Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  IS YOUR OC A MARY SUE?

  1) Does your character have the same name as you or a name that is a variant of yours, such as a nickname or different spelling?

  Oh, goddamn it.

  2) Does your character look a lot like you?

  3) Is your character the youngest in his/her given profession and also the most brilliant?

  4) Does your character share strong opinions and beliefs with you?

  5) Does he or she often state these opinions, argue with other characters about them, or try to win them over?

  6) Does your character get listened to, followed, and respected more than his or her age, position, and experience would merit?

  7) Is your character a hybrid of two races?

  8) If so, is this hybrid race in any way “tragic” or “cursed”?

  There’s a loud knock at the door, and I dart through the living room to answer it, vaulting over the couch and scrambling nearly directly over Avery, who is wiping off her eye makeup as she warily eyes her phone, which is facedown on the coffee table.

  “Who’s here now, Gene Hackman?”

  From outside: “It’s Ashley!” More knocks. “Hell-ooooo?”

  I summon my coldest glare at Avery, and she looks slightly guilty for a second but then throws her arms up with haplessly self-righteous attitude.

  “She’s good at this stuff! Okay? Get off my dick! Just be a normal human being for once. Please. I know you can do it.” She wads up her third eye makeup–remover pad and tosses it into an empty coffee cup on the table. “I know things are weird between you guys, but she’s not that bad, I swear.”

  I wave her off, taking pity on her, and open the door. Ashley’s already in her dress for the dance, a cute black baby-doll-style cocktail dress that looks irritatingly perfect with her hair.

  “Hey, Divider!” She smiles a big, toothy smile at me. “How excited are you for the dance!”

  “Not going,” I mutter, shuffling backward to let her in.

  “Why? Too lame for you?”

  “I’ve got plans later!” I sardonically try to match her bright tone.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “I’m being executed by the state!”

  Ashley seems not to hear me as she glows around my apartment, idly picking things up, seeming to judge how much they cost, and putting them back down in ways that very clearly show how much she thinks they cost.

  “It’s cute here.” She can’t resist a passive-aggressive dig, adding, “Cozy.”

  “Ashley,” shrieks Avery. “Help much?”

  “Right. Yeah, totally. Okay, well. Oh—is that my dress?” Ashley stares at the navy dress Avery’s wearing. Avery shrugs and tugs at its scalloped lace hem.

  “Is that cool?”

  “Of course. It looks hot on you! Very Kate Middy. Because, I mean”—she laughs, so lilting that you can almost picture the musical notes they’d use in closed-captioning—“I’m pretty obviously Pippa. Anyways, let’s do this thing.”

  Ashley dumps the entire contents of her makeup bag onto the floor, and Avery slides off the sofa. They’re both huddled on the carpet over the makeup like it’s a fire keeping them warm. Ashley murmurs something to herself, then selects an eyeliner and leans in toward Ave until their identical strawberry blond heads are nearly touching. I feel a pang and wish, like I sometimes do, that Matilda and I were closer in age.

  “Hey, Scarlett, have you got any nail polish remover?” Ashley waits a beat, then frowns a little and repeats, “Scarlett?”

  I snap to attention, at this point totally used to her addressing me as Divider.

  “Yeah, um, yeah, I’ll get it.”

  As I head down the hall to Dawn’s room, the familiar iPhone text alert chimes from the living room. I nearly reach for my own phone anyway, a Pavlovian response.

  “Oh God, he’s texting me!” Avery yells from the other room.

  “What did he say?” I yell back.

  There’s a pause as ostensibly she opens the text.

  “Sup!” she shrieks, like the final girl in a horror movie.

  Ashley works quickly. In twenty minutes, Avery has gone from ferret to fetching (which I’d watch the shit out of on Bravo). The makeup is flawless. The dress is classy but sexy. Her hair is simple but cute, just a few bobby pins drawing her bangs off her face. Mission accomplished.

