Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (11 page)

THANKS TO THE MORONIC SHUFFLING OF JASON TOUS—
I can tell by the imprint that it was his neon green-and-yellow Air Jordans—the zinnias cannot be salvaged. But some of the American Beauty roses are okay, and the snapped lavender bunches can be dried and hung. (Ruth is not the sort of person who would do that, but Dawn is at least the sort of person who would make an obsessive Pinterest board full of intricately hung dried lavender and
then
not do it.)

“I’m gonna come back and fix this as best I can tomorrow, okay?” I ask.

Ruth shrugs and nods. I can tell she’s still pretending she doesn’t care as much as she does about her flowers. Apparently there is no expiration date on this “pretending not to care” nonsense. I have a hunch that she thinks openly caring that much about a garden is encroaching on
Tuesdays with Morrie
territory.

Instead, I focus on the eggs, which oozed like gross gelatinous grenade-lumps on Ruth’s roof until they half froze in the chill. As I scrape and wipe them away, the smell of weed drifts tellingly by. Underneath me, Ruth is sitting on her porch, wearing the same rumpled high ponytail she slept in. She’s vaping. Who the hell got her a vaporizer?

“I’m gonna pay you extra for this,” says Ruth.

“No, don’t.” I make a face as I shovel the remnants of one cracked egg into the plastic bag on my arm.

“What?” she yells from below.

“Don’t pay me extra!” I call back. I think agreeing on a certain amount of money an hour is fair, but I don’t like bonuses; they always feel like charity.

“That’s very sweet of you,” she says.

Finished, I sidle on my butt over to the ladder, climb down a few rungs, and jump the rest of the way. I wipe my flat palms together with a sense of accomplishment.

“Your roof is normal.”

“Not as long as I’m living under it,” she quips.

“That’s true.” I peel the disgusting icicle-eggy gloves off and balance them on the porch rail.

“So . . . it’s a destruction holiday,” Ruth says, trying to grasp the concept of Mischief Night, which I explained to her as I prepared for aborted-chicken-zygote battle this morning.

“In essence.”

She exhales a white cloud that lazily rises. “Did you
know
them?”

“Yeah, they go to my school.”

She nods, a small reaction, because she probably guessed.

“What did
you
do last night?” she asks with a pointed tone that I don’t like.

“Lost my temper. You know what I did last night.” I busy myself picking flecks of egg off the gloves and flicking them away.

“You didn’t go out?”

I wrinkle my nose. “No.”

“What was Avery doing?”

“I have no idea. Probably studying for the SATs.”
Probably studying for Mike Neckekis’s junk.

“You didn’t want to go out with the boys who came here?” She makes it sound like they came over to sip Arnold Palmers and play charades.

“Uh, no.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not a douche.”

Ruth shrugs, vapes delicately with her pinkie in the air, and lets it go again. “When I was your age . . .”

“You prank called a stegosaurus?”

“Very funny. Actually, whenever we had a bad substitute teacher, I’d get the whole class to throw their textbooks on the floor very hard, and he’d reflexively duck under his desk—that’s what we were taught to do during the war if a bomb fell.”

“Dark.”

“You should take advantage of your youth while you’ve got it.
Drink some whiskey. Spend some time with boys—or girls, if you want. Egg an old lady’s house.”

I make a
Come on
face.

“Not for you?” she asks, sounding amused.

“I’m not an asshole.”

“You’re sixteen. By the time you’re twenty-one, they’ll expect you to be a real person. This is your asshole window. It’s wide open.”

“Ew, don’t talk about my asshole window.”

“I just wish you’d raise a little hell! You know? Soon it’ll be too late.”

“Um, too late? I think I’ve got a while.”

“You really never know how much time you’ve got.” She looks off into the distance for a second, focusing on something far away. Then she snaps back into the present. “For instance, I read in the newspaper today that a lovely straight-A student at the Hun School passed away last week.”

“Oh. That sucks.”

“She snorted too much Molly.”

“I don’t think you snort Molly.”

“Well, she snorted too much
something
.”

“Who even snorts things anymore? Like, just take it with water. Who are you, Bret Easton Ellis?”

“Scarlett, she
died
,” snaps Ruth very uncharacteristically. “Everything is a joke to you.” It startles me enough to shut me right up. I scrape egg in silence for a minute. She sighs and rubs her temples with two fingers each, nails painted bright green.
She wears zero makeup but lives for gel manicures—one of the zillion Ruth contradictions I’m obsessed with.

