Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (18 page)

“But now he hates you. And I didn’t even have to do that; you did it yourself.”

She pushes past me, the stall door slamming closed, and stops by the mirrors. Through a sliver in the joints of the stall walls, I can see her fixing her hair and dabbing the smeared makeup off her cheekbones.

I feel like someone just put hot wax all over who I am, laid a strip down over it, and then ripped everything right off, and now there’s nothing left.

Dazed, my eyes wander to the wall and land on
Scarlett Epstein is a slut
, still there from when I scrawled it in Sharpie two years ago as a joke that now seems snide and terminally unfunny. I mindlessly fix my eyes on it until the words lose their meaning.

Ashley pulls her hair into a severe, careless ponytail, with those little lumps sticking out that girls with straight hair always get.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“No, you’re not. Honestly, it’s not a big deal. Keep pretending I’m the dumb, mean, hot girl and you’re some weird, ugly outcast nobody likes, if you really need to feel like you’re better than me.”

I hear the door of the girls’ room open and shut, and she’s gone.

I breathe again, sort of, but quick and short, like a fragile reptile in the wrong climate. I slide down the wall. I can barely feel it when I hit the floor.

He thrust into her a bunch of times. “I love you,” he whispered into her ear. She moaned because it felt so good, and replied breathlessly: “I suck.”

I suck. “A bunch of times”?
Even if that’s technically how sexual intercourse works, you’d think I could do a little better than that. The forum is pretty desperate for a sex scene, so I’m trying to give them what they want, but it isn’t happening. Normally I don’t even have to delete a sentence and try again. To be honest, I don’t feel like writing—I haven’t for a while now, actually—but they’re kind of my only friends besides Ruth and Avery now. Both of whom have called a few times, but I put a kibosh on my phone after my dad left a few apologetic messages. I don’t feel ready to pick up and talk to anybody just yet.

Okay, let’s go.

He thrust into her hard, but not so hard that it seemed like he had an anger problem or anything, just the normal amount of hard. It felt good. It felt great, actually!

He thrust into her a few times, and it felt like how that feels for people who have had sex.

He thrust(ed?)

Forget “thrust”; it’s gross. And “into her” used to confuse me in the fourth grade when I was sneaking Dawn’s Jodi Picoult novels, because it kind of seems like a weird metaphor. Right? “He is inside her” doesn’t sound literal; it sounds like some kind of strange aphorism for “He lives inside of her heart, forever” or something.

He climbed on top of her and moved around, like one does.

Maybe I’m not good at writing anymore. Wouldn’t that be funny? Yes and no!

“That feels really great,” she said.

“I’m so glad, thanks,” he said.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome?”

Wait, why am I—why is she, I mean—thanking him? He’s not helping her build an IKEA cabinet. You don’t thank people
for having sex with you, I don’t think, unless maybe you’re disfigured or seven hundred years old or something.

“This feels really good!” she said.

“For me, also!”

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, this is bad.

Delete all.

I trudge toward Ruth’s house with a copy of my dad’s book. I’m giving her mine—something tells me it deserves about as much valuable real estate on the bookshelf in my room as Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s
A Shore Thing
. I wonder what she’ll say about it. Probably something like, “The literary world needs another white male perspective like I need these shingles on my ass,” or some other perfect withering quip.

I knock on her door, and nobody answers. I glance back at the garden, checking to see if she’s crouched in the sunflower patch, lighting up. She’s not. I knock again harder, and the door creaks open by itself.

“Ruth?” I yell, tentatively stepping inside. “Are you home?”

I walk through the foyer, following that never-ending shelf of feminist literature that winds all the way into the bedroom. I’ve never been in there before; our relationship has always been contained to the garden, the porch, the foyer, and the kitchen. (And, on one memorable occasion, the bathroom. I walked in on her puking. “Schnapps,” she explained as she choked over the toilet, before I ran to get her a glass of water.)

