Previously on Femslash Friday: The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Mean Girls is the film equivalent of the hyper-closeted girl who let you make out with her in between boyfriends but snubbed you in the hallways in high school. She’s not gay, you’re gay, and sometimes you happen to be gay inside of her mouth, which isn’t really her fault, if that happens. You’ve got a big old lesbian crush on her, and if you tell anyone about what you two really do when you’re supposed to be tutoring her in pre-calc she’ll deny it. And who would believe you?
don’t ask, don’t tell
You’re familiar with Mean Girls, of course; you’ve been on the Internet. Its status as a camp classic among gay men is already assured, yet its queasy, fascinated relationship with girl-on-girl relationships keeps lesbian and bi viewers at arms’ length — close enough to make out with but far enough to push away if someone else walks in the room.
The specter of lesbianism is one that gets raised periodically throughout the film — supposedly for the purpose of shooting it down. Janis Ian is named after the famous lesbian singer-songwriter; Regina confesses to having been her former friend before explaining she disinvited her from a birthday celebration because “you can’t have a lesbian at a pool party.”
Did you have that best friend in high school? Readers, I did. Her name was Jessica and we spent every day together and I had never met anyone more beautiful and we ate lunch by ourselves on a bench and we made each other laugh. The week she stopped talking to me, she told the boy who had asked me to prom not to do it, “because she’s actually a man in woman’s clothing.” It broke my heart. I had a fever for days. I hadn’t even thought I was in love with her, until I found out she hated me for it. But you can’t have a lesbian at a pool party. You can’t like someone else too much.
It’s hard not to watch Mean Girls now without extratextual information coloring each scene — Lindsay Lohan went on, famously, to date Samantha Ronson, while the actors who played Aaron Samuels and Damien both came out several years after Mean Girls was released. There’s a frisson of gayness wherever you look. Cady’s first interactions with Janis and Regina — the girls who war for her heart and soul — read more like romantic meet-cutes than anything else. Regina rescues her from the unwanted sexual attentions of Jason “Do You Want Your Muffin Buttered,” swiftly putting him in his place, and gallantly pulls Cady under her wing.
And Janis — well. Janis is very excited to meet Cady.
That is the slouching, casually disinterested, smirking, hair-twirling pose of someone who’s just met her new girlfriend. Nothing about this says “Hey, nice to meet you; I look forward to our heterosexually-based friendship” and everything about it rumbles “Hello, Red.”
Janis proceeds to use her shiny new relationship Cady to keep tabs on her ex (and who among us cannot say we have done the same) and pushes her into dressing and acting just like her last, lost girlfriend. Regina, meanwhile, trots out a series of psychosexual power plays that would make the Marquis de Sade’s head spin in order to keep Cady close to her and desperate for her approval. It’s like a Beebo Brinker novel, with all the high-femme head games swirling around. Cady might like Regina’s ex? Then Regina’s taking him back. And Regina wants to see the look on Cady’s face while she does it.
Cady’s transformation into Regina is supposedly complete when she accuses Janis of being “like, in love with me or something,” which causes Damien to bring his car to a screeching halt:
I don’t love you, Janis tells her. No one loves you. Everybody hates you. Which, in the world of Mean Girls, is kind of the same thing.
(Must I accept the fact that Lizzy Caplan is probably heterosexual? I don’t want to. I don’t want to.)
What to do with Janis! The filmmakers don’t seem to know. Is she a cool girl lost in a parade of power femmes? A butch heterosexual? A misunderstood dyke? Regina is clearly wrong for using her purported sexuality for excluding her from that long-ago pool party, but the filmmakers don’t seem to want a lesbian on their hands any more than she did. They bring Janis right up to the Lesbian Line and then at the last minute snatch her back with the help of Kevin G.
Consider: one of the last scenes in the movie, Janis is in menswear and a gel-sculpted Dolly Wilde hairdo with a gay man as her date. They’re wearing purple tuxedos, a color so indelibly associated with visible gayness that it nearly got the Teletubbies cancelled fifteen years ago.
A truly daring ending would have had Kevin asking Damien to dance. Damien, I am so sorry you never got to make out with anyone in this movie because you were too busy being the Neutered Gay Best Friend. I hope your first college boyfriend was adorable and the two of you had sex all the time.
Tell me that this is the face of a woman who’s excited to dance with a heterosexual man. Go ahead. Tell me that. I will be here, waiting for you to look me in the eyes and tell me the greatest lie since “Jo and Blair were just really good friends.”
