[Previous Post]
Part 2, Chapter 3: Never Have I Ever
We open on the kitchen of Indi's new apartment where Fran is cooking up some breakfast. Balls. It's balls. But ignore that for a moment because Fran just served up a side of plot hole:
Aside from sour apples and the occasional rabbit, she’d been eating salted meat and fruit leather for the better part of two years. The bunker had fresh food.
How is Indi still this fat then? If all the high-calorie bombs are gone, how is Indi still fat enough that she couldn't survive a transcontinental voyage to a woke Oregonian enclave? Hell, how does BETH still have such refrigerator proportions?
Fran plucked the balls out of the little plastic dish she’d set by the electric range and dropped them into the pan, angling it with her other hand to make sure they got an even coating of the melted butter. They sizzled, a sound like dozens of small mouths chewing at once.
In case you didn't believe Fran was about to fry up some testicles. But wait, I thought Indi was using the testicles to synthesize estrogen or extract estrogen or whatever for her shiny new job of getting Sophie knocked up with some zombie baby batter? Wouldn't she need all those "giblets" for this new gig?
Additionally: dozens of small mouths chewing at once. Clearly Grootch has never fried anything because this simile is completely whacked and also extremely inaccurate. Pop something in your mouth real quick and listen to the sound your chewing makes. Now imagine that sound multiplied. Does that sound like something frying in a pan? No. No it does not.
Fran took a pinch of salt and sprinkled it over the testicles before turning them with a chopstick, exposing their seared and caramelized undersides.
We'll pause class for a moment while all the male Kiwis adjust themselves in sympathetic horror.
Fran gave the balls another minute before snatching them out of the pan. Hissing in pain, she dropped one in her bowl of rice and beans and the other in Beth’s, then stuck her burned fingers in her mouth. The salty, faintly cheesy taste of her own skin made her think of being four years old in their kitchen at the Marblehead house, a sulky little boy sucking his burnt forefinger after touching the hot griddle “just to see.”
Fran is here described to be grabbing hot foot out of a hot skillet like a fucking MAN instead of looking for a spatula or large spoon.
FAINTLY CHEESY TASTE OF HER OWN SKIN. Cheesy. Excuse me while I go be violently sick in the toilet.
Fran thinking of his deadname in his own mind.
Why had he done it? She couldn’t remember.
This is why pronoun bullshit needs to stop. These two sentences refer to the same person, Fran. The first, when he was a child of four. The second, now while he is an adult. The pronoun shift gives me a headache.
“You forget to use a fork again?” Beth drawled.
Fran, scraping the onions from the pan with a spatula, glared at her in
silence, fingers in her mouth
Fran as a retarded manchild confirmed.
The three troons eat their dinner while Indi takes a depression nap. Robbie seems to only be eating rice and beans while the other two eat their pan-fried testicles atop a bed of rice and beans with onions. No protein for Robbie? It's awful transphobic of you not to realize big manly men need more calories than delicate women to function optimally.
Then they start smoking weed in Indi's fresh new apartment which just seems unconscionably rude. And play "never have I ever," which I guess means we've reached the fetishized sleepover portion of the book.
“Never have I ever...” Beth, sprawled on the couch beside Fran with her head pillowed on the armrest, hesitated, tongue curled up over her upper lip. She tapped the neck of her beer bottle against her teeth in contemplation. “Started a fire on purpose.”
Fran laughed in horrified delight as Robbie, sitting on the floor in front of her with his head resting on her knee, tipped his drink back.
Starting fires is one of the Macdonald Triad so this actually tracks for me.
Oh we also learn Indi supplied the weed for this so never mind on the rude thing earlier. They're ALL shitty tenants.
“I did!” protested Robbie, looking faintly hurt and extremely drunk. He blinked. “I burned down Stewart Bohannen’s house. Junior year.”
If we're keeping track, this is now the second boy Robbie attacked while in high school. We had the nail gun incident when she was a sophomore and now a year later as a junior she BURNED DOWN SOMEONE ELSE'S HOUSE. Why wasn't she in some kind of detention center for wayward girls?
The older woman’s huge dark eyes were wet and, for just a moment, unfocused, as though she were lost in a daydream. Her chin trembled. She stifled a hiccup with one dainty hand. The spasm seemed to pull her back into herself. Her eyes narrowed in thought. “Never have I ever prayed to God.”
