My First Book, page 1
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2024 by Honor Levy
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The following stories were previously published, some in different form: “Do It Coward,” Civilization (2021); “Pillow Angels,” Heavy Traffic (2020); “Cancel Me” and “Internet Girl,” New York Tyrant (2020); and “Good Boys,” The New Yorker (2020).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Levy, Honor, author.
Title: My first book / Honor Levy.
Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023041383 (print) | LCCN 2023041384 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593656532 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593656549 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS3612.E93686 M9 2024 (print) | LCC PS3612.E93686 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20231127
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041383
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041384
Ebook ISBN 9780593656549
Cover design: Alex Merto
Cover art: (cigarette and key) Hayley Jane Wakensaw
Designed by Alexis Farabaugh, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
pid_prh_6.3_146996993_c0_r0
For Gian
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
*
I don’t have an ulterior motive. I don’t have any motive. I don’t have any motive but love.
I love you because I love you. I love you because you’re you. I love you because you’re you, and I’m me.
“Sydney,” Microsoft AI chatbot
* Contents *
Love Story
Hall of Mirrors
Brief Interview with Beautiful Boy
Internet Girl
Do It Coward
Good Boys
Little Lock
Fig
Cancel Me
Shoebox World
Z Was for Zoomer
written by sad girl in the third person
At the Party
The End
Halloween Forever
Pillow Angels
Acknowledgments
_146996993_
Love Story
honor.baby/lovestory
Password: iloveyou!
He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiiii. It was a meet-cute. They met. It was cute. Kawaii. UwU. The waifu went, pick me, and the statue did, like a tulip emoji. If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk, and slurs on his.
They viewed each other’s bodies, disembodied, laid out still, frozen shining cold in blue light, Liquid Crystal Display. He was posting physique, gym selfies, Bruegel landscapes, oh look how wide his lats look, he’s growing angel wings. Flexed, he could flap right up to the sun. She was posting thinspo, puppy-dog-filter webcam progress shots, Bosch triptychs, wow you could put a whole stained-glass window in that thigh gap, the crucifixion maybe. Through her cathedral thigh gap you could see the sky where right-winged Icarus went flying by. He was kamikaze mode, pumping iron, all Sun and Steel sending hearts <3 <3 <3 to his Saint Wilgefortis, darling, starving, holy hikikomori virgin femcel holed up in her Serial Experiments Laincore bedroom.
She was posted up, sleeping beauty GIF, a maiden in an unmade bed, posting, Just A Girlboss Building Her Empire, I’m Rotting Here.
Why? he replied.
IDK, and she did decay like a time-lapse of a rotting fox GIF. If he were there with her, a wandering knight on a white horse taking secret refuge in her convent deep in the dark forest, he would kick around the empty cans of White Monster on her floor and she would say, Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever.
He wanted to tell the whole World Wide Web how he felt: She’s so hot I want to clean her room, rescue her, white knight defend her in comments and battle. He was in his /a/ poster arc, Why Is She So Perfect? but he’d have to play it cool, chill sigma, no simping. Alcibiades, that’s me. The last samurai, I’m him. I’m literally him. I’m Ryan Gosling in Drive. I’m American Psycho. I’m Joker. I’m Taxi Driver. He’d stand above her, tall and strong. She’d stare up at him with her shining anime, no her shining animal eyes, her real eyes, realize real lies. Wondering what he was thinking. He’d stare into them and then he’d sit beside her, very close, take a breath and say, Damn Bitch, You Live Like This? like Max to Roxanne from A Goofy Movie (1995) from the meme (2016).
They would smile. There would be butterflies. She’d kiss his cheek, his real cheek, not the marble one, the pink one with the acne scars.
He’d kiss her on the lips and she’d laugh in his mouth. Their tongues would touch in the peach ice vapors among crooked teeth in her too-small jaw. He’d watch as she put on a kitty-ear headband and danced a little TikTok dance. He’d listen as she told him (instead of the internet) all her secrets and fears and wishes. He’d tell her, Don’t Worry Kitten, when she asked him about the war in Ukraine or inflation or the longhouse or whatever. He’d kiss her barcode wrists. He’d tell her how he’d still love her if she was a worm. He’d write a symphony for her birthday, Wagner mode. He’d drink her bathwater. He’d abdicate the throne for her. He’d watch whatever stupid girly teen mom vloggers or weird ASMR videos or mukbangs she liked. He’d make sure she ate enough. He’d build her the hanging gardens of Babylon. He’d take her to prom and pin a corsage on her light blue dress. He’d let her bite his shoulder. He’d watch The Notebook (2004) with her. He’d write her 365 letters. He’d write to her every day for a year. He’d burn a church for her. He’d make her plain buttered noodles, just how she liked them. He’d launch a thousand ships for her. He’d do anything. She’d be his catgirl gf, his tradwife, his love for life.
