Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (19 page)

“I don’t know. I guess I thought you’d moved on to wittier influencers like Jason Tous.”

He stares straight ahead, looking contrite. But he just has nothing to say for himself. I admit, I’m partly sticking it to him because at some point, it was two roads diverged in a wood: He’s (rightly) upset that I wrote creepy Internet fiction about him, and I am (rightly) upset that he has transformed into a proper popular asshole. But ultimately, I don’t care about any of that right now. Everything that seemed like a big deal last week is in my emotional rearview mirror.

“Well, it’s nice of you to try. But I don’t think I’m into any ‘what’s the deal with’ stuff right now.” I hand him a beer.

He shakes his head. “It’s not that, like, not at all. I have it here on my phone. Why don’t you just give it a chance? I bet you’ve watched this enough times you’ve memorized the dialogue by now.” He gestures to the TV.

Fair point. I shrug.

“Sure, whatever. But I have veto power. If I’m not into it in five minutes, it’s done.”

“Deal.”

He scrolls quickly through his iTunes library—which I quickly note consists almost entirely of Kanye and stand-up specials—at least his taste is still good—and hits play on one.

The emcee introduces the woman, Tig Notaro. I am already rolling my eyes at Gideon’s tone-deaf attempt to make me feel better.

“Just wait,” Gideon murmurs. My heart does a weird sputter because he looks exactly the way he used to when he was about to play me a comedian’s boundary-breaking set—his eyes are shining with adrenaline, and he’s leaning forward with his hands on his knees like he’s about to begin a race.

As the opening applause calms down, Tig Notaro begins her set with, “Hello. I have cancer. Hello. How are you guys?” She is met with some confused giggles but mostly silence. Like the audience, I am officially listening.

For the next thirty minutes, everything fades away as she talks. She’d been diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer only three days earlier, she says, and as a professional comedian, she can’t make it into neat jokes yet.

Instead, she does something amazing: She’s bracingly honest. She talks about how friends felt bad, now, when they complained about petty problems in their own lives, but she genuinely wishes they would just talk to her normally. She makes fun of platitudes like “God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.” She doesn’t hide her fear of the future. She faces down an L.A. audience who came to hear some hip, ironic observational comedy and tells them—without packaging it into a joke-punchline format—that she just found out she might die soon. Every laugh she gets throughout the whole set is the result of her being totally, completely, un-comedian-esquely straightforward and honest.

The applause is long and thunderous and gives me enough time to realize that I’m crying. This is how Ruth must have felt when she found out, why she didn’t tell anybody, how hard it is to negotiate with yourself, let alone other people. How you decide to just let go. I’m not mad at her anymore. This crying is a different kind of crying than I’ve been doing for the past few weeks. The ice finally broke, and now I’m underwater.

Gideon leans to the side on the sofa and wraps me in a big hug, my tears soaking into his Maclaine-house-smelling MHS hoodie, leaving a blotchy wet spot behind. This goes on for a while, but I can’t tell how long. This kind of crying is a little bit like falling into a black hole: Maybe it lasts two minutes, maybe two hours, maybe you get torn apart, maybe you time travel back to 1887—you can speculate, but you can never really know.

Finally, I pull away from him, even though it feels unnatural to separate again, and I try to pull myself together. I sniffle, draw the back of my hand across my wet eyes. I wish I could yell at him for being such a jerk lately, but I’m too drained. And besides, it’s too late. I already saw the glimmer in this “hot popular guy” of that chubby comedy nerd I was best friends with when we were thirteen, the weirdo who knows exactly what half-hour stand-up set will reach me through my thick armor of bullshit. Gideon is still Gideon. Maybe that’s all I need to know.

A few trips back and forth to the fridge later—becoming increasingly, acutely aware (in a good way) of Gideon checking
out my butt in the neon shorts each time I go into the kitchen—we have torn through the six-pack. I’m tipsy and laughing and feel like the big things, the real things, are far away. I’m in a mental place that’s pretty rare for me, which is: I just want things to be easy. Context-free. I want to be like any nondescript boy and girl sitting on a sofa drinking beer, across America, right now.

After three beers, I drop my final bottle in “the recycling,” a repurposed Target bag hung on the living room door, and saunter back to the sofa.

“Hey, where’s your mom?” asks Gideon. “I want to say hi.”

I know exactly where she is—she’s meeting Brian’s mother at that Mediterranean place downtown—but instead of going into it, I opt for, “Out?”

