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Offred is not a good person, or maybe she is deep down, but from everything that’s been shown, that girl's just plain trouble with a capital T. Unadulterated reckless, spineless, impulsive, self-aggrandizing Trouble.
She’s known a lot of trouble and she’s known plenty of women just like Offred once upon a time: those middle-class white girls who think they know it all, that they’ve struggled just because once their professor at some fancy college didn’t give them the grade they wanted, or they have some oppressed minority friend that gives them license to say, “how it really is though!” to all their other college-educated middle-class friends. All of whom use words like “gig economy” and “gentrification” and “intersectionality” as they takeover the lease of some poor single mother in a rare affordable apartment block that is gonna be torn down soon in favor of IKEA-chic condos, which they’ll complain about, but still put down a deposit on.
She knows Offred. So many women here are Offred, and this is the first time they’ve ever had to do anything they didn’t really fucking want to do.
It’s not to say that it’s a choice to be living this way, because, no, she isn’t exactly thrilled about the rape either, or the stupid uniforms, or the torture and beatings and brainwashing and religion, or the lack of anything fun to do at all. But it sure beats the alternative she was living beforehand, and that’s something not one of these idiots here seems to understand. None of these other “fallen” women really had fallen before.
They never scraped the bottom of piss-covered dumpsters for a half-eaten meal, only to come up empty-handed for days at a time. They never curled up, shivering on the city streets in the middle of January. They’ve never seen the inside of a prison cell, or a foster home, or a needle-strewn flophouse. They didn’t spend a year blowing every vein with sketchy smack that stung and burned and carried the chance of sudden OD if you were just unlucky enough to get the wrong batch. None of them had to suck a stranger’s dick just to get a roof over their head for one night, and those same strangers were from the universities that these girls went to and, yet, those boys never treated them like human garbage to be used, abused, then discarded in the gutter. And it was all that degradation for 10 bucks and a fix.
Instead, they volunteered at the most hipster soup kitchens after the daily Starbucks visit, did fun-runs “for charity”, gave cutesy land acknowledgments about colonization, marinating in their own feel good bullshit. They changed their Facebook profile pictures to whatever Cause of the Month it was trendy to be involved in, posted their pronouns on their Instagrams “in solidarity” as if there was even a question with their UGGs and bouncy little ponytails, and maybe handed some particularly sad looking beggar a dollar bill once a month. Boy, they probably spent time online ranting about the state of society and how awful it is for all those poor people: the refugees, the natives, the blacks or gays, and whoever else was on the progressive radar at the moment. It was so easy to sign an online petition and scream at some random text on a computer screen, yet so difficult to actually do anything at all that would matter in the least. That would require the effort of getting off their iPhones for more than 3 minutes. God fucking forbid.
Oh sure, they cared, as they sat at their Macbooks in their Pinterest-inspired flats, wasting hours on social media looking at fine art in museums they went to once while lamenting the lack of funding for social justice issues in between commenting on their BFF’s new professional photos of her baby and pure-bred dog in matching fucking pumpkin costumes, or the ex-college roommate’s latest holiday to Jamaica or someplace fancy in Europe or whatever. Oh my god, Mackenzie, did you hear? Jason is getting his PhD in Ancient Prussian Lyric Poetry in Zurich this summer! Hey, sign this petition to get Obama to give crayons to dirt poor teens in Alaska. Fuck the clean drinking water, suicide epidemic, and chronic gasoline huffing. Give those Inuit some crayons.
It all made them feel real good, she bets, all that fake outrage from their comfy little chairs in their heated apartments with food in the fridge and no meth habit smashing down on their skulls every second of the day.
Offred wouldn’t have given her skinny junkie ass a second glance before, and they both know it.
No, but Offred sure is bursting full of self-righteous bullshit now.
And she’s dumb as fuck to top it off.
Talking so loudly and brazenly about Mayday or whatever stupid shit she wants, whenever she feels like it right there in public. It’s the sort of definitive arrogance of privilege, and to pretend it doesn’t still exist even in Gilead is just fucking wrong. Offred gets away with so much. Like the previous Ofglen did--until she didn’t. Ofthomas. Ofdavid. All of them. She knows if she was to be caught even hinting about resistance, even taking too long to look at a bottle of milk on a shelf, there’s the butt of a rifle in her ribs or a ticket straight to the Colonies. These bitches get away with so much that she never could. Even crazyass Ofwarren, rattling off whatever batshit thing she has on her mind at 200 decibels. And the Guardians, what do they do? Barely fucking blink. Their worlds have always been so goddamn different to hers, to the point that sometimes it feels completely personal. (It's not. Obviously. But that doesn't change how it feels.) Theirs was a world of back-talk, full lunchboxes, compassion, and easy fucking assimilation. Fine, maybe they've had the occasional target on their backs 'cause, they're all women in a man's world too but not like her. Not a flashing neon bullseye of shame.
