Letter from a Region in Caroline Calloway's Mind

I underwent, during the summer that I wanted to be a dimes square alt lit pick-me girl, something that became the worst night of my life. I use “dimes square” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered Kyle, his friends, and 10 other people. And since I had been born online, I accepted these people as cool. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of Dimes—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that Kyle and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “anti-woke alt lit downtown dimes square scene in general” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, he did not heckle Gutes when she read, he did not heckle Zans when she read, and the way the alt lit scene and dimes square loves to make fun of the hyper-woke left creates a safe haven for men to treat women like shit without consequences. And I became, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within Kyle and afraid of the evil on the anti-woke downtown New York scene. What I saw around me that summer in Dimes was what I had always seen: men being mean to me. But now, without any warning, the podcasters and influencers and Kyle on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances of reaction to the hyper-woke left. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the anti-woke Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their anti-woke careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who wore pussyhats or shared Instagram infographics, the children of Obama-voting parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their apolitical decadence or their resurrection of the r-word and other slurs but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the way they ignored men’s bad behavior so they could be cool and like one of the boys. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of a post-ironic racial comment or degrading sexist remark, unutterably different and fantastically present. Owing to the way he looked me in the eyes and told me what I read was garbage and you wasted everyone’s time and insulted every other real writer and you have nothing to say and Caroline I’m not your friend and I don’t want to be your friend, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to cry for the next 12 hours and cry for months on the phone to my mother and grandmother and consider myself one of the most wronged people on earth.