Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (5 page)

I check my phone. It’s eight twenty. We’d be well into the episode by now. I feel like I’m in detox. I decide to call my stepmom, Kira, who is an excellent person to answer what I want to ask because she’s written about pop culture for basically every highbrow magazine and blog on the planet.

“Hello, Scarlett!” Her lilting English accent is like aural Vicodin.

“Hey. Why do people like Jennifer Lawrence so much?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I don’t think I like her, but if I tell any other American, I’m worried my citizenship will be revoked.”

Kira laughs, and I hear my baby half sister, Matilda, giggle, probably from Kira’s lap.

“Well, what don’t you like about her?”

I twist my mouth into a frown at the wall, struggling to find the words. I always want to be especially articulate for Kira.

“It’s like . . . she has such a good PR team that she knows she
should pretend to have no PR team. Or she’s so overly calculated that she knows she should pretend to be uncalculated.”

“First of all, Scarlett,” says Kira, with a smile in her voice, “if you put this much thought into school, you’d be the valedictorian.”

“But seriously . . . why do people respond to that?”

There was a thoughtful pause on the other end. Then she finally said, “I’d wager people like looking at how little effort she puts into, say, late-night shows. They identify with it. It makes them feel like they can be lazy, and it’ll come off like effortless charm. Does that help at all?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“What’s this for?”

“No reason,” I mumble.

She has to go shortly after, profusely apologizing because she and my dad are late for a dinner party.

Dawn’s acted even more psycho since Dad married Kira, a gorgeous black Englishwoman who looks immaculate in Google image search, even as far back as page fifteen of the search results. She’s thirty, smart, and pedigreed as hell—she got six figures for her debut novel, which came out last year. She is one of those women who doesn’t eat any bread at restaurants but would never judge you for eating it. Whereas Dawn’s and my motto is basically “Can we get some more bread for the table?” in Latin. It makes way more sense for Dad to be married to Kira. I asked him once why he married my mom. He thought about it for a minute, then finally said, “She was fun.”

Not lately. Dawn hates when I geek out with Kira over
books—the very first time we met, we immediately discovered our shared love of
The Secret History.
And Dawn
really
hated, before they got married and Kira’s book came out, how impressed and flattered I was that Kira used to talk to me about the editing process like I was a grown-up, an actual writer.

Now that the
Lycanthrope
cast photo is gone, a photo of Matilda is the only one wedged in the rusty outside door of my locker. She’s like the most perfect baby ever, good-natured and smiley with deep dimples, like a babyGap model. She may be my half sister, but she’ll grow up in a totally different world—even her name evokes intellect and specialness—which I try not to think about too much or I get jealous. It’s one thing to be jealous of Ashley Parker but a whole other thing to be jealous of a prehuman who doesn’t even know what her own feet are.

They live in a gorgeous, airy loft in Brooklyn. It makes sense with Matilda and Kira’s book and everything that they don’t really have much time to invite me over and why my dad doesn’t call as much as he used to. He’s probably really stressed out—I’m a lot like him, so I can tell. Last year I tried to persuade Dawn to let me move in with them, and she flipped out.
If I’m so horrible and he’s so great, why doesn’t he ever come to see you? Why aren’t his checks ever on time?

It doesn’t have anything to do with me. She just doesn’t want to live alone. And more than that, she doesn’t want Kira and my dad to win.

I try my best to go to New York all the time. Avery and I go see Upright Citizens Brigade, then run to catch the last New
Jersey Transit express from Penn Station back to Melville at one
A.M.
While we’re sitting on the train and Ave’s napping next to me, I look out the window at the pinpricks of twinkling lights receding in the darkness and think about living in New York. It’s like the closest thing to a John St. Clair show there is in real life, where everybody’s like my dad and Kira—smart and articulate and creative—and I’d never feel alone.

