Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  The tops of Avery’s parents bowed heads shake with silent laughter.

  “Carried you. Carried you, is what I meant. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Avery and her parents say. Ave’s mom looks at Ashley expectantly, and she reluctantly mutters it too.

  Ashley’s a popular senior at MHS. She and her friends have spent the last nine years making fun of me for wearing thrift-store clothes (they weren’t cool yet), bringing weird wholesale Sam’s Club chocolate milk to lunch unlike everybody else’s normal Nesquiks, and the million other tiny indicators kids can sniff out poorness with. The most glaring example of this was in second grade, when all the popular girls had Double Stuf and I had some cheaper fake-Oreo brand; I’d scrape all the cream off one cookie and put it in another, then throw out the dry, empty cookie and eat the homemade Double Stuf one. One day, Natalia and Ashley sat across from me and stared as Ashley whispered unnecessary narration into Natalia’s ear like I was a nature documentary. Look, then she scrapes the cream off, then she puts it in the other cookie, then she throws the first cookie out, then . . .

  Since I became friends with Avery and close with her parents, the teasing has been like a long game of chicken: Was I going to rat on her, or was she going to stop siccing her Ugg-booted henchwomen on me? So far, neither has happened. Ave just stays out of it.

  Even after nine years of torture, though, Ashley’s prettiness still stuns me like a manta ray. She looks like a Disney princess, pale with fiery red hair and a perfect ski jump nose, and stops just short of being too beautiful, as if God designed her to provide a believable photo for catfishing people. Ave is pretty too, but she’s like a wilted version of Ashley with braces and slightly duller hair. If they had been fetal twins, Ashley definitely would’ve consumed Avery for nutrients, and all that’d be left of Ave would be a tumor with a few teeth in it.

  Ave’s mom gets up with some plates. “Salmon, anybody?” She explains to me, “We’re doing the Grain Brain diet, but I think I have some spelt crackers in the cupboard if you want.”

  “Thanks, I’m okay.”

  “Have you read about that? Wheat, carbs, and sugar destroy brain cells. Even quinoa,” she says, glancing at Avery’s dad quickly to make sure she recited it correctly. Professor Parker teaches a graduate class on nutrition at Princeton. The only noise at the table is the oppressive clinking of silverware. They’re the total opposite of me and Dawn—we’re either screaming at each other or laughing hysterically, big emotions that ricochet off the walls of our apartment.

  “Little late for me, I think,” I reply.

  “Scarlett, you know you’re very bright,” Professor Parker says brusquely, which is how he says most things, even compliments.

  Ashley lets out a sharp breath of air from her nose, a mean, soundless laugh. Her mom gives her a warning glare.

  “Listen, I understand that you don’t care about doing well in school right now, but there are a handful of colleges known especially for their exemplary creative-writing programs. Just get that GPA up, and your writing will speak for itself. You’re very talented,” he continues.

  I feel my face burning, especially considering I haven’t really written since the show went off the air. The Parkers make everything sound so purposeful, as if I set out To Write, or to Be a Writer. Writing is just the only thing that makes me feel like a real person, not the tap-dancing reflection of myself that I am around other people. Until Lycanthrope High ended, I’d find ways to write all day at school, like on the backs of handouts in class or hidden in the stacks of the school library between AMERICAN HISTORY (A–P) and AMERICAN HISTORY (P–Z). It didn’t seem odd or unique to me that by the time sophomore year was over, I’d written a novel-length fic.

  Besides the BNFs, Avery was the only person I told, and she talked me into letting her read it. Of course she told Professor Parker, and then he read it, and I was super-embarrassed and mad at Ave because it had all kinds of teenage hedonism in it and what have you. And when he finished, he called Dawn and told her that I had an immense talent and there were creative arts high schools specifically for students like me and he’d send over some pamphlets. Dawn was so pissed—she said he was trying to give me “champagne taste on a beer budget.”

