Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have cheated on me,” I blurt. “Oh. Ha, cheated off me. Is what I meant.”

  He stares.

  “Because, like, I didn’t do the reading,” I add.

  “Yeah, I got that.” He waves the test he’s still holding.

  “Well. I never promised you a rose garden. So. Okay. Um.” I awkwardly slip by under his armpit and speed-walk to my locker, wishing for the first time that I’d done the reading and his A+ on the test had helped him get into Dartmouth. Then he’d owe me one. Then . . . that is the end of the plan, really. I’m so lost in fantasies that I don’t notice him following me to my locker.

  “Scarlett, hold up.”

  My name coming out of his mouth so casually gives me a head rush, like emotional brain freeze. He pauses in front of my locker, running his hand through his hair.

  “I was kind of a dick the other day, I know. But it was weird, what you said. I do have friends.”

  “What?” It takes me a second before I realize that he’s talking about my verbal brain fart from the other day.

  “I mean, they don’t go here. I know that sounds fake, like how girls are like”—he does a girl voice—“‘I have a boyfriend, but he doesn’t go here,’ and actually they’re just making it up. But I’m not.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  He shifts, irritated. “Don’t just say okay if you still don’t believe me.”

  “I do believe you!” I mean it.

  “I have friends,” he says again, then makes a face that’s like Oh shit, the more I say that, the faker it sounds. At that moment, I am even more positive that Gideon and I have a lot in common. I feel protective, like I need to rescue him.

  “Um, so why did you copy off me in the first place?” I strike a come-hither pose I see Dawn use with her boyfriends—hip jutted out, head cocked to the side, back arched a little more than is natural. It feels, and probably looks, quite strange.

  “I thought you were good in English. I always see you reading.”

  He has noticed me. Reading. But still. Noticed me!

  “Have you ever seen me reading any books on the English syllabus?”

  He shakes his head. I raise my eyebrows, and he smiles a tiny bit, and I might actually die right here.

  “Only Lycanthrope graphic novels. Which are you on?”

  “Number fifty-five,” I manage.

  “Oh, right before Sam Kieth starts illustrating. He’s awesome. Do you know him?”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, you’ll see. I bet you’ll like him a lot.”

  I nod emphatically like seventeen times in a row. “Yeah! Yeah, that sounds cool; I’ll check it out.”

  “So you’re pretty bummed about the show?”

  “I mean, yeah, sure, I thought it was good, didn’t you?” I barely recognize the faux-casual voice coming out of my mouth. (So this is how it happens. This is how girls change for boys. I am simultaneously annoyed at myself and mildly amazed that I have the ability.)

  He nods.

  “How come you didn’t want to talk to me about it the other day?” I ask.

  “I didn’t not want to; you just caught me off guard. I mean, we haven’t talked in years. . . .”

  I can feel the conversation heading south, but I can’t stop myself. “Weird. Because I saw someone else come up to you right after that, and I don’t think she’s spoken to you ever, and you seemed pretty okay with it.”

  He looks freaked out. “What are you talking about?”

  From down the hall, a pair of padded boobs turns toward us and actually seems to aim, like they’re preparing to fire stealth missiles. The girls around her, dressed almost identically with slight variations, are either staring at me or at their phones.

  Ashley says something to Natalia, smirking, and walks toward us. I’m suddenly conscious of what I’m wearing: a T-shirt, baggy jeans, a headband I borrowed from Dawn’s Blair Waldorf–inspired headpiece collection hastily pushed over my two-day-unwashed hair.

  When Ashley draws close enough, she leaps into Gideon’s arms and curls up. She is like the opposite of those animals who puff up to scare away predators; she shrinks herself into something as delicate and girly and palatable as possible to snag her prey. My stomach starts to burn. Crushes are so stupidly physical sometimes, like colds.

  “Hiiii-yyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeee,” she croaks, torturing out the salutation into seven million syllables, then slides down him like a pole and looks at me. “Hey, Divider!”