  “You look amazing,” I assure her.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, totally.”

  “Thanks. Thank you. Sorry for . . .” She jerks her head, cockeyed, toward Ashley, who is checking her phone.

  “Please, this is what I’m here for.”

  “Babe, we gotta go,” Ashley interjects, a little more frozen over than she’d been just a second ago.

  Avery nods stiffly, still looking incredibly nervous, picks up the little clutch she’s chosen for the night, and heads for the door.

  “Bye.”

  “See you, Divider,” Ashley says flippantly as she waltzes out the front door. We had a good run with my God-given name for a minute there.

  “Bye, have fun!”

  Avery takes one step out the door, then she runs back and grabs my arm.

  “You have to come with me.”

  “Ew. What? No.”

  “What if it’s bad? Like, what if we have nothing to talk about, or dancing is awkward, or he tries to have sex with me?”

  “Is he gonna?” I ask, startled.

  “I have no idea! That’s the point!”

  Ashley dips backward through the doorway, grabbing the frame for support, and chirps, “You tell him I said you can’t.”

  “But maybe I want to!”

  Ashley gets an odd look on her face and says, “I had sex for the first time after a school dance when I ‘maybe’ wanted to, and it was awful.”

  Ave and I both look at her, taken aback. She shrugs, sort of sadly. The moment ends when Avery’s phone chimes.

  “Oh, it’s him again.”

  She opens the text and reads it: “Where letter-R letter-U.”

  I roll my eyes. “Right out of Jane Austen.”

  “Please come, Scar. I’ll owe you. I’ll watch a whole season of Lycanthrope with you. I’ll do your take-home math tests.”

  “You already do that.”

  She stops pleading and looks a little indignant. “Yeah. I do. So actually, you owe me.”

  I think of what Loup said about writing myself brave. Its accuracy is irritating. By staying inside and fantasizing instead of actually going out and doing something normal teenagers do, I accidentally Mary Sue’d myself to the first degree in front of my friends, writers that I respect. It’s so humiliating. And it stops now.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Really?!” she squeals, jumping up and down.

  “Yes.”

  Avery scoops up the makeup bag and tosses it to Ashley, who semi-begrudgingly catches it and comes back inside, shutting the door behind her.

  “Your turn!”

  Chapter 15

  MY DAD HAS THIS EXPRESSION: IF YOU’RE GONNA BE A BEAR, be a grizzly bear. So I blew out my hair and borrowed an outfit from Dawn, and now I’m a grizzly bear in a short, tight red bandage dress that rides obscenely up my thighs when I get in the back of Ashley’s car. I’d never admit it, but this dress makes me feel weirdly powerful and Kardashian-esque. It figures that I’d have to channel a totally different person in order to work up the nerve to go to this dance.

  We pull into the class parking lot, and Ave and I both sort of take a second to regroup. Ashley reapplies her lipstick in the rearview mirror, visibly impatient to get inside already. Avery shakes her head in awe.

  “I can’t believe your boobs right now,” she says.

  “It’s Dawn’s bra.”

  In the interior rearvie
w mirror, Ashley’s green eyes creep predatorily over to me, a spider crawling toward a fly.

  “I didn’t know Victoria’s Secret had good clearance prices!”

  She shuts off the car.

  A touching amount of time and effort has been spent making the gym look Halloween-y. Big black crepe paper covers the walls, and the backboards and basketball hoops are draped with cobwebs. I immediately zero in on Gideon—and so does Ashley, darting over in her tight black dress to back him (with him quite willing) into a corner. I watch them and hate myself for feeling like I’m at that first free fall on a roller coaster and my stomach has just dropped out of my body. He glances at me once, then again in a flickering up-and-down glance. Actually, I am either insane or I feel a lot of eyes on me.

  “Oh my God, Scarlett, people are staring at you,” says Avery.

  I focus on the floor, yanking the bottom of my dress down.