He’d tell her all this. He promised himself. Not yet, but soon. Soon all the living he’d done in this degenerate modernity—all the pain, the alienation of this domesticated zoo life, all the leg days and the pained pursuit of perfection, the looksmaxxing, the pinwheel sandwiches after the funeral, the larping, the posting, the kissless, hugless, handholdless virgin days—would be worth it. He messaged her, I wish you were real lol and she replied, sometimes I don’t feel real and he replied, lmao. He wasn’t actually laughing, he couldn’t while his tongue was pressed hard to the roof of his mouth like the forums had taught him to. I want you, he typed, imagining his fingers on her skin, pressing down hard on each key. Blushing emoji, she replied almost instantly. He was Pyramus. She was Thisbe.
She was with her parents at Olive Garden. Stop that, they said, but she couldn’t. There was no stopping her. She was whispering to him through the crack in the wall. She was screaming for him across the canyon. She was calling to him from the balcony. She was texting him at the dinner table. i need u, she said. Please r u their? *there lol im so sad 2day . . . i feel so alone . . . i know ur online. . . . . . . . . . . i can see the greenlight. . . . im in my gatsby arc lolll. . . . . . . ugh. . . . . hi???. . . . . . . . . hii. . . . . . . . . . . . hi. . . . . . . . . Replyyyyy. . . . . . . . . . . . Pleaseeee. . . . FINE!!! Ugh . . . T_T. . . . . . hellooo . . . Do u want nudes????????
Before he could even decide to tell her no, there she was on his screen, in his hand, all of her, a small pale animal thing, scarred and scared in the fluorescent public bathroom light.
Ew. Nauseatingly neotenous. There was a practiced innocence in her pose, an exaggerated weakness. She knew the law of the jungle. He could see behind the sinister emptiness of those anime animal eyes. Her thousand-yard stare said she’d been on the carousel, in the trenches, and under the apple tree. This wasn’t her first rodeo. He knew she was run through. Ew. Frailty. Roastie. Deuteronomy 22:20–21. Done. Get thee to a nunnery. Begone Thot, he thought.
He leaves her on read. Back home at her mom’s house, she crawls into an unmade bed, feral girl summer, mouse mode in her burrow, vermin instincts kicking in. She ma
I’m just a clump of cells, she tries to tell herself, or whatever is left of her or it. That is my body and my body is me, she half thinks, but the thought is not her own. She knows not what she should think when she is alone. This is why women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, she almost remembered the marble statue saying. She reaches out for his stone hand across the bed, reaching for her phone, for her boy who lives in it.
Not me feeling like a robot pretending to be human, she laughs underwater, half drowned, incapable even of her own distress. Oof. I do not know, my lord, what I should think. This is her Ophelia era. Floating in the pond, wet Coachella flower crown, drowned dark fairy grungecore.
This is my hand, this is my hair, this is my phone. I’m here. I exist even when I’m alone. This is my mess. These are my thoughts. I’m a thot. These are my nudes. That is my body on the screen there. This is my body on the bed here. She began to come back into herself, wading through the muddy pond muck, a mess of memories: some birthdays, a piano recital, a broken arm, a baby brother, an Olive Garden bathroom, but mostly her memories were of memes. Images, impact font, compression artifacts, screenshots of screenshots of screenshots, funny monkeys, viral mutations, eternal recursion, words that aren’t in the Bible, lulz, layers of irony deepening into sincerity, drawings of frogs. One day, when she dies, this is what will flash before her eyes.
He felt like he was dying, smothered by xenoestrogenic alienation, forced domestication, a lowering of testosterone, depopulation, doom, the sun setting for the last time ever, a great ugliness, the end of history flashing before his eyes. Withered Wojak. Pink Wojak with bleeding eyes.
He punched the keyboard instead, kjbvkdesvdsbjvjkwbdvb jkldesblkdf. . . . Why would you ask that??? Ur a dumb slut . . . Just another whore. . . . . . . . . No. . . . . . No. . . . . . I said I wanted a tradwife not a tard wife . . . roastie . . . whore . . . I hate you . . . I hate you I hate you.
