“You look nice,” the woman says.

“Thanks,” says the rapist’s girlfriend.

“Special occasion?”

“Anniversary.”

“Lucky guy.”

“I’m the one who’s lucky.”

The rapist’s girlfriend has no idea that she is dating a rapist. Should the woman say something? While the rapist may not have raped his girlfriend yet, that doesn’t mean he won’t. At least, if something does go down, she might recall this conversation and hopefully not blame herself so much.

“Not to get stalkery, but didn’t you create the app Tender Buttons?”

The woman is stalkery, but the rapist’s girlfriend doesn’t know that.

“Wow, you know Tender Buttons. I am the creator!”

The rapist’s girlfriend’s ego seems to grow three times its size, like the Grinch’s heart, if the Grinch’s heart were already enormous.

“Congratulations.”

“How do you like the app?”

“I don’t know how to properly communicate this, but I met someone through the app who raped me.”

The woman doesn’t feel great blaming the rape on the rapist’s girlfriend’s app, like it’s a fart and she’s blaming it on the dog, a circumstance with which the rapist is probably also familiar, but the truth is out of the question. The rapist’s girlfriend wouldn’t believe her, or she would, but she’d be so disturbed by the woman’s behavior that she wouldn’t.

“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

The rapist’s girlfriend angles her eyebrows in forlorn, sisterly solidarity. She takes the woman’s hands in her hands and squeezes them gently.

“Aren’t you concerned that your app might be used for sinister purposes?”

“I worried about that a lot when it was in the initial stages. The reality is that any app, such as a hookup app, can be used to manipulate and hurt others, primarily women. I figured, isn’t it better to try to foster human connection than not?”

The woman stares into the pools of bottomless remorse and empathy that are the rapist’s girlfriend’s eyes. She is utterly sincere; the woman can tell. The rapist’s girlfriend truly believes that she and the rapist are making the world a better place.

“I don’t understand why we need more tools to connect with others. Sometimes we don’t know the people we already know. The guy you’re with, the guy who makes you feel lucky to be in love, that guy could turn out to be a rapist.”

The rapist’s girlfriend is taken aback, and she drops the woman’s hands.

“I appreciate that you must be in a lot of pain, but he would never do that.”

“What if I told you he was the one who raped me?”

“My personal life is none of your business, and I don’t like being harassed in the john.”

“I was fostering human connection!”

That went well. In hindsight, the john, so dubbed by the rapist’s girlfriend, wasn’t the best venue for that ostensibly casual showdown, as the woman has to wait there for the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend to pay and anniversarize elsewhere if she doesn’t want to risk the rapist’s girlfriend pointing her out to the rapist. How she wishes there were a “view source” option for human beings; buried between brackets she could locate the phrase “This is a rapist” and thus duly inform the rapist’s girlfriend. She lets pass what seems like a purgatorial amount of time, but when she finally returns to her seat, the rapist and the rapist’s girlfriend are exactly where she left them. The rapist’s girlfriend whispers to the rapist and the rapist spots the woman and looks as stricken and trapped as the anime piñata in the quinceañera Zen bathroom, though he recovers quickly. The woman is crazy, he says, no doubt that’s what he says, they went out and were intimate, intimate is undoubtedly how he puts it, and after he wasn’t into her, she started tracking him on the internet like the NSA, half the hits on his website are from her IP address, she created a fake dating profile to talk to him, and it’s no coincidence she’s here when they’re here, though he didn’t think she’d take her crazy IRL.