Old names and old faces started to blur into view. Mike’s blue spikes and charming smile. Liam smiling as he wore a pair of fairy wings at Reading Festival... Fairy wings... Dave with the long Jesus-like hair he’d flick around at gigs, grinning as we sat around him afterward, plaiting it, almost like a willing uncle. Those boys had been our friends and boyfriends. We’d grown up together. They’d been nice, middle-class guys. They walked you home to make sure you were safe. But then...the rape jokes. Georgina’s party. Games of spin the bottle when everyone was too wasted and it was always their idea. The comments they made about us. The song lyrics they wrote about women in the gigs we went to, and cheered on...

My hand went back to my mouse. Tiffany’s profile was canceled without me giving it much notice. The hours I’d spent poring over all these women, and yet I had never thought to check up on the boys from my own past.

Boys who were men now.

It was almost a shock, when Mike’s name came up on the drop-down menu. This mysterious alpha from my adolescence on something as basic as Facebook. He looked way older than thirty-two, crinkles all around his eyes. In his profile picture he held up a baby, assumingly his, and...

“No fucking way,” I said out loud, but this time not because I imagined I was being watched through a portal. But it was ludicrous. The baby was wearing a Babygro that said “My Daddy’s a Feminist” on it. I clicked through and met Mike’s wife, going backward through their love affair, laughing with a sharp ha as I saw pictures of them together on The Women’s March. Jessica’s words drifted poison through my brain again.

“There are the women they fuck, and the women they fall in love with.”

Did Gillian know about the jokes he used to tell? Girls he used to use and shame? Did he even remember himself? How easy it was for these boys. When they needed a groupie to screw and discard, there we were. Throwing ourselves around to their shit music, worshipping their mediocrity, and feeling lucky if they chose us that night to touch up and then tell everyone we were a slut afterward. And, now, when they needed girls to love them, and still want to fuck them even though they’re fat and bald and their shit band never made it, girls who will grow their child inside them, and make them look like good guys with their pointless slogans—they’d managed to find those girls exactly when they needed them too.

Fern: OK, so you are so right.

I’m sitting here alone and remembering everything and feeling fucked-up too

Jade: RIGHT?