Listicles For People Exactly Like You: 8 Signs You Are an Armenian Kid in a Goth Band in South Pasadena by Rufi Thorpe

1. Last night you smoked pot after your parents went to bed and ate an entire key lime pie while sitting on the warm cement of the driveway looking up at the stars. Your mom is going to be really mad, and your only plan is to try to convince her that she never bought the pie in the first place and that she is slowly losing her mind.

2. You play mostly 21-and-under events in community centers. You are the bass player. None of you, except the keyboardist, who is the guitar player’s possibly autistic cousin, likes Goth music, but its what the people want. In fact, several twelve-year-old girls have crushes on you and you use this to comfort yourself when you feel out of place in your high school where everyone assumes you are Mexican.

3. Your favorite band is Black Flag and you wish more people wanted to have a conversation with you about it.

4. You don’t like the fresh taste after brushing your teeth. You prefer the soft, warm, yeasty feel of your mouth in its natural state and so you delay brushing your teeth in the morning as long as you possibly can.

5. The only way to make yourself go to school is by promising yourself that you can buy an energy drink from the 7-11 across the street during lunch. The Korean lady who always works the register knows you and teases you gently in a way that makes you feel grown up. It is the best part of the day.

6. You only have crushes on girls who will never in one million years be interested in you. Your friends encourage you to be more realistic, but your pining for these pretty, popular girls is intense and all-consuming. It is a vocation of sorts.

7. You can hear your little sister masturbating at night through the wall and it creeps you out really bad. She has been doing it since she was eleven and you are convinced there is something really wrong with her, but otherwise she is completely normal and your parents like her better than you.

8. Your black beanie fell in a puddle of rain water the other day and you wore it anyway, and it made you feel cool, so you kept asking people to touch your hat all day, and then laughing hysterically when they recoiled from the wet, muddy wool.