Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (17 page)

“It’s bullshit,” I snap. “Are you aware that there’s a line, an actual line in that book, that goes: ‘At thirty-two, Denise was still beautiful’? At
thirty-two.
Denise. Was still beautiful.”

There is a moment of reproachful silence with jazz under it, as if I’d just crapped on the floor and only Duke Ellington did not seem to mind.

“And it’s not just Franzen! I tried to read
Infinite Jest
, but I had to stop on page 167 when Orin is screwing that single mom because he does that, because that’s indicative of how interesting and tortured and fucked up he is? And it says in the paragraph—do you remember this?—that after they had sex, he traced an infinity sign on her back, and, to paraphrase, that she was so
stupid
that she thought it was an eight.”

“I don’t know if it says—”

“This woman is a single mom, holding down some awful job so she can feed her kid, and being judged for dating when she has the time, and just doing
the best she can 
. . .” I get a little choked
up. I can tell by Dad’s face he just figured out why I’m upset.

“—and she sleeps with a guy who thinks he’s smarter than her. And she knows that. Because she’s
not
stupid, even though he thinks she is, or even if everybody thinks she is. And he traced what could be an eight
or
an infinity sign on her back after they had sex. Of course she wouldn’t think it was an infinity sign. Because that would be romantic. It makes no sense that some asshole who doesn’t respect you would do that. She’s
not stupid
.”

I’m being too loud. People are looking over at us, but I don’t care. I don’t want to make a scene, I’m just a little tipsy and a lot sad and I just want to ruin everything that everyone in this room holds sacred.

Flannel C, the oldest, says gently but authoritatively, “Orin’s not supposed to be a nice char—”

“It’s not Orin saying he thinks she’s stupid, it’s the God voice saying she’s stupid. It’s not the character, it’s the
writer
. I understand the difference between omniscient narration and a close third. That’s your problem, you assume everyone else is stupid, but they’re not!”

Now everybody’s actively staring at me. Dad smiles briskly at onlookers, trying to pull me aside.

“Scarlett, calm down.” He looks pained, like he’s the prom queen and I’m dumping a bucket of blood on him. He gives the Flannels a look and tries to take me aside into a quiet corner, shushing me. “This is why I wanted to talk to you—”

“Leave me alone,” I yell, backing away, knocking over a pile of his display copies. A fierce burning behind my eyes threatens
to spill out any second. I can’t stand it in here for another minute, and I stumble out into the street without my coat, my whole body tingling all over with panic, trying to breathe through the sudden tunnel vision, feeling like I might throw up.

I am waiting for xLoupxGaroux to come get me, in a very public Starbucks where I most certainly can’t get chopped into tiny pieces and hidden under his floorboards. Luckily, he was on Gchat when I logged in from my phone and put out an SOS call. It took me a while to persuade him to meet me. He kept saying he didn’t think it was a good idea. But finally he relented.

“Scarface?”

I look up, shocked by the voice. An attractive, bigger, thirtysomething woman in a cute cardigan is standing over me, a preppy-ish trench coat folded over her arm.

“Umm, hi,” she says.

I feel like I may have stumbled into an alternate universe. “What?”

“You’re Scarface, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Real name?”

“Scarlett. You?”

“Maura.” She breaks into a really lovely smile. “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”

We hug.

“Wow, I am just—I don’t know what I was expecting, but . . .”

Maura nods, understanding. “You assumed I was a gay man.”

“Kind of. Yeah.”

“There’s a really large contingency of lady slash fans, y’know.”

“Yeah, I do know that. Or, you know, intellectually, I was aware of that. I just . . . yeah. Looking back, nobody ever . . .”

“Asked me if I was a man or a woman? Yeah. It happens. Not that I’m making it clear myself.” She shrugs and sits down.

It all makes sense now, I realize, and say, “And that’s why you didn’t want to meet up with me.”

She sighs, stirring her coffee. “I was afraid if we met IRL, you’d be all surprised, and it would ruin everything.”

“I know the feeling.” I sigh.

“I hope I haven’t disappointed you.”

“Of course not!”

She raises her eyebrows—the exact expression I’d pictured on xLoupxGaroux whenever (s)he said “spill it” or “waiting for the truth.”

“No, really. Assuming things about people makes an ass out of you and me.” I stare into the swirling eye of my caramel macchiato. “Mostly me.”