  The truth is, part of why I started writing is that it’s one of the few activities that doesn’t require any expensive helmets or gear or pay-by-the-hour instructors. And Dawn’s right, we can’t afford any of those schools Professor Parker mentioned, but I can’t say stuff like that to the Parkers, because underneath this conversation, they know it, and they know I know it, and articulating it would just make things weird. I already think sometimes that I perform for them a little too much, constantly trying to be funny and charming, like I’m singing for my supper or something.

  Instead, I try to stop blushing and shrug like zero shits given.

  “Frankly, I think MHS is a bad fit for both of you,” says Mrs. Parker, and she gives Avery a pointed look. Freshman year, Avery’s parents made her go to a fancy, expensive boarding school in Massachusetts. She hated it there, but they refused to let her come home until she resorted to drastic measures: A few days before summer break, she tagged along with some girls in her hall to get their belly buttons pierced. One not-so-accidental crop top later, Avery was matriculated at MHS for sophomore year.

  As Ave’s parents start grilling her about SAT prep, Ashley’s phone chimes with a text, and she snatches it off the table.

  Kevin Rice, Avery mouths at me. That would be Ashley’s latest conquest, who graduated MHS last year but eschewed college in favor of landing a record deal with his screamo band. I forget the name. It’s like Burgermaggot, or Juicewater, or some other two-word gibberish that sounds like you’re having a stroke when you say it.

  Ashley beams as she reads the text message. You can practically hear the cartoon bluebirds chirping around her head. He wears eyeliner, for God’s sake.

  “Light of my life. Fire of my loins,” I say quietly, and watch Avery snort gratifyingly into her salmon. Professor Parker stifles a laugh, but Ashley sees his eyes are squinty and smiling.

  “Dad, you’re being annoying.”

  He straightens himself out.

  “It’s not even him anyway,” says Ashley, then a little quieter: “You assholes.”

  “Language, Ashley Nicole,” Mrs. Parker says on autopilot.

  “Buttholes,” she says, then gets up and storms to her room.

  If Kevin’s out, that means she has someone else in rotation. Ashley, as everyone at MHS knows, has a pattern. She goes out with a different guy every other week, and every time it ends, it’s The Most Dramatic Thing That’s Ever Happened. She winds up in the girls’ bathroom crying, smoking a wrinkled Virginia Slim she stole from her mom’s purse, then covering it up by spraying enough Gap Dream to choke livestock. Ave once went in right after her, and she almost had an asthma attack.

  Ashley, Avery says, then swears to Never Love Again (she’s one of those every-first-letter-capitalized kinds of feelings-havers) and Focus on School and Cheerleading and How Hashtag-Blessed She Is until some other boy who has a car asks her if she wants to “chill.” Then they make out in the back row of The Even Faster & Even Furiouser and she comes home with her shirt on inside out, In Love Again.

  After Avery and I help clear the table, we go to her room so she can “tutor me in math,” otherwise known as “read Rookie and play F-Marry-Kill while drinking seven hundred Diet Cokes from the mini-fridge.”

  As we pass Ashley’s closed door, we hear a pealing laugh. Even her laugh is perfect.

  “Who’s the new dude?” I ask.

  “I have no idea, Scarlett,” Ave informs me in the sweetly patient tone she always uses when I’m looking for Ashley intel, like how you might talk to a three-year-old. “I’m not on whatever review board she presents her biweekly meat to.”

  “You know who your sister remin
ds me of?”

  Ave nods, waiting.

  “Patience. Hot, popular valedictorian. Secretly a three-thousand-year-old demon bent on world destruction.”

  That’s one of the things I liked most about the Lycanthrope universe: Everyone who is beloved here, you can bet they’re evil there. That works in reverse too. John took trope-y archetypes and turned them upside down; nobody’s ever what you’d expect them to be.

  Ave humors me. “What happens to her?”

  “She gets beheaded by a giant pair of ancient scissors.”

  “Uh, really?”

  “Yeah, they’re the only thing that can—just forget it, okay?”

  As close as Ave and I are in some ways, there’s a layer of our friendship way underneath where we split apart. She lives inside rules, angles she can draw with a protractor or determine with her graphing calculator. Sometimes I miss having a best friend who totally gets me.

