Pizza Girl

by Jean Kyoung Frazier

There’s a vague slam when dealing with the youth on social media where mid-olds like myself posit that their brains aren’t developed yet. It’s factually true, but it accomplishes nothing. Being seventeen and made aware that your prefrontal cortex isn’t stabilized until your early 20s doesn’t make you question your choices: “Oh, I’m not a fully developed adult capable of making completely logical decisions, better not follow my impulses oh wait I’d need a fully formed prefrontal cortex to decide not to listen to myself, and I can’t yet do that.”

Also it’s just stupid. We know the type of dumb that teenagers are, it’s catalogued and dissected and studied, so when a kid thinks they’ll never get hurt and that their high school romance is the most important thing that has ever happened and that they want to be a vlogger or influencer, it’s like, yeah, duh. Let them want that. Go win 500$ at a Fortnite tournament. Use your ebrake to stop because you can’t afford to fix your car on that Wendy’s-drive-through salary. Don’t tell your parents a 200$ VISA bill is keeping you up at night. It’s cool. You’ll figure it out.

Pizza Girl is exactly that. A narrator that’s insidious because they’re the perspective character, and you justify for them by default:

“I just worry that I’m a lot like Dad.”

Without turning from the screen, she said, “You are.”

Before I could really process this, let it take me to a dark space, she continued, “You’re smart and have an eye for detail. Your dad was always point out things he noticed, things I never would’ve seen myself. Your sense of humor is similar too, not a lout ha-ha, in-your-face kind of funny, but quiet, a little dark, honest funny, is what I always thought. It’s why people liked him so much. Did you know that everyone in the neighborhood loved him? He had a way with people, connected to them in just one interaction, and it’s because he never pretended to be anything but himself…”

“I meant the bad stuff.”

She’s consistently choosing violence. Just purposefully mean. And every metanarrative justification positioned for the reader still serves to obscure the path behind the narrator’s eyes: “...[H]ow I couldn’t seem to say anything anymore that didn’t come out like glass, a bottle being thrown against pavement, all its pieces jagged and uneven...” There’s a barrier between how we read the in-book world and how the narrator does. This is not the timeless moment of what I believe is specifically early 2010s Los Angeles, frozen on the page. The level of defeatist nihilism that oozes from each paragraph is grounded in mid-nineties counterculture, smelling of Gen X ennui. It’s a nadir tale—hopefully, at least—where the compounding effects of continuously bad events shape the narrator into a, well, a fuck-up. And keeps her there.

If it is a story of the failures of capitalism, the collapse of the promise of an attainable American Dream for the generation reading it, then it is a clunky one. The book is called Pizza Girl, a job that delineates, without defining, the narrator. It is what pushes the plot forward, what serves as a call-and-response from the catalyst-character of Jenny Hauser, who eventually drops the, “Hey, Pizza Girl” detachment and perhaps sees her as we see her, as a someone who is both less and more than her occupation:

There was a plane in the sky and I was trying to guess how many people were inside it. I pictured every seat, every person, and I wondered about their names, ages, jobs, what they were listening to on their iPods, where they were coming from, who they were going home to.

Again, she’s the narrator. We are forced down one of three paths: root for her, root against her, or abstain. No vote. She’s awful. But she’s your eyes. So root for her, or stop reading. Watch as she, what, fucks things up, and use it as a Donny Don’t moment? Chalk it up to unfinished-brain youth? Or feel nothing, watch it all slide by, and end where you began? 

“Don’t do what Donny Don’t does”

If the point that Pizza Girl is trying to make is that nothing really matters, then, sure, I see that in the pages. It’s a daydream of a book, idle musings for an afternoon or a weekend.