Engagement

from Bad Houses (Arsenal Pulp Press, September 2024)

When I couldn’t go on social media without getting sad or angry, I hired an intern. A quiet kid from one of my first-year composition classes. After the second week of class, as I was erasing notes from the whiteboard about how to paraphrase without plagiarizing and the students were getting up to leave, I asked, “Is anyone interested in an internship opportunity?” By the time I turned around, the class was empty except for him, smiling.

At first, the intern came up to the shared adjunct office, and I told him about how I wanted him to run my social media because I was “too busy” writing my books and teaching. I didn’t tell him how being on Twitter and Instagram had started to feel like volunteering to be flayed, like I was slowly transforming into nothing but empty skin blowing in the wind. I told him to study up on my posts for a week and then come back and I’d quiz him. The next week, after class, he came up to my office and told me what I would tweet if I were walking my dog and someone—as often happened—asked me what breed of terrier he was, and I had to tell them I didn’t know. He offered a few different options for humorous observations I might make about how weird it is that it’s acceptable to question an animal’s ethnicity, or about how I was going to start making up random terrier breeds to answer that question. I offered him three photographs—a photograph of my dog panting beside me imitating him, a screenshot of an announcement about a poetry chapbook I had coming out, and another of my new-old bicycle—and asked him to caption them in my voice. I sat there for four minutes while he wrote captions and then handed them to me. Once he was done, I took his phone and logged him into each of my accounts. After he left, I went onto my phone and logged myself out.

I felt better, though he then started to email me a few times a week to see if he could get any new photos or tidbits from my life that I might want to share online. Within the week, I sent him my address and told him to swing by. He came up, met my partner and our dog, and I told him, “Take pictures of whatever you think would be worth posting about. Stock up.” He went around the apartment and took a picture of my coral cactus, my national writing award collecting dust among the clutter on my bookcase, and my dog crawling over my partner as she tried to do yoga after a run. When he asked again if I had any stories to share, I meditated on the flatline of my days and didn’t know what to tell him, so I just opened my arms to the apartment and said: “Paraphrase.”

By the end of the month, I handed him a key to the apartment. In the morning, he would come by and walk the dog to the park and back. My Twitter filled up with pictures of my dog being walked and little witticisms about him. He tricked my dog into posing for reaction GIFs by holding a tennis ball out of sight from the camera and slowly moving it. He got a lot of likes that way, and a lot of replies. Engagement. Eventually, after our class on revision, he asked me what he was to do with the messages he was getting, which were meant for me and seemed personal. I sat back in my creaking chair, thinking, and eventually I said, “Write back to them. I don’t want them to think I don’t like them.”

After he started having heart-to-hearts with my friends and fans, he reached out and told me he wanted to better represent me and my writing online, so I emailed him copies of the books I’d finished and the ones I’d been meaning to finish, now that I finally had so much time for writing. After he read the books, his tweets got better, started using the #amwriting hashtag to tease the content of the books in progress. As the tweets got better, it made sense to invite him to sleep on the couch and finish writing the books for me. I sat him down and told him where I thought they were heading, told him which were on submission and where. He began to sit at my laptop for hours on end, my headphones in his ears, my music coursing through them. Soon, every morning I had nothing to do but wake up and make coffee for him and my partner, though a week after he moved onto the couch, he started making the coffee too.

Eventually, I had to be honest with him. I told him he was doing a great job and that things were so much better with the extra time and head space, but that I was starting to feel weird about his gender. He was cisgender, and it had started to seem uncomfortable to me that he was running a trans person’s accounts and writing a trans person’s books. When I told him that, he broke down and said, “No, no, no. I’m just like you.” By the end of the week, his nails were bright red, and he was using gender-neutral pronouns too.

They were, I mean.

Eventually, my intern was sleeping in the bed with my partner, and I was sleeping on the couch with the dog—until the dog began climbing into bed with them. I slept in late, past their waking up and getting dressed and walking my dog and making coffee and kissing my partner goodbye and writing my books and, two days a week, riding my new-old bike to teach my classes. I was nothing but an adjunct, so nobody seemed to notice. Since I had so much more time on my hands, I started to follow them and sit in their old spot in the classroom, and a few weeks later they asked me to stay after class, and we went up to their shared office to talk. I sat across from them. They reached into their messenger bag and pulled a paper I’d written about augmented reality games out of a folder and slid it over to me. “I’m a little worried about your work,” they said, tapping the emblazoned D on the top of the page. They told me to make sure I did the revision, because my grade would need it. I took the paper home with me, to the dorms, and I had my roommate read it over. He told me he agreed with my instructor’s notes. He agreed with the grade.

Even if my grades were suffering, I felt so much lighter than I had in such a long time. I felt good when my instructor announced at the beginning of class that they’d just sold a novel on top of their recent poetry chapbook. The class clapped. I clapped along with everyone, emboldened to live in a world where a trans person could have the success they seemed to be having. I felt happy for them. I knew how hard they worked. After class, I went up to the front of the classroom and congratulated them, and they looked over at me, not making eye contact for long. “Thanks,” they said. “Have a nice week.”

