty strength like Meghan and whatever the hell Caroline is in her misery. I don’t want to be used or abused. I don’t like libertinage. I don’t like Marquis De Sade alright?

And just right then some of course Hot Guy— with tattoos and muscles—wandered aimlessly perhaps drunk or high or both and crossed onto her property to throw up in her bushes; this was Bella’s family’s house. Terrifying her he asked her if he could get her number and watch a movie or hang out or chill. Couldn’t anyone tell didn’t anyone care she was a romantic and not a sex addict? How she hated everybody just looking to fuck her and fuck her brains out. Not even Meghan would have been interested in chilling. She had no attention span for movies, and she gave her number to literally no one. Not even the girls had it. It was Meghan’s insurance to remain the anonymous promiscuous girl you had to worry about everywhere stealing your husband or your boyfriend.

Chapter 14. New York’s Most Oversexed Young Woman

“You don’t know who I am?” Meghan addressed this unwitting dimwitted DILF.

“I’m Meghan Clocktower. New York’s most dangerously sexy girl.”

Chapter 15. The Hybrid Coquette-Siren

“Her appeal consists of her being able to have any of us if she wanted; so the logic is we all want her because she can’t commit to any of us; and she can’t commit to anyone, because we all want her so badly; she’s a tautology and a paradox; she’s a coquette and a siren; she likes to play hard-to-get and alternatively drown sailors at sea with pretty song. The girl repulses in the very same instant that she attracts and vice versa.”

Chapter 16.

“What am I doing tonight? Answer the question. What am I doing tonight? Don’t make me have contempt for you!”

This sorry pitiful cheating DILF started the golf cart suddenly and pushed by shoving this coquettish seductress away and running over her foot. She screamed. Then she fell flat on her back into a handsome young man’s arms, because wherever Meghan went: she had good men to take care of her. In all events. In every situation.

Chapter 17.

“Hey you’re Chelsea right?”

“No, not if you ask to confirm that’s what my name is. Assume you’re right and have some confidence.”

“Alright then.” The Hot Guy feeling turned down turned off and depressed went down the silky beach like satin at noon.

And then she felt bad. “Come back. I didn’t mean it!”

He wasn’t turning around. Chelsea Wickaugh ran down the beach. “That’s my curious way of flirting by ripping on a guy—

“When he had confidence enough to approach you at all Chelsea and taste,” he half turned and said spitefully to the breeze his face a spurned silhouette with the sun behind him.

Chelsea was dumbfounded. “Who are you to say what you either have or don’t have enough of? That's for the woman to decide. Get lost! Men these days,” she murmured to herself wandering tiredly back to her sun chair. Why were they so emotional? Men weren’t supposed to have feelings. It was so obnoxious. Stop crying and stop being a baby and just be bold direct and confident and straightforward as hell and be the way they goddamn used to be before mental health awareness fucking ruined sensitive guys. Because it was good to be sensitive but not if it made you either a coward or a fucking beast. You want to be a tenderhearted sensitive manly gentleman who was cold and hard as a man needed to be ready to go to war or punch stab or shoot anyone at any goddamn moment. A hunter. A pirate. An outlaw. A cop or a robber. Men who looked death in the face and spat on it. Who were scared but afraid literally of nothing and nobody. Men who were drunks and scoundrels who were uncontrollable and unownable. And unrepressed and goddamn out there.

When the intellectual Hot Guy was obsessed with Meghan who wasn’t attached to anyone a lot of the girls were obsessed with him; it was how different he was; it was his sense of humor; it was how he dressed and talked and walked with so much inner confidence and inner strength; but he couldn’t take his mind off his beloved libertine Meghan with green eyes. Whenever he went to a party around here it was that self-loathing girl who depended upon sex to feel powerful and boys to feel validated with the rosy cheeks who flirted with him and led him on compulsively who haunted all his dreams; but then there was otherwise the romantic one, the Bella Cordings girl with the voluptuous chest and the little mouth with the full lips and those gigantic blue eyes he couldn’t keep away from him who demanded romance and commitment when it was the libertine promiscuous Meghan who stole his heart. Couldn’t she tell he wasn’t a romantic so much as just a rake? God why did all these fools think he was a such a nice guy—because perhaps he was fundamentally a good man but he was not a nice one; was it because he read a lot of books and tucked his shirt in? Look closer! It was half the reason he was so gentlemanly so he could sneak around and be very sneaky. He was not “sweet” as girls believed. And he was not “nice.” He was actually bad in a good kind of way. What he authentically was: was a damned toxic hotrod of a son of a bitch no different than Meghan; he just didn’t have to fuck everyone’s mom like she had to fuck for validation everyone’s dad. He was a rake. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing and also a sheep in wolf’s clothing, so he could get away with everything and not get away with anything, all at once.

