Note: This story, heavily autobiographical, is the sixth and last in the Haters and Losers cycle.

It was the era of one’s expertise, the century of Obama. The most popular anime in the West was Shingeki no Kyojin and there was still some hope that the Arab Spring might stick the landing. Nicholas Zussman, soon to go into his seventh semester at UMass Amherst and tenth and hopefully final semester of college overall, walked the streets of Hakodate without much care; the personal crises that had beset him in previous years and the terror about the state of the world that would beset him in years to come were, at the moment, nearing the end of what would turn out to be an approximately eighteen-month-long period of equilibrium. No longer did he feel affronted and insecure about his beliefs about the world and about how to behave; not yet did he realize the various hypocrisies and repressions that he had developed to make up for the loss of the affronts and insecurities. Not yet had his relative comfort in his own moral standards given way to ever-stricter philosophy and theology; or, at least, that process had not yet reached its apogee. He knew enough Japanese to have gotten around well enough for the past five weeks and to have been interpreting, as best he could, for his parents, who were with him; Professor Williams would, he hoped, be more or less pleased with him when he got back, even though he had not been doing this through a formal study-abroad program like he had been encouraged to.

2008. A moment in spring, a fifteenth birthday party, walking along train tracks.

At almost twenty-seven years old, Marie Boisjoli had still not entirely outgrown the social dynamics of late adolescence. She had a tendency to default to pithy, doctrinaire opinions of the environments of her youth—high school as a place that could have been a contender in her esteem if certain things had been very different; her first college roundly demonized; and UMass Amherst, at least as it had been five years ago, as a flawed wonderland that might have been practically perfect in every way had she only been a couple of years older and wiser when she was there. She had not rediscovered the Catholicism of her childhood until after she had graduated, and now overlaid on the social dynamics of the standard Millennial extended adolescence was the spiritual perspicacity, consisting in tumult, of the short sharp adolescence of a hundred years ago or more. She lived in an artist’s loft in North Adams and skateboarded to Mass.

Note: This story is written, in a strictly limited way, from the point of view of a character who is being a bad friend to somebody in a sensitive situation (questioning one’s gender identity). Due to the writing style, the narration reflects this character’s viewpoints rather than my own. I feel the need to clarify this from the get-go because I know that there are people who find my own approach to issues of sexuality and gender validating or even inspiring, and I do not want to create a nasty surprise or the appearance of betrayal as these readers encounter Hayley Weingarten’s less-than-generous behavior around those topics.

1. 

Hayley Weingarten secretly liked to think of herself as a good person, secretly because she did not want to be thought of as the sort of person who self-identified as a good person. She was sixteen and had never done anything particularly wrong in her life, unlike some. She went to church and youth group, she did well in school, and her classmates liked her; one of the “popular crowd,” she was nevertheless spiritually and culturally out of step with the rest of that group. She never had to be told to take Buster for a walk; only seldom did she have to be told to sweep the kitchen before going to bed or to cook dinner with Dad every Tuesday and Friday.

One of Becky Zylberberg’s roommates, Rosie Distano, read feminist genre fiction from the eighties and nineties with titles like Nights at the Circus and Tipping the Velvet; she had been in, sequentially, a feminist punk band called Clitemnestra, a Wiccan folk-metal band called Dorothy Clusterfuck, an all-female symphonic metal cover band called Tinúviel, and an agrarian anarchocommunist agitprop band called Tractor Hacker, in addition to putting her own songs on Soundcloud under the name Anni DiPiombo. Raised Italian Catholic among ravioli-battening nonnas and Seaside Heights douchebags (hence the first name, which in full was Rosaria), she had soldiered on through her own doubts about the standard corpus of controversial social teachings into her very early twenties, then bolted from the Church for the neopagan community halfway through her junior-year spring at UMass Amherst because of some quiddity in Pope Francis’s diplomatic relationship with a Southeast Asian dictator Becky had never heard of. These days she described herself as a hopeful agnostic on her good days and a Freudo-Marxist on her bad ones, even though since starting her graduate studies at la Sapienza she had also started going to Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore about once every six weeks. She was nominally working towards a doctorate in international relations with a focus on the European Union, but most of what she actually wrote was a series of thematically linked short stories that she described as satirical but Becky thought of as pretentious.

It had been about three weeks since his breakup when Thad met Zewditu, and it took another three months or so before they started dating. He met her at Sol Azteca on Beacon Street in Brookline but did not actually see her eating much, merely sitting forlornly at a table with chips and salsa nursing what seemed to be a virgin margarita. Thad normally did not make it his practice to try to start conversations with strange women sitting alone in restaurants, both because he knew that most women did not appreciate it and because he himself did not enjoy it, but he made an exception in this case because Zewditu herself kept looking up at him and his nopalitos with soulful, probing eyes. When he walked up to her and asked her why she was staring, she pointed to a splotch of salsa verde that had gotten onto his shirt just to the left of his necktie, and he had wiped it off madly in deep embarrassment while she stifled a chuckle.