  Chapter 3

  GIDEON’S BEEN IN THE SAME CLASS AS ME SINCE PRE-K, THE chubby boy in the XL Old Navy polo sitting way in the back, doodling manga on the back of his English tests, but like me, he’s invisible.

  My crush on him began in second grade, which is not quite as creepy as it sounds. It was circumstantial, initially—my dad spent afternoons working on his book, and Dawn’s shift at TGI Fridays started at two P.M. Mrs. Maclaine offered to pick me up with Gideon and watch me after school. Neither of us were outgoing, and at the center of both of our friendlessness was an overlap, like a Venn diagram: He was weird because he was shy, and I was weird because I was poor.

  Initially, the arrangement was cool only because Gideon’s family is rich. They live in a big house, similar to the ones Dawn cleans, and his dad’s a plastic surgeon in the city. We could hang out in his giant rec room, or float in the swimming pool, or plunk in front of the flat-screen TV while devouring his mom’s homemade snacks. (That alone was a treat. The Maclaines eat farm-to-table; the Epsteins eat freezer-to-table.)

  As I got older, I became more embarrassed about how Dawn was always twenty minutes late to pick me up, smelling like mozzarella sticks, with her tchotchke-pinned apron slung over the passenger seat. Then I’d feel guilty for dreading it. That was when I first started writing, trying to unravel feelings I couldn’t really talk about.

  By eighth grade, Gideon was still a foot shorter than every other boy in class; he trudged and wove through the hallway like a Frogger nobody paid attention to. I still got straight Cs and had no idea how to talk to other people. School was just a forced, lame interlude between our real worlds, our various obsessions, and our friendship. We both watched Lycanthrope religiously. We’d even Gchat after each episode, incredulous about what we’d just seen—but I never told him about my fanfic friends. I was afraid that would cross some invisible weirdness line.

  The turning point was the swelteringly hot summer between eighth and ninth grade, the year our parents left books on our beds with titles like Your Body Is Changing and It’s Normal (Not Witchcraft). It was the best summer of my life, probably—the last one before we drifted apart freshman year, for a number of reasons, many of which were established on this one particular day.

  We were sitting on the giant leather couch in his cushy central-air-conditioned basement, eating Oreos and watching a stack of old Saturday Night Live “best ofs” from the 1970s that Gideon slowly built up through Christmas and birthday presents every year. Gideon was the only person I could share that kind of comfortable silence with, without feeling compelled to make dumb jokes to fill it.

  Neither of us understood a bunch of the references on old-school SNL episodes, but it felt dangerous somehow, different from anything we’d seen at the movies. The way Gideon watched John Belushi hurl himself at a wall reminded me of how I’d always read my favorite lines from books out loud, savoring the taste of them. That day, after a particularly long vintage Steve Martin binge, I finally asked him.

  “Is this what you want to do?”

  He turned bright red. “What do you mean? I don’t know,” he stammered, then asked again, as if he was short-circuiting, “What do you mean?”

  “Like, comedy?”

  “I . . . sometimes think I want to. But it’s so silly. It’s not a viable career path.”

  It really bothered me when he did that, echoed things his dad said to him like they were gospel. As far as Mr. Maclaine was concerned, anything that wasn’t med school wasn’t a viable career path.

  “It’s just dumb,” he said softly.

  “It’s not dumb at all!”

  “It’s something I think about. Not, like, a lot.” In Gideon-speak, that meant obsessively. It went way further than just SNL: Gideon watched every stand-up special on the air, pirated hard-to-find ones off the Pirate Bay, obsessively watched his favorite comics, and—as I realized once when I glanced at him in the middle of a Chris Rock special—took notes on the rhythms of the jokes, how the lineup came together, which segues felt natural and which felt forced.

  “Why don’t you try it?” I prodded. “Stand-up?”

  “Like at the school talent show, you mean? There’s a reason why I barely say anything in class. Do you really think anyone else from school is sitting here watching this stuff?”

  “Maybe some of the teachers. The old ones.”