After hesitating for a second, I push the door open.

The bedroom is small with one bright window, illuminating tiny dust particles that float across the room. Posters of classic French films from the sixties hang on the wall, their yellowed edges curling up and inward. A ceramic ashtray shaped like a mermaid sits directly on the mattress, filled with cashed joints and the black dregs of weed.

That’s when I see the pill bottles—thirty at least, neatly stacked on a mirrored tray next to the bed with the exception of one bottle, which lies on its side, empty. On the nightstand, draped over a water-damaged copy of
The Handmaid’s Tale
, an oxygen mask lies coiled like a snake.

“Ruth?” My voice comes out a squeak, then I find it again. “Ruth!”

The house is empty, but she’s still everywhere. She must be out grocery shopping, or buying fertilizer, but even as I’m telling myself this, I know. I just know, somehow, and I have no idea how I could’ve been so clueless this entire time.

I bolt out of the house, hearing the screen door slam and bounce a few times behind me, and vault over the flowers. I think this is what disassociation is—seeing through a shaky camera, hearing your own heavy breathing like a heroine in a horror movie. I hurtle up the apartment stairs two at a time.

“Dawn!”

She appears from around the corner in her uniform, wrapping up her hair under the headband she uses when she cleans.

“Is everything okay?” she asks, alarmed.

“It’s Ruth, she’s not home, she’s always home at this time, and I went in—” I double over gasping, sinking with dread like an anchor. “We need to call the hospital. Something’s really wrong, the door was unlocked, and—I think I’m gonna faint.”

“Sit down and breathe. Okay? Are you listening? We’re gonna figure this out.”

Intellectually, I want to brush her aside and call every hospital in Central Jersey immediately. But the dizziness overtakes me, blurring my vision and forcing me to plop down on the floor. Dawn grabs her cell phone.

She speaks brusquely to someone on the phone for an indeterminate amount of time, then calls someone else and speaks to them too. The whole time I try to breathe, to stay calm.

Dawn turns to me, holding her iPhone slightly away from her, and says, “They took her to Robert Wood Johnson. I’m calling them now.”

I stumble to my feet and lurch for the door, still seeing everything through a weird fish-eye lens of panic, my own hand looking odd as it reaches for the knob. Dawn holds out her hand to stop me and listens to the voice on the other end.

“Yes, she came in—no, we’re not blood relatives, but my daughter is very—I see,” Dawn murmurs, her face almost immediately becoming a subdued mask so that I know exactly what she’s going to tell me when she hangs up the phone. It’ll be any minute now, and that will make it real. All I can really do is wait and hope I’m wrong. Dawn scribbles down another number on the back of an unopened bill, hangs up, and calls
that one. After I don’t know how long, maybe ten minutes, she finally hangs up.

“Scarlett, she’s gone.”

“Like . . . what do you mean?”

“They took her to the hospital last night. She wasn’t alone; she had a friend with her named Sally. Do you know her?”

I shake my head, beyond guilty. I didn’t even know Ruth had any other friends.

“I just spoke to her. She told me Ruth had been very sick for a very long time.”

“I mean, she was really old, but she seemed totally—”

“She had breast cancer for years. When it came back this time, it was terminal, and she decided to stop treatment. She passed away early this morning.”

I feel myself just stupidly shaking my head.

“Why would she do that?” I whisper.

“I didn’t ask.”

“She called me a bunch of times the other night. I didn’t pick up.” I pull up her name on my cell phone’s missed-call list. “See? Look!”

There she is, RUTH, at seven thirty-two
P.M.
, eight oh three
P.M.
, and nine twenty
P.M.
For some reason, that is when I actually feel it, the fact of it undeniably hitting every part of me at once, like an ice-bucket challenge.
Ruth is dead
, just punching me in the stomach and casually walking away.

“Oh my God. I had no idea,” I hear myself say. “Oh my God. How did I not see it?”