Cady gets Aaron Samuels and his bangs in the end, I think. He continues to exist, which I find mostly unobjectionable.
But here are Regina and Janis at their happiest, respectively, in the entirety of Mean Girls:
“It’s her dream come true,” Regina said snarkily of Janis during the trust fall sequence, “diving into a sea of girls.”
Regina knows because her dream has always been the same.
Tags: femslash fridays, lesbian queen bees, lesbians everywhere, lgbt, mean girls
this is absolute genius.
Okay, I am sure high school was difficult and challenging for everyone, but Jessica was a cunt and I think we should go to her house and egg it.
she broke me, dude
SCOWLS FIERCELY
I’m ready to head up the Prank Call squad.
BORN READY
There are a looooot of Jessicas out there. I would support egging this one’s house.
So many of them. >:( My Jessica/Regina JUST decided that all her relationships with dudes fail because she isn’t straight. As a happily-married lesbian, I say HAAAAHAAAAA.
It’s petty, but it’s sweet.
#NotAllJessicas
So great are the crimes of this Jessica that all Jessicas (Jessicata? Jessicantes?) must suffer. Lo, the firstborn Jessica of each house shall have said house egged. Note that I am not leaving out possible firstborn cattle named Jessica–their houses’ll get it too.
(srsly, Jessiceaux? Is Jessica already plural? Like, “a pack of Jessica” maybe? An unkindness of Jessica?)
We prefer “a gossip of Jessicae”.
A Squee of Jessica
She didn’t want to knoooooow meeeee *sobs*
(mine was a little earlier because I was precocious and, like 10, but it still broke my heart how I was good enough to kiss in privacy but she wouldn’t talk to me in school)
For a final editing project in my high school film class, I made a new Mean Girls trailer that turned (“turned”) it into a lesbian romantic comedy. Literally all I had to do was take out Aaron Samuels and slap a few Butchies songs over it. Easiest A I ever got in my life.
I approve.
PUT IT ON YOUTUBE
PUT IT ON YOUTUBE
PUT IT ON YOUTUBE.
PLEASE.
You go, Glen Coco!
Tina Fey says on the commentary that she did improv at Second City with someone named Glen Coco. Lorne Michaels asks if “You go, Glen Coco!” was a thing; she says emphatically that it was not. For more Mean Girls commentary facts, just ask. I have plenty.
I really, really enjoyed this post; I wanna say exactly why, but I can’t put it into words, I’d just come off sounding trite or worse, dumb. So I’ll wait for a great comment, then reply “This” and thumb it up.
This.
It may be a stretch but I will be using this argument to make sense of Lizzy Caplan’s character’s utterly unconvincing relationship with Adam Scott’s character in Bachelorette.
Or with ELDERLY JOHN CUSACK in “Hot Tub Time Machine.”
“But he would have looked like Young John Cusack to HER bc time machine, Nicole.” “No, but then when they’re back in the present, Lou has fixed it so they get married, and they make ZERO ATTEMPT to age her, so it’s still Elderly John Cusack and Young Lizzy Caplan.”
But IRL she dated Matthew Perry for six years so THROWS UP HANDS.
Elderly John Cusack is only 5 years older than I am, so I guess I’m pre-elderly. Pass the Geritol.
(But yeah, she is quite a bit younger than him or Perry, so ewww.)
John Cusack is exactly my age. Fetch me my walker.
But he’s John Cusack! I’m nearly ten years younger than Lizzy Caplan and I would still date John Cusack.
(One thing that always struck me about that movie- when they go back to the future, John Cusack et all have NO MEMORY of the changes Lou made. So John Cusack and Craig Robinson had no memories of their 20+ year marriages, and Not Jonah Hill had no memory of his childhood! I am way too distressed about this.)
I haven’t seen Bachelorette, but I find her ongoing relationship/non-relationship with Adam Scott in Party Down extremely convincing. They’re both kind of fuckups, and they’re both quite bad at sustaining a relationship, thus making them a theoretically terrible but actually fairly compatible match.
I feel like that only happened b/c of Party Down. (RIP)
Slow, solemn claps. Also, _that regina george gif_. My heart! My life!
