Jane’s favorite scar was a half-moon like an Amazon’s shield, from a catfight she’d gotten into during a comic book convention in Portland. They’d been put on a panel together because they had so much in common, apparently: they were both women, and they’d both written autobiographical comics about their bizarre childhoods. Granted, Jane’s was about homeschooling and mass murder, and this girl, Leigh, had written about adoption and a disease called Reactive Attachment Disorder, whose initials, RAD, did not accurately sum up the hellish experience of living with someone suffering from said condition, according to Leigh.
Jane had read some of the comics, and found them sanctimonious, unscientific, and distasteful. True, Jane’s scientific education began and ended with the library; she’d never so much as lit a Bunsen burner or dissected a frog. (Although she thought she might like to do the latter, at some point, just for fun. Viscous fluids, flesh vulnerable as a peeled shrimp, maps of blood vessels ever-branching.) Also true, Jane’s judgments of most people began with something superficial, such as body fat distribution, or a proferred brand name, or vocabulary used in a simple sentence, and then she built a more rational case by a process similar to the backformation of words. “Junkie,’ she could say dismissively about a celebrity who’d just come clean about their Oxycontin habit, a celebrity whom Jane had long been jealous of the thighs thereupon, yet a gentleman Jane knew who struggled nobly with heroin addiction might have the same label applied, but without the negative hiss that accompanied her judgment of the former. Similarly, the biggest reason that Jane disliked Leigh from the get-go was Leigh’s failure to attribute agency to her verbs: this was often incorrectly termed the passive voice by those college-educated nitwits who’d never had Ancient Greek and Latin crammed down their throats, or more populously to the point, was referred to as “weasel-words” on Wikipedia. Leigh wrote sentences like, “That house was under consideration,” or “That pizza got eaten.” Jane interpreted this as more of a moral failure in Leigh’s life to accept or attribute responsibility (for Jane was most sensitive to the faults in others that sheconsidered herself to be working diligently to overcome); this was only borne out by the events which culminated in jello wrestling in a hotel bathtub. God, that was a fun scene to draw, though. Jello and blood spatter everywhere, like CSI: Midwestern Church Potluck.