For once, maybe, she could be that ghostly, that type of invisible, in that way they are. But the darker hue of her skin, her past that's written in every scar and wrinkle, everything about her personally screams suspicion to Guardians, Eyes, and Aunts alike.
Offred waltzes around, spewing her idiocy like some Ivy college Commie Club president, no doubt inspired by her equally insipid partner in crime from before, the previous Ofglen.
They really don’t get it, do they?
Offred totally thinks she’s some white savior like those Mormon assholes, here to rescue all the hapless sheep dressed in red, as if she’s the first woman to consider that maybe Gilead isn’t such a great place for "us" (is there even an us?) and somebody should, maybe, like, do something, you know? Somehow, Offred believes herself to be so much better than her walking partners, more capable, more resourceful, and so much smarter. The way Offred walks and looks and speaks down to her, as she couldn't possibly have figured out anything for herself about this religious hellhole. She and Offred, no, they’re still not equal, not even fucking close, not even when reduced to nothing but walking baby incubators for other rich white people.
How stupid does a bitch have to be to be that blind to her own privilege? Pretty fucking dumb.
It’s the same shit now as it was then, before Gilead. Offred talks a goddamn lot for someone who does fuck all. You can take the girl off Twitter but you can’t take Twitter out of the girl. Blah blah blah. Outrage here, indignation there. They shouldn’t be allowed to treat us this way!
Oh yeah, sister? she wants to scream in return. Who's gonna stop them?
A hundred Offreds have pretended not to notice when she has suffered. They briskly walked by, heads down, avoiding eye contact in some pantomime of bullshit modesty or courtesy. As if they’re doing her a favor by graciously not acknowledging the pure hell she’s living. They always shuffled uncomfortably if she got too close, their scared, beady little rodent eyes always expecting the awful junkie whore to shake them down, or worse–give them whatever disease they believe she must have.
A hundred Offreds didn't even care that she was alive once. No one did. (And to be totally fucking honest, she's not convinced Offred even cares now.)
Where was all that outrage when she was getting her ribs kicked in by a john as she refused to let him fuck her up the ass without paying extra? Where was Offred when she got the cops called on her by some snooty businessman type just for sitting on the sidewalk to catch her breath for a second? How about when she was spat on in a Dunkin Donuts bathroom for having the audacity to glance beside her at the woman standing too close? Where was this anger when she routinely got followed around every store she ever stepped foot in, and if she was particularly unlucky, escorted out by force, bruising her arms, just for picking up a candy bar? She had the money (sometimes). But no, her type (Black, poor, junkie, whore–take your pick) wasn’t allowed. When her friend OD’ed from bad smack, and was only found 3 months later, stripped naked and raped in some ditch off the interstate, where was Offred then, ranting about men--or anybody--being allowed to treat women this way?
So really, it’s bad here, obviously. Slavery just is what it is, and there's no point in calling it by some other name. But it's not that unfamiliar to what she lived before. Where the fuck were all the indignant Offreds then?
She’s not lying when she snaps at Offred on their walk. It is more comfortable here to have a warm bed and three good meals a day. She’s not begging or hooking or scraping through each day by sheer will and fentanyl alone. There is a certain security, for a little while anyway, until she fails to produce a baby and gets sent to The Colonies. But until that day, it’s not the worst thing ever... maybe.
Except some days it is.
When the hatred devours her, those days are pretty bad without junk. Her muffled screams are devoured by her threadbare pillow instead of a man's hand, but she's still silently screaming all the same. It's bad when she remembers how broken she was back then, but at least she could read, at least she had her own money, at least she had her own name.
They called her Lillie. (Like the flower, innocent, beautiful, pure. Mama was so optimistic once upon a time.)
A few even said baby or honey. Her mama called her darling in that fleeting twilight of childhood before the vodka flooded her liver ‘til it rotted. Her friends could smile, if they ever wanted to. She got an A in math as a sophomore before she dropped out to take care of Mama, working shit jobs before the streets claimed her with their sirensong promises. She had a good solid name, and options. Maybe not many, and not the best ones, but there was something masquerading as choice underneath the bad pimps-slash-boyfriends, the smack habit, and the desperate daily fight to survive. The future was open at least, if insecure and unknown. Even on a bedbug-ridden mattress in a squat with raw puncture sores scattered over her arms, it was open. Something.
It’s those really bad days where Lillie realizes that she doesn’t fucking care if she lives or dies anymore. If it’s all the same shit, different day, what’s the fucking point? She’s traded a heroin addiction for reading.
There was that guy that would stand on the corner near the university peddling his self-published book about pies and zero-sum games. He tried to get her to buy it once, running his mouth at supersonic speed about his theories. Rocco had beat the shit out of him for crowding the block, as if his dumb little book would really deter and distract all the college assholes seeking out dank weed.
