by Anna Breslaw
He sighed, audibly.
Jason was slumped insolently in his chair checking his phone, with his legs spread much wider than they needed to be. He glanced at Gideon, then broke into an Ol’ Boy grin and slapped him on the back.
“You’ve got it made, dude! Lighten up.”
“Nah, it’s not chill.” When he was with them, Gideon slid into colloquialisms he’d never use normally. The other day in AP Philosophy, he actually heard himself say, “Proust was dope.” Everyone laughed, even the teacher. With him, though. Not at him. It gave him a proud rush.
Dylan Dinerstein, usually the quietest, piped up: “I get it. You don’t want to settle on one. You want to rent a little first, and now you’re stuck with—”
He jerked his head toward the stairs.
“It’s not even like that,” Gideon mumbled.
“You won’t even feel, like . . . obligated to put a down payment on her once she’s got a lot of miles on her.”
“Miles?”
“Hi!”
Ashbot stood at the top of the stairs, flanked by the other three guys’ dates, who were all wearing black. Ashbot had finally found her clique: the sort of girls who dated guys like Jason and blotted their pizza and wore Miss Ordinaria–brand lingerie. Still, of course, Ashbot looked hotter than all of them. She was wearing a white dress that flattered her pale, creamy skin. Then they glided down the marble stairs, their four-inch heels clacking perfectly in time with one another.
Gideon held out his arm and Ashbot took it, smiling brightly at him and tossing her hair, accidentally showing the on-off switch on the back of her neck. He fixed her hair to cover it again.
She zeroed in on his yellow tie. “Oh, you have to change that. Quick, we’ll be late.”
“What’s up with that? They look like they’re going to a funeral.”
Ashbot rolled her eyes. “God, did you even look at the invite? It’s a black-and-white ball.”
Gideon groaned. “Goddamn it.”
* * *
Since it was also the year of the Miss Ordinaria test run, and press would be there, the celebration this year was bigger than usual. Fancier. A crowd of people clustered outside the gates in cocktail attire, trying to fake their way in by saying some invented relative was a dearly departed donor.
“Laaaame,” Peter sighed, barely looking up from his game app.
“Baby, stop,” whined his girlfriend, tugging at his tux sleeve.
As their driver handed the limo keys to the valet, Gideon made his way toward the ballroom with Ashbot, wincing from the flashbulbs of press and paparazzi that usually followed a Maclaine at a social event. It didn’t faze Ashbot, naturally, and the photos would end up looking great, which was the reason so many actresses were Ordinarias passed off as real by their managers and agents: nary an unflattering candid shot in sight.
The grand ballroom was huge, white, and full of sparkling decorations. A live jazz band played tasteful standards under the conversation, with a few couples dancing and chatting on the dance floor. Expensive seafood was draped over a giant avalanche of ice on a long marble table, and a fountain burbled in the center of the room. Caterers, all in white, drifted from one side of the expansive room to the other, offering hors d’oeuvres to the millionaires and investors and Silicon Valley boy-geniuses. They were too busy invasively prodding and examining the new Miss Ordinarias, awestruck by their seeming so real.
It felt, all in all, more like a wedding reception than a donors' ball. A wedding reception at a gigantic doctor’s office. This was both excellent branding work and a weird vibe that made Gideon even more nervous.
Ashbot didn’t look fazed, because “fazed” was not a setting. She looked at him and smiled—he watched the glittery green makeup on her eyelids appear and disappear when she blinked. (They didn’t need to blink, but the feature was added when the company realized the lack of blinking made people uncomfortable.)
“Why don’t you go talk to them?” Gideon gestured toward the guys’ dates, clustered in a tight circle in front of the bar.
“Okay!” She practically skipped away.
Gideon scanned the crowd. So, a black dress. It was impossible. They were on everybody, from eleven-year-old heiresses to seventy-year-old matrons. He could just give up. Maybe she would find him.
That’s when he saw her.
He couldn’t explain how he knew it was her, really, other than he just did. She was standing on the edge of the dance floor, her arms crossed, and she was staring at him without any subtlety. He began walking toward her, his heart pounding. She didn’t move, didn’t meet him halfway, and she wasn’t smiling.
She just looked so familiar somehow, but the way déjà vu is familiar—it could be a real memory, or it could be that one of your synapses just fired weirdly for a second.
As he came closer, he saw she had brown hair, pinned back, and olive skin. She was sort of skinny-fat: skinny but not toned like Ashbot. Most of all, she stuck out. She didn’t belong here. But instead of pitying her, or tattling to a security guard, Gideon immediately recognized himself in that.
Finally he reached her, and they faced each other.
“Who are you?” he asked apprehensively, then made a face. “God, this is so melodramatic.”
She shrugged. “I’m Anonymous. Obviously.”
“What’s your real name?”
She continued glaring at him, ice-cold, and deadpanned: “You don’t think my parents named me that?”
“If they did, you should call Social Services.”
Bantering with her felt as natural as eating or sleeping. Weird—he was usually so quiet.
“So. Your dad’s empire is doing well.”
“Do you go to Pembrooke? Is that why I recognize you?”
Her mouth twisted in a sad smile.
