Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  Self-effacing laughs. Gideon was totally different up there. Relaxed, calm, self-assured. He even looked a little taller.

  “But no, it’s a good marriage. Of course they do fight sometimes,” he continued. “Probably no more than normal. They grew up pretty different. That’s part of it, probably. He grew up Irish-Italian, pretty strict family. He’s been in therapy for a long time and gotten past a lot of that stuff. My mom grew up as a piece of wood and some fabric, and now she’s an ottoman.”

  He had said it so casually that you’d almost miss it if it wasn’t so odd. There was dead silence, but he continued deadpan, like he hadn’t said it. Confused laughter from a few parts of the room. I remember literally holding my breath.

  “It’s a really romantic story. So my dad fixes old furniture for a living. They locked eyes across the secondhand store one day, and that was it. He had her reupholstered, her legs polished—the kind of ottoman he could see himself marrying. I mean, of course he says that she was already that ottoman on the inside. He just wanted her to have the upholstery to match because she deserved it.”

  Then suddenly, I got it. He was being personal; he just wasn’t being literal.

  “Isn’t that a romantic story? It’s just like The Notebook, if you swapped out Rachel McAdams for an extraneous piece of living room decor that’s an afterthought to most people.”

  Big burst of laughter, sweeping Gideon along with it—but he allowed himself only a chuckle. (“I hate when comedians have that fake little laugh right before a bit, like they’re being swept away by how awesomely funny this memory was. It’s so obvious,” he once mumbled with a mouthful of popcorn as we tore through the miserable collected works of Dane Cook “for research.”)

  Gideon stopped, abruptly breaking the rhythm, and stared at a point behind me. His face said: Oh, shit. I twisted around fast.

  And there was Mrs. Maclaine, sticking out like a sore thumb in an Hermès scarf (I once called it “a HER-mees,” like herpes, and she corrected me: “an er-MEZ”), standing next to the bar with her arms crossed and looking very, very angry.

  Five minutes later, Gideon and I sat on the damp curb, still so adrenaline-jazzed that we barely even cared we were in trouble. Meanwhile, Mrs. Maclaine stood by her BMW and called what seemed like every parent in Melville to let them know that we weren’t going halfsies on a crack pipe. Her hand shook a tiny bit. The only reason she hadn’t peeled off with Gideon was to wait for Dawn to come pick me up.

  “I just knew when I came on they were all looking at me like ‘Oh, no, here we go, it’s a kid who’s gonna joke about why high school sucks,’ and I just . . . I wanted to prove them wrong.”

  “You were so, so funny. I was really nervous on your behalf, so I only laughed a few times, but . . .”

  “I wanted to surprise the hell out of everybody in the room, you know?”

  I shook my head. “You didn’t.”

  He looked hurt. “Really?”

  “Almost everybody. But I wasn’t surprised at all.”

  We both looked out at the gleaming puddles spotting the parking lot in front of us, then beyond, to the freeway. The mutual high was fading, and we were back in our own lives again.

  “I hate it here,” he mumbled.

  I just stared at the pavement. There was so much I could say. But I just whispered, “Me too.”

  He turned toward me, a familiar face but in a really unfamiliar way, his green eyes locked on me. He moved his head closer to mine, and it felt so right that I’d already closed my eyes.

  “Gideon Andrew Maclaine, you get in this car right now.”

  Headlights beamed onto us as a second car swished through the puddles to a crawl. A really shitty car. Dawn’s car.

  As I headed toward it, Mrs. Maclaine tapped on Dawn’s window, her car keys entwined in her perfectly manicured hands—claws, I thought meanly—and Dawn cranked the squeaky handle until the window rolled down.

  “Ms. Epstein, I know you’ve got a lot going on,” Mrs. Maclaine said to my mother, her words dripping with disapproval, “but your daughter is out of control, and I certainly can’t parent for you. Please find somewhere else to send Scarlett after school. I’m done.”

  With that, she slid into the driver’s seat of her BMW, where Gideon was already waiting. Behind the tinted black glass, I saw he was looking straight ahead, blank. They glided out of the parking lot and onto the highway.

