Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(19)

She came in and stood at the front of the room, wearing a slightly outdated tank top and jeans, but she was all the more beautiful for it. The girls glared.

“What’s . . . um . . . what’s your name, sweetheart?” asked Mrs. Greer, who barely knew how to use a smartphone and was trembling ever so slightly.

“Hi, I’m Ashbot.” She faced the class and waved a little, tossed her red hair. “I’m here to get an education, I guess, or whatever.”

“I’d like to educate her so hard she can’t walk tomorrow,” mumbled Chris Thompson, and two boys behind Gideon snickered.

“Have a seat, dear.” Mrs. Greer was so freaked out that she was almost imploring Ashbot.

She whirred softly down the third row of desks, toward Gideon’s, and he got a whiff of a super-girlie Bath and Body Works perfume that must have scored high on the Preferred Scent of Eighteen-to-Twenty-Five-Year-Old Men Test. Gideon’s demographic. They were dead on, he thought, stupefied.

She stopped at his desk and stood over him, her green eyes wide and loving. The whole class stared.

“Hey, Gideon,” she said. His name sounded very personal in her mouth. He swallowed hard.

Then, smiling, she cooed, “I’m your eighteenth birthday present.”

*

“I need to talk to you!”

To his credit, this was the first time that Gideon had dramatically stormed into the Ordinaria Inc. boardroom. He had disregarded the secretaries’ protests but tried his best not to be a huge dick about it.

His father was mid-meeting, in one of the many that made up his day. Seventeen men and two women sat around a long conference table. They all looked up when Gideon burst in.

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m busy right now,” his father replied, gritting his teeth, obviously surprised by his son’s gall.

Gideon ran out of steam and complied, just one of the latest series of compliances that made up his whole life. He seemed to be getting closer and closer to asserting himself but never quite going the distance.

He sat in the waiting room until his dad came out, then stood up and walked toward him with resigned determination, like someone ready to argue with a doctor about a loved one’s fatal prognosis.

“So you got my gift,” said his dad.

“Yeah. In front of my whole class. This is bullshit, Dad. You need to get me out of it,” Gideon snapped, turning bright red.

“I thought you’d be happy.”

“You’re not doing this for me; you’re doing this so I can be the, like . . . unofficial ambassador of integration. The first one to actually date it. The least you could do is be honest.”

His dad shrugged. “Gid, you’ve got to lose it sometime.”

Gideon winced. The secretaries studiously pretended not to hear.

“You could stand to be a little more appreciative, you know. She’s designed especially for you. My team and I pretty rigorously studied a couple of years’ worth of your, uh, browser history—”

“You. Are. Not. Saying. This. To. Me.”

“She’s about half a mil on the market. Rent her out if you want. Hell, you could sell her on eBay and buy a house on Nantucket with that kind of money.”

“I don’t give two shits about Nantucket,” snapped Gideon.

“The Cape, then.” His dad looked around, exasperated. “I have to get back in there. We can talk more about this at home, if you really want to.”

This was his father’s way of saying End of discussion.

Gideon slowly closed his eyes and took a very, very deep breath. “So you’re telling me it’s done.”

Then his dad did something incredibly strange. For the first time in a decade or so, he reached out and tousled Gideon’s hair. Gideon was so taken aback that he didn’t have the reflex to smack his hand away.

His dad looked at him, bemused, and chuckled as he headed back to the boardroom.

“Oh, kid. Is it ever done.”

*

Later that week, Ashbot was pouting. It seemed to be her default.

“Are you gonna touch my boobs soon?”

“No,” Gideon said, for the seventeenth time that day. He was at his locker, and she was leaning up against the one next to his—a locker whose male freshman owner was standing awkwardly next to them, gawking too hard to ask her to move.

“Why?”

“I, um, I can’t. I just can’t.”

Ashbot sighed.

She had not left his side since the day she arrived at school. Partly because she was absorbing how Gideon walked, talked, and seemed to think, in order to better simulate a real teenager. Gideon had seen enough newly manufactured Ordinarias following his mom around the grocery store and asking inane questions to know that much.

He just wished Ashbot’s hair didn’t smell so good.

“So after school, are we, like, gonna go somewhere or something or whatever, yo?” she asked.

Ashbot’s language had been programmed with research adults had done on how teenagers spoke. It was bad.

“Ashbot.” He tried to sound kind, but firm. “Nobody at this school talks like that.”

She tilted her head, listening intently.

Then, guilelessly, she asked, “How do they talk?”

He thought about it.