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Ripping staggered holes all the way to my chest
All the way to my chest
But every tremble in your voice still echoes in my ears
One good night of sleep per year
There's a tombstone in the brush with my name on the front
But I had no guts to get, "Here lies He-Ran-Outta-Luck"
On the back of it
Sharp as a tack, but in the sense that I'm not smart, just a prick
In the fingers and the toes of all of those who show interest in me
Janis can now tell the truth that she had once wondered in early high school: Regina George doesn’t taste like plastic. She tastes like strawberry lip gloss and blood-marked lips and regret.
The two of them hooked up right before graduation, after Regina led her team to crush the enemies (or, rather, to beat their opponents, but Janis would bet ten to one that Regina gave some sort of blood-thirsty speech beforehand because she has never met a challenge—or a girl’s neck—that she didn’t want to sink her teeth into).
For all of Regina’s shifts after breaking her neck, she still clung to certain beliefs. She walked out the next day saying it was just an experiment, throwing Janis’ heart back into her hands as if this was a one time thing, a straight girl digging her nails into a lesbian in order to find out if short nails actually did do things that no boy could ever compare to.
The thing is, Janis knew what it felt like to kiss Regina. There might have been six years between kisses, between a fumble at a sleepover that led Regina George to destroy her reputation and a hook-up before graduation, after a game, all victory, all challenge, no defeat, because they’re girls and they don’t know how to turn shit off, they just know how to sit in grudges, they just know how to let shit burn like flames on an oil slick, impossible to snuff out, impossible to drain the fuel from—
And she knew what Regina George did. That Regina was as into Janis as Janis was into her, that Janis might have been the one to plan the revenge but that a girl wouldn’t have steadfastly worked to perpetuate a rumor for that fucking long without a meaning behind it.
And if Regina was just going to continue claiming that there was nothing between them, well—
Janis moved. She left. She ran away and never spoke to anyone save Damian after graduation, because like fucking hell she is going to dwell on anyone that wouldn’t admit the truth of what she kept tucked behind her teeth when it came to her feelings for Janis.
But now, it’s the fifteen year reunion. It’s been fifteen years since she tasted Regina George’s mouth.
The dickishness level of people in high school, it turns out, has literally no indication on how they turned out in life. Gretchen Wieners took over her father’s company, a perfect goddamn nepo baby handed the keys to the castle. Karen is perfectly happy as a stay-at-home mom with two kids and an instagram account full of thirst trap pics. Damian is happy to run his father’s restaurant.
And Janis herself?
She left this fucking town, with all the kids that she’d spent too many years getting to know, with all of these kids that knew too much about her, and she went to the furthest college away that she could afford to go to, with a combination of loans, scholarships, and financial aid.
She spent the first year or two of college bouncing from class to class, major to major, racking up student loans that she wished she hadn’t taken out when the economy crashed and suddenly a journalism degree was barely worth the paper that it was printed on.
(Thankfully she’d only ended up taking out federal ones, not private ones, so Sallie Mae wasn’t making out sloppy-style with her paychecks and stealing her future, but there was still a small chunk of her pay coming out every month to head on over to Daddy Mohela.)
She was lucky that one of her classmates- the girl she’d been dating at the time- had a dad who worked for the New York Times, which got her the in she wanted, and yeah, she became a sell-out of sorts, Janis knows. But who isn’t?
By day, she’s a reporter. At night, on the weekends, she still plays the greatest emo hits in her one-time girlfriend’s bar in Bushwick, taking advantage of that open mic night.
Janis is the only one who truly got out of this town.
Well, her and Regina George.
No one knows what happened to Regina George after they all graduated, where she went, what she majored in, what she built the wreckage of her life into.
Well—
One person does.
Damian still talks to Cady after all these years, despite the fact that Cady broke Janis’ heart more than Regina did, at the end of the day, because middle school is a menace that fucks everyone up, because Janis knew what she was doing when she tumbled into bed with Regina George that high school night, her high on weed, Regina high on the victory at the game, but the thing that she built with Cady crumbled into fucking dust.
The way that Cady betrayed them—
A girl knows how to hold a grudge, okay? Janis learned at her mother’s tit how to hold onto the things that hurt you. On how to turn hatred and ache into the grain of sand that a pearl forms around inside of your aching oyster chest.
And so when Janis arrives at the reunion, a black denim jacket draped over her shoulders, hair not as jagged as it was in high school but still dyed jet black, because there are parts of yourself that you can never leave behind, there are parts of yourself that will be a thorn in other people’s sides for years because it was a thorn in your side too, when you weren’t allowed to express it, and so you’re gonna make it other people’s problems for as long as you fucking can, she isn’t ready to see Cady.
(Would she ever have been ready to see Cady Heron after everything that happened between them?)
Cady walks up to Janis and says hi, casual as if what happened in high school is nothing more than a flipped page in a book she read years ago and never returned to, never dwelled over, never picked apart like a fucking scab that she couldn’t get away from, and that grain of sand yanks itself around inside of Janis’ guts, hammering away at the inside of her ribs.
And she can’t look at Cady. Can’t look at Cady, who seems to have moved on from the years, who really did leave high school behind, just like Damian did, because despite the fact that they’re still in town, that they never ran away, they were able to bury old hurts and allow new things to grow.
Cady is smiling and Damian is smiling, Cady asking about Damian’s boyfriend, Damian asking about some sick animal that Cady’s rehabilitating, and Janis can’t handle it, because it’s not fair. It’s not. It’s not fair that Janis the only one hanging onto the past. The only one carving away at the wounds so that they stay fresh. The only one pressing her nails in so she remembers what it’s like to hurt.
