"I can see you're still playing the same mammalian power games, Dr. Dominator."
"With my Defloration Ray, I'll take your precious virginity, Metagirl."
"If only it were that easy. It'll take more than a cellphone to pierce through my hyperbolic hymen."
Marcie sat at the back of her Lit class, completely immersed, scrawling quickly in her journal. She had just dashed off a two page essay for Jude the Obscure, which, in her mind, she had referred to as Jude the Obtuse. She had stricken the inadvertent joke twice in her essay, but was careful to make it still legible to her teacher. With half an hour remaining in the period, she worked on the script to her comic.
Dr. Dominator dallied with the dials on his device. "All I need do is set the proper persuasion frequency and-- Ack!" The gadget turns on the fiend and envelopes him in a mauve glow.
"Ha. See, you've encountered my elliptic recursion membrane and it fed your beam right back to you. You're my buttdog now, DD. Get down on your knees!"
"Your demand is my command."
"Splendid. Now lick this vinyl boot. Ha ha ha!"
"Marcie!"
"Uh, yes?"
"Could you hold it down back there? You're disturbing the rest of the class."
"Uh, yea. Sorry, Ms. Waterman." She hadn't realized she was laughing out loud. Half the class was staring at her. She gazed over them abstractedly as if their heads were fleshy balloons.
***
In Chemistry, Marcie chatted to her friend and lab partner Gwen. Gwen whispered, "Why do I have to have this guy in half of my classes? He stared at me all throughout Calculus. At least I have you in this class."
"It must be your new bra. It practically pushes your tits up under your chin."
Gwen looked down at her chest. "I wish I could cut these things off."
Marcie waved a glass rod at her friend's breasts. "What you need is for them to appear and disappear with the situation."
"Magic boobs?"
"No, dynamic breasts. Yes, perfect for Metagirl." She got out her notebook and jotted down the idea.
"You're going to be famous, Marcie."
"And so will you, by extension of my impressive aura and your own radiant coolness."
Gwen pretended to be interested in the fluid changing colors in her beaker. "Don't look now, but Larry is making the universal gesture for cunnilingus."
"What a fleadick. Wait, that's too good for him. I read that fleas have impressive members for the insecta family."
Gwen scrunched her nose. "I think that's the insecta order," she corrected.
Marcie sat back in her chair and tilted her head to the side to the left side almost horizontal. It was a habit she had from when she thought the extra blood in her left hemisphere would allow her to reason more clearly. Gwen knew exactly that. "Wait. Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Chordata. Class:-- don't tell me- Arthropoda. Ok. You're right. The order is Insecta. So the family must be the flea since there are different species that suck on various furry creatures."
"Those could be different genuses. Is that right? Genuses? Doesn't sound right, like penises. It's peni or something, I'm sure."
"That warrants a question for Ms. Claypool. And we could also ask her why penis occured in conversation twice within as many minutes."
Gwen turned her head and, with her mouth almost buried in her own shoulder, mumbled, "Which begs the question of what we're going to do about Larry."
Marcie didn't look up, but continued filling values into her Chem notebook. "That's what you're going to do about Larry."
"I think I'm going to find a boyfriend, a kind of placeholder boy."
"That's insidious and cheap. Besides, it implies that you are not complete. And you need nothing else when you have me."
"I could get some gawky, clueless geekboy," Gwen said nonchalantly.
"Those are the best kind. But don't be too charitable."
"This warrants exploration."
"Life was easier in frontier times," Marcie pronounced.
"Yea, we could just shoot Larry."
***
Marcie endured the loud and bumpy busride home by writing in her journal:
Metagirl observes the geometry of her circumstances and uses a formulaic response the whole. If caught in a surprising or confusing situation among these linguistic apes, the group necessarily consisting primarily of boys, an algorithm can employed, such as the greeting custom.
"Hi. How are you?"
"Fine."
This is the most basic template. Of course, with an unlimited dictionary of terms, different data can be plugged into the structure.
"What's shaking, peach tree?"
"Rabid squirrels. Better watch your nuts."
With a generative equation, improvisation is easy. The difficult part in negotiating anthrospace is discovering the tricky angles and axes human relationships.
Marcie shuddered. This is why she had few friends and absolutely no time for acquaintances. She looked around at the faces bouncing along with her on the bus. More than half were involved in some animated, yet vapid, conversation. The other kids appeared to be ready to off themselves and take a few others with them. She felt sorry for them. None had learned to create a framework for understanding the world. They probably never would.