What are you virtually rebelling against? "Protozoa" by Ella Martinsen Gorham

The first line of Ella Martinsen Gorham's "Protozoa" should not be possible. Two fourteen-year-olds are taking a Lyft to the girl's house from school. According to Lyft, children under 18 are not permitted to take a Lyft without an adult present. I suppose it's possible that Lyft drivers sometimes don't care, and as long as the fare is paid for, they just drive the kids. Maybe it's an open secret, and maybe kids are always making fake accounts where they claim to be eighteen. It's hard for me to believe a driver would pick eighth grade kids up at a middle school and not wonder if they're really eighteen, but what do I know?

It doesn't really matter, anyway, because a Lyft ride that shouldn't be happening is the perfect way to start this story. Nothing happening in it should be happening. That's really a lot of the point of "Protozoa," which weaves in and out of real life and online life, just like kids do. Following the story requires some multi-tasking, which I did with about as much success as most kids do when they watch YouTube and do their homework at the same time. I ended up feeling like this was sort of a familiar, "What's to be done with the children of America these days?" story.

Not that the story isn't right to critique modern youth culture and the parents who enable it, or that it doesn't execute its critique ably. Many of the prime suspects for the fragile mental health of teens are on display: the diss-tracking boyfriend; sexual over-stimulation at too young an age; the mob frothing at the mouth as it follows controversy online; kids let loose into the world well before they know how to avoid calamity. One interesting element of the story are the parents who subtly undermine each other, with one trying to be "cool" by letting her daughter dress in fishnet stockings while the other one tries to keep a close watch and convince her to stay in touch with the "real" world. The mother is a cook whose favorite dishes are all made with rabbit, meaning she literally slays symbols of childhood innocence for a living. It's a good portrait of the evils of modern times, but that isn't enough to make it memorable.

Two things about the story make it stand out for me as more than just an after-school movie, or maybe, to be more charitable, a somewhat less edgy version of "Rebel Without a Cause" remixed for a new generation.

First, there is the image of the title itself. "Protozoa" is the name the idiot diss-tracking boyfriend comes up with for Noa, the protagonist eighth-grade girl. It's just one of his stupid rhymes, and he doesn't attach any particular meaning to it. But Noa "savors" the name, meaning we, the reader, are invited to read something into it as a clue to her identity.

Protozoans, in case you've forgotten, are one-celled organisms that can move around. There's a lot of diversity to protozoans (and no real agreement, given how messy taxonomy has come, about whether they are a kingdom, phylum, or something else). The most important thing about a protozoa for the purpose of reading the story is that the name means "primitive animal." They're one-celled, but very complex, and they do a lot of things we associate with animals.

Noa is a primitive animal in many senses. She's fourteen, so she's just developing as an adult, She's also getting a lot wrong because she lacks life experience, meaning she has a lot of development to do. For that matter, nearly all the humans in the story seem lost in life on Earth, meaning they're almost all primitive animals.

But Noa evolves, which is the second interesting aspect of this story. Step one in her evolution was her relationship with the suggestively named Aurora Waters, a girl she only ever knew online, although they both live in the same city. Noa and Aurora Facetime each other in order to cry together. Aurora came up with the idea after hearing of Japanese men gathering to cry in front of each other. The girls have a longing for some kind of authentic sentiment in a world where it's barely possible to even know what that is anymore, and they are stumbling to try to fulfill that longing in whatever broken way they can find.

This reminds me of the Korean practice of the "mokbang," a live-stream channel where someone eats while an audience watches. It's not a sexual fetish thing. It's just people who no longer have a family at home to eat with looking to share the experience of eating together. Noa is temporarily made too happy to cry with Aurora when douchebag boyfriend "Paddy" almost has sex with her, and her relationship with Aurora is in trouble from then on.

But Noa is going to go a step beyond crying with Aurora in a private room. After sneaking out to spend time at a construction site with some kids in real life, she comes home and immediately goes to her room, where she cries in front of the camera. She posts a gif of herself crying uncontrollably, and it immediately starts to pick up a following. She has touched a nerve and started a trend, a trend she seems born to have birthed: "It was as though they'd all been waiting for Noa, full of feelings that no one else wanted to deal with. They were right behind her. So many that the echo of sobs was almost unbearable. Gathering momentum, they pushed outward like a tide."

We've already had a couple of short stories in BASS this year that were as much about the formation of an artist as the story itself. Wendell Berry's story with a name too long to write again and Jeffrey Eugenides' "Bronze" both fit this description. This is also the origin story of an artist, although an artist who will probably grow to only temporary prominence, since her medium is the Internet.

Overall, I found it a reasonably thoughtful meditation on what the Internet hath wrought for youth culture. It's a world full of sadness, but so distracted by interesting things to do all the time and unfettered ability to enjoy the excitement of youth, it struggles to even realize its own sadness.