  Jason Tous saunters by with his little dude-cadre, reeking of Abercrombie Fierce. We glare at each other. I wonder whether he was even a little bit affected by what I said to him outside Ruth’s house. It’s hard to tell, since his expression is consistently at some unreadable early point on the Darwinian evolution chart.

  Mike Neckekis appears from the refreshments table with two Solo cups of punch. He’s wearing a nice gingham shirt and looks higher on the human-evolution chart than usual. He smiles at Avery and hands her a glass.

  “Hey! You look really nice.”

  “You too,” she says, seeming to relax a little, then lowers her voice: “Tell me this is alcoholic.”

  “Maybe a little,” he says, and she makes a “score!” sign with her fist. He turns apologetically to me. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get one for you. Wait a second.” He disappears again to get a punch for me and returns with one. I sip and say thanks.

  “So, like, you want to dance or something?” he asks Avery. She nods hesitantly and looks at me.

  “Yeah, go! I mean, if nobody dances to the Black Eyed Peas, do they even exist? Just food for thought.”

  She laughs. “Okay. But listen, please don’t feel weird that you came; you’ll have fun. And you seriously look amazing. Everybody’s staring at you.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  The bleachers are reminiscent of Diane Arbus, smattered with a handful of homely Girl Geniuses and a couple of weird guys with pube-y facial hair who haven’t had a growth spurt yet. As soon as I sit down way up on the highest bench, I feel a lot more like myself, in my natural habitat, but in keeping with today’s little forum trauma, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

  Down below, my classmates are dancing or awkwardly milling around in same-sex groups. The guys seem aimless and doofy, trying to love-tap one another in the balls. The girls move with more of a purpose. Natalie Wetta and Liz Lanteri jokingly slow dance together. We’re all going to graduate soon, and go to college, and grow up, and get married, I think, and realize with a start I’ve said we instead of they. Usually the only we is me and Avery, or me and the Were-heads. Or me and Gideon, before he outed himself as Lord of the Douche. I was so delusional to think he was above this popularity stuff.

  I’ve tried to look everywhere except at Gideon and Ashley, but I’m a masochist, so I glance around for them. Ashley’s nowhere to be found, and hearing a few thuds of dress shoes on the bleachers, I realize Gideon’s climbing up toward me. I am still mad at him, no matter how cute he looks.

  This is the part where I am supposed to be a sparkling, vindictive angel of revenge whose cutting remarks make him feel like shit.

  “I like your shoes,” I blurt.

  He glances down at them. “Oh. Thanks.” Then he sits next to me, leaning a little bit forward with his hands on his knees, staring straight out at the dance floor like he’s intentionally trying not to look at me.

  “So did you get to the Sam Kieth illustrated editions?”

  I don’t say anything. I freeze helplessly, torn between wanting to yell at him about his cisgender white male sense of entitlement and whisper to him that he smells like pine needles and dreams.

  “It, um, was really stupid, what I did.”

  He has now given me permission to go with option one.

  “It was pretty spectacularly stupid, yeah.”

  “I didn’t know who lived there. Not that that’s better, but if I knew it was, like, an old lady by herself—and that you knew her—then I might not have . . .” He trails off. “I totally forgot you lived in that neighborhood.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Can you, um, tell her I’m sorry? For me?”

  “I already told her.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah, I told her I was sorry I go to school with a bunch of idiots who ruined her garden, and that people do really shitty things to fit in without thinking about it at all. And that I ever thought for a split second that you were cool.”

  He looks stunned, which makes me even angrier, because it’s obvious that he chooses to hang out with girls who never tell him off and just let him get away with anything. And I’m so, so annoyed at myself for caring about it.

  He turns toward me, his nose crinkled up with irritation, as if I’m being An Emotional Girl™ and missing some major piece of information that makes him not an utter ass.

  “Scarlett,” he says.

  “What?”

  He shakes his head, one side of his mouth twisting in kind of an embarrassed smile.

