By the time Alison arrives at the lovely bucolic farmhouse she feels like a submarine at crush depth. She’s early, and awkwardly loiters at a distance, surrounded by tea lights and easels cheekily displaying the couple’s blown-up social media posts, to observe the ceremony she wasn’t invited to. Despite her titanic pregnancy, Cece’s arms are no thicker. With short tender secular vows and an elegant handfasting ceremony, the newlyweds stammer over their happy tears. Alison would have cried even if she didn’t hate them. She’d been good, she hadn’t made any trouble for him, and this is where she ended up: there was no reward for being a mature adult who forgave and worked on herself. She rubs her numb fingertip when they kiss.

Kant realizes it sounds like he’s fishing for compliments, and that in doing so he might find the lake empty. He apologizes and stares at his stupid face in the sideview mirror, getting sucked into an emotional gravity well where he pities Julian for dating such a loser, and resents Julian for pitying him, and pities himself for being pitied, all of which cancels out into silence.

As much as he appreciates the support, he doesn’t actually want Julian to like him for his niceness or intelligence. He’d hoped that being in a relationship would somehow make his self-worth feel less concentrated around cartoonishly yucky sexual degradation; yet six months in, neither of them has acknowledged Kant’s obvious avoidance of sex, because he can’t or won’t specify his needs, being convinced that he is always in debt and on probation, that Julian’s assenting to date a stammering moon-faced pornsick Asian virgin in his thirties was already asking too much, and any extra demands would only risk losing everything, plus what could be more pathetic and off-putting than begging Julian to please pretty please be terrified of his cock. And on top of all this, Kant is basically someone who, in his normal life, wants monogamy, stability, even kids someday, a life entirely incompatible with his hideous desires, so wouldn’t it be simpler to refrain from indulging them, lest they get their roots even deeper in him? If Julian hasn’t brought up the sex problem, it’s probably because he’s fine with not having sex with Kant, and who could blame him.

And yet: Kant also wonders if his own reticence is a smokescreen to avoid admitting that he’s never been very physically attracted to Julian either. It’s not that Julian doesn’t take care of himself, with his thrice-weekly gym visits and flexitarianism; he is undeniably good-looking. But not perfect. He has a recessed chin and patchy leg hair, butt acne, a dick that could be two inches longer (though still bigger than Kant’s), and occasional hand eczema requiring creams and latex finger cots. None of this comports with the fantasy in Kant’s head. It would be unconscionable to ever suggest that Julian is inadequate; it’s clearly Kant who’s lacking, for looking the way he does, and wanting the vile, absurd, disgusting, and physically impossible things he wants. Yet the sense of his own guilt and hypocrisy do nothing to counteract the wanting.

Kant shakes his head. For him, sex is not play, and not sports, nor even work—sex will always be a trial, ending in a verdict.

The first time she complained about her phone being broken, I told her it was for the best, and that personally whenever I feel like taking a motivational break, I pair some inspiring savage images with sickening music; for me I like to crank “Another One Bites the Dust” while looking at that photo of the American soldiers sticking the flag into Japan, just a double dose of freaking epicness, after a few minutes of that I’m always eyes-up and ready to rock. She said a few sort of negative things about this, so after I set her straight on the “No Bummers” policy in my house, I reminded her that if we were gonna pursue our goals we had to keep focused on the long term.

Then, in rebuttal to her crying, I asked her to explain why she thought that was a constructive or salient response to what I’d just said, and all she did was keep crying, which proved my point. It was giving irresponsible. It was giving lack of commitment! [...]

I also saw the potential for profit here, intuiting early on that anything money touches opens a new vista of exploitation. Once my year of punishment was over, I signed up for my own Everquest account, where I befriended other players and then stole their loot. (Without getting too deep into it: there was no official way for players to trade items in-game, so you had to drop them on the ground, and with practice it was easy to ninja-gank a Willsapper or Circlet of Shadows to sell through online brokers.) By the time the game’s devs caught wise, I had made about $12K. I convinced my mom to open a bank account for me and told her I was selling Neopets, then went on to explain the microeconomics of Neopets until she bluescreened. She liked that I cared about money and stayed put in the basement all day, which meant I wasn’t selling drugs or gender. But with my new debit card I was still making deals, the most lucrative of which was flipping porn domains; a Scandinavian guy emailed me with an offer to purchase mommythroats.com and teenfuck.com for $15,000, a bargain. By graduation I had minted $35K from my modem, though I spent most of that on weed, anime VCDs, and a used ’96 Toyota Camry.

Friendless, cash flush, rashes, scabs, incredible grades with zero effort: that was high school for me. My college application essay was a hive of falsehoods about being an Olympic hopeful figure skater who, after an ACL tear, discovered a true passion in ukiyo-e woodblock art. I got in everywhere.

Back then I’d thought social justice drama was a college phenomenon, but here I learned everyone was doing it, politicizing in bad faith what were obviously just bad manners. If you left dishes in the sink you found yourself accused of spoiling the commons or outsourcing labor. If you asked someone to turn down the music at night, you were entertaining carceral logics. I certainly project-managed my share of callouts and their fallouts, and I have to admit that I played the game hard and well. I led the charge on censuring the textile artist for saying that bisexuals in cishet relationships faced less discrimination. I denounced the cishet Israeli sculptor for centering herself and queerbaiting after she made a Facebook post during Pride with a rainbow flag painted on her cheek. I practiced calling people “folx” and got mad when others didn’t. I also ran a tight defense, deflecting accusations of being an elite by pointing out that my Stanford tuition was funded largely by the inheritance from my immigrant father—who committed suicide, by the way. And I straight-up crucified Craig at a picnic for whining about getting zero pussy, lit him up so hard he spiraled and eventually went full blackpill, which just goes to my point that all identarian politics are homologous: even when they represent opposing values, all are engaged in a vigorous pledge to the same principle of belonging.

After a few months I was essentially in a polycule with Zamira and her traumas. Every conversation was like laparoscopic surgery, a delicate lifesaving procedure performed near-blind, and any attempt to set boundaries was taken as a wholesale rejection of her and our shared ideals. Why couldn’t I drive her to and from a flower shop in West Oakland for an anti-war poetry reading? Was it for the same reason I didn’t share and retweet her post about her new ($900-a-head) three-day community fermentation class for BIPOC? Or let her propagate her monstera cuttings on my vacant windowsill? Always with that syllogism that all bad-faith identitycels use: I am an X, and you don’t support me, therefore you don’t support X. Of course this cynically exploits the real facts of bigotry, that people generally are out to get X, so it’s hard to dispute in general terms, even though, wait a fucking minute, I’M X TOO!!!