It was sometime after Thanksgiving that they came in and showed off their new vintage blue-stoned ring. “Engaged!” they said, their hair-framed face flushing. We clapped again.

I felt so good and so happy for them, which made me wonder why I didn’t feel very happy for myself, which made me look at my life and realize how much time I spent smoking pot with my roommate and watching anime late into the night when I should have been researching and writing and revising my papers. How I was going into debt to go to school without really knowing who would come out the other side to pay it off. How I had not been on a date in months, and nobody even seemed to look at me. How I hadn’t ever really looked at myself either. I went on Twitter and saw people tweeting about how people like me—cisgender, straight white men—were destroying the world. I felt sad, and then I felt angry because I felt powerless. It all seemed so true.

At the end of the semester, as I put off my schoolwork, I was completely addicted to social media. I was online so much again, scrolling endlessly through Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, feeling bad about myself and still feeling sad. So much life I wasn’t a part of. I felt thin and empty. I liked so many things, retweeted so many things, commented and shared. I was so engaged in everything and everyone, but nobody was engaged in me. I eventually found myself searching my instructor’s social media and seeing what they were up to. I didn’t follow them because they were my instructor, and I thought that would cross a line. They posted cute engagement photos of them and their partner and their dog. They had a series of photos of them signing book contracts and announcing the recent receiving of arts grants. They had six times as many followers as they’d had months ago. People kept posting photos of their chapbook, kept saying how excited they were to preorder their forthcoming book of fiction. Everything seemed to be going so well for them. Everyone seemed to care.

Scrolling through their profiles in the dark, I was unable to shake the question. What had I done to deserve this life? Why did they get all of that attention instead of me?

On the last day of the semester, when I turned in my final essay for their class, which I had started writing three hours before it was due, they asked me if I’d done any of the revisions of my C and D papers. “No,” I said. “I didn’t have the time.” They looked down at the paper, pulling a smile that was clearly out of politeness. Their lips were painted a bright shade of pink. Only the previous week, they had told the class that they were starting to use she/her/hers pronouns. “I see,” they said to me. I mean, she said to me. “I hope you do better on this one.”

After I failed the class, I spent the winter break online. I decided not to take my parents’ money to fly back to Florida for Christmas, claiming I had a lot of work to do to make up for a difficult first semester, claiming I had to prepare to retake the composition class I’d failed since the class was required to graduate. But over break, while I was online, crashing on the couch in my roommate’s family basement far out in the suburbs, I wasn’t preparing for that. Instead, I created a plethora of fake Twitter accounts and fake Instagram accounts and started messing with my former instructor. It started off small, posting emojis and GIFs that seemed inappropriate, considering what I was responding to. Posts that I knew would confuse her. After she started blocking some of my accounts, I started tagging in anti-trans accounts to her tweets. It was a low blow, I knew, but I wanted to make her feel as inhuman and small as I felt. Once I started down that path, I committed. I woke up early, did some push-ups to turn my brain on, and started tweeting and commenting on her posts. Every time an account of mine got blocked or banned, I made two new ones, as if I were some kind of troll hydra. I started posting “guess whooooo??!?!!” from accounts created on new IP addresses when mine got banned. After a month of this, she started tweeting and posting on Instagram less. By then, she had already locked her accounts to new followers, but I’d prepared for that. Just before I started tagging in anti-trans accounts, I’d taken a few days to create forty or fifty real-seeming accounts that I followed her with before the real onslaught started. Sleeper cells I could awaken as needed. As time went on, her follower count stagnated, no longer steadily growing, and eventually she stopped posting altogether. I’d won, I thought. I was finally good at something, I thought.

A few weeks after she stopped posting, after I got a D on my first essay in my new composition class in the spring, I saw her leaving campus, and I followed her home. After I found out where she lived, I stopped the car and turned around. A week later, I went back. I didn’t know what I was doing, not really, but I knew I was furious, and that she hadn’t posted online in nearly a month. I felt so far away and pointless. The one thing I had excelled at had been taken away from me. After waiting around an hour or so, she came out of her apartment building, both her and the dog shuffling on the sidewalk in the slush-mud of February. As they walked down the street toward where I was parked, I stepped out and started yelling at her. Telling her that she wasn’t all she was cracked up to be. That she was a bad teacher anyway. That her class was shit and that she clearly played favourites. That my failure was her failure. As I yelled, her dog hid behind her legs, and her face fumed in the cool air, her nails chipping in her fists. She looked exhausted in a way that made me so angry.

“You bitch!” I said to her, after I’d stopped yelling and she’d taken a few steps in my direction. “You ugly bitch!” I said, as she wrapped her arms around my body. “You hideous—” I said, as her skin opened up to a great rabid darkness inside of her, which I found myself both cursing and flinging myself into.

 

John Elizabeth Stintzi is the award-winning author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments, the poetry collection Junebat, and the forthcoming short story collection Bad Houses. Their work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Malahat Review, Kenyon Review, and Best Canadian Poetry. They are at work illustrating their first graphic novel: Automaton Deactivation Bureau.