Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  “Yo!” I shout.

  One of the guys drops an empty bottle in his haste, and I snag it, barely slowing down. Jack Daniels—of course, patron saint of boys who try too hard to be Men. I hurl the bottle at the slowest boy as hard as I can, and it glances off his shoulder blade with the whack of glass on bone.

  “Fuck!” he yelps, stopping to crouch and massage his shoulder. One of the other two keeps running, but one slows to a stop, looking back to see if the injured one is okay. I shine my flash-light in that guy’s face and actually gasp—as if I am on a soap opera and just caught my estranged evil twin making out with my husband—because it’s Gideon. I mean, of course it is. I’m surprised, and not surprised, and that combination takes my voice away for a few seconds, but fortunately I get my words back.

  “Seriously?” My voice verges on shrieking. The injured boy—it’s Dylan Dinerstein—is still rubbing his shoulder and looking sullen, but I’m addressing Gideon. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He shakes his head minutely, and I think I see a flicker of something in his face—guilt maybe—but he says nothing.

  “That’s the problem with you assholes,” I snap. “You have nothing to say. So you pick on people who do.”

  I can’t look at Gideon anymore—with him it’s way too complicated. But the other guys? They’re anything but. The words fly off my tongue before they’re filtered by my brain.

  “Know what? I hope you get monster boners when you wreck an old lady’s house, or when you make Leslie Barnes feel like shit for raising her hand. In ten years, Leslie Barnes will be running a million-dollar company—but you’ll still be here, still doing this, for the rest of your life. She won’t even come back for reunions. And neither will I, bitches.”

  From behind me, Jason walks into my line of vision, keeping his head down. It seems like I may have struck a chord, but I’m too high on adrenaline to really know. He gestures to the other guys, and they stalk out of the woods in the direction of a stretch of main road where kids always park their cars when they come to drink.

  I trudge the opposite way, resisting every temptation to look back at Gideon, and end up at the edge of Ruth’s wrecked garden, surveying the damage. A line has been crossed. He’s just not the same person anymore, right? He wears their dumb clothes and teases their weak targets. Still, the same little hopeful recorded message plays over and over in my head: Maybe the short, chubby comedy nerd is still in there somewhere! At what point do you start writing off the only person who you thought really got you?

  I hear the shutter door bounce twice, and before I can warn her, Ruth pops out, wide-eyed, in an uncharacteristically feminine kimono with her hair in a scrunchie high on her head.

  “Are you okay?” I ask Ruth.

  “I’m fine. I was sleeping.” She surveys her garden.

  “Do you want me to . . .” I helplessly sort of move my hands around in a way that feels appropriately sympathetic. She shakes her head.

  “We can’t do anything about it tonight. Besides, it’s easy to grow them back.”

  Still, I’m mad on her behalf. “Ugh, those guys are—”

  “Those aren’t guys; they’re kids. Please, go to bed. You can help me take care of it tomorrow if you want. This is way too much late-night excitement for someone past menopause.”

  She sighs, a brief cloud passing over her usual laissez-faire attitude.

  Even if she’d never admit it, I know how much she loves looking at her garden.

  Back in bed but wide-awake, I wonder if I even know Gideon, or know anyone really. Is this the moment I’m supposed to realize Gideon’s actually a shitty person who just happens to have excellent taste in comedy? Or is this the moment I realize I’m too judgmental and living in my own weird cerebral universe and have unrealistic standards for boys, or just for life?

  It’s been bothering me more and more that I can’t ever see anything objectively, that every observation I make is filtered through my personal lens whether I like it or not. I mean, all my favorite novels are like that. F. Scott Fitzgerald basically is Gatsby, so obviously it’s Gatsby’s book, and Daisy comes off like a flake. But maybe in Daisy’s unwritten book, Gatsby is a flashy, patronizing asshole who thinks he could win her with money and fancy stuff. And that might be an even better book.

  Eventually, sometime around when dawn breaks and I hear the jingle of Dawn’s keys landing on the kitchen island, I fall asleep wishing more than anything that I could float outside my head and see things for what they truly, honestly, objectively are . . . and kill the tiny voice in my head that constantly questions whether that truth even exists.

  Whatever. One thing at a time.

  Chapter 13

  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 fanfiction, 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.

  Chapter 14

  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.