Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(17)

xLoupxGaroux: There’s got to be a checks-and-balances system . . . one of us writes a bunch of installments, and the rest of us give feedback. Because when left unchecked, OFCs can be really goddamn irritating.

DavidaTheDeadly: calm down dude, i think we’ve all proven we’re above mary sues here.

DavidaTheDeadly: alright. so. installments?

I admit, my motive here is to keep us all together as long as possible. But I think theirs is too. Even if they don’t say it.

DavidaTheDeadly: scarface, it was your idea, so you first.

Scarface: Haha. Goddammit. OK.

xLoupxGaroux: Are you gonna cry again?

Scarface: Shut up.

xLoupxGaroux: Tell you what. If you kick us off with some original characters—who are not annoying—we can take it from there.

Scarface: Deal.

If this is what it takes to keep it going, fine. I almost don’t want to mess with werewolves—John made them so much his own that if I touch them, I may as well be writing yet another Connor/Becca fic. I still feel a little weird about inventing people. They’re usually unrealistically perfect or tortured or something. If I write them wrong, all my credibility in the community will be shot. Writing Lycanthrope fic was easier because I knew those characters just as well as I know Avery, or Ruth, or—oh.

The Ordinaria

Part 1

submitted by scarface_epstein

Shit, shit, shit, and furthermore, goddamn it.

Gideon was hoping that his school wouldn’t be the first. But it was, of course. Pembrooke Academy was one of the best—and most expensive—private high schools in the country. If they started it at some random public school, it would be like opening a Rolls dealership in Trenton. Gideon knew this because he’d heard his father snap, “Are you kidding me? It would be like opening a Rolls dealership in Trenton,” to Steve Mullen on the phone in his home office last night.

Gideon paused in the middle of the hallway and pressed his ear to the door. His father, CEO of Ordinaria Inc., was talking to his four advisers: Steve Mullen, his assistant Steve J., his assistant Steve P., and Don.

“I agree,” said Steve Mullen, the most levelheaded of the bunch. “We sank all this money into a new product for this whole ‘get the teens’ campaign, so why not place them with the affluent and horny? We’ll make our money back in five seconds flat. I vote Exeter, Andover, Deerfield, and Pembrooke.”

“Yeah, start elite, build some buzz,” Steve P. said.

“It certainly worked for Facebook,” Don chirped.

“Shut up, Don,” said Steve P., because Don was his assistant.

“All due respect, Mitch, would that cause any problems with your son?” asked Steve Mullen, the only Steve who could get away with that question because he’d lost a teenage daughter years before, and even Gideon’s dad still walked on eggshells around the topic.

“You mean Gideon?” (His father said this as if Gideon was not an only child.) “How so?”

“Well, all due respect, you’re dumping fifteen female teenage sex robots into his senior class. That might . . . have some kind of effect on his school.”

Gideon could practically hear his dad roll his eyes through the door.

“Steve, you’ve met my son. He should thank me.”

*

The first day of school was always a mixed blessing, Gideon thought as he walked across the campus with a stream of other students in identical starchy blazers and awkward ties. For one thing, he didn’t have a girlfriend. You’re not incredibly popular with girls when your father is considered the most destructive force for women’s body image since Barbie. As for guys, he always suspected—rightly—that any male student who asked if he wanted to play some lacrosse or go to the movies later was trying to befriend him only for an Ordinaria discount. (Which was illegal anyway, unless they went through their dads. Can’t have forty-year-old Ordinarias making out with fourteen-year-old boys in the quad.)

On the bright side, during the school year Gideon didn’t have to hear his dad scream at a Breast Crafter that a nipple was too large. Most things were preferable to that, including but not limited to dancing in battery acid.

Gideon was seventeen, and since the day he’d been born, he’d watched his father build his empire, heard him endlessly pitching to donors when Ordinaria Inc. was just a start-up. Ten years of massive success later, and Gideon could recite the hard sell by heart.

[To billionaire.] Listen. All it takes is one down payment and a very reasonable time line to pay the balance, and you’ll be happy for the rest of your life. That’s the only thing this product is wired for. They won’t turn down tickets to the Stones because they’re too tired. They won’t drink three glasses of white wine and ignore you. They’re not cranky. They’re not complicated. They’re not . . . [dramatic pause, air of horror] real.

It worked massively well. Forbes-well. The Maclaines were nationally, legendarily wealthy. And to be honest, after going through what he was sure was one of the stranger puberties in history, Gideon was totally used to them. Blasé, even. At this point he sort of saw them as can openers with cleavage.

So they decided to skew younger. Who cares?

*

The fact that Dean Arnolds appeared visibly psyched and Dean Jacobs looked incredibly depressed was an immediate giveaway. The five hundred students assembled in Maclaine Hall immediately started whispering and smacking one another on the shoulder. Most of them knew what was coming. The Internet’s good like that. Some of them didn’t dare hope for it. Others had sworn up and down that if it happened, they’d transfer to the local public school, zombie teachers and lackluster facilities be damned.