  He smiled and glanced at the stack of DVDs. “You actually kinda remind me of her,” he said. “Gilda.”

  “Really?” I stared down at the carpet, crestfallen that he thought my doppelgänger was Roseanne Roseannadanna.

  “Yeah. I don’t know. You look sort of like her, I guess—in old pictures, when she’s not in costume. But mostly . . . you kind of think like her. I don’t know how to say it. Your mind, or your thoughts or something, they’re just different from most people’s.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, goose bumps shooting up my arms and legs. It was, and remains, the best compliment I’d ever gotten.

  “I wish I was more like that,” he said quietly.

  “So just try it! What’s the harm? It’ll suck for five minutes. School sucks for, like, eight hours a day. It’s nothing.”

  “I dunno. I just feel like . . . it’s all been done. There’s nothing I can do that won’t be a total knockoff of someone who’s better.” He sighed.

  I almost blurted out that I felt that way about making up stories, but I bit my tongue at the last minute—too embarrassing. Which is strange, now that I think about it, because before that summer, I’d tell him everything, down to the last unappetizing, unflattering detail.

  I adamantly unstuck my thighs from the leather sofa.

  “Well, I’m not letting you start high school without trying it.”

  He looked for a second like he was considering it, drumming his long, thin fingers thoughtfully on his denimed thigh. Then he rolled his eyes, giving me his signature wide-eyed You’re being batshit look.

  “Where am I gonna go, Scarlett? The Yuk Machine?”

  The Yuk Machine was (and still is, because nothing changes here—it’s like a lamer Brigadoon) right off the highway in a strip mall, wedged between a liquor store and a ShopWay.

  “This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.” Gideon paced in the parking lot, drenching his sneakers in dirty puddles.

  I gazed up at the neon sign. The Y was burned out.

  “Actually, the Yuk Machine is a terrible idea,” I said. “The Uk Machine is the best idea I’ve ever had.”

  Inside the dim club, I fiddled nervously with the neon under-21 bracelet, my Converse squishing against the inexplicably damp floor. The Yuk Machine would not have seemed out of place on the set of Children of Men. But when I glanced at Gideon, he was beaming like a cancer kid on a pamphlet for the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. He was really gonna do this. In a flash, I was way more nervous than he was.

  “Nobody’s, like, parents are here, right?” he whispered
.

  I got on my toes and twisted to and fro to check for nosy Melville housewives. Instead of him helping me look, I felt him subtly glance me up and down, quick and fluttery like a moth, as if I was some random girl walking by him on the street and we hadn’t been best friends for almost seven years. It gave me a little shiver. In a good way, I realized.

  We quietly slunk to a small, wobbly table in the back and waited for the guy onstage to finish his set.

  “. . . alimony, right? I mean . . . what, even?” the guy was saying. Then he sighed and drank half his beer. Gideon and I winced at each other. At least he wouldn’t be a tough act to follow.

  Finally he finished, and the depressed-looking emcee came back on.

  “Anybody else want to try their hand at open mic night?”

  Gideon stood up.

  “Oh, good,” the emcee intoned in his flat, dead voice. “A child.”

  Finally, some laughs. Gideon faltered, and for a second I really wanted to kick that guy in the balls. But Gideon ambled up to the stage and jumped on anyway, taking the mic from the emcee.

  “Hi, guys,” Gideon said placidly.

  I noticed my nervous leg-jiggling was shaking my little table. I stopped, then unthinkingly started biting my inner cheek instead.

  He took a deep breath. “So, I’m forty-two, and . . .”

  “Bullshit!” shouted a drunk man in the back.

  Gideon smirked, winked, and became someone other than himself. “Thanks, man. Appreciate that. Nice to hear I can still pass for thirty.” He paused for the giggling from various parts of the room.

  He unhooked the mic from its stand and walked haltingly across the black stage, seeming to be in deep thought. My heart was pounding. I felt like it was me up there, squinting beyond the lights.

  “Uh, so my parents are still together. . . . Um, thanks?” he said to the smattering of applause. “I’m just gonna point out that you have no idea what kind of marriage you just applauded, by the way.”