  “Hi.”

  She turns to Gideon. “Did I ever tell you this? Sophomore year I was driving to a party, and I saw Scarlett on Route 9 by the Walmart, dancing on the divider.”

  (This is what actually happened: Dawn called me crying after some guy dumped her in the parking lot of Stop-n-Fresh. I had to take the public bus from the stop on our street to that strip mall that lets out on the highway, and then was running—not dancing—down the divider toward the parking lot to physically drag her away from a lonely pink-drink bender at a shitty bar. Ashley was making an unfortunately timed turn into the parking lot when she saw me “dancing.” The good news is that I now know the stories behind every tattoo inked on some dude named “McG.”)

  “I wasn’t dancing,” I say, for the twentieth time, bracing myself as I feel her slowly pulling the guillotine up.

  “Oh, hey!” Her sea-green eyes sparkle maliciously. “Can you tell your mom she did such a good job cleaning our bathroom?”

  My head rolls down the hall.

  She laughs, tinkly like a fairy’s cough. “Sorry, I’m so random, it’s just that we’ve had so many housekeepers, but she’s really above average. She even speaks English!”

  “It’s true!” I say.

  “Maybe the hotel staff in Cabo can pick up some tips from her when we’re there!”

  I’m confused. “In . . . Cabo?”

  “Yeah, she better have her bag packed! She—” Her face drops. “Oh my God, I’m sooooo sorry. My mom organizes this trip to Cabo every year for people who live in the Manor and have kids in Drama Club . . . but you guys don’t live in the Manor, do you?”

  “Sure don’t!”

  Melville Manor is not as rich as it sounds, but Dawn would call it comfortable, which is her euphemism for “richer than us.” Almost all the popular girls at school live there, two minutes apart, and throw house parties every weekend. Every year since 2012, when Megan Mullen died in a car accident biking home from one of those parties, local cops have staged a graphic bike-car accident on the football field for us all to internalize. Last year, Natalia Zacoum lay on the five-yard line in front of a Ford Taurus, half-on and half-off a Schwinn, smeared with fake blood. All the popular girls cried. Jessicarose Fallon passed out. It was hilarious.

  “Sorry, ugh, I’m sooooo awkward,” she says, leaning casually against Gideon’s shoulder as if she is too top-heavy to support herself on her own, and asks him, “Are you going to the Halloween dance?”

  He shrugs.

  “I was on the decorations committee. So much drama, I can’t even.” (From overhearing snippets of conversation since freshman year, it seems that Ashley has a chronic condition of not being able to even.)

  He glances down at her, then looks away and rolls his eyes in sort of a fond way, with an enigmatic little laugh. She links her arm through his and starts pulling him away from me like a determined little tugboat wearing Tory Burch flats. He turns back, once, and points at me.

  “Hey. Don’t forget. Sam Kieth.”

  “I wo—”

  “You’re such a dork,” Ashley tells him sweetly, stepping on my words.

  “You’re a dork,” he teases her back, their flirting irritatingly effortless. They start walking away, linking up with a bunch of other popular kids, Gideon looking irritatingly at home with them.

  But t
hen he turns around and looks back at me one more time.

  Chapter 8

  The Ordinaria

  Part 2

  Submitted by Scarface_Epstein

  It was week four of the Miss Ordinaria control test at Pembrooke. Fifteen beautiful teenage robots walking around in the school uniform, pausing and just standing in the dark common room every night and reactivating when the students came in, had become normal-ish. More than that, it was beginning to feel less like a crazy science experiment than a mass craving for the latest smartphone—exactly what Gideon’s dad had hoped for.

  It started with the douche-bags. Jason Tous, one part-icularly obnoxious senior whose parents were massively generous supporters of an unpopular political party—and, worse, he wore a really stupid jacket—had been boasting for weeks.

  “My parents say if I get a twenty-three hundred on my SATs, I can get a down payment for one of those. Whichever one I want. Maybe even a custom model.”

