Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(12)
I wrote that down.
“Life isn’t a beautiful gift to treasure every moment of. It’s shitty and unfair, and I’m not gonna give you any ‘wisdom’ on how to gracefully come to terms with life or death or anything.”
I nodded.
She exhaled, visibly relaxed—her forehead wasn’t tensed up anymore like it had been when I first knocked on her door—and shrugged.
“I could use a hand with the garden. If you want to come by a few days a week and help me out, you can pick my brain about when dinosaurs roamed Earth. How does that sound?”
“Yeah! Great.”
“Good. Starting now. Can you show me how to do an emoji?”
She handed me a cracked iPhone with no case. She’d been texting with someone called “K.,” flirtatiously bordering on straight-up smut.
I showed her how to access the emoji keyboard and handed it back. She vacillated between the wink face and the kiss-blowing face, then looked at me.
“Hello? Make yourself useful.”
“Kiss, I think. Wink emoji is a little bit ‘recently divorced dad.’ Also,” I said, “you spell twerk with an e.”
She revised and hit Send, and I was glad to see the ghost of a smile on her face at my response.
“You want some bourbon?”
“I’m fifteen.”
“What’s your point?”
After one faded flower teacup full of bourbon, I was drunk. Ruth drank triple that and seemed totally fine, considering she was asking me what books I was reading in English class, whereas I was trying to focus my vision while wondering who I could possibly persuade via text to take my make-out virginity.
“What are you reading?”
“The Turn of the Screw.”
“Good one. Classic. Sexual repression, ghosts—what’s your teacher’s name?”
“Mr. Radford.”
“What’s he like?”
“Uh, young.” I thought. “Enthusiastic.”
“You should do him!” She said it with the same tone of wholesome encouragement you’d use to say You should do yoga! or You should visit Lake Placid!
“What?!”
“Don’t look at me like that. Every great writer has ‘turned the screw’ with a professor. Obviously it would be better if his balls hung a little lower, if he was older, more established, but . . .” She shrugged.
“Jesus Christ. Ew. Also, I’m not a—don’t call me that.”
“A what? A writer?”
I nodded.
“Why not?”
“It feels weird.”
“It’s supposed to feel weird. If it didn’t, that would be a problem.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “You want some more bourbon?”
Later that month, I finished my social studies assignment, which was honest to a fault (I got a B-and a Please see me after class, with “please” underlined thrice), but I stuck around to help with the garden, and Ruth and I have been friends ever since.
“You’re really wasting your energy worrying about this,” Ave informs me as she highlights some boring crap in her calc textbook. “Guys are like H&M tops to Ashley. Next week he’ll be in the Goodwill bin, and my parents will yell at her for insisting she’d wear it forever and being so wasteful with their money.”
I shake my head, gritting my teeth as I yank out the stubborn weeds congesting Ruth’s zinnias. “It’s because he’s special and she knows it.”
Ave makes a noise.
“Um, yes?”
“All I’m saying is, Ashley has horrible taste,” Avery tentatively begins as I sweat all over Ruth’s tea roses. “I mean, Kevin Rice? Hello?”
Ruth furrows her brow. “Who’s Kevin Rice?”
“A tool,” Ave and I say simultaneously.
“No. This is a tool.” Ruth holds up her spade. “I don’t know how either of you expect to get into good colleges if you can communicate only in street.”
“Sorry, in street?” I say, aghast. “Tell me, then—what is the appropriate word?”
“Asshole,” Ruth incants sagely and turns back to her petunias.
“Scarlett, maybe Ashley liking him is an indication that he sucks.”
“Inconceivable.”
“You only quote The Princess Bride when you’re afraid I’m right.”
“You’re dismissed. The real question is, why would he even like her? Aside from looking like a Hollister model and getting perfect grades”—I wilt a little but continue—“her whole personality is put on.”
Ruth shrugs, relighting the last of her J. “Sure. It’s usually a phase. Girls figure out what boys want, they do it for a while, then they stop. Trust me, I used to see it every year when I was teaching.”
“If she knows what boys want, I wish she’d tell me,” Ave mumbles under her breath, then trills sardonically, “As my parents would say, we’ve both been ‘blessed with our own gifts’! Here’s mine”—she points to her head—“and here’s hers.” She pantomimes big boobs, then instantly looks guilty and stops talking. That’s what happens whenever she rags on Ashley to me.