“Scar, listen, baby. Can you just listen? Scarlett.”

I can’t, though. I let myself tumble back down on the floor and start to cry, these weird gulpy shock-tears, like how kids cry right after they fall down.

“From the way her friend made it sound, Ruth was in control, and she decided how she wanted it to go.”

Her words remind me of the way parents tell their kids about a dog they just put down.
She was really old, so we brought her to a farm where she can run and play.
It doesn’t make up for anything that really happened; it’s just a nicer way to frame the truth.

“There was nothing anybody could have done,” Dawn says, trying to reassure me, but it just makes me feel worse, because Ruth was dying and I wasted so much of her time talking about a stupid boy.

I surprise myself by becoming furious with Ruth—a fury that almost feels like an anxiety attack. If she’d deigned to talk to a doctor for a single hour out of the zillions of hours I talked her ear off about Gideon, she might still be alive. For all the time she wasted with me, shooting the shit and smoking weed, she couldn’t go to the hospital for forty minutes and thoroughly discuss her options? The rational part of my brain knows I have no right to be angry at her, and I should even be proud of her, but I’m so mad that she didn’t tell me.

She just slipped off with no one the wiser, all noble and dignified. What a bullshit move.

I’VE CRIED AND CRIED, BUT I DON’T FEEL LIKE I’VE EVEN
gotten below the surface of it. It’s like I’m skating on a frozen lake, with no idea how deep the water underneath the ice goes, or how cold it is, waiting for it to crack and for me to plunge in. I don’t have the energy to talk to anybody or to write. The only thing I’ve done in the past few days is look up the Kübler-Ross model and discover, to my disappointment, that Kübler-Ross is one person, whereas I’d always pictured that Kübler and Ross were two lifelong best friends until Kübler passed away in a freak umlaut accident and Ross was left bereft on his knees, screaming, “KÜBLERRRRR!” And eventually he got it together and put his grief to good use by coming up with those stages.

Apparently when you show up to school for a week straight wearing pajamas and your unwashed hair in a topknot that bats might fly out of any moment, people get concerned. At some
point, I spent one of these free-floating chunks of disoriented time in the hot seat in Mr. Barnhill’s perpetually burned-coffee-smelling office, where they plop down the cutters and potential bomb threat–makers to get to the bottom of how serious it is. Like you’re in a film noir movie with one swinging overhead light, except instead of the murder of an aspiring showgirl who got mixed up with Peter Lorre, it’s feelings.

“. . . learned recently that you’ve had a loss,” Mr. Barnhill is saying. Of hearing, I wish. But I nod a little, the minimum required for him not to send me to the principal’s office for lack of participation.

“How are you feeling?”

He appears to be wondering what the most sensitive way to approach death with a student while eating a cruller might be.

“Fine,” I hear myself reply.

He bites into the cruller, pauses, then gingerly puts it back down on a napkin.

“There have been concerns from some of your teachers—when they ask you questions, you don’t hear them. That you seem to be preoccupied lately.”

Not one class here has ever occupied me
, I think.

“In any case.” Mr. Barnhill rises and brushes some cruller crumbs off his oxford shirt. “There’s some literature that I’d like you to glance over.”

Mr. Barnhill sidles over to the table near the sofa where the cutters usually wait to speak with him and pulls four pamphlets out of clear plastic displays, stacking them in a pile. He hands
them to me. The one on the top has a glossy photo of a sad eleven-year-old boy on the front flap and reads, “The Grieving Child in the Classroom.” Underneath those, I can only assume, are the STD pamphlets students usually walk out with.

But even after that, he keeps looking at me for a long time. I realize, to my surprise, he is truly concerned. He might be a good guidance counselor; I just haven’t noticed until now. Or maybe I don’t have the energy to keep feeling like everyone’s lame, and the curtain I’ve always looked through has fallen down.

“Look, I know these are really cheesy,” he says. “But they can be helpful if you’ve never had a death in the family.”