  “The only reason I went with them in the first place was because you said I had no friends.”

  He sighs. Then he gets up and walks back down to the dance floor.

  That’s bullshit, I think. Maybe it was partly what I said, but he loves having baller status at school. It’s so unfair—I put on the dress, came to the dance, and actually tried, and nothing worked out the way I wanted it to. I should have known that coming was a stupid idea.

  I track down Avery and tell her I’m gonna go.

  “No! Why? Did Gideon say something to you?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not why. I’m tired. I’m in a shitty mood. I’ve been sucking in my stomach for, like, two hours. I need to go home.”

  “Come dance with us.”

  I glance warily at Mike, who nods and smiles in a seemingly genuine way. I really don’t want some bullshit charity third-wheel routine.

  “Okay. I’ll need some more punch.”

  Three Solo cups later, I’m nice and tipsy enough to non-self-consciously dance with Avery in sort of a performative, faux-dirty way that Mike and some other boys nearby who’ve never looked twice at us seem to appreciate. But we’re totally ignoring them. We don’t usually act like this. Our friendship isn’t really very affectionate or physically silly. Most of the time we sit kind of far away from each other and banter because we’re both weird and trapped in our own heads and uncomfortable with touchy-feely stuff. Like two brains in a jar. But it’s surprisingly fun to just let go.

  The Fray comes on, a slow song, and Mike and Avery dance as I go get more punch. Unexpectedly, as I’m ladling punch into my cup, my eyes start swimming with tears. At the Fray. I’m obviously losing it. Or I’m just turning into Dawn, who full-body sobs during Super Bowl commercials about Sprint “framily” plans. It was only a matter of time.

  Gideon and Ashley slow dance, but over her shoulder, he’s looking at me. His expression looks studiously blank, like it used to when he was troubled about something, trying to parse out a jumble of thoughts in his head, but who knows what it means now? I wish he’d stop. Yes, I’m standing alone, as usual. Gawk at me all you’d like when I’m dead and stuffed and posed in the Museum of Natural History as Girl Standing by Herself.

  Careful what you wish for, though: He stops looking at me when Ashley pulls him down toward her, tangling her fingers in his slig
htly-too-long dark hair forever brushing his collar, and they kiss. And I die a little.

  They’re still kissing when I leave.

  Chapter 16

  I’M STARTING TO GET WHY RUTH WAS SURPRISINGLY NONCHALANT in the wake of Gardenpocalypse. The flowers are nice, but it’s the actual gardening part that’s cathartic. You’re basically brawling with dirt. I especially need to blow off steam because the BNFs—and other people in the fandom—are starting to write response fics about Gideon and Ashbot and Scarlett, which is simultaneously incredibly cool and more than a little weird. As I sweat it out in shitty dad-style jeans with my hair pulled up in a topknot, getting the November tulip bulbs started, I begin to feel a little better.

  “So?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you forgive him?” asks Ruth, her tone implying that I’m a complete idiot.

  “What do you mean? You’re the one he apologized to.” The wind blows Ruth’s overpowering weed smoke toward me, and I cough. “God.”

  “He’s obviously apologizing to you. He doesn’t know me from Adam.”

  “I’m not the one he was making out with on the dance floor.”

  “You could’ve been.”

  “You mean if I’d just acted like everything was totally fine? Like you said, I don’t know how to be fake.” My raking becomes harder and more vicious. “And I learned my lesson. I’m never going to another dance again. Guest starring in one episode of The Young and the Vacant was enough for me.”

  Maybe I had a sliver, like, a modicum of fun. But there’s no way I’d tell her that.

  Ruth shakes her head. “You’re so angry all the time. Aren’t you tired?”

  “I’m kidding. I mean, I won’t go to another dance, but I’m mostly joking.”

  “That’s what’s angry, the jokes.”

  I wipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my garden glove, exasperated.

  “How about you try to analyze me when you’re not completely stoned.”