Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  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.”

  A collective slap as two hundred high fives were given.

  “Attention!” snapped Dean Jacobs, stomping her designer heel once, hard.

  Everyone was quiet again.

  “This is still Pembrooke, and I fully expect every one of you to act accordingly,” she barked. Underneath, her defeat was audible.

  “Oh, lighten up, Shelly!” said Dean Arnolds, slapping her on the fragile back so heartily that she stumbled forward. She tugged the hem of her suit back in place and glared daggers at him. He didn’t care.

  “I hope you all know who to thank for this,” bellowed Dean Arnolds cheerfully. “Because his son is among you. Right here . . . in . . . this . . . room. Gideon Maclaine, where are you?”

  Then 999 eyes (those of all five hundred students, including Kenny Adaire, who’d lost an eye last summer in a freak racquetball accident) flaring with all sorts of emotions turned toward Gideon at once.

  For a second you could hear a pin drop, if anybody had a pin. But nobody had a pin, so the only thing plummeting was Dean Jacobs’s patience.

  The sobbing girl broke the silence by crying harder while glaring at Gideon, which was terrible. Whenever he saw a girl crying, even a random one in the quad, he felt weirdly guilty, like he was somehow responsible. This time, he actually was responsible.

  “Son of Mitchell Maclaine,” Dean Arnolds continued. Gideon felt like he was in the Bible. “CEO of Ordinaria Inc., who’s an entrepreneur, an innovator, and a massive donor I’m sure we’re all incredibly grateful for.”

  That last bit was pointed, clearly addressed to the girls: Remember the name of this hall. Remember who funded your equestrian classes. Where you should have learned to REIN IT IN.

  * * *

  The delivery was the following Thursday. It was the first day in Pembrooke history that nobody, not even the stoners, cut class—but attendance didn’t matter because class was shot to hell. Students and teachers alike gathered by the window to watch as the Ordinaria Inc. truck pulled around the school’s cul-de-sac. Gideon was the only one in SAT Prep who didn’t leap up to watch the action—even Mrs. Gr
eer, who was ancient and seemed surprised by nothing, was straining at the window like the rest of them.

  Gideon didn’t have to run to the window because he had seen it a million times. He knew the deal. Right on cue, all the guys in class sighed and groaned with disappointment when the Ordinarias weren’t pulled out of the truck in clear Barbie-like casing, naked and on display.

  It was marginally classier than that. Each one came in a long white rectangular container—sort of a coffin/pastry-box hybrid. As per usual, overlaid on a big pink lipstick kiss print, in the company’s iconic cursive font, was AUTHENTIC PRODUCT, ORDINARIA INC. On each of these, though, was a hastily stuck-on label in standard type instead: MISS ORDINARIA—TEST PRODUCT.

  “You think they’re naked in there, bro?” Dylan Dinerstein asked Paul Watts, because of course.

  “No,” Gideon said reflexively. Everyone looked at him. He bit his tongue.

  Homely, sweet Lisa Lerner turned to him, her cowlike eyes enormous and pleading.

  “They’re gonna be nice, right?” she asked.

  It was at this moment that Gideon remembered when his father had once described 2001: A Space Odyssey as a slapstick comedy.

  “Yeah, um. Of course they will,” he said.

  * * *

  Even Gideon had been wondering exactly how much would be different from the Ordinaria proper model, with which he was very well acquainted—a beautiful thirty-to-fifty-year-old ersatz woman, brightened, less weary, and not as caustic as a human female of her age. Sometimes they were so lifelike it was uncanny. But Gideon could always tell by their eyes, the one feature that had frustrated his father to no end. No matter how many new developers or how much money he threw at it, there was something impossible to get just right.

  The classroom door swung open, and Gideon noticed the absence of the familiar whirring noise that Ordinarias made. But there in the doorway was a Miss Ordinaria.

  The class fell silent, but their expressions were united: Holy shit.

  Gideon’s breath caught in his throat very unexpectedly. She was gorgeous, in a totally different way than the Ordinarias Gideon had grown up with. Her skin was glowing but still seemed real; her face was just unique enough to pass for a real girl’s. She had a little bit of (improbably becoming) rosacea. She was . . . God, just really sexy. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he was furious with himself, like his father had just scored a point.

  She came in and stood at the front of the room, wearing a slightly outdated tank top and jeans, but she was all the more beautiful for it. The girls glared.

  “What’s . . . um . . . what’s your name, sweetheart?” asked Mrs. Greer, who barely knew how to use a smartphone and was trembling ever so slightly.

  “Hi, I’m Ashbot.” She faced the class and waved a little, tossed her red hair. “I’m here to get an education, I guess, or whatever.”

  “I’d like to educate her so hard she can’t walk tomorrow,” mumbled Chris Thompson, and two boys behind Gideon snickered.

  “Have a seat, dear.” Mrs. Greer was so freaked out that she was almost imploring Ashbot.

  She whirred softly down the third row of desks, toward Gideon’s, and he got a whiff of a super-girlie Bath and Body Works perfume that must have scored high on the Preferred Scent of Eighteen-to-Twenty-Five-Year-Old Men Test. Gideon’s demographic. They were dead on, he thought, stupefied.

  She stopped at his desk and stood over him, her green eyes wide and loving. The whole class stared.

  “Hey, Gideon,” she said. His name sounded very personal in her mouth. He swallowed hard.

  Then, smiling, she cooed, “I’m your eighteenth birthday present.”

  * * *

  “I need to talk to you!”

  To his credit, this was the first time that Gideon had dramatically stormed into the Ordinaria Inc. boardroom. He had disregarded the secretaries’ protests but tried his best not to be a huge dick about it.

