Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer Page B

were filled with everyone Samanta knew, people Sam had never met. They came from Kyoto, Lisbon, Sacramento, Lagos, Toronto, Oklahoma City, and Beirut. Twenty-seven dusks. They were sitting together in the virtual sanctuary of Sam’s creation—they saw the beauty; Sam saw all that was wrong with it, all that was wrong with him. They came for Samanta, a community of her communities. As far as they knew, it was a happy occasion.
    > Just take it to someone else. Insist that they open it up.
    > Just fucking throw your phone from a bridge.
    > Can someone explain to me what’s going to happen here?
    > Funnily enough, I’m crossing a bridge right now, but I’m on an Amtrak and you can’t open the windows.
    > Send us a picture of the water.
    > Today Samanta becomes a woman.
    > There’s more than one way to open a window.
    > She’s having her period?
    > Imagine thousands of phones washed up on the beach.
    > Love letters in digital bottles.
    > Why imagine? Go to India.
    > Today she’s becoming a Jewish woman.
    > I’m on an Amtrak, too!
    > A Jewish woman how?
    > More like hate mail.
    > Let’s not figure out if we’re on the same train, OK?
    > Israel is the fucking worst.
    > Wiki: “When a girl reaches 12 years old she becomes ‘bat mitzvah’—daughter of commandment—and is recognized by Jewish tradition as having the same rights as an adult. She is now morally and ethically responsible for her decisions and actions.”
    > Set your camera’s phone on timer and then rest it on the ground, facing up.
    > Jewish people are the worst.
    > Knock knock.
    > Why would you even want to take a picture of stars?
    > Who’s there?
    > To remember them.
    > Not six million Jews!
    > ?
    > Dying laughing.
    > Anti-Semite!
    > Dying, anyway.
    > I’m Jewish!
    No one ever asked Sam why he took a Latina as an avatar, because no one, other than Max, knew that he had. The choice might have seemed odd. Some might even have thought it was offensive. They would be wrong. Being Sam was odd and offensive. Having such prolific salivary and sweat glands. Being unable not to think about walking while walking. Backne and buttne. There was no experience more humiliating or existentially dispiriting than shopping for clothes. But how to explain to his mom that he would rather have nothing that properly fit than have it confirmed to him, in a mirrored torture chamber, that nothing ever
would
fit? Sleeves would never end at the right place. Collars would never not be too pointy, or rise too high, or angle improperly. The buttons of every button-down shirt would always be spaced such that the penultimate one from the top made the neck opening either too constrictive or too revealing. There was a point—literally a single location in space—where a button might be positioned to create the natural feel and effect. But no shirt had ever been made with such button placement, probably because no one’s upper-body proportions were as disproportionate as his.
    Because his parents were technological fucktards, Sam knew that they periodically checked his search history, the regular sweeping of which only rubbed his blackheaded nose in the patheticness of being a preteen with a Y chromosome who watched button-sewing tutorials on YouTube. And in those evenings behind his locked bedroom door, when his parents worried that he was researching firearms, or bisexuality, or Islam, he took to moving the penultimate buttons and slits of his loathsome shirts to the only endurable position. Half the things he did were stereotypically gay. In fact, probably a far greater proportion, if you were to remove the activities, such as walking an average-size dog and sleeping, that had no quality of straightness or gayness. He didn’t care. He had not even the smallest issue with gay people, not even aesthetically. But he would have liked to correct the record, because he had the largest of all issues with being misunderstood.
    One morning at breakfast, his mom asked if he’d been