When I started writing fics, they were mostly about Connor and Becca. They’re not the most popular pairing—one-third of the Gillian love triangle, and Gillian’s sarcastic plus-size best friend—so it took me a while to figure out why people liked my fanfics as much as they did. I guess I’m funny, something I seem to be the last to know about. I never thought about it until last year at the mall when I made this girl pee her pants. I didn’t know her that well—Avery met her in their accelerated-genius Princeton math class and invited her along without asking me.

I don’t even remember what I said to make her laugh so hard; I just remember going on compulsively for, like, five minutes until she was squeezing her legs crossed in front of the clearance rack in Wet Seal and breathlessly begging me to stop. It’s mostly useless—a party trick, like being double-jointed. No decent college would accept someone with a 2.9 GPA just because she once made some girl have to run to the food court bathroom and stick her 7 jeans under the hand dryer.

Scarface: What’d I miss?

xLoupxGaroux: WELL. We’ve been talking about doing one last fic challenge. It didn’t really end. And the fix-its are okay, but they’re getting hammered. Every time someone uses the canon characters, people flip out on them about whatever ending they made up.

Scarface: What about the next matriculating class at Pembrooke?

xLoupxGaroux: Like, a number of years later, you mean?

Scarface: Yeah. All OFCs and OMCs. Blank slate, same world, same rules.

WillianShipper2000: ugh idk if i even WANT to make up my own, we could just switch to a diff show

xLoupxGaroux: TRAITOR

DavidaTheDeadly: actually . . . scarface, that’s not a bad idea.

Scarface: Willian, think about it: You can write your
own
couple to ship! And Loup, you’re always complaining there’s too much het fic. This would be a make-your-own.

xLoupxGaroux: OK. Hold up.

Loup is our de facto snarky leader. He doesn’t suffer fools, but his deepest, darkest secret is that he’s essentially a nice
person. Otherwise he’d never tolerate Willian’s basicness—the
Lycanthrope
fandom can be snobby about that stuff.

xLoupxGaroux: There’s got to be a checks-and-balances system . . . one of us writes a bunch of installments, and the rest of us give feedback. Because when left unchecked, OFCs can be really goddamn irritating.

DavidaTheDeadly: calm down dude, i think we’ve all proven we’re above mary sues here.

DavidaTheDeadly: alright. so. installments?

I admit, my motive here is to keep us all together as long as possible. But I think theirs is too. Even if they don’t say it.

DavidaTheDeadly: scarface, it was your idea, so you first.

Scarface: Haha. Goddammit. OK.

xLoupxGaroux: Are you gonna cry again?

Scarface: Shut up.

xLoupxGaroux: Tell you what. If you kick us off with some original characters—who are not annoying—we can take it from there.

Scarface: Deal.

If this is what it takes to keep it going, fine. I almost don’t want to mess with werewolves—John made them so much his own that if I touch them, I may as well be writing yet another Connor/Becca fic. I still feel a little weird about inventing people. They’re usually unrealistically perfect or tortured or something. If I write them wrong, all my credibility in the community will be shot. Writing
Lycanthrope
fic was easier because I knew those characters just as well as I know Avery, or Ruth, or—oh.

The Ordinaria
Part 1

submitted by scarface_epstein

Shit, shit, shit, and furthermore, goddamn it.

Gideon was hoping that his school wouldn’t be the first. But it was, of course. Pembrooke Academy was one of the best—and most expensive—private high schools in the country. If they started it at some random public school, it would be like opening a Rolls dealership in Trenton. Gideon knew this because he’d heard his father snap, “Are you kidding me? It would be like opening a Rolls dealership in Trenton,” to Steve Mullen on the phone in his home office last night.

Gideon paused in the middle of the hallway and pressed his ear to the door. His father, CEO of Ordinaria Inc., was talking to his four advisers: Steve Mullen, his assistant Steve J.,
his
assistant Steve P., and Don.