  The other guys looked insanely jealous. Then they all glanced in what they thought was a subtle way over at Gideon. He knew they were thinking: That quiet loser has what we all want, and he doesn’t even care.

  Gideon pretended he didn’t see them and secretly checked his phone under his desk.

  Inbox (1)

  It was from an address he didn’t recognize: anonymous@Pembrooke.edu. This wasn’t the typical format of student e-mail addresses. Gideon’s was GMaclaine@Pembrooke.edu.

  He opened it. It read:

  You’re not what you think you are.

  That was it. End of e-mail. Gideon read it again and still couldn’t make anything of it.

  He glanced around the room to see if someone was messing with him. Mr. Reed stood at the blackboard, two or three kids everyone hated listening intently, the rest zoning out, and Jason Tous talking quietly about a freshman’s weird vagina. Just calculus as usual.

  * * *

  Eventually Gideon started trying to dodge Ashbot, but she was tough to lose, considering she was designed to stay only a certain distance from him unless he pressed a tiny sensor on the small of her back. And he was not going anywhere near the small of her back. Not that he wasn’t tempted.

  One afternoon, as she followed him to AP Chemistry, it occurred to him that the mysterious e-mail might have something to do with her—maybe someone in Ashbot’s past was trying to intimidate him. Then again, it would mean that his dad had lied, that Ashbot wasn’t actually custom-made for Gideon and fresh out of the box. He had to admit: It wasn’t implausible, considering his dad was full of shit regularly.

  But—ugh, did he have to ask her? It was so awkward. Finally he bit the bullet. As the late bell rang, he turned to her.

  “Um—this is sort of a weird question, but before this, were you a rental?”

  Ashbot froze, reconfigured her face—one of those uncanny moments where she looked genuinely taken by surprise, not like her machinery was processing and forming an adequate response.

  “Yeah,” she replied flippantly. “But your dad wiped me. I don’t remember shit.”

  (Ever since she and Gideon had the language discussion, she’d been picking it up quite well and sounded nearly normal.)

  Naturally, he thought, all that stuff his dad said about making a custom one just for him was bullshit. He should’ve known.

  “Oh. So you don’t remember who, um . . . your . . .”

  Ashbot shrugged and shook her head. “Nope.”

  Gideon felt awful—he didn’t want her to think he was one of those guys who judged rentals. Those guys were the worst. They’d check out the available Ordinarias and then request their full history just to make sure they weren’t getting into any weird territory. Anything unusual on that list, good or bad—NBA players, Forbes-list CEOs, famous gay actors who need low-maintenance beards—would make or break whether they rented her.

  Jeez . . . since when did he actually care about them so much?

  “Why do you ask, anyways?” Ashbot cocked her head.

  “No reason,” he mumbled and silently recited the e-mail over and over and over again. Who had sent it? What did they know? And were they coming for him?

  Ashbot lowered her head as they walked, her vivid red hair falling slightly in front of her face. Gideon had a weird urge to brush it away but thought, Nope, nope, nope.

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said, still chipper but sounding more melancholy than the regular, empty models he’d grown up with. Sort of like, just because she wasn’t programmed to use a melancholy tone, that didn’t mean she didn’t feel melancholy. But he reminded himself that even though she seems like a she, even the most technologically advanced “she” is still an “it.” He recited, in his head, his dad’s old pitch: She’s not . . . real.

  * * *

  There was a rapidly growing club at Pembrooke: the Anti-Ordinaria Society. They would organize! They would make change! They would force administrators to listen! Or at least they would once they got their shit together.

  The problem was that they were from the exact opposite camps. Half of them were girls who didn’t shave their armpits and wrote term papers with titles like “Every Sentence Is a Rape.” The other half were girls—and a few boys—who wore monogrammed cable-knit sweaters and were insanely jealous of the robots. Mostly they just stayed after school in an empty classroom, ordered pizza (guess which faction of them blotted it), and argued.

