Cropped Red Hoodie

"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore as harmless as doves, but as wise as serpents."

Mais hélas! qui ne sait queue ces Loups doucereux,
De tous les Loups sont les plus dangereux.¹

—Charles Perrault, Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, avec des moralités, ou, Contes de ma mère l’Oye, 1697

Once upon a time, a girl thrifted a cropped cableknit red cashmere pullover hoodie. She took a selfie in it. The selfie was cute and not too revealing; the hoodie, while highlighting her small waist with its cut and her fine cardiovascular health with its color, disclosed only a slim crescent of midriff above her somewhat baggy zoomer jeans. So she posted it & set it as her profile picture on twitter.

John Everett Millais, Little Red Riding Hood

A man who had chosen to go by the name of Bleidd saw her selfie. He gave it a little red heart, he replied something about a book he saw in the background of her picture, and he dm’ed her.

Now, no offense to any Bleidd’s reading this, but Bleidd is a weird name, even in Wales. A normal girl is less likely to respond to a dm from a Bleidd. But our heroine was not a normal girl.

She had a fairy godmother. Because she wasn’t a princess or anything, her fairy godmother was pretty low tier. At her baptism, her fairy godmother, who didn’t know much about Christianity, was deeply moved by the reading from the Gospel, “Judge not, lest ye be judged”—an attitude very foreign to the cutthroat social world of the fae court—and also deeply moved by a few christening reception mimosas. So her fairy godmother gave our heroine the doubtful gift of being unable to judge others.

Like I said, she was kind of mid, so the “blessing” didn’t work 100%. But it did leave our heroine less apt at judging body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, intention, status, normality. This weak judgment reinforced itself, because she took it very literally when other people said it was important to be nonjudgmental,² & tried to avoid judging others even to the degree that she was capable of judging, so that her interpersonal judgment was not only weak but untrained by trial and error.

Another shitty thing about this “blessing” is that it only modified our heroine. So she got the “judge not” part, but was still subject to the “lest ye be judged” stuff. Handicapped in mimetic desire, she was very odd, & other people did indeed judge her. And her judgment was at least good enough for her to notice that.

So our heroine was somewhat withdrawn from society, & “in hidden place/ did spend her days, & loved in forests wild to space,” & the wildest forest she could find was the internet, where she had a semi-popular twitter account about etymology, a topic that had colonized the share of her intelligence that would otherwise have been devoted to interpersonal judgment.

So it didn’t occur to her to judge Bleidd’s weird name. Which is a very powerful feature of weird names: they filter out judgmental people, allowing you to avoid ill judgment you don’t deserve, & ill judgment that you do.

Bleidd had not just noticed that she was very pretty, and very young, and that he desired her. He had also noticed—and I wish I understood men like him enough to know if his noticing was conscious or unconscious—something that I had to learn consciously, & which I feel a little funny telling y’all, unsure as I am whether my audience is mostly composed of wolves, prey, or hunters: in this selfie, as in many of her selfies (he checked her media tab) the light on her eyes was uneven, one was in shadow & one was not.³ To him this suggested—and god, I wish I knew his exact thought process here—that when she took and posted the selfie, she wasn’t thinking particularly about how her eyes looked to other people, which further suggested that she herself was not much one for looking into other people’s eyes, which further suggested to him that she might have somewhat weak interpersonal judgment.

She was very candid in her answers to his questions. She told him she was baking treats for a care package for an online friend in the grips of a mysterious & painful malady,⁴ & further that she planned to spend the summer with that friend, when the friend’s usual helper, her older brother (saddled with the name of Grosvenor, his mother’s maiden name, of which she was very proud), would be traveling.⁵

Arthur Rackham

Her friend, invalid as they were, was not quite such a juicy morsel for Bleidd as our heroine was. But Bleidd gathered that the friend did have certain things that he might want, a nice apartment in an expensive city, some family money to support them in some degree of independence. And Bleidd believed the friend was weak & lonely enough to make an easy mark.

So before our heroine could even set off on her errand of mercy, Bleidd insinuated himself into the online friend’s life, leeching off of what the friend had. And when Grosvenor took off, Bleidd showed up in person.

He wanted an open playing field. It did not take him long to subtly torture the sick friend until they were in agreement that the best thing was for them to go to inpatient right now, don’t worry about messaging the heroine, you’re having a mental health crisis, I’ll take care of everything, she’ll understand.

So when the girl in the cropped red hoodie showed up to her invalid friend’s apartment, it was Bleidd who opened the door.

“God, this is kinda weird. I guess it’s always weird to meet your online friends. Like I don’t even know your real name. Or I guess maybe that is your real name, I don’t even know that. Like actually I’m realizing I don’t even know how you pronounce it. Like I guess, you know, technically in Welsh it’s like blithe? But I don’t want to be too like prescriptivist⁶ about it, like maybe you say it blade?”

