Sarai Walker - Dietland

“No thanks, I’ll take the men’s boots.”

He reluctantly brought me different sizes, and I found the ideal fit. I laced up the boots, tying them in a knot rather than a bow.

“So?” the salesman said.

In front of the mirror, I stood at different angles, still not accustomed to the sight of my legs on display, but the combination of colorful tights and black combat boots was something I couldn’t resist. “This is exactly the look I want.”

“It’s certainly a look.”

I handed him my black flats and asked him to throw them in the garbage. Out on the sidewalk, I clomped with purpose, feeling almost gleeful. The boots changed the way I walked, demanding a more confident stride. Though I was unlikely to stomp anyone, I knew that I could.

After several blocks, I found a bench, empty and beckoning, and sat down, grateful for the chance to set down my shopping bags. I stretched my legs out in front of me, still admiring my boots, and while doing so I considered dinner possibilities, thinking of perhaps stopping at the market on the way home. A bus stopped in front of me, idling at the red light like an impatient animal. I saw the breasts again, the ones that had been unavoidable all day. The breasts were on the side of the bus, part of an ad for V— S—, the lingerie chain. Marlowe had dedicated an entire chapter to V— S— in Fuckability Theory. She referred to it as Bonerville. In the ad, a model lay on her side in a sheer lilac-colored negligee, her breasts slipping out, each one as large as my head.

The bus pulled away, taking the breasts with it. After the cars passed, I saw a young man in the middle of the street, heading in my direction. He was perhaps eighteen or nineteen and remarkably slim, wearing jeans and a black bowler hat. The hat is what first attracted my attention, but as he came closer I was able to make out what was printed on his lavender T-shirt: an illustration of a woman’s face—dark hair, black eyeliner.

I knew that face.

The boy saw me staring at his shirt. “You like?” he said, pinching the shirt where his nipples were.

“But how . . . why is she on your shirt?”

“They’re selling them in the East Village. Get yourself one.” He continued on down the sidewalk. “Later, sister,” he called over his shoulder.

I watched him walk away in his lavender shirt, wondering how it could be that the girl who used to stalk me at the café was now emblazoned on T-shirts like Che Guevara. In a few weeks, Leeta had become both a symbol of rebellion and a fashion statement. She was the face of a movement.

Soon, there would be other faces.

Airman Tompkins

During her deployments in Afghanistan, United States Air Force captain Missy Tompkins had eliminated more than two hundred enemy combatants. She returned home from active duty to live with her mother in Reno, but wouldn’t speak about her experiences in the war or the men she had killed. Missy kept her feelings about that to herself.

The daughter who returned home from the war wasn’t the daughter that Mrs. Tompkins remembered. The new Missy was withdrawn. She rarely spoke, slept most of the day, and sat at the kitchen table at night, smoking roll-up cigarettes and drinking Jack Daniel’s. She didn’t bother with her appearance, her dark blond hair limp with oil, her skin blooming with blemishes she didn’t attempt to hide. Sometimes she made late-night phone calls in the parking lot of their apartment complex, sitting in the grass near the dumpsters so her mother wouldn’t hear what she was saying. Missy disappeared for days at a time without a word. Whenever Mrs. Tompkins tried to talk to her, Missy told her she wouldn’t understand.

One day Missy went out to buy tobacco and never came back. For days, Mrs. Tompkins returned home from her shift at the Silver Dollar Steakhouse hoping to find her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, which for once would have been a welcome sight. After a week passed, Mrs. Tompkins considered calling the police, but Missy was a grown woman who could go where she pleased without having to report to her mother. Instead of calling the police, Mrs. Tompkins searched her daughter’s bedroom, where she found a note. Missy had left it inside the jewelry box she’d had since she was a little girl. She wrote that she loved her mother and her country, and then confessed that she’d flown the plane that had dropped the Dirty Dozen into the desert.

Missy’s mother didn’t follow current events, but news of the killings had trickled down to the tabloids she browsed at the drugstore during her breaks from work. In the note, Missy wrote that she wanted her mother to come to terms with the news and then, once she was ready, send the note to the editor of the Los Angeles Times so it would be published.

Mrs. Tompkins didn’t know where her daughter was, but she knew she would never see her again. She decided to burn the note, had started to burn it—the corner was jagged and singed—but then she pulled the sheet of paper back from the flame. She read Missy’s words again and decided they didn’t belong to her. She didn’t understand what Missy meant, exactly, but her daughter had been in the war and people would respect what she had to say. Mrs. Tompkins sent the note to the newspaper, where soon after it was printed on the front page.

“Jennifer asked me to help her and I don’t regret what I did,” Missy had written. “This is a different war, not an official one, but who decides which wars are legitimate?”

The Jennifer Effect

Jennifer was already a national obsession, but after the publication of Missy Tompkins’s note, she became a national frenzy.

MISSING AIRMAN SAYS “THIS IS WAR”

Federal law enforcement swooped down on Mrs. Tompkins’s Reno apartment complex. She was questioned about her daughter for days with barely any food or sleep. Along with Missy’s brother, she appeared in a nationally televised press conference with FBI agents, military officials, and members of Congress, urging Missy to turn herself in.

Immediately after the press conference, Cheryl Crane-Murphy turned to her guest, a retired military general, and asked him if he wondered why Missy Tompkins had written a note and wanted it published. “Why broadcast her guilt? Excuse my language here, general, but that note is really just a big eff you to the military, isn’t it?”

The general, tightly gripping the armrests of his chair as if to restrain himself from lunging at the camera, responded without answering the question. “We do not train American women for combat so they can come home and use those skills on us.”

“Might Jennifer also be in the military?” Cheryl Crane-Murphy asked. Missy’s reference to “Jennifer” in her note bolstered the idea that there was a real person named Jennifer who was commanding others.

The general became so enraged at the thought that he turned to the camera and said: “We don’t know who you are, Jennifer, but we’re going to find you and kick your ass.”

Every aspect of Missy Tompkins’s life was examined, from her childhood in Reno to her enrollment in the Air Force Academy to her years of military service as a fighter pilot. It didn’t take long for investigators to discover that Missy Tompkins had spent her high school years in Southern California, where she lived with her father, and that during this time she had a classmate named Soledad Ayala.

“The plot thickens,” said Cheryl Crane-Murphy. “Leeta Albridge is connected to Soledad Ayala, the mother of tragic Luz, and now Missy Tompkins is connected to Soledad too.”

Soledad was supposedly in Mexico City visiting her sick aunt, but the police discovered that she didn’t have a sick aunt. They were searching for Soledad so they could question her about the events unfolding in the United States, but she seemed to have disappeared.