Tacky by Rax King

Tacky by Rax King

Author:Rax King [King, Rax]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00


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Despite all the secretive rutting in dark corners, Travis assured me that he was always on the lookout for ways that we could spend “real” time together. Even I wasn’t naive enough to believe that we were boyfriend and girlfriend, but I was naive enough to believe that I could pull off a liberated adult woman’s sexual detachment with a boy that I was fully in love with, and I believed that his stated desire to spend real time together was itself real—I didn’t recognize it as a ploy to keep spending as much, shall we say, “unreal” time with me as I’d allow. After all, I told myself, if all he wanted was to fuck me, I would have let him just fuck me. He had no reason to lie! I look back on that logic and long to beat some sense into my kid self, especially because I see the ghost of that self-delusion in so many romantic self-delusions that have plagued me since then—that tragic mix of overconfidence and self-hatred.

We did spend “real” time together twice, and the first time was when he came over to watch Josie and the Pussycats. I was excited, not because I thought he would like the movie—I didn’t—but because I thought he’d recognize me in it. I’d cut and dyed my hair Manic Panic red to resemble Rachael Leigh Cook’s. I wore the same low-riding pants that are hallmarks of the movie’s wardrobe to my assignations with Travis. I felt as if I were sharing porn with him, showing him what turned me on. I thought it’d be effective. I didn’t yet realize the perils of sharing a cherished artwork with another person: the other person may not feel the feelings you do about it.

My favorite scene in Josie and the Pussycats is set to one of the titular band’s songs, written for the movie—not “Three Small Words,” but “Pretend to Be Nice,” which is almost as good. It’s a vividly colored montage that hops between frames from the band’s debut music video and shots of them accelerating towards stardom, buying better clothes, being recognized on the street, wearing knee-length lapis-toned leopard-print cardigans, etc. (That’s the way all the clothes in this movie have to be described, by the way. No article of clothing is just one thing. If pants are snakeskin, they are also neon green and metallic-hued. As a writer, I’m stuck with these clunky constructions that read like garbage and fail to capture any of the magic of the movie’s aesthetics.)

Anyway, we were watching, Travis and I, and during the montage he just turned the TV off. I looked at him. He was toothache-faced, obviously miserable.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, horrified. I hadn’t expected that he’d like the movie all that much, but neither did I expect it to traumatize him.

“This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” he said.



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