Joanna Maarkuvi (“What informs a motivation?”)

I didn’t really like Kenley O’Leary, but when she decided that her next brilliant idea for the school paper would be weekly profiles of student organization leaders, I was intrigued. The first one she put out was about my friend Janet, who was the president of our Social Justice group. It was filled with tidbits about her summer trip to Venezuela. The general consensus was that Kenley might’ve had too much interest in “hot Latin guys” and not enough in Hugo Chavez, but that her interviews were generally harmless.

It made sense, then, that when my least favorite person in my own Feminist Coalition, Desiree Wendell, suggested I appear in Kenley’s column, that I would agree to it. It took some convincing—bitter old hag that I am, admitting that Desiree had a good idea was difficult—but eventually, I conceded.

And one-on-one, me and Kenley, was what I expected, but not what I got. I got a double interview: Kenley, myself, and Karl Arzt. Now, Karl is probably my closest friend on campus, possibly out of everyone on the planet. (I don’t say “best friend,” I don’t believe in those anymore.) But he’s not the leader of my group.

“No,” Kenley explained. “He’s the head of the new socialist group!”

“Awesome!” I said. “I guess I’ll have to add that to my list of organizations!”

“You two know each other?” Kenley asked.

“Yeah, we’re friends,” Karl said. “I’m actually in her group already.”

“Oh? And how did you two meet?”

“Well,” I said, “we had Poli Sci class together, then we both showed up at a student Democrats meeting, and right after that our friend Audrey asked us both to come to the GSSA with her.”

“And then things just sort of clicked and we worked together on projects and—oh, we both own the same shirt,” Karl said.

“Really? What shirt?”

“It’s a Communist shirt. From Threadless.”

“So do you two hang out a lot?”

“Yeah, of course. We drink and talk politics.”

Kenley nodded. Then she looked at her watch. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Holy shit! I forgot that I told Amanda I’d meet with her to study bio! I have to run!”

“Can we schedule another appointment?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure, call the office, we’ll figure it out then, I really gotta run!”

I did call the office, a few times, to no avail, eventually contenting myself with the idea that they’d call back and that the interview wouldn’t run until there was more of it to run.

I was wrong.

“Couple Ignites Leftist Base On Campus,” read the headline. At first I assumed it meant that we were two people, which we were. My assumptions were proven wrong quickly.

“The University has found its very own Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, its own William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, its own John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Karl Arzt ‘09 and Joanna Maarkuvi ’10, leaders of the College Socialists and the Feminist Coalition respectively, are the pair I speak of. Deceptively platonic, Maarkuvi acted as though she was not even aware that Arzt would be at her meeting with me. But they’re active members in each others’ clubs, live in the same hall, and even wear the same clothes.

“They also share a penchant for a lack of subtlety—last year, in this paper, amid weeks-long controversies, Maarkuvi accused a prominent soccer star at our school of advocating domestic violence. At last year’s anti-war rally, Arzt attempted to unite other participants to overthrown the United States government.

“If you look up either Arzt or Maarkuvi on Facebook, you will find they are both quite fond of posting links to progressive websites—as well as their own leftist notes. They are also both listed in relationships with other people—though Maarkuvi’s boyfriend ‘Dmitri VA’s’ page is sparse, without a profile picture or his entire last name, leading me to believe he may be fictional. Let’s hope that Arzt’s girlfriend, the more realistic Jennifer Redman, doesn’t hear of this development in her boyfriend’s life!”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Fuck her!”

I called Dmitri pretty much immediately. “Look,” I said, “I know you don’t often read my school’s paper, but your stepmother might, and I just wanted to let you know that there’s an article in there this week that might upset you.”

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s about me. The writer tries to say that Karl and I are dating and that you don’t really exist.”

“Why am I even in there?”

“The writer—Kenley—looked me up on Facebook, I guess.”

“Well, then she knows I do exist.”

“Your page is so sparse.”