*fans self*
ETA: to clarify, specifically about Janis Ian being TOTALLY CASUAL, but also generally Janis Ian.
i don’t think i realized it until i read this, but i too had a jessica/regina. i felt finally unalone with her, we practically lived at one another’s houses, and our association helped me ride the shifting tides of popularity when elementary changed to middle school and the things that made me different became more visible. and then, one day, she cut me off utterly. i became an outcast with my very own lunch table. i dreamed of her every night. i begged her to reconsider. the loss of her friendship defined me.
then one day when i was a senior in high school, she approached me at lunch and apologized for everything.
THEN, in college, we were roommates for a year and had an entirely satisfying one-night stand.
the thing that makes me feel best about this situation, is that it means that i am janis ian. and that is the greatest gift of all.
“THEN, in college, we were roommates for a year and had an entirely satisfying one-night stand.” THIS IS WONDERFUL
Yes. This is the best story ever and needs to be its own movie.
perfect
I posted about this in a separate comment, but since it’s a week late, I don’t know if anyone saw it. Relaine and other people who had Jessicas- is there a poem or short story that you would have liked to assign your teenage self? I’ve got a young writing student who is broadcasting her heartbreak with every thing she turns in to me. Probably something coded that wouldn’t make her feel singled out.
Oh man, the feelz. I had a “Jessica” in high school, too. She told me that I wasn’t allowed to touch or come near her, and the fact that we used to hug (JUST HUG) made her sick. It gave me such a phobia about physical intimacy that my first girlfriend broke up with me because she “thought I didn’t like touching her.” No! I did like it! I was just worried about liking it *too much.*
I did NOT know that the actor who played Aaron Samuels was gay. SPICY.
Lizzy Caplan is an incredibly crushworthy lady, and Janis Ian is basically what I wanted to be in high school. I was made out to be a lesbian once or twice by Hudsonville, Michigan’s very own branch of mean girls, and I maybe wouldn’t have minded the label if I was half as self-confident as Janis. (Tragically, this enormous ego of mine didn’t develop till well into college.) Such as it was, I cowered in corners and faked sick a lot that year.
Also, hooray for an FF about a movie! This is relevant to my interests!
I will never look at “mean girls” the same way. great breakdown. I wonder if Tina Fey would agree.
I was Janis in high school. Every bit of it that it’s eerie. I still am mostly, though I somehow ended up married to a dude. It’s okay though, he drives a Subaru and is obsessed with Rachel Maddow and we met at an Ani DiFranco show. He’s still a man, but nobody’s perfect.
Excellent “Some Like it Hot” reference!
Have we had a The Toast article about Some Like It Hot? Because it seems like the sort of thing that should exist.
I second this. There is so much going on in that movie. Would love to read the Toast’s take on it.
I have never been so glad to have started out at a high school where everybody was too gay to function. Fuck Jessica, man.
In university, I found out that one of the girls who had made life for difficult for me in high school than absolutely necessary because of my gayness had fallen for a girl and realized she herself was a big ole lesbian. I legit cackled with evil, satisfied glee.
Ok, possibly only tangentially related, but I always loved the Jessica Wakefield Is A Big Ole Les theory. The mean girl who is completely predatory with men because she does not actually give a shit about them except as status objects or weapons to use on women? Yeah, that’s a gay. Like 90% chance.
It worked for Santana.
HOLY SHIT THAT IS PERFECT. Gay Jessica Wakefield should be the next Ronbledore.
Full disclosure because I know you Toasties will only judge me for a moment and then will move on and all will be forgiven. Right? Right? Okay.
I HAVE NEVER SEEN MEAN GIRLS. As a lover and connoisseur of pop culture, I have always felt this lack–quite keenly–but, well, 2004-2005 was a rough time for me and I missed out on a lot of things TBH. So your thoughts, dear ones. Is this a movie worth seeing, ten years late? Or is it acceptable to just skate along on my basic understanding of it, via common catchphrases and Tumblr gifsets?
Oh, it’s quite a lot of fun, I think you’ll enjoy it!
Good to know! Thanks, Mallory.
Oh yes it is worth it!
Yay! Thank you for weighing in. Sometimes these things don’t hold up, you know? And I only allow myself so much time in front of the television since I spend so much time in front of my computer screen…
it is ALWAYS acceptable to skate along on your a basic common-catchphrase understanding! Mean Girls stands up to the passage of time and is a fun watch in and of itself, but please don’t feel judged for not having seen it. “The canon” is just as bullshit a way of thinking when it’s enforced on pop culture as when it’s telling you to read dead white dude western literature.