  I got in the car. Dawn glared at me, shaking her head.

  “Don’t pull this shit with me, Scarlett. I already have enough to deal with.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to stay in that moment where Gideon was up there doing something so much better than just fitting in. Or in that moment on the curb when he came close enough that I could see the little flecks of brown in his green eyes.

  Dawn yanked on the stick shift until it got into the right gear, and we headed home.

  I stared out at the moon drifting alongside us, darting behind telephone poles and back out, but all I saw was the way Mrs. Maclaine had looked at me, like I was a speck of dirt on her countertop. I thought about how families like the Maclaines have big empty spaces between one another, while families like me and Dawn are smooshed on top of each other, hearing everything the other one’s doing, barely being able to breathe our own air. The Maclaines have the latest, sleekest cars and phones. Nothing’s ever an old model, something straining or squeaking or clicking, nothing about them ever invokes the ultimate embarrassing concept of trying. They have a beautiful silk curtain over the various awkward, rusty embarrassments of being human, and we don’t.

  That was the night the Maclaines decided, definitively, that I was a bad influence, and also when I realized that Gideon never seemed to contradict them. For the first time, I felt a wedge between us. He wouldn’t stick up for me, I worried, for reasons that felt bigger than our friendship, reasons that had to do with how his mom looked at my mom in the parking lot. And honestly, just thinking that made me mad at him—that worst-case scenario I’d assembled in my mind.

  After that, our friendship reversed—the conversations trickled backward into generic pleasantries, then nothing. We went from best friends to just faces that passed each other in the hallway. In the years since we’d drifted apart, Gideon got taller and fitter, going from soft and chubby to large and solid in a man-ish way that makes my hormones do a Mexican hat dance.

  I stayed the same. Size six and five-foot-seven in heels (that I do not own). I pretty much wear a couple of different varieties of Old Navy clearance items and my dad’s baggy dress shirts with leggings. I still wear the bras and underwear I’ve worn since, like, seventh grade. And every time I try on bras or jeans in a department store and some saleswoman says they fit me “right,” they feel so tight I can’t breathe, so I size up, because the patriarchy.

  I have dark hair and gray-brown eyes. My dad’s Jewish, and Dawn is half Mexican, so I either have skin you’d call olive or skin you’d call “jaundiced yellowy but with a great dark tan in the summer.” My face is, I don’t know, face shaped? I have to wear glasses, which sucks, but I did pick some bomb pink plastic grandma glasses from the Walmart Vision Center.

  Gideon may not broadcast it like I do, but he’s still weird. I know he is. Not like one of those kids who skulks around the band hallway proclaiming their strangeness with T-shirts, but a quiet, unshowy weird, like a slightly crooked picture frame. There’s only one other guy I’ve liked, and it was Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights, so that wasn’t gonna end with a spring wedding.

  The problem is, even though so much time has gone by since we’ve been friends, whenever I’m around him, I still feel entitled, demanding, and greedy, kind of like Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I might miss social cues occasionally, but even I know that We’re supposed to be together. There’s no reason I shouldn’t come right out and say it, we’ve
already wasted a lot of time, and would you like to do everything-except-sex with me? is not an ideal opener.

  But mostly it’s scary because thinking about how I felt when I hung out with him is really close to how I feel when I’m writing. Like there are a million pegs but only one that fits in this weird hole, and I’m the hole, and writing is the peg. And Gideon is like another, um . . . peg. Hi, metaphor.

  After skimming the boards—more bad fix-its, more nosy bloggers—I decide to Gchat Loup about my problem.

  xLoupxGaroux: What do you mean? You can’t write anymore?

  Scarface: i just sit there and stare at the screen like the missing link. I need STRUCTURE. I need you guys!

  xLoupxGaroux: Whoa. You weren’t kidding about that PMS, were you, sweetie? Look. It was comfortable writing Lycanthrope fics because it was a pre-built world, with pre-built characters. But maybe you’re having trouble building your own because . . . well

  Scarface: uh yes?

  xLoupxGaroux: You don’t seem to get out much. I mean, you have to LIVE in order to write well about life, you know? Tolstoy didn’t spend the first 30 years of his life on the sofa watching Hulu Plus and then out of nowhere write Anna Karenina.