The rest of them drank.
We are then transported to a flashback where we learn Fran's a Jew because of course. During some kind of religious ceremony, Child-Fran sits daydreaming about how he wants to look as a woman.
Fran imagined for a shameful moment what he might look like as a woman, with his long fingers and elegant oval face. Would he be convincing? This was the word that occurred to her most often.
Would she wear her hair long? Dark, curly falls of shadow spilling over her bare shoulders—too broad?
A skirt that unfolded like a dragonfly’s wings out from long, bare legs— like Sailor Moon.
Again with the shifting pronouns in reference to one individual. And also, LOL SAILOR MOON.
Dear Jesus, please kill Steve. Let him die and he doesn’t come home tonight, and I don’t want any other stepdads, amen.
We're given zero context for this but I'm going to assume it's a prayer made by Beth considering the next one is Robbie.
Also the unintentional comedy in the two trans identified males being Jewish and growing up without a father, respectively, is just beautiful.
Robbie’s mother led the dead cicada of his girlhood through the close, sweltering air under the tent.
This sentence is incomprehensible to me. We learn that Robbie's real name was Kitty, that she's half-native (Representation MattersTM), and that her mom took her to a traveling revival in a last-ditch attempt to get the gender demons out of her.
PREACHER USED THE LAYING ON OF HANDS. IT WAS INEFFECTIVE.
ROBBIE USES GENDER MAGIC. IT HURTS ITSELF IN ITS CONFUSION.
After this flashback, we jump forward to Indi rolling around in bed thinking about Mackenzie, the zombie boyfriend with whom Sophie is planning on attempting to make a baby.
Indi lay awake, sheets kicked to the foot of her new bed, and thought of the thing in the pit that had once been a man named Mackenzie. That odious rich kid name. Whiteness. Old money. Spoiled and unloved packs of boys like that had roamed the streets of Bridgeport in her childhood. Probably they still did, only now with less discernment as to who they preyed on.
Isn't Grootch a white boy from Massachusetts? Is this some elaborate method of expressing contempt towards oneself?
If I don’t give her what she wants, will she let us live? And if I do, what would it mean to put the future of the world into those little ombré claws?
Ombre claws.
She rolled onto her side and drew her legs up against the comforting weight of her belly, filtered air blowing over her bare skin and carrying her sweat away into a world of dark, clean vents scoured bare by endless wind.
Indi airing out her undercarriage and probably stinking up the entire ventilation system in the process.
We jump forward yet again to the following day. Fran has made his appearance at the volunteer work tent where he is very worried he might be assigned to something better suited for UNDER-HUMANS: ditch digging.
Maybe I’ll get to help Indi in her lab. Premed isn’t nothing. They won’t make me dig ditches. Why would they even need ditches?
Spoiled little brat.
we’ve got the medication to keep their kids and PCOS patients from going feral. Unless they want to start a large-scale horse piss concentration facility, they’ve got to deal with us.”
Again I ask: WHAT ARE THE RULES OF THIS? A woman with PCOS still isn't a man. At what point does an unaffected little boy transform into a zombie? Why? Is the virus still around if it has effectively killed off all adult males? How is it being spread?
“They aren’t going to strip-search our people. We’ve dealt with them before, and we don’t allow it.” With a smile she checked the box next to the “F” on the form. Fran’s heart leapt in joy and terror as she took it. Her token. Her proof. All at once the bunker seemed to open up around her, its blank walls limitlessly clean, its every unmet inhabitant a new best friend just waiting to be taken by the hand and led sprinting into fields of wildflowers and waving grass.
I’m going to be a woman here. I’m going to be real.
The bunker seems to possess the same lack of morals we see in Big Pharma and it doesn't surprise me at all that a troon would ally himself with them. They are explicitly trying to gain a monopoly on estrogen medication, taking advantage of (in the confines of this universe) mothers fearful for their young sons and women afflicted with PCOS. Evil. Fran allying himself with evil because evil is content denying reality in order to make Fran useful makes perfect sense.
It's been said before but this book seems to be written by someone who hates trannies with a passion. It's baffling to me that any troon would read it and give it a positive review what with how unflattering a picture it paints about their nature.