Chapter 18.

Caroline Van’noble was shopping insolently. Impudently and imprudently in the cold. She didn’t know why. She hated shopping. She had people do it for her normally. She didn’t even intend on buying anything, and she didn’t know what in the hell she was looking for either.

It was damned hot out.

It was damned hot but she felt cold, chilly; it felt brisk.

It wasn’t warm not even with the fifteen glasses of brandy and sherry she had just with breakfast and lunch and cocktails.

Everyone was looking at her like they always did.

Fools.

Idiots.

Everyone was rudely staring when a starer should be drawn and quartered and hung and/or just shot point blank. Well even if she weren’t “freezing” she would have turned hilarious hysterical heads regardless.

She was wearing a long pink sun dress, but it didn’t make any difference. She was freezing.

She half wished faintly vaguely if she could be conscious of herself and not self-conscious as wishing for anything that she had bundled up—she was that cold that chilly unfeeling and bitter. Bitter against all the men who didn’t who failed to understand her. And her friends who hated her, her family who ignored her. All her betrayers! And all of it they rudely expected her to “cope” with for her being herself by being too hard on everybody and too hard on herself, people who were too hard on her in return for being herself for trying to be better than herself and shoot for the moon like the moon was a man or a good book, all the silly people who had no aspiration to be better than whoever they already were and wanted to stay being and would never cease being because no one dared to be any better than what someone else told them to be.

Cowards!

No one wanted the world to be better. No one expected or demanded more.

She was furious.

You should demand more all the time every day from everybody from yourself from the world and there should be no end in sight to all the sick institutions and people you wanted like hell to reform and improve if it fucking killed you or them or all of us. When no one was enough for her while she was “too much” for everybody else— sick degenerate frail weak and impotent people, fearful feckless lying lazy people she wanted to smack in the head with a big pink eraser until they died of throat cancer or mouth cancer or finger nail cancer—here she was now then and again Caroline lonely in herself irresolutely but uncompromisingly locked up inside herself withholding from you from me from them from herself these pieces of herself these broken fragmented infernal pieces in shambles, gambling ambling and rambling but above all just shopping in Vineyard Vines stores and such in East Hampton alone and by herself but solitary independent free and indomitable and impenetrable, indefatigable irrefutable and desperately happily alone, alone in the world, alone to herself, alone to others not needing anyone, not even needing herself; she was that strong; she was that ruthless; and that fearless; and resilient; physically perfect but morally superior too; intellectually adroit and superficially an idiot; miserable but damn strong; sharp as a tack; smooth as a penny in winter; she was always shopping because maybe one new identical preppy dress made all the difference. All the difference she goddamn needed to stand up to them bitches and sons of em’. To stand up to it. To stand up to this place. This hellhole. This shit hole. This country. This world. This body. This life. This mind. This existence. This lust this everything. Every damned every goddamn thing. Not to bow down to it or anyone or lie dead before it. Not to exalt it or exult in it. She was a proud mean cunt of a girl. To be one to be true to be whole to be pure to be new and fresh but old so old so terribly old no one even knew or could tell how old she goddamned was or would ever know, so she was always shopping always cursorily gazing perusing discerning, sagaciously judging all these utterly punctilious and pugnacious pugilistically pretty pink dresses in all these goddamned windows, and she had the money; she had shitpiles of heaping steaming steamy smoky smelly filthy money; and she had fine good hard looks and sunglasses she always wore when she was out to dissolve every summer day behind and win insolvent and insoluble unsolvable and unwinnable games of chess against an unbeatable chess player— Caroline, smoldering and smoking through the cold heat of summer chilly wishing she had bundled up just a little, but not being able to wish not being able to hope or pray, not believing in it, or dream not being able to be conscious not amidst these storms of disapproving jealous envious curious staring and judging condemning when not admiring a certain fine good grace of form her natural sublime finesse and her characteristic fine elegance that brooked no quarter with unspeakable candor.

The End