  Scarface: i get your point.

  xLoupxGaroux: Do something crazy. Go ask out a boy.

  Scarface: oh shit. no way.

  xLoupxGaroux: Yes way. I will if you will!

  Scarface: it’s SO much worse in high school! people talk about who’s dating with such GRAVITY, like they’re talking about wikileaks.

  xLoupxGaroux: If you don’t I’ll jump ship, swear to God. Lots of good slash OTPs for that CW show Imaginary Detectives . . .

  Scarface: JESUS. Okay. Fine, I’ll do it.

  xLoupxGaroux: Good. Honor system.

  Chapter 4

  I MARCH OVER TO GIDEON, MY HEART POUNDING, FEELING all the blood rush up to my head as I get closer. What the hell. After all, the first time Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath, she bit him on the cheek, and he married her anyway. And they lived happily ever after.

  “Hey,” I say. He looks up from his phone.

  “Oh, hey,” he says in that neutral, accommodating voice you get when some stranger’s about to ask you for directions. When I don’t say anything, he asks, “Um, do you, like, need something?”

  “It sucks about the show, right?” I blurt out.

  “What show?”

  “Lycanthrope High.” For the first time, the name of the show sounds dumb and cringey coming out of my mouth, like how I’d imagine it would feel if I said the title of something I wrote myself.

  “Oh.” He sort of shrugs. “Sure, I mean, I watched it when it was on. I wasn’t, like, a superfan or anything.” It is hard to tell whether he’s being honest or following the high school commandment of Thou shalt not show thy uncoolness by openly caring about something, which I have never been good at.

  “Okay, look. Imagine your life without access to comedy. That’s what it feels like. It’s so boring that even small, momentary escapes are in full Technicolor, like flirting with an older guy with a big calf tattoo at the gas station. It’s worse than boring, actually, because it’s not like you’re sitting in a waiting room, flipping through Redbook. I mean, that’s boring, but at least you’ll eventually get called in to your appointment. Whereas life is boring, but unless you’re suicidal or a Scientologist, the waiting and the appointment are the same thing—you know? Isn’t that how you’d feel?”

  —What I want to say.

  “Oh. Dope.”

  —What I actually say.

  Another weird long silence, the opposite of the knowing ones we used to have when we were kids, during which I pray for Aaron Sorkin to swoop in and write my life for the next two minutes (sans the cis-hetero-white-male-on-a-soapbox part).

  “I—do you want to do something sometime?”

  He looks surprised. “Uh . . .”

  “I know it’s been a really long time since we hung out, but I think we still, you know, we like the same stuff, and we’re both . . .”

  The look in his eyes stops me, like I was about to say “serial killers” or “Coldplay fans.” Shit. Come on, try again. I can be articulate. Go.

  “You know, like how you and I both . . .” His blank look makes me falter again. I wave to vaguely indicate the hallway, the school, the town, the world. “Don’t you still feel like you don’t really . . .”

  “What? Fit in?”

  “I mean . . . yes? No. Sort of.”

  A mix of confusion and annoyance clouds his face. Why did I think this was a good idea?

  “I don’t feel like that.”

  “Okay, um, I’m sorry.”

  “That was a long time ago. You know? I mean, we haven’t hung out in, like . . .” He is so weirded out, he can’t even finish the sentence.

  “Yeah, no, totally,” I mumble, backing away.

  He shrugs. “So, I’m good now. Plenty o’ friends. Thanks for your concern, though.”

  My face feels like it’s on fire. I back off and hurry away. In the back of my head, though, I’m thinking, Nobody who has plenty of friends would say “plenty o’ friends.”

  Just when I’m about to speed-walk around the corner, I glance back at Gideon, and with my head turned, I smack directly into Ashley.

  “Oh, sorry,” I mumble.