We chat a little bit over our coffee. Maura tells me she’s a freelance graphic designer for a few major companies, but what she really wants to do is draw comics. We mourn
Lycanthrope High
for a while and finally get back to talking about ourselves IRL.

I give her the latest on Gideon and Ashley (whom Maura
keeps accidentally referring to as Ashbot, sending us both into fits of giggles). I mention he was into
Lycanthrope
too and flaked on lending me some of the graphic novels.

Maura rolls her eyes.

“There’ll be more. God, so many. You won’t even remember him eventually.”

“Are you . . . with someone? Married?”

“God no. Single, dating.” Maura shrugs. “It’s so early to settle down, you know? There’s so much I haven’t done or haven’t seen. I still feel pretty young. Most of my IRL friends have had babies, and it’s like . . . I feel like entire
friendships
have devolved into just . . . trying not to say that their baby is ugly.”

I laugh. Relieved I’m not judging her, she laughs too.

“But I guess everything seems dull compared to the show, you know?”

“Totally.”

“I want a William.” She pauses, then adds, “
And
a Connor. And a video camera. I had really high expectations of New York. I thought this was where all the freaks go! No such luck.”

I laugh. “Right, I thought . . . Actually, I always thought I
knew
that I wanted to live in New York after high school. Now, I’m not so sure.”

“How come?”

I lower my voice, look her dead in the eye, and ask, “Isn’t everybody here kind of full of shit?”

She lets out an infectious laugh that makes the whole Starbucks shine for a minute.

“People are kind of full of shit everywhere,” she concurs. “But you’re a little young to be jaded already, aren’t you?”

“I think it’s the opposite.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I’m getting un-jaded.”

Whether or not Maura understands, she lays her hand on mine.

“Well, I’m always around if you want to talk. On or off Gchat.”

When we say goodbye at the subway, she asks if I’m going to tell the others on the board that we met.

“Do you want me to?”

For the first time, she looks vulnerable, like she doesn’t know how to answer. Before she does, I shake my head.

“It’s your story to tell.”

On the one ten
A.M
. train back to Melville with three other passengers—two sleeping, one sketchy—I watch the city skyline recede like I usually do, but it’s the first time I’m glad to leave it behind. Not that being back home is much better. I wish I could just stay on this train, a safe, in-between nowhere.

I finally check my phone. Fifteen texts from Avery. Slightly more than usual. She probably just had sex with Mike and all fifteen are “interesting” tidbits of physiological info copy-pasted from the “Sexual Intercourse (humans)” Wiki page.
I don’t even have the energy to tell her my life has turned into a Dr. Seuss book called
Oh the Assholes at Home and the Assholes You’ll Meet.

Before I get a chance to open any of the texts, she calls me. I answer.

“Hi. Pregnant yet?”

“Oh God, I’m so sorryyyyy,” Avery wails, not sounding like herself. She repeats it over and over raggedly: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t be mad at me, I’m sorry.”

FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TRAIN RIDE, I PIECE TOGETHER
what happened,
Law & Order
style: Mike came early to pick Avery up for a movie. Avery closed but didn’t shut off her laptop. Ashley went into Avery’s room because she wanted to e-mail herself Avery’s AP History essay. Avery had been reading the last Ordinaria chapter on the Were-Heads message board.

Ashley read the chapter. She read all the chapters. Then she sent them to Gideon.

My basic nightmare, essentially. Created by Dick Wolf.
Donk-donk
.

“It’s not your fault,” I lie to a hyperventilating Avery, as one of the other passengers wakes up with a start and glances curiously at me. “Come on. Calm down.”

“I just wasn’t thinking!”

“It’s really okay.”

“I’m so sorry!”

“It’s fine.”

“Ashley’s been crying in her room for like an hour.”

I’m taken aback by this.
“What?”

“You really hurt her feelings, Scarlett.”

“I hurt
her
feelings?” I’m aghast.

Ashley’s been hurting my feelings for the past seven years. But everything feels different now. I’ve been a bully too, just in a different way. I guess good writing is like an X-Man power, a magic trick, and I abused it.

“What are you gonna do?” asks Avery.

An excellent question, considering the only real choice I have is to move to the People’s Republic of Totally Screwed. Gideon must be so weirded out by this, and nothing’s worse than freaking out the person you like; it’d be way less embarrassing to just be hated. A burst of fear crashes in on me, as if it’s coming from outside my own body, the first tidal wave of a panic attack.

“I have to go.”

I hang up on her.

