Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (7 page)

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: [email protected]. This wasn’t the typical format of student e-mail addresses. Gideon’s was [email protected].

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.

He snapped away from the distraction. “That—I don’t even know wha—look, that doesn’t even
sound
appealing.”

“Oh. Sorry. Is this better?” She lowered her voice to a sultry whisper. “I want to get some panties for you.” Then she stopped and looked confused. “Well, not
for
you—”

“Okay, that’s enough.”

But Ashbot was already walking inside, a woman-robot on a mission.

I thought you’re supposed to listen to me
, he thought, irritated, as he followed her.

They walked straight into a fury of shouting, indignant hair tossing, and handmade signs:
MISS ORDINARIA IS MISS-GUIDED
and
GE
T SEX ROBOTS OUT OF
PEMBROOKE
. He recognized most of the girls from school. And they recognized him. They immediately started shrieking wordlessly at him, like he was an evil Beatle.

The black-clad Victoria’s Secret employees were even more frantic than usual, trying their best to get it under control.

Before Gideon could stop her, Ashbot bypassed her usual favorite, boy shorts with pink on the ass (they were Gideon’s favorite too—he had no idea how she’d picked
that
up), and pushed straight into the yelling crowd, as polite and chipper as ever.

“Pardon!”

“Your dad is ruining our school!” shouted a dark-haired girl he recognized from AP Chem.

“Your dad is ruining our
lives
!” sobbed a large girl in a cardigan.

“Jessicarose, weeping isn’t constructive,” the dark-haired girl snapped.

Their squabble let him slip through the crowd and catch up with Ashbot.

He found her staring up at a giant display of new merchandise, mostly black, red, and white lacy underthings. But this particular line came in only two sizes—two perfect
sizes based on surveys, research, and years of work. One for a woman aged thirty to fifty, the other for a teenage girl.

The large sign above the underwear table read:

FOR THE
NATURAL
ORDINARIA

(
AND NEW MISS ORDINAR
IA!)

Ashbot looked dazed, like she was having a major revelation. Like whoever first invented fire. Gideon grabbed her arm.

“Come on. Now. We have to get out of here.”

The crowd started jeering and snapping thongs at them. A bejeweled one nearly hit Ashbot in the face. Gideon whacked it off course.

As he tried to firmly steer her out, she kept saying, “I get it now! I get it!”

Gideon gritted his teeth, trying not to elbow that sobbing girl in the face as he hustled them both out. “You get what?”

“People are mad because they want to
be
like me.”

Her tone was hard for Gideon to read.

Behind him, the protesters engaged in a collective groan/eye-roll situation. And one of them piped up from the way back: “Um,
really
? Anonymous would disagree.”

A bolt of lightning struck Gideon.

“Wait—
what
did you just say?”