“I agree,” said Steve Mullen, the most levelheaded of the bunch. “We sank all this money into a new product for this whole ‘get the teens’ campaign, so why not place them with the affluent and horny? We’ll make our money back in five seconds flat. I vote Exeter, Andover, Deerfield, and Pembrooke.”

“Yeah, start elite, build some buzz,” Steve P. said.

“It certainly worked for Facebook,” Don chirped.

“Shut up, Don,” said Steve P., because Don was his assistant.

“All due respect, Mitch, would that cause any problems with your son?” asked Steve Mullen, the only Steve who could get away with that question because he’d lost a teenage daughter years before, and even Gideon’s dad still walked on eggshells around the topic.

“You mean Gideon?” (His father said this as if Gideon was not an only child.) “How so?”

“Well, all due respect, you’re dumping fifteen female teenage sex robots into his senior class. That might . . . have some kind of effect on his school.”

Gideon could practically hear his dad roll his eyes through the door.

“Steve, you’ve met my son. He should
thank
me.”

* * *

The first day of school was always a mixed blessing, Gideon thought as he walked across the campus with a stream of other students in identical starchy blazers and awkward ties. For one thing, he didn’t have a girlfriend. You’re not incredibly
popular with girls when your father is considered the most destructive force for women’s body image since Barbie. As for guys, he always suspected—rightly—that any male student who asked if he wanted to play some lacrosse or go to the movies later was trying to befriend him only for an Ordinaria discount. (Which was illegal anyway, unless they went through their dads. Can’t have forty-year-old Ordinarias making out with fourteen-year-old boys in the quad.)

On the bright side, during the school year Gideon didn’t have to hear his dad scream at a Breast Crafter that a nipple was too large. Most things were preferable to that, including but not limited to dancing in battery acid.

Gideon was seventeen, and since the day he’d been born, he’d watched his father build his empire, heard him endlessly pitching to donors when Ordinaria Inc. was just a start-up. Ten years of massive success later, and Gideon could recite the hard sell by heart.

[To billionaire.]
Listen. All it takes is one down payment and a very reasonable time line to pay the balance, and you’ll be happy for the rest of your life. That’s the
only thing
this product is wired for. They won’t turn down tickets to the Stones because they’re too tired. They won’t drink three glasses of white wine and ignore you. They’re not cranky. They’re not complicated. They’re not . . .
[dramatic pause, air of horror]
real.

It worked massively well.
Forbes
-well. The Maclaines were nationally, legendarily wealthy. And to be honest, after going
through what he was sure was one of the stranger puberties in history, Gideon was totally used to them. Blasé, even. At this point he sort of saw them as can openers with cleavage.

So they decided to skew younger. Who cares?

* * *

The fact that Dean Arnolds appeared visibly psyched and Dean Jacobs looked incredibly depressed was an immediate giveaway. The five hundred students assembled in Maclaine Hall immediately started whispering and smacking one another on the shoulder. Most of them knew what was coming. The Internet’s good like that. Some of them didn’t dare hope for it. Others had sworn up and down that if it happened, they’d transfer to the local public school, zombie teachers and lackluster facilities be damned.

“We have an announcement—” Dean Jacobs began.

“We have a fantastic announcement.” Dean Arnolds beamed.

Dean Jacobs glared at him, and he wilted just a bit as she continued.

“We are thrilled to announce,” Dean Jacobs unconvincingly lied, “that we’ve been chosen as one of the first secondary institutions to host Miss Ordinarias.”

Immediately, enough male students’ eyes lit up that you could see it from space, with the exception of a bored handful who wondered,
God, where are the male ones already?
The girls were sullen, scuffing their penny loafers against the hardwood floor. One girl right next to Gideon began to sob.

“As you may know,” Dean Jacobs continued, her face increasingly deadening, “while Ordinarias are primarily mark-eted to ages thirty-five to sixty, Miss Ordinarias are designed to appeal to the eighteen-to-twenty-five demographic.”