“I have pictures.”

“I know. That’s what I don’t get. She’s lying, she’s twisting the facts, and what we told her, and I can’t see her motive. She’s not one of the conservatives.”

“Could she have anything against you personally?”

“Well,” I said, “yes. There is something.”

“What is it?”

And then I began to tell him the story of the previous fall—the one I had alluded to a few times back then and which Kenley had mentioned in her article, but which I had never gone into full detail about. It was the main reason why anyone on my campus knew my name, and it was Kenley herself who set it in motion.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, I had decided to join the newspaper staff as a way to be more involved on campus. I decided to be a writer and a copy editor, and while I wrote one article—a CD review—I never got to copy-edit, and I eventually stopped going to meetings when I showed up for copy editing duty once and was ignored for twenty minutes straight. Which was their loss, the paper is notorious for its grammatical errors.

Anyway, Kenley was the editor-in-chief at the time, and she ruled the staff with an iron first. A cold iron fist. Everything that came out of her mouth was unforgiveingly snippy. I disliked her immediately.

The week before I left, she wrote an opinion column entitled “How Stupid Girls Perpetuate Sexism.” Rather than using this as an opportunity to instill latter-day Wollstonecraftian ideas about how these girls were taught unfairly by society, she excoriated them—for getting drunk and acting dumb—never mentioning that boys did the same things (though without the miniskirts and heels), and that there was never anti-male backlash against them for it.

At least, this was its major problem for me; my friends Audrey and Eve saw a different issue, namely that drunk girls do not account for widespread sexual assault or pay inequality. At the end of their letter to the editor (which they sent in after I had left the paper), they advised Kenley to sign up for a women’s studies class.

I’m not sure why, but Marcus Dannenmeyer took umbrage to this. He was the next responder, writing a letter which thoroughly insulted Eve and Audrey while saying that their letter “makes me want to go back to the Rule of Thumb”—the rule which stated that a man could beat his wife with an implement no wider than his thumb. I can’t now remember what else he said, but he absolutely personified the Angry White Man.

And who responded to him?

Me. Drawing on his words and those of my friends, I pointed out why he was wrong and why he was an absolute moron.

Since then, I’ve gotten some odd looks. And I guess Kenley hasn’t yet forgiven me for being part of the ‘mob’ that disagreed with her. Not enough to not spread lies about me, anyway.

When I was telling this story, the call-waiting buzz on my phone went off. I looked—Karl, of course. “Hey, I gotta go,” I told Dmitri.

“Why, is your other lover on the line?”

Questions like this were the other reason I felt guilty about the article—that Karl and I were having sex was an easy joke for Dmitri and I to make, but it wasn’t true and seeing it in print made it seem like it might actually be. We did hang out a lot, and I didn’t need the actual suspicion or the rumors flying.

“No,” I responded. “Just Karl.”

He scoffed. “Well, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

We hung up, and I called Karl back. “Yo,” I said.

“Yo,” he responded. “Well. This is weird.”

“Yeah, um, William. John. Jean-Paul,” I said.

“Mary. Yoko. Simone,” he responded. Then he burst out laughing.

“What?”

“Just how much of a bitch Kenley is. I mean, we told her we weren’t dating. We were there to talk about our groups. And she just decided to completely ignore us. The newspaper’s just a shitty gossip magazine.”

“What will Jenny think?” I asked.

“She’ll laugh. What about Dmitri?”

“I already told him. He didn’t seem to care.”

“Mm. Good.”

“I think Kenley’s only doing this to get back at me,” I said.

“For what?”

“Taking Audrey and Eve’s side last year.”

“Against Dannenmeyer? You were justified. That guy’s a dick, and she’s a bitch, plain and simple. It’s funny, though…” His voice trailed off at the end.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“That she uses this to build a scandal around you. Dating me? Making up a fake boyfriend? Who really cares? If she knew what you really did I think she’d have an easier time making you look bad.”

He was right, of course.