In the future, everyone’s credit card debt glows in a rainbow holographic number over their head like the green diamond from The Sims. Most people got their act together out of shame, but not me. When I go to buy my $14 vegan Caesar salad at Whole Foods, everyone in the self checkout line snickers and takes pictures of my glowing number. I see myself in photos later that night on the internet – bad posture and no makeup, hunched over the self scanner with my teeth out, fumbling my Discover Card from my wallet. Everyone in the comment section calls me a retard and says I should be put to death by the state. My Discover Card has the skyline of Chicago on it. Some people in the comments say they’re going to take a road trip to Illinois to come and kill me, and someone else correctly identifies the Whole Foods as the one on Ashland Avenue. One man says I should be put in a gulag. Another one replies that my arms are too skinny for the gulag and they should just turn me into glue. A third man says that I need to be prayed for.
“Oh jeez,” I say out loud to the blue glow of the computer screen. The computer doesn’t reply, but its fan is whirring so loud that it feels like a conversation. The laptop is overheating with only one tab open and it’s burning the skin on my thighs. I need a new computer, but if they catch me at the Apple Store again I’m afraid there’s going to be a lynch mob like there was the last time. The employees let me hide behind the genius bar, but they weren’t happy about it and they told me not to come back there with a number like that ever again. The number is a little bit higher now.
I got tinted windows in my car so that no one would see my number when I was driving and try to run me off the road or knock my car into Lake Michigan when I’m driving home on Lake Shore Drive at night. But then the government passed a law saying that rainbow numbers must project through a car’s interior and roof, and so now it glows over my Volkswagen anyway, and I made my number higher from buying the window tints for no reason. I put a “baby on board” sticker on my bumper so that people would stop trying to kill me all the time. It worked, and now people just roll down their windows at me at stoplights and scream that if it weren’t for the infant in my backseat, they would follow me to wherever it was I was going and cut my brake lines after I walked away from the car. I keep a big black garbage bag in the glove compartment and I wear it when I drive. I do this because I get a lot of garbage thrown at me, because the government keeps my driver’s side window permanently rolled down as punishment for being a six-diger. A six-diger is a slur for someone who has six digits of credit card debt.
There are websites online where people go to make fun of six-digers. One is called Page Six-Diger, which I would think is kind of clever if I wasn’t the subject of their scorn. They call me Piglet on the website. I don’t really know why, but I think it’s probably because I’m short and because I’m prone to blushing, so my face always turns pink when I notice that people are making fun of me and my number. And also maybe because they think I’m greedy like a pig. I guess I prefer not to think about why. But the point is they call me Piglet and everywhere I go they say “oink oink” and make snorting noises at me.
Contrary to popular belief, I have a good job. They can’t fire me because rainbow numbers are a legally protected characteristic, much to my employer’s chagrin. My boss shakes her head in disgust when she passes me in the hallway. They put my desk in a broom closet because they didn’t want clients to see the number glowing above my head and sever all their contracts with my company. They printed “Piglet” on my ID badge at work as a joke and the HR lady said it would be $28 dollars at my own cost to issue a reprint in my legal name. She said it while the whites of her eyes were showing, with her irises rolled up and staring at my number. I sighed and walked back to my broom closet.
I bought a white eyeliner pencil from Sephora. The cashier made a post about me on Reddit, on a board called r/PigletSnark. For the next few days people responded with photos they took of me on the train and walking around downtown with my waterline traced in white.
“Lol Piglet thinks she’s Audrey Hepburn.”
“I think she looks kind of cute here actually,” I replied from one of many of my anonymous accounts.
“Piglet burner detected.” Someone responded ten seconds later.
I clicked to the main page of the board and scrolled: pictures of me, pictures of my phone’s screen zoomed in all the way so that you could see what I was looking at. Pictures taken from behind, from above me on escalators, pictures on the train, pictures taken from across the street.
“Piglet trying to learn French.”
“Piglet looking up how to start a candlemaking business.”
“Bleary eyed Piglet eating an ice cream cone and walking home alone – all dressed up like she had gone on a date haha.” I sigh and shut my smoking hot laptop.
There are websites where men post half-jokingly that they think they could fix me.
There are corners of the dark web where people claim to be six-diger bounty hunters, where they claim to be credit bureau vigilantes who will one day take me out for good. Maybe they are and maybe they will.
At night I sleep with a silk sleep mask over my eyes because the rainbow glow is too bright – like trying to fall asleep under a neon sign.
Sometimes as I’m drifting off, I have this dream that I buy a domain name, www.pigletsrainbownumber.com and at first, people only click on it to read what I have to say and to make fun of me for it. In this dream, I’ve scanned my last seven years of credit card statements onto the website and I go through each transaction one by one, explaining each charge to my hostile audience. I explain what I was thinking and who I was hoping to become with each purchase. I explain each failed dream and each version of myself that never panned out, each new me whose light was snuffed out by the old me. In this dream, people soften as they see shameful little bits of their own psyches reflected in my gross fiscal irresponsibility. In this dream, people start to respect my commitment to reinvention, to my repeatedly failed self improvement arcs. In this dream, people start to salute my fortitude in getting out of bed and leaving the house. In this dream, I become the image of steadfast loyalty to God’s holy creation. In this dream, people start to appreciate that I take all that is thrown at me, literally and figuratively, and somehow keep moving forward. In this dream, Piglet is Job 2.0, and everyone knows it.
I guess my hope is that deep down, people wouldn’t want to kill me as much if they could get to know me a little bit better. Although in reality, I guess it’s possible that they would want to kill me even more. The dream isn’t quite as grand as the notion that to be known is to be loved, it’s more like to be known is to not end up curb stomped to death outside of a Williams Sonoma. And I have always been a dreamer.
-- Claire Brennan is from Chicago, Illinois. Twitter: @evilclaire
