The Nix(64)

“You’re not using this to cheat, are you?” her roommate asked a few weeks into the operation.

“No. It’s so I can study. At the gym,” Laura said.

“Because cheating is wrong.”

“I know.”

“And I’ve never seen you exercise.”

“I do exercise.”

“I’m at the gym all the time and I’ve never seen you there.”

“Well, rats’ eggs on you!” Laura said, which was something her mother always said instead of cursing. Something else her mother always said is Don’t let anyone EVER bully you or make you feel bad about yourself, and at that moment her roommate was making her feel very bad indeed, which was why instead of apologizing Laura said, “Listen, feeb, if you haven’t seen me at the gym it’s ’cuz some of us don’t need to be there as long as you do,” because her roommate was, let’s face it, objectively morbidly (almost fascinatingly) obese. She had legs like sacks of potatoes. For real.

The word “feeb” was something she made up on the spot and felt pretty proud of, actually, how sometimes a nickname can capture a person’s essence like that.

Her phone dinged.


Whatcha doin 2nite?



Jason again, probing. He was never as obvious as when he wanted to sext.


Homework :’(



The only class Laura was taking this semester that related in any way to her future was her one business class, macroeconomics, which was so abstractly mathematical and had basically nothing to do with the “human element” of business, which was really why she was going into this field at all, because she liked people and she was good with people and she maintained a huge cavalry of online contacts who texted her and messaged her several times daily through the many social media sites she kept a presence on, which made her phone ding all day, repeatedly, the sound like a spoon lightly tapped against a crystal goblet, these pure high singing notes that made her feel bolts of Pavlovian happiness.

And that was why she was a business major.

But macroeconomics was so stupid and boring and unnecessary for her future career that she did not feel at all bad collaborating with a boy from her orientation group, a graphic design major and Photoshop artist who could, for example, scan the label of a Lipton Green Tea bottle, erase the ingredients list (a surprisingly long and sciencey thing for something that claimed to be “tea”), and replace the ingredients with an answer key to the test—all the formulas and concepts they were supposed to have memorized—matching exactly the original Lipton typeface and color so that there was no way the teacher would ever know she had all the test answers in front of her except by reading the ingredients list on her Lipton Green Tea. Fat chance, in other words. This boy was quasi-repaid with hugs that were maybe a little too tight and too close, as well as bi-semester visits to his dorm room downstairs when she “forgot” the key to her own room while going for a shower and so had nothing to do but crash at his place wearing only her favorite tiny towel.

Did Laura feel bad about all this cheating? She did not. That the school made it so easy to cheat meant, for her, that they tacitly approved of it, and moreover it was actually the school’s fault for making her cheat by (a) giving her so many opportunities, and (b) making her take so many bullshit courses.

Example: Hamlet. Trying to read stupid Hamlet again— Her phone chirped. Another iFeel update. It was Vanessa: iFeel scared about all this terrible economic news!!! Which was exactly the kind of boring update that got you taken right off the Alert List. Laura selected Ignore. One strike against Vanessa.

Anyway trying to read Hamlet and identify “logical fallacies” in Hamlet’s course of action, which was such bullshit because she knew for a fact that when she interviewed for executive vice president of communications and marketing for a major corporation they would not ask her about Hamlet. They would not ask her about logical fallacies. She had tried to read Hamlet but it kept getting all gummed up in her brain:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on’t! ah fie!



What the f*ck is that?

Who talks like that? And who said this was great literature? Because mostly from what she could tell in the few places where Shakespeare actually wrote in English was that Hamlet’s just stupid and depressed, which she was like if you’re sad and depressed and cheesed about something it’s probably your own dumb fault and why did she have to sit here and listen to you wallow in it? Plus there was the matter of her phone, which chimed and squawked and dinged roughly ten times per soliloquy and made her feel mentally encumbered trying to read stupid Hamlet knowing there was an update just sitting there waiting for her. It was a chiming sound for a text message but a birdlike chirping sound whenever her closest seventy-five friends updated their iFeel status, was how she’d programmed the phone. At first, she set it to alert her when any of her iFeel friends posted anything, but she quickly realized this was untenable given her thousand-plus friend roll, making the phone look something like a stock ticker and sound like an Audubon sanctuary. So she culled the Alert List to a more manageable seventy-five, though this list was a fluid, ever-changing one as she spent at least a couple of hours weekly reevaluating it and swapping some people out for others on the bubble using an intuitive sort of regression analysis based on several metrics, including the interestingness and frequency of the friend’s recent posts, the number of hilarious pictures recently uploaded and tagged, the presence of anything political-ish in the friend’s status stream (political statements usually caused bickering, so anyone chronically guilty was ejected from the top seventy-five), and finally the friend’s ability to find and link to worthwhile internet videos, since finding, in any consistent manner, good internet videos was a skill like panning for gold, she thought, and so it was important to keep in one’s top list a couple of these people who could spot cool videos and memes before they went viral, which made her feel good vis-à-vis her place in the culture, seeing these things a day or a week before everyone else in the world. It made her feel like she was on the leading edge of everything. It was approximately the same feeling she had walking around the mall and seeing how every clothing store reflected exactly what she wanted right back at her. The photographs, poster-size, life-size, some even blown up bigger than that, showed attractive young girls just like her, in groups of attractive and racially kind of diverse friends that looked just like her friends, having fun in outdoor settings that she and her friends would totally go to if there were anything like that around here. And the feeling she had when she saw these images was that she was wanted. Everyone wanted her to like them. Everyone wanted to give her exactly what she desired. She never felt as secure as she did in dressing rooms rejecting clothes for not being good enough for her, breathing in the deep, gluey smell of the mall.