“Sorry. All I’m trying to say is . . . you know. Live in the moment. Get a little nuts. Life is short.”

I shrug. “To be honest, it kind of feels like my life hasn’t started yet.”

“Kiddo,” Ruth says, “your life started the minute you put pen to paper.”

I roll my eyes. But maybe she’s right. She
is
seven thousand years old.

After I’ve returned home and washed the egg off my person, Dawn and I sit on the sofa and devour a large half-mushroom pie. Every local takeout guy is more or less a member of our extended family at this point. On TV, some
Real Housewives
or another flickers on mute.

“I think next week we should have dinner with Brian,” she says mildly, blotting her second slice with her French-manicured hand.

“Which one is that? Bald or Balder?”

She eyeballs me. “Brian.
Brian.
The only guy I’ve been dating for the last two weeks.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

She props her arm on the back of the couch, leaning in toward me, a worry line creasing her forehead.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Fine,” I mumble.

She brightens. “Guy trouble?”

“No! Guys aren’t the only thing girls are sad about. Jesus.” (I’m mostly irritated that she’s right.)

“I was just asking.” She sounds hurt, and I feel a twinge of guilt.

My cell phone rings. I beam.

“Dad!” I say, holding up the phone and already hopping off the chair. She nods blankly, the usual reaction, and I walk away from the kitchen table into my room. I shut the door, intentionally fueling her paranoid—and
mostly
inaccurate—suspicion that all I do when I’m on the phone with him is complain about her. I sometimes do, but he never does. Honestly, Dawn worries that he talks tons of shit on her to me only because she talks tons of shit on him to me.

I slide my thumb over the phone to accept the call. “Hi!”

“Hey, Scarlett!” Just hearing his familiar, comforting voice is calming, especially when he says, “How ya holding up?”

I don’t even have to ask what he means by that: He knows the
Lycanthrope
cancellation broke my heart. If you want humor and understanding, you go to Dad. If you want to determine if a Louis Vuitton bag you bought on eBay is real or not, you go to Dawn.

“Other than my abject devastation, I’m okay.” I sigh.

“I know,” he says warmly. “Hang in there.”

“I’m trying.”

“I just keep thinking how unfair it is that it never won an
Emmy,” he says, sounding genuinely incredulous. “Just because it’s not some hour-long HBO miniseries. Those pretentious idiots.”

“Yeah, that’s what a lot of the fandom has been saying. Indignation Central over there.”

He laughs quietly. “What other responses have there been?”

I shrug. “Most people are moving on. I think mostly the migration is to that CW show
Imaginary Detectives
.”

“And you?”

“I’m sticking around.”

“Loyal.”

“To a fault.” I sigh, fake-dramatically.

“Have you started my present yet?” he asks.

“Oh, you mean that doorstop full of papers?”

Dad sent me some books—
The Corrections
and
Infinite Jest—
for my birthday.

“I haven’t gotten around to it,” I admit, “but I will really soon, I promise.”

I wonder if I should tell Dad about the Gideon situation. We don’t usually talk about guy stuff outside the weird metaphorical father/daughter talks based on TV shows and novels we’ve read, but it’s still bothering me a lot, and maybe he has advice.

“So, Dad, I—”

“I’ve got some news!” Dad cuts me off, then makes a fuzzy noise that I realize is a deep breath.

“Oh. Bad or good?”

“Good.” He clears his throat. “Great, actually.”

“John St. Clair’s wife actually had a hysterical pregnancy, and the show will be back on next season?” I ask hopefully.

“My book launch party is a couple of weeks from now. Friday, the eighteenth.”

I shriek with joy.

“Jesus. Scarlett, my ears.”

“Oh my God! Are you serious? Dad, that’s awesome! God, it’s been years!”

“That’s the funny thing. I mean, I wrote it years ago, obviously. In fact, when I was still married to your mother. Ha-ha!” He laughs nervously. “Although Kira helped me quite a bit with the last revision.”

Of course she did. The vision of Kira and Dad brewing some French press coffee and spending a lazy Saturday morning in the brownstone going over line edits almost makes me hurl with aspirational envy.

“Dad, that’s amazing. Seriously. You’re gonna be famous. And I am
so
gonna benefit from that sweet, sweet literary-world nepotism.”

