T-GIRL CONFESSIONS:

TWO GIRLS, ONE SECRET

DICK CHRISTMAS

SHABBY STREET BOOKS

I'm not gonna lie, I live a pretty beige-coded existence. I mostly wear the same clean girl fit and eat the same basic bitch breakfast—avocado and poached egg on a toasted croissant—every day of the week. I'm always the first person to show up for my shift at Shelf Indulgence and the last one to leave.

Part of it owes to convenience: ordering the same breakfast means I know what to expect, I know what I'm going to get.  But another part of it comes down to fear. My whole life, I've been terrified of being late, of missing the beginning of a story, of people thinking less of me if I fail to be perfectly punctual. If I order the same breakfast, the coffee shop will have it ready for me when I get there, and saving time on ordering ensures I'm always on time for work

The irony is, most people look at me like I'm a freak, as if I mustn't have a life outside of the bookstore. As if sitting in my car until the store opens means I'm some kind of loser.

Ngl, every single morning is a perfect copy-paste of the one before it; there are zero plot twists, aside from the ones I read behind the counter when I'm not doing inventory or stocking out new releases.

Ever since I asked for a raise, the boss has been requiring me to wear formal wear to work. Because I'm inept when it comes to fashion, I end up looking like some antiquated idea of a school teacher. This gets me more attention than usual, but it's hardly the kind of attention I'm looking for.

On any given day, I typically catch the eye of four kinds of people: the microbang manifesto girls, the Camus cosplayers, the SparkNotes spouses, and the necro-bibliophiles.

The microbang manifesto girls are black cat lesbians who wear safety pins through their lips and hoard print zines about everything from feminist punk to obsolete media maintenance. When they see me in my work clothes, they either scoff or find an excuse to chat me up. They tell me all about their three-chord girl-power pop-punk band like I'm supposed to be impressed when really all I am is resentful that they can pretend to be interesting more easily than I can.

The Camus cosplayers are another minor annoyance, one that rarely graduates to the level of threat. These cats come into the store in their wire-rimmed glasses, with their Salvation Army copy of David Foster Wallace under their arm, and they all work at looking intense and brooding and like they're totally the type of person who has made Infinite Jest their Bible, even though they've never cracked page forty.

Ever since I started wearing formal wear, they've proliferated like Gremlins and some of them can get a little pushy asking for my Insta. They don't like it when I tell them I don't have one. They don't like it when I fail to look impressed by their admission of writing poetry.

It's not that I don't find poetry romantic, it's just that I find the admission both transparent and desperate. I guess you could say those two words sum me up as well. I'm transparent about my desire to keep my head down, to just do my job. And I'm desperate for a more exciting life, but clueless about how to obtain one.

Speaking of desperate, the necro-bibliophiles are another matter. They lurk in the clearance aisles, digging around for out-of-print Zebra paperbacks like they're hunting for the Necronomicon, or stalking the stock boy, extolling the virtues of some forgotten 80s extreme horror novelist. Of all the groups mentioned here, they may be the most persistent, precisely because they think they have a real shot. Because they think I'm as weird as them—a twenty-five-year-old woman working in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Then you've got the SparkNotes spouses, almost always husbands or boyfriends—paperback pilgrims who have made a journey into a strange, unknown land of text—looking to score a copy of the latest best-selling fluff their partner wants them to read. But what they really want is for an employee to give them a quick summary of the entire book and its themes, so they can engage their partners without having to read the whole thing themselves.

Once the SparkNotes spouses see the pencil skirt and the simple blouse and thick-rimmed reading glasses, the hand with the wedding band goes in the pants pocket and out comes the male bravado. They want to tell me how much they bench, where they work, what kind of car they drive. As if those kinds of things are supposed to impress someone who has made literature her entire personality.

Most of the SparkNotes guys are harmless, but every once in a while you get one who gets handsy. Luckily, the owner hired a security guard after teenagers kept pinching shonen books from the graphic novel rack.

It's not that I'm averse to being picked up or that everyone who talks me up is chopped. It all goes back to fear and uncertainty. For most of my life, I've barely dated because I can't quite settle on what I'm looking for or even who or what I'm attracted to.

I managed to make it through high school without dating and only started meeting people once I graduated and got a job. My first real boyfriend was a guy named Philip, a small, thin guy who was more effeminate even than me. We only lasted three weeks before he told me I wasn't his type.

The next person I tried to hook up with was a girl I met at a cafe, an attractive, athletic dirty blonde nineteen-year-old. She seemed into me until she found out my secret. Then she threatened to have her older brother put me in a coma. I never saw her again.

At a certain point, I gave up trying and di