  That all changed when Anonymous began to mass e-mail them.

  Nobody saw her or knew who she was (they assumed it was a her), but since everybody wanted to be in on the secret, everyone insisted they did. Delilah Johnson said she was a faculty member but had sworn not to say whom. Hailey Kissel said it was a friend of hers from another Miss Ordinaria–infested prep school. This is how Anonymous remained that way. If they weren’t all so busy tangling their gossip together, they could have tracked her down easily through her e-mails. That was the only way she ever contacted them.

  Anonymous sent out e-mail blasts.

  You may think you have nothing in common, but you do.

  You have the best intentions, pure hearts, and senses of social justice.

  If this goes on, it could escalate.

  It could kill the entire human race!

  We all know how stupid guys are.

  They can’t be trusted to make good decisions themselves.

  That’s how every war happened!

  Even the Trojan War, which they tried to pin on Helen of Troy. What dicks.

  Assemble in the common room at approximately seven P.M. tomorrow.

  That is when varsity football practice lets out.

  Let’s yell at them.

  Bye.

  These e-mails were massively effective. Very soon, Sumner Ruiz, who had a shaved head and pins through her ears, was walking through the halls chatting excitedly with preppy Betsey Halsey, an old-money heiress to her family’s stretch-pants fortune. It was sort of lovely. But it proved abrasive to everyone who wasn’t on their growing team.

  * * *

  Gideon knew it was just a matter of time before they got him. In fact, he wasn’t sure why they hadn’t already, considering he was the son of the CEO and appearing to openly squire a Miss Ordinaria around school. He was like JFK in the convertible.

  But he wasn’t concerned with angry mobs. The only thing on his mind was that e-mail. He just couldn’t figure it out. He’d scoured the Internet. He’d gone over to Ordinaria Inc. and poked around through some files until a seventy-year-old executive secretary caught him. He had even asked his dad, over a rare “family dinner” at their enormous dining table.

  “So . . . is there anyone who, like . . .” Gideon asked tentatively as he watched their maid carve up the too-large roast chicken. “Would want me to know something about myself that I don’t know?”

  His dad glanced up
as he took a sip of his Scotch.

  “Not that I know of. Helen?”

  He looked at Gideon’s mom. She shook her head. She barely spoke.

  Then his dad turned back to him, a mean-or-jovial glint in his eye. “You’re not coming out, are you?”

  Gideon elected not to answer. Instead, he said, “I got a weird e-mail.”

  “What, like a ‘You are part of an unstoppable woman-hating behemoth that will destroy society’? Or one of those ones where some nut job writes to tell you he can fly?”

  “Well, neither. It said—”

  “Let’s not discuss it at the dinner table,” his mom said abruptly.

  “I agree,” his dad said through a mouthful of chicken. “You’re a Maclaine. It’s part of the territory.”

  * * *

  Every time Ashbot was in the mall, she became a little girl skipping through the daisies. She’d point out the same stores every time as if they were brand-new modern marvels.

  “Look, a Talbots!”

  Gideon rolled his eyes.

  “Ashbot, that was there two days ago. And last week.”

  She beamed. “I know; it’s just so exciting!”

  “Why? Why is it so exciting?”

  “It’s like being with my friends!”

  This was so incredibly depressing to Gideon that he went straight to Wendy’s to get her a Frosty.

  His least favorite part of their regular mall excursion was coming up. It was the giant Victoria’s Secret looming across the clear walkway. He had to be the only eighteen-year-old guy who dreaded walking past Victoria’s Secret because a girl who liked him wanted to get lacy things.

  “We can’t stop in there,” he said firmly.

  “But you’re supposed to want me to buy very padded cups!”

  Gideon stopped and frowned. He might be losing his mind, but it sounded like something loud and aggressive was going on in there. It was hard to tell, since the whole store was basically one very padded cup.