  His father was mid-meeting, in one of the many that made up his day. Seventeen men and two women sat around a long conference table. They all looked up when Gideon burst in.

  “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m busy right now,” his father replied, gritting his teeth, obviously surprised by his son’s gall.

  Gideon ran out of steam and complied, just one of the latest series of compliances that made up his whole life. He seemed to be getting closer and closer to asserting himself but never quite going the distance.

  He sat in the waiting room until his dad came out, then stood up and walked toward him with resigned determination, like someone ready to argue with a doctor about a loved one’s fatal prognosis.

  “So you got my gift,” said his dad.

  “Yeah. In front of my whole class. This is bullshit, Dad. You need to get me out of it,” Gideon snapped, turning bright red.

  “I thought you’d be happy.”

  “You’re not doing this for me; you’re doing this so I can be the, like . . . unofficial ambassador of integration. The first one to actually date it. The least you could do is be honest.”

  His dad shrugged. “Gid, you’ve got to lose it sometime.”

  Gideon winced. The secretaries studiously pretended not to hear.

  “You could stand to be a little more appreciative, you know. She’s designed especially for you. My team and I pretty rigorously studied a couple of years’ worth of your, uh, browser history—”

  “You. Are. Not. Saying. This. To. Me.”

  “She’s about half a mil on the market. Rent her out if you want. Hell, you could sell her on eBay and buy a house on Nantucket with that kind of money.”

  “I don’t give two shits about Nantucket,” snapped Gideon.

  “The Cape, then.” His dad looked around, exasperated. “I have to get back in there. We can talk more about this at home, if you really want to.”

  This was his father’s way of saying End of discussion.

  Gideon slowly closed his eyes and took a very, very deep breath. “So you’re telling me it’s done.”

  Then his dad did something incredibly strange. For the first time in a decade or so, he reached out and tousled Gideon’s hair. Gideon was so taken aback that he didn’t have the reflex to smack his hand away.

  His dad looked at him, bemused, and chuckled as he headed back to the boardroom.

  “Oh, kid. Is it ever done.”

  * * *

  Later that week, Ashbot was pouting. It seemed to be her default.

  “Are you gonna touch my boobs soon?”

  “No,” Gideon said, for the seventeenth time that day. He was at his locker, and she was leaning up against the one next to his—a locker whose male freshman owner was standing awkwardly next to them, gawking too hard to ask her to move.

  “Why?”

  “I, um, I can’t. I just can’t.”

  Ashbot sighed.

  She had not left his side since the day she arrived at school. Partly because she was absorbing how Gideon walked, talked, and seemed to think, in order to better simulate a real teenager. Gideon had seen enough newly manufactured Ordinarias following his mom around the grocery store and asking inane questions to know that much.

  He just wished Ashbot’s hair didn’t smell so good.

  “So after school, are we, like, gonna go somewhere or something or whatever, yo?” she asked.

  Ashbot’s language had been programmed with research adults had done on how teenagers spoke. It was bad.

  “Ashbot.” He tried to sound kind, but firm. “Nobody at this school talks like that.”

  She tilted her head, listening intently.

  Then, guilelessly, she asked, “How do they talk?”

  He thought about it.

  “Like . . . God, I don’t know. Not like in the movies. I know that isn’t very helpful,” he said apologetically.


  Ashbot nodded understandingly. “Word.”

  xLoupxGaroux: Rolling with the robot subplot! Ho-LEE-Shit. Ballsy move. But I think you actually made it semi-interesting. Solid work.

  WillianShipper2000: agree!!

  xLoupxGaroux: I could use some more hot guys. But, yeah, some simmering (boring hetero) sexual subtext in here . . . Get thee to a nunnery, Scarface.

  WillianShipper2000: wait y should she be a nun??

  xLoupxGaroux: SMALL FRY. Google it.

  WillianShipper2000: don’t call me a fry

  DavidaTheDeadly: guys!!!!

  xLoupxGaroux: Hiiiiiii!

  DavidaTheDeadly: scarface, this is . . . unsurprisingly . . . a weird story. but i’m into it! at the very least, it’s making my work day go a little quicker.

  xLoupxGaroux: Ehh . . . I dunno how much robot I’m down for at this point.

  DavidaTheDeadly: but think about where John would take something like this! Ashbot would totally transcend her origins. look at Davida, she was a werewolf raised in loup garou culture, but she learned how to be a girl.

  I roll my eyes.

  DavidaTheDeadly: in any case, I am into it. if you need a beta reader LMK. More pls.

  WillianShipper2000: me too!

  xLoupxGaroux: Agreed. Featuring more hot guys. And a shirtless Gideon please.

  DavidaTheDeadly: Ditto.

  WillianShipper2000: ditto.

  Ditto.

  Chapter 7

  MR. RADFORD PASSES OUR TESTS BACK AND MINUTELY SHAKES his head at me as he slides mine onto the table. Thirty-seven. A disgruntled noise comes from behind me. Gideon’s glaring at his test. Also thirty-seven. He glances at me, and when I catch him looking, he looks away. Then when he thinks I’m not paying attention, he looks at me again.

  When the bell rings, he catches up to me by the door.

  “Hey!”

  I stop, my heart pounding hard enough to shake my brain. Even before we got our tests back, for some reason, I could feel him looking at me the whole period, boring holes in the back right side of my head. And it’s not a good feeling, it’s that nauseous fight-or-flight feeling I get when I see Ashley and Natalia looking either near me or at me and whispering something and laughing. But that’s not fair, because he’s the one who did something wrong.