The fourth excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress. For the first three excerpts, please click (in this order) here and here and here.
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Standing outside her smeary beige high school at 7:12 AM on Monday, August 25, 2014, the first day of her junior year, Zoey spends a few moments checking out her classmates, the same pathetic nonentities she’s known for-freaking-ever: the concussed jocks, the perky sluts, the woozy potheads, the glowering lezbos, the emotive fags, the thuggish blacks, the white kids imitating thuggish blacks. No one there deserves to kiss her butt, not that anyone has ever tried.
But someone should try. Zoey knows beyond any doubt that someone as upper-percentile as she deserves a following. An upper-percentile following. A following she can cultivate via the greatest technological development ever, the Internet, the best place to attract attention.
She opens her backpack and takes out her phone. She logs into her account on allrighty.com, a blogging platform “FOR REAL AMERICANS”, as its masthead declares, quotes included. She reviews what she wrote the previous night (ellipses in original):
Welcome to The Zoey Zone, a blog by me, Zoey Jennings, a 16 year old girl. Yes, even a girl can have her own blog. What will they think of next?…Anyway, I should warn you, while I might occasionally write about Typical Teenage Topics such as fashion and music, I do plan to write mostly about, gasp, POLITICS. And NOT from a liberal perspective, either. I’ve never swallowed the lies spewed out every single minute by the liberal news media. Even sweet little 16-year-old girls like me can see the immense damage that [United States] President Barack Hussein Obama [in office from 2009 to 2017] and his fellow Marxist radical lunatics have done to this country. And I don’t know about other girls, but when I see damage, I point it out, so people can fix it. I’ve always pointed stuff out. I plan to do a lot of that here, on this little old blog. I’ll tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…with some cute emojis to boot. [Emoji of a woman’s high-heeled red boot, facing right, appropriately enough.]
I do own a pair of cute red boots in real life. Perhaps I could have kicked some sense into Michael Brown while wearing them. Then perhaps he WOULDN’T have physically attacked a cop, trying to go for the cop’s gun. Then perhaps the cop WOULDN’T have shot that dumb-ass dead. And then perhaps all those outside agitators WOULDN’T have made an attempted cop-killer a hero and rioted in his name [a reference to the weeks-long civic unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, that has followed the fatal shooting earlier that month of an unarmed, eighteen-year-old black resident, Michael Brown, by a white police officer; the above sentences present the police department’s version of events—went for gun, thug, outside agitators]. Of course, those rioters would have found some other criminal loser to idolize, but…I own PLENTY of boots perfect for my new career as a kicker. [Four emojis of the above women’s high- heeled boot, facing right, in brown, in blue, in red again, and in yellow, respectively.]
Zoey has second thoughts. She wants to do more than just troll some liberal snowflakes. She wants to discuss vital issues in an engaging manner, the way her favorite right-wing news site, Viddy, does, probably an unusual site for a teenager to read, even a teenager like her who has taken Gifted Classes since sixth grade; most teenagers, even the allegedly Gifted ones, would rather spend hours each day on social media, watching videos about, say, cats riding skateboards, than read about the actual world everyone lives in—the actual, complicated, at times totally left-wing and absolutely totally depressing world. She might cultivate a greater following if she dumbed down her content, reducing if not eliminating the news commentary.
No. Her index finger mashes the on-screen PRINT button several times. Someone has to point out this country’s idiocy, even if no one else cares.
Copyright © 2026 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 