Dawn’s car is idling in neutral in the desolate parking lot of the Melville stop when I get off the train at a little past two in the morning. As soon as she sees me, Dawn jumps out and slams the door, her North Face jacket hastily thrown over pajama pants, and starts screaming.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Wait, stop, I—”

“Your dad and Kira have been looking for you all night! I thought you were lying dead in some bar bathroom! How could you do this?”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, echoing Avery, but about something so much bigger that two words can’t begin to cover. The tears I held in in front of Dad and Kira at that awful book party finally start to fall and don’t stop.

Dawn is astounded, the anger melting off her face.

“What happened? Please tell me. You’re scaring me. Did somebody hurt you?”

This time she’s the one working the
Gilmore Girls
/
Jeopardy!
technique on me, trying her best to get me to open up so she can suck the pain out of me like it’s poison. But all I can do is cry harder.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I sob as she wraps me in a confused hug. “I’m sorry.”

Waking up for school on Monday feels like I’m taking doomed steps up a few rickety wooden stairs to a guillotine.

I always thought part of the reason I didn’t like school was that nobody knew what I was actually good at. Turns out, it’s the opposite. Now that I know at least three people read my stories who are sort of
in
my stories—and, oh God, if his reading level is above picture books, Mike Neckekis makes four—what needs to happen today is that I avoid them at all costs, even if it means
cutting class. Which I do. Mr. Radford’s class is the first I bail on to hide in the library stacks instead.

The library remains a safe haven for approximately three minutes until I realize that Gideon is sitting at one of the computers with his arms crossed, watching me crouch behind the astrology section like a nervous rodent.

This is a nightmare.

But then I get a little indignant.
He’s
the one who’s been running hot and cold with me for months.
He’s
the one who flirts with me in private, then ignores me in public. At least
I
told the truth. I mean, I told the truth in a speculative fiction serial on the Internet, but I told the truth. How hard could it be to tell the truth to his face?

I tentatively slink out from behind astrology, wondering if my horoscope this week was “Pisces: Your World Will Implode,” and confront him.

“Hey,” I say.

His expression remains ice-cold.

“‘
Hey
’?” he repeats. “Really?”

“Well . . .” I scuff my sneaker against the linoleum, ashamed. “There’s not really a handbook for this.”

He looks lost. Angry and lost.

“I just don’t really know what to say, you know?”

Actually, I don’t know. He’s acting like I’ve been calling the shots this whole time and all he’s done is react to my insanity. I have a memory-flash of something Dawn said in a family-therapy session, right before my dad split—
He’s calm
but wrong, and I’m loud but right, but since he’s calm, it always seems like he’s right.

“Did you talk to Ashley? She’s really upset,” he says in the same placating voice.

“Why do you like her? You’re supposed to be with me,” I blurt out.

His eyes widen. All the kids at the computer cubicles put on very intent fake-not-listening faces, like they are way too engrossed in copy-pasting a Wikipedia article about feudalism to pay any attention to this ridiculous live-action telenovela we’re performing in the middle of the library.

“Are you kidding right now?” he asks with ice in his voice, raising his eyebrows.

“No! You’ve been—”

The librarian glares at me and raises a passive-aggressive two fingers. (When the faculty want us to quiet down, they have this infinitely irritating peace-sign gesture that means “quiet,” occasionally supplemented by the specific and immensely irritating phrase “Heads up, hands up.”)

I lower my voice incrementally. “You keep jerking me around. And I’m not just talking about the past couple of weeks. You’ve been trying to play both sides for a really long time, and I can’t just keep sitting around waiting for you to
choose
me, Gideon.”

He glances around wildly, his face bright red, as if we are in a scandalous French sex farce where he is a common waiter and I’m a married duchess who just took my boobs out.

“Why . . . dude, why are you bringing this up now?”

“This has been going on for too long,” I hiss.

“I don’t even know how to feel about any of this.” He gestures at his computer screen, where the last chapter of the thing I wrote glares mercilessly at me. “You don’t see how this is weird for me? At least I try, Scarlett. I mess up, but I try to talk to people and be open and see where they’re coming from.”

“By making fun of the losers and the fat kids, right? Wow. That’s amazing.”

“As opposed to you? You just cross your arms and judge everybody else and just—sometimes it’s like you suck the air out of the room.”

I look down, pushing my hand against my forehead, feeling like my brain could explode at any moment.

He lowers his voice. “How could you write that stuff about me? About my family? I just—I can’t believe you’d do something like that.”