He laughs. “Let’s not get our hopes up just yet. It still feels very surreal.”

“Well, get used to it, pretty soon it’ll be very real!”

“That’s true,” he says, sounding way more measured and low-key than I’d expect from a debut novelist who has been working on this manuscript since I was eight.

“Don’t sound so elated; you might sprain something.”

“What about you?” he asks. Being typically modest, of course he is changing the subject. I reluctantly roll with it.

“What about me?”

“It’s about time I saw some of your work, isn’t it?”

“It’s
fan
fiction, I’m not Alice Munro. And to answer your question, I’ll send something to you when you have the hookup at the
New Yorker
.”

“Scar, I mean it. I might not have a ton of time right now because of all the book stuff, but I really want to read them. I know you’ve been at the top of the pack in this community for years. When can I see them?”

“When they’re good enough for you to read,” I say.

“I have no doubt that they already are.”

I brush that off, insisting I’ll send one soon, but all the while a warm, loved feeling creeps up behind my rib cage like ivy.

The Ordinaria
Part 4

Submitted by Scarface_Epstein

It was the night of the Pembrooke donors’ ball, when all the wealthy parents who had swimming pools or lacrosse courts in their names were rewarded with highballs, a live band, and zero mentions of the money. That would be déclassé.

Gideon’s father had basically strong-armed him into hanging out with Jason Tous and his two flunkies from school. Now here they were in his foyer, in impeccably tailored suits, sitting on stiff-backed chairs in the laboratory waiting room as Ashbot and the other (human) girls got ready upstairs.

His father, naturally, really liked these obnoxious guys—
not to mention zeroed in on them as potential Miss Ordinaria consumers. Some of them had even applied to intern at the lab.

Gideon hated it at first . . . but then he surprised himself. Getting wasted and making sexual jokes about “product testing” was kind of fun. He would be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy hanging with them just a little bit, having a beer with some normal guys and pretending he was one too, at least for a little while.

He noticed he was jiggling his leg nervously and stopped. Usually these things were incredibly boring, and he went only because his parents made him. Not this time. He’d gotten another e-mail from Anonymous last night:
I’ll be at the donors’ ball. Black dress. We need to talk.

It was the first he’d heard from Anonymous since the original e-mail. Black dress! So it was a woman (probably). He was determined to get to the bottom of it. He just hoped there weren’t too many women in black dresses—he really didn’t want to go up to someone cool-looking and ask, “Are you Anonymous?” like a noir blind date.

He sighed, audibly.

Jason was slumped insolently in his chair checking his phone, with his legs spread much wider than they needed to be. He glanced at Gideon, then broke into an Ol’ Boy grin and slapped him on the back.

“You’ve got it made, dude! Lighten up.”

“Nah, it’s not chill.” When he was with them, Gideon slid into colloquialisms he’d never use normally. The other day in
AP Philosophy, he actually heard himself say, “Proust was dope.” Everyone laughed, even the teacher. With him, though. Not at him. It gave him a proud rush.

Dylan Dinerstein, usually the quietest, piped up: “I get it. You don’t want to settle on one. You want to rent a little first, and now you’re stuck with—”

He jerked his head toward the stairs.

“It’s not even like that,” Gideon mumbled.

“You won’t even feel, like . . . obligated to put a down payment on her once she’s got a lot of miles on her.”

“
Miles?
”

“Hi!”

Ashbot stood at the top of the stairs, flanked by the other three guys’ dates, who were all wearing black. Ashbot had finally found her clique: the sort of girls who dated guys like Jason and blotted their pizza and wore Miss Ordinaria–brand lingerie. Still, of course, Ashbot looked hotter than all of them. She was wearing a white dress that flattered her pale, creamy skin. Then they glided down the marble stairs, their four-inch heels clacking perfectly in time with one another.

Gideon held out his arm and Ashbot took it, smiling brightly at him and tossing her hair, accidentally showing the on-off switch on the back of her neck. He fixed her hair to cover it again.

She zeroed in on his yellow tie. “Oh, you have to change that. Quick, we’ll be late.”

“What’s up with that? They look like they’re going to a funeral.”

Ashbot rolled her eyes. “God, did you even look at the invite? It’s a black-and-white ball.”

Gideon groaned. “Goddamn it.”