I tried that
, I want to say, but speaking doesn’t seem worth the effort.

I haven’t been able to sleep a lot, and last night at three
A.M.
, I hopped on my computer, Googled a lot of articles about grief, and skimmed the first couple of pages blankly. Then I clicked farther down in the results. Nothing seemed specific enough—and, I realized, nothing will. There is no Dear Sugar on how to deal with the fact that your dad would sell you into human trafficking for a
New Yorker
byline, or how to recover from the long, painful death of the nonrelated seventy-three-year-old retired lesbian feminist professor across the street who made you buy her weed.

And, even worse, somewhere around page twenty-two of the Google search results for grief advice, I began to suspect that no matter where I go after high school, my problems will
never be “relatable” page-one Google-search problems. That they will in fact continue to narrow down to a tiny, sparkling pinprick that nobody can see but me.

Ruth at least should have stuck around to see her garden grow back in.

I keep thinking of it that way, like:
She should’ve hung out a little longer
or
She shouldn’t have bailed because.
I know rationally that it wasn’t her choice—that after years of fighting, she was lying in a hospital bed with her body failing even though her mind still wasn’t ready—but it’s easier to think of it like she got a little too high and slipped out of a party early without saying goodbye to anybody.

I’ve been sitting on her porch for a few hours now, gazing out at the bright paved street, half hoping that at any second the screen door will slam and she’ll come out in suspenders and a white oxford, talking smack about the sex life of a woman who cut her off on the Superfresh line. I never got to tell her how much she meant to me. But even if I had the chance, I wouldn’t know how to explain it. It was too long and too complicated. I would have just made jokes until she gave me a knowing, chastising look that said I was hiding behind cleverness.

“Hello. Are you Scarlett?”

I glance up to find a woman in her seventies standing over me, wearing a modest floral dress and fleece, her hair henna red.

“Hi. Yeah.” I stand and shake her hand.

“I’m Sally. Ruth’s friend. I spoke with your mom on the phone when she—”

“I remember.”

I want to ask Sally whether she tried to change Ruth’s mind when she made the choice to stop treatment. Although once Ruth was set on something, the idea of anyone trying to change it was laughable.

“I’m out here from California, just for a few weeks. I’m making the arrangements.”

“I see.”

Then she looks at me curiously.

“I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“You have?”

She nods and smiles at me. “Yep. She told me you helped out in the garden.”

“Yeah.”

“And how you remind her of herself at your age. She said it sometimes seemed like your mom wasn’t, ah”—she clears her throat—“wasn’t there a lot, and Ruth tried to be there for you when she wasn’t. You were very important to her, you know.”

This all should make me feel good, but instead it makes the bottom drop out under my heart.

“She was ready to go, you know. More than ready. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t have it.” Sally sighed. “Even toward the end, before I flew out here, she seemed very happy. She said she was finally getting to read because she wasn’t nauseated all the time, and nobody treated her like a sick person.”

“Mm-hmm,” I say, gazing off into the middle distance, trying not to cry. I understand, now, that over-the-top Sicilian funeral in
The Godfather
where the wife is trailing after the casket, wailing. When someone close to you dies, every emotion becomes very close to the surface. The other day at school, the vending machine ate my $1.25 when I tried to buy Combos, and I almost curled into a damp, sobbing fetal position in the hallway.

Sally goes on, “I was wondering if you’d like to speak at the memorial service.”

The prospect of this snaps me out of my semi-catatonia. I want to tell her that Ruth’s death doesn’t make me want to write, the same way my parents’ divorce or my dad’s idiotic novel doesn’t make me want to write. It just feels too big, too fundamental to who I am now, not just something happening around me that I can perceive and filter. Let alone talk about in front of people.

I don’t think I feel feelings right. I think my body processes important feelings the way people with acid reflux digest food wrong—there are abnormal holes in me that make it leak out in unexpected places here and there, and by the time it gets to the end, nothing is left to be flushed out. I don’t know if I can talk about it in front of people.

