She gets why the rapist raped her and presumably didn’t rape the rapist’s girlfriend, because the rapist’s girlfriend is cool and, pre-rape, the woman was ordinary, not cool. The rapist’s girlfriend and the woman would possibly have been friends if they didn’t have the rapist in common and had met at a party or a meet-up. It’s irrelevant, though, the woman thinks, since the woman lacks the skill set for making friends anymore and the stuff she likes—for example, the Kinks—is stuff she’s discovered through her surveillance of the rapist, and she hates it when someone she hates has occasional good taste. A rapist should have bad taste. The woman doesn’t know what she would have liked on her own or even what she would have “liked” in the age of quotation-mark “likes.” Who would she have become if she had never been raped? Before the rape, the woman had studied art history. She liked Jenny Holzer and Yasumasa Morimura. She could spend hours in a room sketching or thinking only about herself. She cared about things like grades and jobs, about color theory and museums and steps walked in a day. But that version of her seems like a fraud.

In terms of quotation-mark “likes,” the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend’s feeds blow up when the San Francisco Chronicle prints a feature in which both are quoted, and which they both rampantly share and like. “The Mission District is the city’s oldest district,” it states, “home to the Ohlone before Spanish conquest, then immigrants from around the globe—specifically, the Italians, the Germans, the Irish, and the Latino community. Until recently, that is, since a new generation of intrepid settlers arrived: the tech elite, armed with impressive pedigrees and start-up cash. These privileged gentrifiers are raising median rents and often, as real estate developers use the morally dubious machinations of illegal evictions and underhanded buyouts, forcing out longtime tenants. Their struggle to stay in an area that holds a lifetime of memories is often met with a mixed bag of sympathy.” This is the point in the article where the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend come in. “Techies are the latest REM cycle in the American dream,” the rapist declares, cleverly.

“We’re making the lives of these people better,” he continues, which reads like an insult, similar to how the rapist would use “girls” when he means women. “A friend of mine invented an app to fight hunger and food waste simultaneously. To date, his app has distributed more than half a million meals that would otherwise have been thrown out.” The rapist, the article clarifies, though it doesn’t refer to him as the rapist, resides with his self-described live-in girlfriend in a sleek, remodeled loft on Folsom Street, in the middle of the Mission District. They came home late after a concert to find the words JOB CREATORS spray-painted across the front of their building. “I prefer the new method of tagging walls to the old,” the rapist’s girlfriend interjects, cleverly. They are so clever. The rapist’s girlfriend posts a selfie of the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend pointing and laughing at JOB CREATORS. The rapist might not be that into it, but the rapist’s girlfriend is definitely a believer in the selfie. The woman passes by the building to see a Hispanic man scrubbing the graffiti off the façade.