  “No, I am soooo sorry,” she says, knitting her on-trend thick eyebrows with overwrought concern, and continues down the hall. She has less of a walk than an easily imitable busty glide, leading with the kind of boobs that prompt dim boys like Mike Neckekis to deem her “really smart” or “really funny.”

  And then she takes a running leap into Gideon’s arms.

  Chapter 5

  RUTH IS DYING LAUGHING, WHICH IS EVEN MAKING AVERY crack up a little, and I don’t appreciate it.

  “It’s not funny.” I shove the bulb into the crude trowel hole I made a few moments ago. “First the show, now this. All of a sudden my whole life is just a shit salad.”

  “Pointed side up, milady!” Ruth shouts from her end of the garden, wiping sweat off her brow and accidentally replacing it with dirt. She grabs her lighter—a gold one, with an engraving I’ve never dared get close enough to read—and sparks up a J.

  Ruth is seventy-three. Did I mention that?

  I roll my eyes and turn the bulb right-side up. Avery’s curled up in the hanging chair on the porch with a calculus workbook, having put in her thirteen minutes of gardening before an “asthma attack” struck. (Ave actually does get asthma attacks, but when asked to participate in light-to-medium physical activity, she has “asthma attacks.”)

  “You do share DNA with her, so I’m sure you have some insight on this,” I say, wheeling toward Avery. “Out of all the boys in school, even Mike Tossier, who looks like Ryan Gosling when you squint from a few paces away, why Gideon?”

  I keep replaying it in my head—Gideon’s arms around Ashley as he stared at her, charmed by her fake awkwardness as she laughed at his jokes, twirled her hair, sprayed her pheremonal glands or whatever—and berating myself with arrows and circles, like I’m examining a bad Super Bowl play.

  “Is this what PTSD is like?” I whine.

  In the middle of lighting the joint, Ruth gives me her patented Shut up, you millennial twit glare. I give her a hopeful Pass that weed, brah! smile. She firmly shakes her head, and I am secretly relieved. This is our usual dance.

  “I just messed it all up,” I mumble, turning back to the remaining bulbs.

  “Oh, right, because before this, it absolutely looked like you guys were heading for homecoming court,” deadpans Avery without looking up from her calc book.

  “Shut your face, Wheezy.”

  Ruth clears her throat. “Well, I think”—she waits for both of us to give her due attention and respect—“I think it went b
etter than you could’ve possibly imagined.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Would you say it was ‘unforgettable’?”

  “No, because I’d like to forget it as quickly as possible.”

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  “Actually, it was. You just have Alzheimer’s.”

  Ruth doubles over and laughs so hard that the joint almost falls out of her mouth. She holds up her hand, signaling for us to give her a second to catch her breath. Sometimes I forget how old she is—I don’t like to think about it. To be honest, these “being adjacent to mortality” moments are a bummer. I know it’s strange to be friends with a seventy-three-year-old, but like most unlikely friendships, ours has kind of an origin story.

  Back in freshman year social studies, I had to interview a senior citizen. All my grandparents had already shuffled off this mortal coil, and I didn’t want to hit up the Melville Retirement Community because nursing homes creep me out. They’re like drive-throughs for death.

  The old lady across the highway, in the dilapidated house with the beautiful garden, seemed like the most convenient option. I didn’t know her at all, but Dawn and everyone else on Leshin Lane seemed to think she was nuts—not just old lady nuts but ageless, mentally imbalanced, “she was like this when she was twenty” nuts.

  I knocked on her door at around four thirty in the afternoon, figuring old people didn’t go to bed until at least five. No response. I knocked again.

  A voice, sounding surprisingly like a sprightly fifty-year-old’s, snapped, “I’m not interested!”

  “Um, I’m not selling anything.”

  She cracked the door just enough that the chain on the latch was taut. All I could see was a sliver of her face. “Go on, then.”

  Talking in that way you do when you know you have to sell somebody on your pitch in the next five seconds, I rushed: “I’m Scarlett Epstein your neighbor I have to do a project for school about studying American history on a personal level and I was wondering if you might have the time to—”