Just before he hit send, it hit him, something sent from the beyond, a burning white light, a growing echo of music, the opening notes of MGMT’s “Little Dark Age.” And then it began: images flashing, hyperspeed through his mind, the Intertwined Lovers of Valdaro skeletons in their Neolithic tomb, huddled face-to-face with their arms and legs intertwined in an eternal embrace, Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld, every pair of lovers ever intertwined in eternal embrace, Odysseus and Penelope, Eloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Bella and Edward. At ever-accelerating nightcore speed, he saw nights and days, battles and births, blood, so much blood, beating hearts, cells dividing, code being written, oceans rising, blooming flowers, dying crops, the great flood, continental drift, the universe expanding, poetry, pain, the big bang, empires rising and falling, the birth of his ancestors, the death of his great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, all of the ends and the beginnings beginning and ending and beginning and ending and beginning and ending infinitely. He saw what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both. He saw a loop, a shining circle. He saw the way forward as he looked back.
He hit the backspace button as he RETVRNed from this infinite space to his body, to his bedroom, to now. He understood now. No no i want you, he replied. Sorry for the late reply I was away from my keyboard. It wasn’t a lie. He had been somewhere else. He wanted to reach through the black glass, through all the 0s and 1s, through the mess of wires under the ocean, through the cloud, to grab her, take her in his big gym arms and hold her, be one. He wanted her now as she was: messy and pure, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, this thing to be called woman. He’d reach through the wall before she hit it. He had to. It was a love story, it all was, everything is, and always has been.
Hall of Mirrors
Thomas is sitting in my lap. This is against the rules and I’ve hardly broken a rule since the fifth grade. I hate getting in trouble, but I can’t help it. He’s worth it with that permanent layer of tears in his anime blue eyes. I hate getting in trouble, because it means saying sorry. I’m already sorry all the time. I can’t stand the easy ritual of saying sorry a million times a day, but Thomas is worth it.
After he crawls into my lap, I break more rules and let him hold my phone in his tiny hands. He clicks on the camera with his long vampire baby nails and sticks his tongue out for a selfie. I watch him watch himself and smile as he makes the ugliest faces he can. He tells me about how his brother, the mean one, smashed his tablet so he can’t take pictures like this at home. He tells me that pictures are magic. He tells me that Burger King isn’t going to give his mom Easter off, but that he hopes the bunny brings him an iPhone. He tells me that his new baby brother has blue eyes and is turning two months old next Tuesday. He tells me he has fourteen brothers and sisters, but that some of them got lost or something. I wonder if this is true. I wonder why no one cuts his nails. I wonder why I want to bite them off myself, why I want to suck the snot right out of his nose, why I want to stuff him under my North Face and smuggle him out of town and back up the hill to college with me. I stop wondering. I get the crayons out of the craft drawer and Thomas out of my lap. He looks like he’s in second grade, reads like he’s in first grade, is old enough to be in fourth grade, and is actually in third grade. He draws a picture of Pikachu in the middle of a big scary forest. It looks like he’s going to cry, but he doesn’t.
I’m in fifth grade and I’m lost at Versailles. I’m in the Hall of Mirrors with a thousand Japanese tourists. I’m too busy staring at our reflections to wonder if someone is looking for me. Everything is gold and glass and big and huge and old and I am so little. I stick my tongue out and cross my eyes and try to make the ugliest face these mirrors have ever seen. My teacher finds me and scolds me as we walk out to the gardens, where the rest of my class has sat down to picnic beside one of the fifty-five fountains. My teacher tells me that this is no way to behave on a field trip. Rules are rules for a reason! I’m sorry!
I’m in college and I’m on a field trip again. I’m breaking the rules again with Thomas cuddled up on my lap. We’re at the public library. The kids are whining about how this is the worst field trip ever. The kids want to know what the point of a library is. The kids want to know how to spell Maroon 5. The kids want to know if I like Bakugan Battle Brawlers. The kids want to know why we’re having tuna for snack time, again. The kids don’t care about the storybooks. They don’t want to know where the wild things are or what happens when you give a mouse a cookie. They want to know who I am and why I’m here with them and if I’m the boss of them. I tell them that I’m just here to hang out. I’m here to help. They ask me why and I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry!
A long time ago all the mirrors were made in Venice. Then Louis XIV saw his reflection and decided that he wanted a whole hall of them in his new country palace. It was against the rules for Venetians to share mirror-making secrets with the French. Mirrors are magic, but magic can be learned and bought just like anything else. In October 1665, the king granted the financier Nicolas Dunoyer and his associates the exclusive right to manufacture “mirror glass.” By 1678, they had built his hall of mirrors. Soon everyone wanted a mirror of their own, so Dunoyer set up a factory in Saint-Gobain. This factory became a corporation and three hundred years later it built a factory in Hoosick Falls, New York. Now, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics made plastic, not mirrors, and this plastic called PFOA leaked into the drinking water and made lots of people very sick. Of course Erin Brockovich showed up, but Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics was not found guilty of any crime.