“Oh, right, Out. I like that place.”

I smile, even though it is an incredibly silly joke that isn’t worthy of him.

“Great tapas bar, Out,” I say.

“I’m into their wine list.”

“They’re always so crowded, though.”

“To tell you the truth, it always seemed a little overrated,” he replies, looking at me a moment too long as he swigs his beer, his big hand wrapped around the neck of the bottle. It’s a weird way to hold a beer. I feel a rush of affection toward him, mixed with a mystery ingredient.

It’s
lust
, you idiot
, my body informs my brain.
You still like him and like-like him, despite all his shitty transgressions as a Popular. You liked him first, and now other people like him too, and when that
happened, you felt like you had to stop. Scarlett Joan Epstein, you are a hipster.

He’s just sitting there, leaning back against the sofa, finishing his beer, one arm sprawled over the back of the couch, so guy-ish and appealing. He catches me looking at him, and we regard each other with a mix of bemused
Are we gonna do this?
and
Is this gonna fuck everything up forever?

In the end, he is the one who goes for it, circling my waist with both his hands. I instinctively arch my back, accessing, for the first time ever, something my body knows how to do but my brain doesn’t. His warm tongue is sort of beery, but not in a bad way. We kiss for a really long time, until it starts getting more breathless and I finally straddle him, wrapping my hands around his neck as he keeps holding my waist. We seem to be taking turns craning our necks in this make-out session (which bodes well if the thing Dawn once told me is true, that whoever likes the other person more is the one who cranes their neck). Gravity begins to take over, so I start awkwardly falling backward, but his hands are so solidly wrapped around my back that I’m not scared, and he moves gently down off the sofa with me in his arms.

To my distant surprise—distant because my brain is waving goodbye as my body speeds off down the highway—we are now on the floor, me on my back, him on top of me sliding his hands down my back to grab my ass. My brain argues feebly:
But I’m so mad at him!
I gasp loudly without meaning to as he breaks away to move down and kiss my neck. My legs have wrapped around his back of their own accord, another testament to the power
of biology. He slips one hand under my shirt and the other one goes for the drawstring on my shorts.

I realize this is how mistakes happen—not thinking, just doing. (Have you ever heard that Katy Perry lyric “No regrets, just love” and wondered how many teen pregnancies it inspired? I have!)

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” I breathe.

“What?” He yanks on the drawstring but accidentally knots it too tight to open, so he just tries to wedge his hand inside my shorts.

I am about to lose my virginity to an asshole just because we hung out when we were kids
, says my brain.

Oh my God, please shut up, you get to drive allllllll the time, give me the keys for once
, my body replies.

But my brain won’t shut up.
I am about to lose my virginity to a guy who makes fun of fat people.

“Wait, stop.”

He takes his hands off me and lies on the floor, facing up and breathing shallowly. I stay on my back, also staring up at the ceiling.

“I, um, I can’t.”

I’m trying to sound nonplussed, like I have almost-sex with guys all the time and coolly stop short because I am playing hard to get.

“No worries! Like, not at all,” Gideon says, now sounding vaguely panicked. “I—I mean, did I go too fast? Or did I do something you didn’t want me to do?”

I look at him with my eyebrows raised incredulously.

“Just now? No. But the last couple of months
all
you’ve done is stuff I didn’t want you to do.”

I sit up stick-straight like I’m in an executive office chair—as if this somehow gives me more authority—trying to catch my breath.

“I mean, first of all, what about Ashley?” I ask.

He holds up his hands in an exaggerated gesture, then flops them dejectedly back down on the carpet in a very teenage-boy-didn’t-get-to-have-sex way. I hope on top of hope that he has an answer both my body and my brain are down with.
Not
an answer like the one he gives me, which is: “What about her?”

The off-the-charts “guy”-ishness of that response nearly sends me sailing over the edge of my sanity.

“Are you guys dating?”

“We’re just hanging out.”

I groan. “Gideon, that is the dumbest euphemism in the world. It’s not ‘hanging out’ if someone gets an IUD.”

“Well, we haven’t had any sort of official conversation about it! I don’t know! Why are you yelling at me?”

“Because you were a dick to her!”

“Really? Since when do you care about Ashley’s feelings?”

“Since I realized she had them!” I roll my head away from him, fixing on a dusty quarter underneath the sofa, feeling my eyes start to burn. “I got mad at her when I should have gotten mad at you. But at least I’m
trying
to be better,” I say. “You’re not even admitting you were a dick.”