“I’m not sure that I’m the right, um . . .”

“I figured you might say that. But it helps. I didn’t want to speak at my husband’s service, but Ruth talked me into it. She was very close with him, and she said it’s what he would have wanted. And in retrospect, I’m glad I did.”

I get a sudden flash of clarity, recalling the story Ruth told me about her life. “You’re the widow. I mean, she told me about you.”

Sally gives me a little, polite “nice to meet you” smile, as much as one can under these circumstances. “In any case, when Ruth was in the hospital, we discussed this, in so many words. And she said there wasn’t anybody who could do a better job than you.”

Goddamn it, Ruth. You left me like you found me: being pushed out of my comfort zone.

At least John St. Clair comes through, as usual. Or at least he did a couple of seasons ago, without knowing it. The season two finale featured an evil “boss” that Gillian had to fight—the demon turned out to be a physical manifestation of the grief she hadn’t dealt with when her mentor at her old school, Mrs. Waterbury, was killed by William (when he was evil, obviously). I liked the episode then, but it turns out it’s shockingly gratifying to watch when you’re actually grieving, because there it is: big and mean and corporeal. Were-Heads and critics pretty much agree that it is one of the most well-done—and crushingly sad—episodes of the series.

When I get home from school, I take a long, life-affirming shower for the first time in five days. I’m sitting on the sofa in a towel, halfway through my twenty-first viewing of the episode, when someone knocks on the door. It is not a good time. The
episode is almost over, and the way Gillian vanquishes the demon is by hugging it, and that scene has been making me cry for the last ten viewings.

Nevertheless, I pause the episode, jump up, and go to the door to squint out the peephole. Gideon is standing outside, shifting uncomfortably, holding a six-pack of beer.

I sigh. He knocks again, and finally I open the door.

“Oh. Um, hey,” he says.

“Hi.”

“Are you . . . how are you?”

“Fine,” I say flatly, then I cough and say in a joking sexy voice, “Faaaaah-ne.”

He smiles a little as his eyes flick up and down my small towel, followed by sort of a guilty-for-checking-me-out sigh.

“I heard about Ruth.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m really sorry.” Then he winces. “God. Is that what you say? It just sounds so dumb. You say that when you, like, bump into people.”

“It’s okay. There’s not really anything right to say, I think.”

“I thought I’d come see if you were okay and everything.”

“Thanks, I’m f—”

“Are you okay though, really? You seem not okay,” he asks, stepping on my words.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Come in.”

He steps inside past me, and I gesture for him to sit down on the sofa, where the episode’s been paused.

“This is a sad one,” he says. I guess he can recognize it from the still.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be watching this?” he suggests tentatively.

“Maybe. Hey, wait here, I’m gonna put some clothes on real quick. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.”

I run to my room and throw on the first clean clothes I can grab—a tank top and pink running shorts—and then I come back and sit on the sofa again.

“So your, like . . . story thing,” Gideon says. I squirm with humiliation. “It was weird for me. I’m not gonna lie. But I know it’s what you like to do. Or how you deal with things or whatever.”

“I think I’m done with it.” I sigh.

“With what? With writing?” he asks, surprised.

I nod and snag two beers from the six-pack. I snatch up the rest and head for the kitchen to toss them in the fridge.

“But you’re so good at it!” he shouts from the living room.

“I don’t know,” I yell back, because I don’t know. The wanting to write has to come before the writing itself, and I just haven’t wanted to, which makes me think I will never want to again.

“So, I thought you might like a stand-up routine I downloaded a while ago,” he yells. “It’s this comedian named Tig Notaro.”

Mildly surprised and secretly pleased, I yell back, “You still listen to stand-up?”

I return to the sofa with the bottle-opener magnet from our fridge and pop open both beers.

“Of course,” he says, sounding surprised that I’d ask.

I hand him one.