She thinks about that pie idea now. What a bullshit world that she can’t be clean and read. Who decided that was okay?
To be honest, sometimes, she wouldn’t mind the exchange back. Dope-blown veins doesn’t seem so harsh in comparison to not being allowed to read a fucking street sign.
But then, she thinks, one controlled rape a month by a man she is familiar with on a clean bed is a much better deal than twenty a week from vicious, perverse strangers on some blood-stained mattress.
Offred is just so full of shit.
They meet for their stupid walk like every day and there are the whispers, all the types that would get Lillie hanged and Offred a slap on the wrist –- again. Offred sure fucking loves talking. Talking and talking and talking and talking. These girls love the sound of their own voices and Lillie doesn’t think much of it. She sees no difference between them now and them then, with all the useless little online petitions going nowhere but, fuck, they must feel good to be so outraged for each other. There's no online now, just this blood red network of oblique revolutionary bullshit. It all works the same, she guesses, which is to say, barely at all.
And it's not like she hates them, she tells herself over and over. What fucking good would that do? She knows there's jealousy, yeah. But she's frustrated as fuck by their complacency once, by their hypocritical arrogance now, by this goddamn place and the fact she’s nameless and essentially coerced into blindness. That leads to rage, all trapped inside her prison of a female body, boiling and bursting. The us and we she hears everywhere (every whisper, every lecture, every hymn) are cold strangers to her, as unfamiliar as the outside world Offred inhabits.
It doesn't really feel all that different than before when it comes down to it.
So, what’s the fucking point?
Lillie looks at the labels of food products on the shelf in front of her, all pictograms like some IKEA instruction guide. Made blind and stupid, chronically discarded as human waste if not for her healthy womb. She wants to scream.
Meanwhile, Offred mutters conspiratorially to some other girl in mildly hushed tones so the Guardians don’t overhear their treasonous little girl power fantasies. And that’s all they’ll ever be: whispers and fantasies.
They didn’t have the balls to make real noise then when they had a chance, and they don’t now.
_______
Her arm itches where a needle once was.
Lillie, too, has lost her voice and it burns in her throat when she tries to use it. This is just like Oxy: she didn't even know she was in trouble until it was way too late.
_______
They stand there like timid, mute little mice in the shadow of a cat. Voiceless. Scared fucking stupid and Lillie's no stranger to exactly how paralyzing that feels when cornered into a decision that has no good outcome any way you look at it. Except they have clothes on their backs, food in their stomachs, a roof over their head, and a choice... at least for a tiny moment. It may not seem like it, and it's really not a good one because there isn't any such thing in this hellscape.
There's only so much anybody can take and, regardless of how much she loathes that batshit Janine and all the stupid shit she gets away with, even junkies have some lines they won't cross. The rock is too heavy to hold onto and her tongue twists and cramps in her mouth, begging for somebody to do something.
The voice of a familiar demon is ringing out above the sea of red. "Come on, girls. You know what to do."
Come on, girls. You know what to do.
Yeah, Lillie sure does. She hears so many voices in her head, hammering with those words. Come on, girl. A smack to the face. You know what to do. A chokehold, a cock, tears. Come on, girls. A room full of teenage girls on filthy mattresses and guns in the other room. You know what to do. A rush of tar into her veins. Come on, girl. Her underwear ripped down in some grimy alley. You know what to do. On her knees, on her back, bruised face pressed into a stained pillow. Come on, girl. A dealer with a wink. You know what to do. Stand there in the cold, waiting. Get in his car. Come on, girls. A room full of cops and politicians, off the clock and just as brutal. You know what to do. Choke, lie, cry, beg, pray, dissociate, die.
Come on, girl. You know what to do.
My name isn't "girl"! she wants to scream.
It gets lodged at the back of her throat and up instead comes rage. But it's her voice: the only thing she has left and she's not invisible right now, not at all.
The burning doesn't stop.
The more words that come out, the more it scalds and sears her tongue until there's nothing left.
_______
They cut out the dead meat and with no pen or paper, she loses even her name.
She will never say it... and even worse, she will never hear it again.
_______
Offred might be right this time. Maybe. But they sit there in Offred's mansion, with her perfect blonde mistress doting on them like some groveling little servant and it should feel righteous and karmic, but it's fucking barbaric. The bitch asks her questions, completely unaware or just stupid. She has no goddamn tongue left. Something burns in her lungs again. The rest of them talk in careful tones, filling the silences with pointless gossip and middle-class nostalgia for a time Lillie never even knew. Idleness was never even an option for her.
It’s like a choice between two deaths, and she’s never really had any choice at all. Not once.
She just wants to blow this whole fucking nightmare to hell, and she doesn’t give a fuck if she takes these precious white girls down with it. There is no other way to get to these men in power than to take away what they covet the most.
Someone’s gotta do it.
And it sure as shit won’t be them.