“I’ve only been in your grade for, like, eight years. Sometimes in your class.”
Gideon pushed on his temples, like it might shift his mind into place. Frustrated, he said, “I remember, but I . . . don’t remember. Does that sound crazy?”
She shook her head, then glanced around them rapidly.
“We shouldn’t talk here.”
* * *
They walked briskly out of the industrial back door, her in the lead, and after five minutes wound up sitting on a curb just near the highway. It had rained, and the black pavement was strewn with shining puddles. The curb was damp, but the situation itself was too surreal for either of them to make “damp formal-wear ass” a priority right now.
“What’s going on?”
She turned to him and took a breath, like she’d been preparing for this for months and knew she didn’t have much time.
“They wiped your memories of me. And some . . . other things, which are also related to me. We were friends for a really, really long time. From when we were kids to when they found out.”
“How would they wipe me? And they found out what? Just get to the point.” Gideon was wondering if he should call 911 on this crazy girl. He was also beginning to notice that damp formal-wear ass right around now.
She halted and glared at him.
“Wait. First, can I just say, I can’t believe you’re doing what you’re doing.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re dating a Miss Ordinaria because someone told you to. You’re hanging out with that human defect Jason Tous because someone told you to. When’s the last time you made a decision by yourself?”
He was speechless.
“Exactly!” she yelled at him, emotion welling up in her eyes. Then she squashed it, and her tone was businesslike again. “If you came out as anti-Ordinaria, it would be huge! It would be, maybe, one of the only ways to stop this before it gets totally out of control.”
“I don’t get any of this. Just tell me, what don’t I remember?”
<
br /> She looked close to tears, which didn’t make him feel that removed guilt he usually did when a girl cried. This time, he felt like he was close to tears.
“I’m sorry; I just don’t remember!”
With wild eyes, she reached into her purse and pulled out a long screwdriver.
“You don’t remember this?” she asked, her voice rising.
She raised her arm up as far as she could and slammed the screwdriver into her thigh.
Even before it came down, this thought popped into his head: The screwdriver hits metal.
As soon as that came back to him, with a click that felt like a brief migraine, he remembered everything. How they were drawn together as kids and didn’t really know why. They’d spend every day together.
“You’re Scarlett, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
He remembered when she’d told him, crying, that her mom had simply stopped blinking. She said in that moment, the truth just occurred to her, even though she’d sort of known it all along. It was too crazy to believe. Gideon said maybe her mom had had a stroke. It sounded serious; her mom needed to go to the hospital.
She’d shaken her head slowly, looking around the room, eerily calm, then reached into his parents’ junk drawer. Grabbed a screwdriver. Gideon had jumped up to stop her, but before he could she jammed it, hard, into her own leg.
The screwdriver hit metal.
They stood there, staring at each other.
“That’s not possible. No.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense if we were drawn together for a reason?” she had asked. She told him—insisted, actually—to sneak a look into his parents’ room late at night. Maybe it won’t be true, she said, but either way, you have to know, don’t you?
So that night at three A.M., he’d crept down the silent, echoing hall to the master bedroom to find out the truth. He’d cracked the door open, which thankfully didn’t creak or moan—nothing in his house made noise—and peered in. His father was sound asleep in the king bed. His mother was standing up against the wall, her head tilted slightly down, shut off for the night to reactivate in the morning.
It was all coming back, even the memory wiping—shortly after he’d walked into their bedroom, his father had taken him to the family doctor, and then it all went blurry, his past reinvented.
Gideon shook his head vehemently.
“No. That’s not possible. No way.”
He heard himself echoing exactly what he’d said before. And he’d been wrong. She looked pained to make him so upset, but her voice was firm.
This was the reason rental Ordinarias were always sent across the country from renter to renter: Some visceral memory, like a moment, or even a sound, could bring it all back. Gideon’s father had been very, very careful about it in business—but when it came to his own son, not careful enough.
“I’m half-Ordinaria,” she said.
He closed his eyes.
She finished: “And so are you.”
“How is that even possible?” he yelled.
“Brief, unfortunate flirtation with installing a reproductive system in the first-gen models. Only a handful of those models exist. And there are only two of us half-Ordinaria that I know of. We’re freaks.”
He hung his head, devastated. For a minute they just sat there, him processing and her waiting; the only noise was the rush of cars wetly speeding past them down the damp road.
Finally he said, “I’m sorry I hung out with those guys.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry you did too.”
“What can I do to make it up to you?”
She thought about it. Then she said, softly: “Don’t forget again and leave me alone here.”
Cerebrally, Gideon knew he should be wary of this girl who’d seemingly come out of nowhere. But in his heart, he knew that they were allies and needed each other to survive. At least for now.
He nodded, grave. “I promise.”
They were both silent for a while.
“So then,” he said, “you’ve just had that screwdriver in your purse for, like, years?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
He laughed a little. “That’s weird.”
She slowly turned to look at him, incredulous.
“That’s weird?”
“I see your point.”
Then they just sat there on the curb, all the shared history back, feeling as comfortable with each other as they’d felt uncomfortable with each other twenty minutes before, staring out at the highway that seemed to go nowhere.