He sighs. “I feel bad about Ashley.”

“Good. You should. But what about the other stuff? Like laughing at Leslie in class, or making fun of Jessicarose Fallon when she ran a fourteen-minute mile in gym.”

He winces and claps his hand over his eyes. “I know. I’ve gone along with some of that stuff, even when I don’t . . .”

“Are you trying to earn my sympathy? Because you won’t. Just because you come over here and listen to comedy with me and act like your old self when we’re alone together doesn’t make everything okay.”

He sits up too, looking like a dog I just kicked, and says, “I’m just trying to explain—”

“Oh, I understand completely! Whoever you’re hanging out with determines which member of the Breakfast Club you’re gonna be.”

Getting worked up now, Gideon begins to raise his voice. “That’s because I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere!”

“You’re just saying that because you think that’s who I want you to be!” I snap back. “You think I want Judd Nelson, so you’re being Judd Nelson. But at school tomorrow, when Ashley wants you to be Emilio Estevez, you’ll be Emilio Estevez.”

“I will
not
be Emilio Estevez!” he shouts indignantly, which would be hilarious out of context if we weren’t both so angry.

“And you know the most messed-up thing? I don’t even think it’s an act anymore. I bet if you were alone in a room, you’d have no idea who you are. You’re just, like”—I shrug, defeated—“you’re a sheep. And I hate sheep.”

He sits there, wounded and angry. Ever since Ruth died, I’ve had a pattern where, for just a few minutes, I can care intensely about some dumb thing I used to care about, but then it flickers out.

“Can you just go away?” I whisper. “Please?”

After a few seconds of silence, the floorboard creaks as he stands, gathering his stuff. He leaves without saying goodbye.

GRIEF IS A WEIRD, QUIET THING. MAYBE IT ISN’T FOR EVERYBODY.
When Shana Miller had an aneurysm in the shower and died sophomore year, girls clustered together in the cafeteria, crying—but I don’t really feel the energy to express anything, even if I felt anything, if that makes sense.

I’m at whichever stage makes me do things like stand in front of my open locker staring at nothing for three minutes, forgetting where I am or what I need to be doing.

“Scarlett?”

Mrs. Johnston, the wiry, gray-haired gym teacher who occasionally tosses off creepy asides about the absurdity of not allowing school prayer, is approaching. Before I can back away, she pulls me into a hug. It is the hug of a woman who should really have an “ample bosom” but doesn’t. She almost impales me on her collarbone.

“The Lord is an everlasting rock, sweetheart.”

“Aite.”

“Mr. Barnhill mentioned you’ve just experienced a loss, and I just wanted to say that I’m here if you need anything.” She speaks with gravity, like she’s giving out a life achievement award at the Oscars or something. The most we have ever spoken before this is when she challenged me on the frequency of my period during the semester we had to take swim.

“Um, thank you,” I say, attempting to use the same tone. Sometime this week, I figured out that the secret to being nice to everybody all the time is to just assume that everybody you interact with is going to be killed in a car crash the next day, and this is one of their final interactions on Earth. That’s, like, the only way you can be nice 24/7. It somehow makes Mrs. Johnston more relatable to know she’s nice because she’s fantasizing about my broken body being pried from the wreckage with the Jaws of Life.

“I brought your mom a quiche.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“You know”—she lowers her voice conspiratorially—“He has a plan.”

“Mr. Barnhill?”

“The Lord, our God. With Jesus at his right hand.”

“I’m Jewish mostly,” I mumble, then say, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

I head for the handicapped stall in the bathroom by the band hallway, which has become my natural habitat, a Melville
tradition for emotionally bereft girls. Let’s just say if Moaning Myrtle ever wants a change of scenery and doesn’t mind the smell of cigarettes followed by a few sprays of Gap Dream, I know just the place.

Back home, from the solace of my bed, I hear Dawn open the front door and greet somebody, saying, “She’s in her room,” even though I don’t feel like hanging out with anyone. I burrow back under the covers, hoping whoever it is will just go away.

“Hi.”

I peek over the blanket. Avery’s standing in the doorway.

“You weren’t answering my texts.”

I shrug. She pulls her TOMS off, one by one, hesitates for a second, then climbs into bed with me, still far enough on the edge that she’s sort of hanging off. This is quite abnormal for us. Snuggling is definitely not part of our “two brains in a jar” dynamic.

“So . . . yeah, this is happening,” she says, like she just heard my thoughts. I nod.