Bleidd, feeling that our heroine’s capacity for pity was not offset by the typical counterweight of judgment against the pathetic, had sown their online conversations with tales of his own pain, how people had betrayed him, or else left him all alone, all true stories, his life being peopled as it was with other grifters or with those weak enough to be devoured, digested, and discarded. He told her now about how he had heroically checked their decompensating friend into the hospital despite his own great fear of loneliness. “I’m so fucked up about this shit with our mutual friend, god I just need to cuddle with someone.”

She hesitated before getting into bed with him. As she dilly dallied, she thought suddenly, she didn’t know why, of a particular etymology: “Hey, did you know that the word chaperone came from the French word for a little hood, a diminutive of chape for a normal cape or hood? It’s kind of funny, because I have a little hoodie, but I don’t have a chaperone.”

And Bleidd said, “Jesus Christ, how are you so selfish & cold, I’m in emotional pain and all you can talk about is etymologies?”

Our heroine had heard that kind of thing a lot. And so, though she saw his big hungry eyes gazing at her, his big hungry smile, and the big sharp hungry teeth in that smile, she listened when he explained away, dismissed, and distracted her from her fears, and she climbed into bed.

Arthur Rackham

Bleidd was targeting online invalids and autistic egirls, which should be a hint to you that he wasn’t a super high level operator. He had an idea of when Grosvenor was supposed to be back, a vague plan to be out of the apartment before then, an even vaguer plan for how to stay. But Bleidd was used to dealing with predators and weak people, and not with people who were neither. So he hadn’t gamed out a plan for how to keep Grosvenor from getting concerned about his sibling’s silence and coming back early, because he wouldn’t have cared about such a thing himself. But Grosvenor cared.

He appeared like Odysseus freeing his household from the parasitic suitors. He took hold of the situation, handling the logistical and practical difficulties of restoring the sick friend from the inpatient hold into their home, & the more emotionally fiddly & supererogatory task of freeing our heroine from Bleidd’s clutches.

Much of Bleidd’s wrongdoing had been, unfortunately, totally within the law, but Grosvenor brought charges against Bleidd for financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult. The case was kind of iffy legally, but Grosvenor was both richer than Bleidd, & possessed of more diligence, so he was better able to last out the siege warfare aspect of the court battle.

I can’t tell what ultimately became of Bleidd. Sometimes such people can get away with their shit for a really long time. But they create almost as much upheaval for themselves as they do for others. It’s a little frightening to see the bad ends that they come to, even when those bad endings are perhaps the only thing that they have ever earned.

Arpád Schmidhammer

I will say what happened to the invalid friend, to our heroine, and to Grosvenor.

Our heroine and her friend were both badly shaken by Bleidd’s mistreatment. The friend and Grosvenor had the seed of a feeling which could have bloomed, without total injustice, into great anger at our heroine for setting Bleidd’s sights upon them and getting them mixed up in this mess. But before they had time to be angry there were practical problems to solve. For one thing, Bleidd’s occupancy had left the apartment quite en bordel. The girl in the cropped red hoodie worked so doggedly at cleaning that the siblings were softened towards her, and more willing to acknowledge to themselves that any fault they could find with her must symmetrically apply to the actions the friend had taken.

So our heroine stayed for the rest of the summer as planned, and Grosvenor cancelled the rest of his travel plans, so that between the two of them, the sick friend was well-supported in convalescence.

Grosvenor grew very, very grateful to her. He was basically strong and natural himself, the kind of person who, all things being equal, didn’t prey upon the weak, but rather spurned them. But he couldn’t repudiate his strong natural love for his sibling, and he had suffered much from his sympathy for his sibling’s loneliness, how their object-level suffering was compounded by how others shunned them for suffering. He saw that the girl was diligent in helping, not only because of pity, but because she saw his sibling unclouded enough by judgment to genuinely like them. Also (you might think this is good or not): although in normal circumstances her poor judgment of character would have been somewhat repellant to him, he felt differently about this weakness because he had saved her from its consequences. And he appreciated the sharp peaks in her spiky profile.

The girl in the cropped red hoodie, for her part, would ordinarily have been afraid of a man like him. But seeing his daily kindness to his sibling eased her fear. So they lived in a household of three, until someday it was a household of four, & then more, and they lived happily ever after.

1. But alas! if you don’t know these soft-spoken wolves
of all wolfkind are the most dangerous.

(Thanks to Tom Will, Stephanie Yue Duhem, & Magician Brain for their aid with translating this—and much more of this verse than the epigraph could ultimately support.)

2. Which people say a lot, because it’s good advice for most people, counterbalancing the constant attunement to the continuous judgment of others, which they judge to be normal, and copy, judging.

3. Google “autistic selfies” and “selfies” and compare the eyes!

4. One actual blessing from her godmother’s gift is that she had less than normal of the human tendency to shrink from the hurt & needy.

5. The girl in the cropped red hoodie was more than a little relieved that Grosvenor was leaving a couple of weeks before she could possibly come. She was afraid to meet Grosvenor, who in no way required her pity. Like many people with weak interpersonal judgment, one of the few heuristics that she had developed was to fear and eschew the obviously strong. Rookie mistake.

6. She had been briefly twitter cancelled for linguistic prescriptivism.