Catching up with this kind of film actually sometimes ends up in disappointment not because of the film itself but because you realise that things people around you said that you thought were super-funny were actually quotes, and your friends are significantly less sponteneously witty than you had prevously assumed. :/
Very few of my friends are spontaneously witty. Alas. I have to shoulder that burden myself most of the time.
I agree that watching it will not be a waste of time. One of the fascinating things to know about it is that the movie is based on a non-fiction book which is a self-help book about dealing with high school cliques and mean girls. So the story and the characters were developed for the movie. (I haven‘t read the book – symmetry.)
INTERESTING!
Hmm. Honestly it’s hard to say. I found it to be genuinely funny (there were parts that made me laugh so loud in the theater I was actually disruptive) but I also saw it at the perfect time. I was a freshman in college so high school was recent but still in the past.
That’s my biggest concern. Seeing this for the first time as a forty-something–will it have any relevance?
I never have, and don’t intend to. The mean girls in high school were atrocious enough, why in the world would I want to relive that in fantasy?
I think it’s like poking a bruise.
Because it has a happy ending.
TBH I only tried watching it earlier this year, and I only got halfway through before I got kinda bored and stopped. I was so repressed in high school that pretty much no movie about high school is relatable. YMMV.
Good point to consider.
Oh thank god the guy playing Damien is actually gay cause I thought no one could hit that nail on the head of a TYPE of Huge Vaguely Mean But Painfully Earnest And Co-Dependant Gay Guy In High School who had not lived it.
Uh ..he said. not knowing anything about that.
So Mean Girls is on Netflix Streaming (IT’S NOT STREAMING GO WATCH IT I KNOW YOU ALL HAVE ACCOUNTS) And I watched it on a double bill with Heathers and how much it felt like a response to Heathers? Like Heathers was playing up this high school meanness as prep for a cynical adult world that requires a literal explosion to stop while Mean Girls suggests that you CAN change the toxic dynamic of High School if everyone tries hard and feels a lot?
Like, that feels like an important cultural shift.
YES. Except also Heathers could never ever get made today, at least not by a major studio or whatever, no? So maybe less that that cynicism has disappeared and more that this is the version we can get funded now? I dunno, but yes on the direct lineage! Also, Heathers is great.
Heathers is the bessssssssssst.
I had a professor who called Mean Girls a cut-rate Heathers remake. I’ve never actually seen Heathers, but I trust his judgement.
FUN FACT, the director of Mean Girls is the BROTHER of the writer/director of Heathers so, yes we can abbume a connection.
Everything is different now that I have learned this.
EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT NOW THAT I HAVE LEARNED THIS.
WAIT does this mean that we can assume that Heathers and Mean Girls are part of the same universe? Can we take your original point one step further and assume that Tina Fey’s character is a survivor of the Heathers school explosion? Does this explain her motivation and dedication to confronting bullying in all its forms, as a way of coping with her survivor’s guilt? LET’S GET DARK HERE
I think we can and SHOULD assume a shared Heathers/Mean Girls universe.
I was the Token Les in my high school’s Mean Girls clique, which was eerily like the Plastics. Then the time came when they held a slumber party and told me I couldn’t come because, “Well, it’d be awkward if you were there.” What did they do at this slumber party? Get drunk wearing peignoirs, and then the peignoirs came off and some Compromising Photographs were taken and subsequently passed all over school. The Plastics fell apart over the scandal as they threw one scapegoat-girl under the bus (but not in front of the bus like in Mean Girls). I just sat in the corner filing my nails, lifting one eyebrow as if to silently say, I’M the awkward one?
So many thumbs up for “peignoirs.”
Oh man. I think I got extra doses of Jessica fall-out because my parents were also gay, but they were really bad at it and homophobia was everywhere. So I had already kinda been burned by the time I had my first Jessica and just…oof. There were more than a few after that, too, going all the way through college.
Now I’m 32 and still kinda screwed up by the Decade of Jessicas and related bullshit, though hopefully only in that residual everyone-has-baggage way.
Does every queer women have a Jessica? Seems to be the case because I know I did–actually I had two. One girl befriended me my freshman year of high school, quick and intense friendship before later that year she all of a sudden decided she hated me and spent the next 4 years making up rumors, or messing up my shit. Then another who was my best friend for 3 years in high school–until she became better friends with the girl who actively hated/friend-dumped me, leading her to friend-dump me as well. Which actually makes best friend 1 and 2 perfect stand-in for Regina and Cady, if Regina and Cady didn’t lose their shit and then get it together at the end.
