Plaid.

    “Plaid,” Jared said.
    “Plaid?” Edna looked up from the book she was reading. Jared couldn’t see the full title because her hand was covering part of it, but the part he could see was Reviving Oph. Edna read a lot of books; she was a librarian. Most evenings, like this one, she would come over to Jared’s apartment and make dinner, and they would eat together, and then she would read in his living room while he sat and played Xbox games with the sound turned off.
    Jared hit the pause button on Guitar Hero III. “Your skirt is plaid,” he said to her.
    Edna lifted the book and looked at the wool pleats in her lap. “So it is,” she said. Then she went back to reading her book.
    Jared said, “Interesting choice.”
    Edna looked at the cover of her book. “Yes, it’s good, written by a therapist who has some ideas about why young girls get lost as adolescents.”
    “There are too many books like that.”
    Edna looked up. “What do you mean?”
    Jared looked around. “Self-help books, I mean. Why can’t people work things out by themselves? I mean, we’ve all got problems, but I think if you concentrate hard enough you can get past them. All these books, all these shrinks, I think they make people weak. Like glasses.”
    “Glasses?”
    “When I was a little kid my eyes weren’t that bad. My mom made me get glasses when I turned fourteen, and my eyes got steadily worse after that. I think the glasses made my eyes lazy, because they didn’t have to work to see.”
    Edna looked at Jared. “That’s an interesting theory,” she said finally. Then she looked back down at her book.
    “Anyway, I meant your skirt,” Jared said.
    Edna looked up. “What about my skirt?”
    “When I said, ‘interesting choice,’ I was talking about your plaid skirt.”
    “Why is my skirt an interesting choice?” Edna shifted and closed her book, putting her finger in to mark the place. She looked at Jared.
    “Aren’t plaid skirts usually schoolgirl uniforms? I mean, women your age don’t typically wear them, right?”
    Edna smoothed her skirt with the hand not holding the book. “Yes, I mean, I guess women my age typically don’t wear plaid skirts, Jared. Where are you going with this? Do you not like my skirt or something?”
    “I think your skirt is fine. I also think girls are just fine. I don’t think society is hurting girls. I wish everyone would stop writing books about it, and making television shows about girls. What about boys? No one ever talks about boys.”
    Edna sighed. “Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s kids we should be worried about, not girls and not boys. But girls and boys have different problems, and I agree with,” here she turned her book around and consulted its cover, “Pipher that girls are hurt when we shove them into our boxes of what it means to be female. Society, I mean. We teach girls to not be strong, not go after what they want, and make them insecure and anorexic and self-mutilators. Teachers do this, and the media and yes, Jared, men do this to girls.”
    “So it’s my fault that girls get anorexic?” Jared’s face was red.
    “Not your fault, but let’s face it, one in four women has been sexually abused before they’re twenty, and most of those abusers are men. Not you, Jared. Other men. And this skirt conversation is a good example of how society looks at females. It’s a perfectly ordinary, innocent skirt, but it’s been imbued with all these symbolic meanings because it’s pleated and plaid, so now it screams schoolgirl? I mean, that ties in, too. Why haven’t we, as society, decided that cargo pants scream schoolgirl? They’re a much more useful article of clothing, with their many pockets and durable fabric. Especially when paired with good, heavy boots for kicking men who want to mess with schoolgirls.”
    Jared had turned his game back on during Edna’s little speech and now he mumbled, “I guess I don’t like the skirt.”
    “Okay, noted,” Edna said. “And now it’s time for me to be going. Unless I’m invited to stay over?”
    “I have an early meeting tomorrow,” Jared said, not looking up from the action on the screen.
    “Fine. I’ll talk to you when I talk to you,” Edna said, and left. Jared heard the door slam, and then the apartment filled with silence.