* * *

Since it was also the year of the Miss Ordinaria test run, and press would be there, the celebration this year was bigger than usual. Fancier. A crowd of people clustered outside the gates in cocktail attire, trying to fake their way in by saying some invented relative was a dearly departed donor.

“Laaaame,” Peter sighed, barely looking up from his game app.

“Baby, stop,” whined his girlfriend, tugging at his tux sleeve.

As their driver handed the limo keys to the valet, Gideon made his way toward the ballroom with Ashbot, wincing from the flashbulbs of press and paparazzi that usually followed a Maclaine at a social event. It didn’t faze Ashbot, naturally, and the photos would end up looking great, which was the reason so many actresses were Ordinarias passed off as real by their managers and agents: nary an unflattering candid shot in sight.

The grand ballroom was huge, white, and full of sparkling decorations. A live jazz band played tasteful standards under the conversation, with a few couples dancing and chatting on the dance floor. Expensive seafood was draped over a
giant avalanche of ice on a long marble table, and a fountain burbled in the center of the room. Caterers, all in white, drifted from one side of the expansive room to the other, offering hors d’oeuvres to the millionaires and investors and Silicon Valley boy-geniuses. They were too busy invasively prodding and examining the new Miss Ordinarias, awestruck by their seeming so real.

It felt, all in all, more like a wedding reception than a donors' ball. A wedding reception at a gigantic doctor’s office. This was both excellent branding work and a weird vibe that made Gideon even more nervous.

Ashbot didn’t look fazed, because “fazed” was not a setting. She looked at him and smiled—he watched the glittery green makeup on her eyelids appear and disappear when she blinked. (They didn’t need to blink, but the feature was added when the company realized the lack of blinking made people uncomfortable.)

“Why don’t you go talk to them?” Gideon gestured toward the guys’ dates, clustered in a tight circle in front of the bar.

“Okay!” She practically skipped away.

Gideon scanned the crowd. So, a black dress. It was impossible. They were on everybody, from eleven-year-old heiresses to seventy-year-old matrons. He could just give up. Maybe
she
would find
him
.

That’s when he saw her.

He couldn’t explain how he knew it was her, really, other than he just did. She was standing on the edge of the
dance floor, her arms crossed, and she was staring at him without any subtlety. He began walking toward her, his heart pounding. She didn’t move, didn’t meet him halfway, and she wasn’t smiling.

She just looked so
familiar
somehow, but the way déjà vu is familiar—it could be a real memory, or it could be that one of your synapses just fired weirdly for a second.

As he came closer, he saw she had brown hair, pinned back, and olive skin. She was sort of skinny-fat: skinny but not toned like Ashbot. Most of all, she stuck out. She didn’t belong here. But instead of pitying her, or tattling to a security guard, Gideon immediately recognized himself in that.

Finally he reached her, and they faced each other.

“Who are you?” he asked apprehensively, then made a face. “God, this is so melodramatic.”

She shrugged. “I’m Anonymous. Obviously.”

“What’s your real name?”

She continued glaring at him, ice-cold, and deadpanned: “You don’t think my parents named me that?”

“If they did, you should call Social Services.”

Bantering with her felt as natural as eating or sleeping. Weird—he was usually so quiet.

“So. Your dad’s empire is doing well.”

“Do you go to Pembrooke? Is that why I recognize you?”

Her mouth twisted in a sad smile.

“I’ve only been in your grade for, like, eight years. Sometimes in your class.”

Gideon pushed on his temples, like it might shift his mind into place. Frustrated, he said, “I remember, but I . . . don’t remember. Does that sound crazy?”

She shook her head, then glanced around them rapidly.

“We shouldn’t talk here.”

* * *

They walked briskly out of the industrial back door, her in the lead, and after five minutes wound up sitting on a curb just near the highway. It had rained, and the black pavement was strewn with shining puddles. The curb was damp, but the situation itself was too surreal for either of them to make “damp formal-wear ass” a priority right now.

“What’s going on?”

She turned to him and took a breath, like she’d been preparing for this for months and knew she didn’t have much time.

“They wiped your memories of me. And some . . . other things, which are also related to me. We were friends for a really, really long time. From when we were kids to when they found out.”

“How would they
wipe
me? And they found out what? Just get to the point.” Gideon was wondering if he should call 911 on this crazy girl. He was also beginning to notice that damp formal-wear ass right around now.

She halted and glared at him.