The worst part of it was that when I finally came out, it was because of this Women’s Studies 101 class project where we had to examine our past friendships with women and then it was like “oh fuck–DEFINITELY was in love with them.”
I never had a Jessica in the sense of a later-gay friend dropping me for liking her too much, but my high-school best-friend-turned-college-LUG was pissed and dropped me when I wouldn’t sleep with her, so………..
I loved the movie Pariah so much, but the “Jessica” in that movie was so bad.
I can’t watch that movie without bursting into tears. BURSTING.
yeah, it got mighty dusty when I watched it.
That reminds me of the french film, Water Lilies. The “Jessica” in that film made me so angry. Still feel angry just thinking about it.
I would like to submit that I, perhaps because I like so many others before me, seek representation where there may be none, always read Janis as canonically bi. Her undeniable love affair with Regina does not mean that she couldn’t plausibly have any kind of relationship with Kevin G. Signed, slightly masculine of center bi girls everywhere <3.
TRUE and if there were even a SPARK of actual chemistry between Janis and Kevin, I would co-sign on this heartily.
not that she still couldn’t be bi. But that relationship with Kevin has GOT TO GO
OK fine fair I shall concede this to you, O great Mallory.
[fun side note – my own Jessica was named Mallory, so.]
I was young when I met my ‘Jessica’. When we first met and became friends at the end of third grade, we knew we wouldn’t see each other all over the summer break so we decided we had to say goodbye in a dramatic and memorable way – with a kiss! Guys, we frenched and it was slobbery. My first kiss, in fact. We were thick as thieves until sixth grade when she suddenly decided I was uncool. She ditched me for a new best friend, and I was heartbroken. She was a terrible human being during those years, but I will forgive her for being 12. And when her new bff moved away a year later, she had no friends left and had to glom onto the new girl and I inwardly rejoiced at her fallen status even though I was still horribly uncool myself.
Ooof. Guys I…I think I may have been someone’s Jessica? Or we were each other’s Jessicas? I was REALLY CLOSE with this girl in middle school. I went to her house every day to do spells and commune with ghosts and light stuff on fire, as you do, and then one day she just stopped talking to me because I was “a bad influence” (I still don’t understand how, as, aside from witchery and pyrotechnics, I was approximately the most boring person in the world in middle school, but whatever.)
Then in high school, I started a feminist club and everyone thought I was a lesbian and this same girl started sneak-attack kissing me at fencing meets even though, despite feminist club, I was ADAMANTLY NOT A LESBIAN GUYS JEEZ, and also, we hadn’t really been speaking to each other for YEARS.
*shrug* Then at 22, I learned that I’m bi, to which my friends/brother/dad all essentially said, “Duh.”
tl;dr: I dunno, man, adolescence is confusing.
ETA: I think my real Jessica was probably in 2nd grade, this girl who lived upstairs from me. We were each other’s best friends/worst enemies and completely obsessed with each other from age 0-8, and then she declared that she hated me forever and wouldn’t let anyone in the school yard play with me anymore.
My last memory of her is visiting her once after she moved away. She made me lift up my shirt so we could compare training bras (TRAINING BRAS. We were eleven!) and coldly informed me: “Ugh, Chrissy, you are SO flat chested.” (ELEVEN!!)
Oh Chrissy, you and your flat chest. Jeez. I didn’t wear a bra in the fifth grade, and some girls made fun of me. I AM SORRY THAT IT’S COLD AND MY NIPPLES WERE SHOWING. THERE WAS NOTHING TO PUT IN A BRA, LADIES.
I love hearing about your surprise fencing make out sessions. I just keep picturing Piper Perabo in Lost and Delirious.
Can’t stop pronouncing it “lugbutt.”
Soooo… I haven’t seen this movie in a while, but honestly if you has asked me before reading this, I would have described basically this as the canonical, barely-subtextual reading. Seriously, we’re not SUPPOSED to think that Regina and Janis both wind up being lesbians? (I never thought we were supposed to think Cady would be. She’s totally straight.) But I thought that the whole Kevin thing was SUPPOSED to be awkward and kinda like LOL this won’t last OBVI.