Janis stumbles outside, breath caught in her throat, the little punch cup in her hand doing fucking nothing to alleviate the ache in her chest. She needs a cigarette. She needs to blast her lungs with smoke. She needs to remind herself that she can feel, that she can grow, that she isn’t plastic, that she isn’t the one fucking person that is stuck in the past, in the anchor, that she isn’t still the same wretch who plotted revenge on a girl because she’d been hurt, because she couldn’t get her off of her mind, because Janis Ian kissed a girl and she liked it and that girl swore that Janis was nothing more than a creeper, an experiment, a predator, when everyone and their mother knows that the apex predator has always been Regina George.
But as Janis takes her first puff, a familiar voice, high and sickeningly sweet, a fucking lie, says, “Looks like you haven’t changed much over the years, Ian.”
Janis spins around to find Regina George there, face bright in the crescent moon above their heads, highlighted silver by the crescent moon.
She still looks unfairly perfect. Blonde hair, perfect smile, perfect boobs, perfect hips, not a hair out of place, makeup flawless, a plastic body.
But there is a laughter line around her eyes, and since when does Regina fucking George get to have laughter lines?
“There’s no way that you changed, too,” Janis says, “I cannot be the only fucking lunatic in this place who clung to the past. I cannot be the one fucking loser hanging onto shit from when we were fucking teenagers.”
Regina’s gaze is cool, icy blue, as frosty as she was in high school, all those ice queen instincts.
She was a monster, back then, but maybe so was Janis, a bit, more than a bit, because she was hurt and she was bitten and she spent the rest of their high school careers determined to become a vampire, because at least if she was the one sucking blood, the one doing the damage, then she wasn’t the one getting hurt.
Fury boils over the edge. “Where the fuck do you get off having laughter lines?”
It’s not fair, the way that memory waxes and wanes over time, the way that Janis can still taste the strawberry lipgloss, the way that a girl made of plastic looks best in the moonlight fifteen years after the last time that Janis kissed that annoyingly perfect mouth—
“Can I tell you a secret, Janis Ian?” Regina says, stepping close to her, “Laughter lines are the new it-factor. Girls nowadays want to see a bit of realism in their lives. The smallest indication of imperfection. That’s what captures their attention. The rest can still be plastic, can still be perfect, and that’s exactly what they want, that illusion of authenticity. That glimpse at something that is like them.”
Regina went to a school for marketing, Janis knows, because she stalked her on MySpace, because she couldn’t let go of the first girl who ever broke her heart, because at the end of the day, for all the justifications she made to herself, she was able to cut off Cady without thinking about it because Cady hurt, yeah, she stung like a bitch, but Regina rooted herself in Janis’ heart far too long ago for Janis to even know how to begin pulling out the weed clippers and getting her out.
Janis has been in love with Regina for fucking years, has been dreaming of her for so long that she doesn’t remember what it’s like to fall asleep without Regina’s blonde hair tangled in her fingers, Regina’s ice blue gaze a thorn in her fucking eyes.
“You haven’t changed one fucking bit,” Janis crows, and it almost feels like a triumph.
Because Regina was the only other one of them to get out of state—she’s been living in New York, a model, a marketer, a behind-the-scenes king of her own kingdom—but she’s just as stuck in her old ways. Just as trapped in plastic. Just as unable to change and move on and be a better person as Janis is.
At the end of the day, Regina George is only looking for a challenge. Only looking for a way to win. And yes, the methods might have changed, but unlike Cady, who broke that plastic, who started working for the zoo when she graduated so that she could help endangered animals, who did what she could to help other people and animals out, who became more than a mean girl—
Janis and Regina carved themselves into stone that night when they were twelve-years-old, Regina always the victor, always the queen, living up to her name, while Janis was always the girl with the broken heart, seeking to dig her teeth into a mouth that tasted of bubblegum and soda and the way that a teenage girl can devour your brain like a fucking zombie, arresting all development, until the day you die.
“And those teenage girls aren’t the only ones, are they?” Regina asks, and she’s stepping closer, and every word is a challenge, a poke, a prod. “You haven’t stopped thinking of me, have you?” She smirks, a perfect red lip, and there’s a flash of pink on the blouse behind her blazer, because the girlboss might be all the rage right now but she has always been a queen, a predator in her kingdom, and Janis only knows one way to get her to shut the fuck up—
Janis stumbles forward and yanks Regina in for a kiss, and Regina’s not ice cold. She’s not a memory made of plastic and nightmares and regrets, all of those nights of college spent waking up with a hand shoved down her boxers and fingering herself awake, gasping awake to the memories of a girl who should have been too plastic to care.
It’s a victory, really, for one goddamn thing in this town to feel the same way that it did all of those years ago, when Janis’ life was bound up in revenge and plastic and the sorts of things that girls bleed themselves to the bones in order to live up to.
But this time, it isn’t a hook up in someone’s bedroom. It isn’t something furtive, something to be denied the next day.
This time, Regina kisses her right back, right here in public, right where anyone could stumble in and see, teeth digging into Janis’ lips, because she’s just as hungry, just as obsessed, because once upon a time, at a middle school sleepover, Regina kissed Janis first.
And from where I'm standing
It looks like I'm way long overdue
I know what you meant when you said, "Fuck you"
Can we act like we never broke each other's hearts?
At least mine, I don't know how you felt from the start
Oh, that's vile, oh, I'm cruel, oh it's goddamn mean
I sure as hell know one thing
You sure ain't dead to me