Connective Cube

This is the third time Lissa takes a trip with friends, or a friend, in the past four years. She forgets to renew her prescription, again, and this time it is two weeks without it. All she can hope is the weeks of anxious nausea stay somewhere in her core, or her head, or anywhere besides her hands whipping back and forth with words and hand motions.

Last time she spread her body on the floor of an intricate bathroom floor with tile pattens that she could not replicate when she got home three hours later. Her phone was dead at the time.

Her friend convinces her the show is full of chill people, and to take the trip to Philadelphia. It will be good for her, she says. Lissa read online that the exhibit memorializes the riot grrl movement, something that she feels is before her time, much like her love of Arthur Doyle Hand Creme and the people who claim that Sonic Youth was much cooler in the 90s.

Last time she went to a riot grrl event, some girl she met through OKCupid and who had sexy glasses and was a lesbian took her to a show at Goodbye Blue Sunday. Lissa decided to date women for a year. Now she dates both, but mostly men. They are the only people who seem interested in her, and at the end of the day, she is a bottom who likes to get on top once in a while, and prefers not to get pregnant, and who doesn’t want to give blow jobs to large cocks several times a week.

That makes life complicated on OKCupid.

Everyone at the show seemed to have a clear cut identity, or at least some attachment to Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. Or Team Dresch. The OKCupid date thrashed to the songs, grabbed Lissa by the breast and kissed Lissa’s forehead on the body to body dance floor. Lissa’s sweaty back did not make her feel like making out with anyone, and she snuck out the front door to avoid the fire hazard in case one of the amps exploded onstage.

Kathleen Hanna married the guy from The Beastie Boys. Maybe there is room for me, Lissa thinks.

Like the riot grrrl covers show, all the people there seem like her art school classmates – visually polished, gregarious and able to articulate their stance on some form of cultural theory or art history that Lissa could only emulate in her bedroom, or her living room when her roommate was away for a determinate amount of time, or anywhere that doesn’t requite her to say something witty or insightful on command.

Maxie at least could appreciate long silences on the bus. Lissa doesn’t ask too many questions about where they are staying. At best, it is on a pull out sofa an Maxie’s old friend’s sofa. At worst, it will be at a collective commune where everyone looks at Lissa like she is an alien because she looks as queer as a mother baking an apple pie.

Lissa met Maxie through OKCupid, but they agreed right away that a sexual relationship would end up in dramatic loss. Maxie is a gold star lesbian, and Lissa slept with more men than women.