I don’t think I had a Jessica in the sense that someone jumped me for being a queermo (well I had a girl at camp who accused me of staring at her when she was wearing a bathing suit but there was no frenemy relationship there; we hated each other) but I definitely had a nasty friendship breakup. Her name was Taylor and when I refused to go along with her excluding someone from our group, she gave me the cut direct and I had no friends for the rest of seventh grade.
(At one point in our fight she informed me that she was giving me “one last chance” to ditch the uncool kid and hang out with her, and I replied “why would I need another chance?” She did not like that. But then she got arrested for shoplifting in our last year of high school and was banned from the graduation ceremony, so it all comes around.)
Was Jessica Jessica Stein?
I’m 35, asexual, and I think I had a Jessica earlier this year. Or at least, someone who really wanted to be a Jessica. We were friendly, and I confided in her about a difficult situation I was (and still am) involved with. I thought she was a very good listener. At some point, I visited the city she lives in with my parents, and I asked her if she wanted to go for drinks, and she said no. After that, she seemed to really take her distance from me, which I assumed was due to her getting bored with my kvetching about said difficult situation.
And then I found her online postings, in which she talked about me as someone very fragile with an obvious crush on her and that I wanted to introduce her to my parents as my special someone. She thought it was *so* awkward that I had asked her in front of a bunch of people, and she was *so* concerned because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings and she didn’t know what to do.
I wrote to her to ask her if she could remove said postings from the forum she’d written them on because I don’t like it when people gossip about me. She replied apologetically, claiming that she’d never intended for me to read the posts, and that she was sorry to hurt my feelings. I told her not to worry, that no feelings were hurt, because she was wrong in thinking I had a crush on her. I said it as nicely as possible.
To which, *crickets*
I mean, seriously, this woman is almost 40 years old. You’d think she had grown out of her Jessica phase. Is there anyone else who has encountered this behaviour in adulthood?
I’ve found “adulthood” to be a theoretical construct for a lot of people, so…yes. That seems like a bullet dodged for you, though.
I know I dodged a bullet. I’m just wondering if this has happened to other people.
“The week she stopped talking to me, she told the boy who had asked me to prom not to do it, “because she’s actually a man in woman’s clothing.” ”
She sounds like a total whim-worshiping second-hander.
I never had a Jessica, but basically every straight girl I’ve ever had a crush on has now come out (except for the one who became Orthodox and had three kids and moved to Israel where she uses her art degree to paint really beautiful ketubot for betrothed couples, which is also really typical of my taste in women, tbh) and I kind of wish I could call up teenage me to tell her that.
One time, in a graduate level philosophy class (yeah, yeah, I know), a girl made a mean girls reference. The professor got confused about what “making fetch happen” meant, so he proceeded in his Norwegian accent to force this poor MA student to recount the plot of mean girls. He was surprisingly invested in Glen Coco.
this is typical of people with baseless inflated egos. the moment you politely call them out and ask them to stop they get quiet. folks like this are keen to rewrite history as well, especially if it saves face and boosts their self image. i can promise you the version of events she is telling her friends goes like this:
[her] so like, yeah, she GOOGLED my name and STALKED me online. she found my posts about her on a forum and she emailed me all butthurt begging me to take it down because it hurt her felings that i told the truth!
[her friends] what a loser!
[her] yeah, i don't talk to her anymore. after she STALKED me online and EMAILED me about my PERSONAL posts i knew it was best to sever ties. i've blocked her email so i know i never have to hear from her again.
[her friends] you are such a strong beautiful woman. we love you. because we are afraid of being cut out of your life as easily as you cut this chick, we're never going to disagree with anything you say or tell you when we have a problem with your behaviour. please don't block our email addresses or post about us on forums. we promise to behave.
Well, the online posting in question was already significantly re-writing history, so I have no doubt that she's doing exactly that. Or pretending nothing happened.
This is the truest post. There is so much lesbian subtext there. Also, my Jessica was also named Jessica, believe it or not.
Hey so, I don’t have personal experience with this, but a week after I read this FF I got a teenage summer camp writing student who is clearly (based on every poem and story she has turned in to me), in deep deep mourning over her Jessica. All I do is give her feedback on her work, and assign literature for her to read, so if anyone has any suggestions for short, PG rated, coded poems or stories that helped you as a heartbroken teenage closet case, lemme know!
This maybe doesn’t match up perfectly, but is close, & the narrator is actually the “Jessica” (a sad, confused Jessica) — “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” by ZZ Packer. You can find it online in the New Yorker archives.