“I hate it here,” he whispered.
“Me too.”
“You know, we don’t actually have to do anything about this. I can pretend I still don’t remember. Maybe I don’t want to choose to be different.”
She shook her head. “In that case, congratulations, because you’re more like Jason Tous than you think you—”
Goddamn it, the doorbell’s ringing.
“—are.”
“Be there in a sec!” I yell. The response is a wordless shriek of fear, like a time-traveling Puritan who just saw her first car.
I click Post, then trudge to the door and open it to find Avery on the stoop, looking petrified, clutching four dresses on hangers underneath clear dry-cleaner cellophane and an industrial-sized makeup bag. She seems taller. It takes a second before I realize it’s because she’s not forced into crone position by a Jansport containing four math textbooks and the entire Western canon.
“I’m freaking out,” she says in the measured tone of someone trying to stop freaking out. She walks past me inside, throws the dresses and makeup on the sofa, then sprawls out on her back on the floor.
“Fuck,” she says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Okay, calm down.”
“I don’t know how to do this,” she says in a monotone, staring blankly at the ceiling. “I’m overthinking it even though I know that’s just making it worse.”
“Dude, it’s just a dance.”
“I watched some YouTube tutorials on how to do a smoky eye, and now I look like a raccoon.”
“Noooo! You look like Margot Tenenbaum!” I am an unconvincing liar.
She props herself up on her elbows and glares at me. “Don’t undermine my intelligence.”
“Okay, you’re right, sorry. You look like a raccoon. A pretty raccoon.”
Avery gets up and jokingly starts fake-going through the garbage, making raccoon noises, laughing. I double over, cracking up.
“Hang on a second. Dawn has makeup remover somewhere.” I retreat to the bathroom and rummage around in the medicine cabinet until I find it.
Two barely defrosted shots of Dawn’s freezer Svedka and an hour on Pinterest studying tutorials with names like “daytime smoky eye” and “~*~*prom hair~*~*” later, we still haven’t managed to steer Avery’s makeup away from ~*~*dumpster-diving varmint~*~**~.
“I need more of those pads!” she moans despondently, meaning the eye makeup–remover pads of Dawn’s that we’ve been burning through. On my way to the bathroom to grab some more, I glance into my room, where the door is ajar, and see that the group chat is already on fire.
DavidaTheDeadly: so, the OC love triangle emerges . . . still think you could have made gidbot p. interesting from a character angle but whatev
WillianShipper2000: agree!!!!
DavidaTheDeadly: though it is nice to see that a (half-)Ordinaria can think for herself.
xLoupxGaroux: Are you kidding me with this? Two words: Mary. Sue.
DavidaTheDeadly: gahhhhh. give it another installment at least!
xLoupxGaroux: Um, sweetie? 1) Half-breed. 2) High morals/ideals and terribly judgmental of others. 3) Looks fiercer than anybody else in eveningwear without trying. 4) Captivates main male protagonist without doing anyth
ing to earn it, really. Either our girl Scarface has been reading too much Ayn Rand (translation: any Ayn Rand) or this is a clear-cut Mary Sue issue.
Scarface: WAY HARSH, TAI. BTW: if you are 14 and read The Fountainhead you don’t even notice the politics, it’s really just a romance novel. Kind of a good one actually.
xLoupxGaroux: I’m gonna pretend you never said that. In fact, can you wipe my brain?
“Scar, where are you?!” Avery yells from the living room.
“Sorry! Give me just a sec!”
WillianShipper2000: who is ayn rand even
WillianShipper2000: is she the one who has that advice column
xLoupxGaroux: Scar, I’m serious. Please brush up on the definition of MARY SUE on the “About Us/Rules” page and do a close read. I don’t want to establish a pattern of lenience with this.
Scarface: dude . . . Do you really think she’s a Mary Sue?
xLoupxGaroux: She’s just too perfect. I want to see her be a real person. Not some idealistic fake paragon of virtue that is clearly a stand-in to make up for your terror of potentially having fun at a party.
Scarface: WTF?
xLoupxGaroux: Whole lot easier staying in and writing yourself brave instead of going out and BEING brave, is all I’m saying.
Scarface: What even are you
Scarface: OK, I guess that’s valid.
WillianShipper2000: ok w8 bump to above question about Ayn Rand tho u guys.
xLoupxGaroux: Jesus. No, that’s Ann Landers. Google it.
WillianShipper2000: No bc everything you tell me to Google is #BORING #OLD #PERSON #STUFF
xLoupxGaroux: If I have to know what “on fleek” means, you have to know some boring old person stuff.
Their banter lets me exit quietly and gracefully from the chat, still smarting. Nauseated, I click on About Us in the upper left-hand corner and open the Mary Sue litmus test. It reads:
Hey, everybody! Everyone’s encouraged to take risks in their fanfics, and for the most part, aside from hateful content or target harassment of anybody else on the board, anything goes. But it would be supercool to leave the Mary Sue stories—self-insertion into the Lycanthrope universe, based on the writer’s wish fulfillment—at the door! Don’t know if your original character is a Mary Sue? That’s cool! Find out now.