“It’s kind of okay.”

“Yeah.”

We lie there for a minute saying nothing.

“How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

She rolls her eyes, flops her arm to the bed in frustration. “Jesus, Scarlett, come on.”

“I don’t know. I’m . . . sad, I guess.” As soon as I utter the word
sad
out loud, I make it real, which makes me tear up again. There’s no end to the crying, maybe. Avery turns over to face me and moves more toward the center of the bed, close enough to me so that I can see tiny green waves in her hazel eyes.

“It’s really sad,” she says, plainly.

“I was just so caught up in other stuff that I didn’t even . . . like, in movies, people get to say their thing to the person.”

“Thing, like, what thing?”

“Their thing. Like, ‘You’re important to me, even though I took you for granted sometimes, and I’ll miss you for
X
and
Y
reasons’—all that shit.” I do air quotes. “‘Closure’ or whatever.”

“I think that mostly only happens in movies,” she says.

I nod.

“Bad movies,” she says.

“I guess.”

She sighs. “Scar, that’s what a eulogy is. It’s all the stuff you didn’t think to say.”

I grunt, annoyed, and turn my head toward the wall. “So Dawn told you about that?”

“Yeah, and I think you need to do it. If you don’t, you’ll never get to say your thing.”

“Maybe.” I’m being stubborn, but it still just seems like a horrible idea, going up there and freezing like a deer in headlights. “Let’s just change the subject, okay?”

“Sure.”

“How’s Ashley?”

Ave’s answer is slightly guarded. “Fine.” Then she adds, almost despite herself, “She’s in her room most of the time. Crying, I think.”

I wonder if I look like the mean girl from where Ave’s sitting, too.

She continues. “Gideon and Ashley definitely stopped doing whatever it was that they were doing. Hooking up on the regs or whatever. If that makes you feel better . . .”

“It doesn’t,” I say.

I’m about to confide in her what happened when Gideon came over, but something stops me. For one thing, it feels like it was ages ago now, swallowed up in the bigger stuff I’m trying to work through. Or, really, sleep through. It also feels private somehow, something between me and him that I feel wrong telling her, and I get a glimmer of what it must be like to be a girlfriend.

There is a pause. It seems like she is weighing the dynamic of the conversation.

“Uh,” she says. “I . . . I had sex?” Her voice goes up at the end.

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I had sex. With Mike.”

Wow. Oh. Okay. In the ten-minute-mile run of sexual activity, she’s a varsity cross-country jock and I’m a fat kid at this point.

“Oh,” I say. “So now you’re, like, A Full Woman.”

She rolls her eyes. “Is that how that works?”

I shrug, thinking of my inability to write a sex scene.

“So, uh, how? Did it happen?” I ask.

“I don’t know. He invited me over last week, and his mom was out of town at some conference. It just happened.”

“Very romantic,” I say, and immediately feel bad for snarking.

“It was!” She sounds wounded that I’d shaded her beautiful virginity loss. “He even lit candles and stuff.”

“Mike Neckekis lit
sex atmosphere candles
?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. I’m impressed.”

“I was too!” she chirps.

“So, then, how was it?”

She stares at the ceiling for a second, takes a breath as she’s about to speak, then stops and thinks.

“Good,” she says.
“Weird.”
Another pause. “Good.”

“Did it hurt?”

“It was kind of uncomfortable at first, but no, not really.”

“Did it feel, you know,
pleasurable
?”

“Sort of, toward the end.”

“You used a condom, right?”

Her head swivels violently toward me. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

A minute passes. Then she sighs.

“Yeah, no, we totally didn’t. I had to go get Plan B.”

“Did Mike go with you?”

“He had wrestling practice.”

“Did you go by yourself?” I ask, alarmed.

She nods.

“You’re kidding. Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?”

She looks off to the side and twists her mouth with concern.

“I thought you were mad at me or something.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve felt like that for a while. And then I read that story you wrote.”

I feel my face go red, the way it does whenever somebody brings up something I wrote IRL.

“Just because I have a boyfriend now doesn’t mean we can’t hang out and keep things exactly the way they are,” she says softly.

I shake my head, but I don’t have the energy to explain why everything’s different now, from my feelings about writing to my friendship with Ave. I feel blanched, totally drained of any cleverness or insight. Eventually we both start falling asleep.

While I’m still half-conscious, I dimly register Dawn, backlit from the hallway, quietly pulling my bedroom door closed.