He’s shaking his head, horrified, like I’m Frankenstein’s monster, refusing to even look at me.

“I’m sorry, I really didn’t—”

“It’s like you’re always
testing
me or something.”

“I don’t mean to.” My voice comes out small.

“Well, if it matters now, I, um . . . I thought I did like you. Or, I think I do. I don’t know. You just make it so hard.” He X-es out of the browser and stands up, grabbing his book bag and storming off.

“What makes it so hard?” I ask as he walks away.

He comes striding back and gets really, really close to me
and says, “You can’t have an inferiority complex
and
a superiority complex. Just pick one.”

Then he does actually storm off.

I feel the tingling in my arms and legs that I know means the beginning of a panic attack, and I barrel into the girls’ bathroom by the band hallway. I brace myself against the sink and stare into the mirror, trying to tell the anxious girl reflected back at me that everything’s going to be fine. The more I freak, the weirder I’ll act, and the worse it’ll be.

I’m reaching for the emergency Xanax I keep rolled in a plastic bag in my pencil box when I hear a sniffle from the handicapped stall. I glance over and see a plume of smoke drifting from above the chipped iron walls. I clear my throat.

A familiar, tearful whine: “Who’s out there?”

“Ashley? Is that you?”

Silence.

“Go away, you bitch,” she snaps, choking up. I walk over and stand outside the stall, leaning my ear toward the door. I hear the little crinkly burns from the end of the cigarette as she inhales deeply.

“I wanna talk to you. Come on, let me in.”

“No.”

“Listen. I really didn’t mean for anybody to read that thing.”

“What!” she gasps, then starts sort of laugh-crying. “You didn’t write it in your little freak diary under your bed. You put it on the
Internet.
”

“Yeah, I did, it’s this website for—stories you can write for
people to read, and I have some friends on that site, and it’s just, like, something I do for fun. Please just let me in. I’m really sorry.”

I hear a rusty click, and she kicks the stall door open with her Frye boot, leaving her leg stretched out so it’s hard for me to come in. A neat pile of menthol butts are lined up in a row on top of the toilet paper dispenser.

Her eyes are puffy and red. She looks right up at me. “Why do you think I’m so dumb? And don’t lie. I’ll know.”

“Because you’re mean to me.”

Perplexed, she wrinkles her nose, like I’ve put a rip in the space-time continuum. “You’re mean to
me
.”

“What? I’ve never said one mean thing to you.”

She holds out the pack of Camels, offering me one with sort of a challenging attitude. I take one, grab the lighter from the top of the toilet bowl, and inhale as she watches me closely. My eyes water, but I refuse to cough.

“You don’t hold it in like weed. Just exhale,” she says, smirking.

I do, making my chest burn like hell, and then I double over coughing.

“I wasn’t dancing on that divider,” I croak.

She rolls her eyes. “What are you even talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. How you always call me ‘Divider’ and treat me like nothing because I’m poor and my mom is single and cleans your house. And for some reason, for the past seven years, you have thought all that’s totally hilarious.”

“Um, yeah,” she sniffles, “because you think I’m a fucking moron.”

“I—”

“And you convinced Avery I am too. She’s my sister! When you’re not around, we’re really close. But whenever you’re there, she acts different. You have your smart, special club, and I’m just a dumb Fembot idiot. Right?” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her gold shadow.

“Even my parents like you more than me, even though I get straight As and your grades suck. They always talk about how shitty your mom is and how you deserve better, and what a smart, great kid you are. You come over for dinner, and they talk to you about books and stuff more than they ever talk to me about
anything
. And
he
likes you more too.”

“Who?”

She lolls her head and gives me this
Oh, don’t bullshit me
look.

“You mean Gideon?”

“Duh, I mean Gideon. He’s liked you the whole time. Probably because you’re pretty and skinny and have big boobs, and you know it. I’m not a boy; I can see right through your crap. You pretend you don’t know or care, and you wear weird glasses and Chucks and you’ll watch his stupid old stand-up specials with him, so he thinks you’re cooler or smarter than me or some dumb shit like that.” She sniffs fiercely.

“You took my sister away from me, so I wanted to take him away from you. And I thought maybe it would give you a reality check, so you’d stop being delusional about some exclusive club you’re in just for being a snobby asshole to everybody. That’s how it started.”

But not how it ended. That’s when I realize it from behind her words: He hurt her just like he hurt me. She stubs out her butt angrily and tosses it in the toilet bowl.