“Wait. First, can I just say, I can’t believe you’re doing what you’re doing.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re dating a Miss Ordinaria because someone told you to. You’re hanging out with that human defect Jason Tous because someone told you to. When’s the last time you made a decision by yourself?”

He was speechless.

“Exactly!” she yelled at him, emotion welling up in her eyes. Then she squashed it, and her tone was businesslike again. “If you came out as anti-Ordinaria, it would be huge! It would be, maybe, one of the only ways to stop this before it gets totally out of control.”

“I don’t get any of this. Just tell me, what don’t I remember?”

She looked close to tears, which didn’t make him feel that removed guilt he usually did when a girl cried. This time, he felt like
he
was close to tears.

“I’m sorry; I just don’t remember!”

With wild eyes, she reached into her purse and pulled out a long screwdriver.

“You don’t remember this?” she asked, her voice rising.

She raised her arm up as far as she could and slammed the screwdriver into her thigh.

Even before it came down, this thought popped into his head:
The screwdriver hits metal
.

As soon as that came back to him, with a click that felt like a brief migraine, he remembered everything. How they were drawn together as kids and didn’t really know why. They’d spend every day together.

“You’re Scarlett, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

He remembered when she’d told him, crying, that her mom had simply stopped blinking. She said in that moment, the truth just
occurred
to her, even though she’d sort of known it all along. It was too crazy to believe. Gideon said maybe her mom had had a stroke. It sounded serious; her mom needed to go to the hospital.

She’d shaken her head slowly, looking around the room, eerily calm, then reached into his parents’ junk drawer. Grabbed a screwdriver. Gideon had jumped up to stop her, but before he could she jammed it, hard, into her own leg.

The screwdriver hit metal.

They stood there, staring at each other.

“That’s not possible. No.”

“Wouldn’t it make sense if we were drawn together for a reason?” she had asked. She told him—insisted, actually—to sneak a look into his parents’ room late at night.
Maybe it won’t be true,
she said,
but either way, you have to know, don’t you?

So that night at three
A.M.
, he’d crept down the silent, echoing hall to the master bedroom to find out the truth. He’d cracked the door open, which thankfully didn’t creak or moan—nothing in his house made noise—and peered in. His father was sound asleep in the king bed. His mother was standing up against the wall, her head tilted slightly down, shut off for the night to reactivate in the morning.

It was all coming back, even the memory wiping—shortly after he’d walked into their bedroom, his father had taken him to the family doctor, and then it all went blurry, his past reinvented.

Gideon shook his head vehemently.

“No. That’s not possible. No way.”

He heard himself echoing exactly what he’d said before. And he’d been wrong. She looked pained to make him so upset, but her voice was firm.

This was the reason rental Ordinarias were always sent across the country from renter to renter: Some visceral memory, like a moment, or even a sound, could bring it all back. Gideon’s father had been very, very careful about it in business—but when it came to his own son, not careful enough.

“I’m half-Ordinaria,” she said.

He closed his eyes.

She finished: “And so are you.”

“How is that even possible?” he yelled.

“Brief, unfortunate flirtation with installing a reproductive system in the first-gen models. Only a handful of those models exist. And there are only two of us half-Ordinaria that I know of. We’re freaks.”

He hung his head, devastated. For a minute they just sat there, him processing and her waiting; the only noise was the rush of cars wetly speeding past them down the damp road.

Finally he said, “I’m sorry I hung out with those guys.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry you did too.”

“What can I do to make it up to you?”

She thought about it. Then she said, softly: “Don’t forget again and leave me alone here.”

Cerebrally, Gideon knew he should be wary of this girl who’d seemingly come out of nowhere. But in his heart, he knew that they were allies and needed each other to survive. At least for now.

He nodded, grave. “I promise.”

They were both silent for a while.

“So then,” he said, “you’ve just had that screwdriver in your purse for, like, years?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

He laughed a little. “That’s weird.”

She slowly turned to look at him, incredulous.

“
That’s
weird?”

“I see your point.”

Then they just sat there on the curb, all the shared history back, feeling as comfortable with each other as they’d felt uncomfortable with each other twenty minutes before, staring out at the highway that seemed to go nowhere.

“I hate it here,” he whispered.

“Me too.”

“You know, we don’t actually have to do anything about this. I can pretend I still don’t remember. Maybe I don’t want to choose to be different.”