Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(21)

He nods.

“How come you didn’t want to talk to me about it the other day?” I ask.

“I didn’t not want to; you just caught me off guard. I mean, we haven’t talked in years. . . .”

I can feel the conversation heading south, but I can’t stop myself. “Weird. Because I saw someone else come up to you right after that, and I don’t think she’s spoken to you ever, and you seemed pretty okay with it.”

He looks freaked out. “What are you talking about?”

From down the hall, a pair of padded boobs turns toward us and actually seems to aim, like they’re preparing to fire stealth missiles. The girls around her, dressed almost identically with slight variations, are either staring at me or at their phones.

Ashley says something to Natalia, smirking, and walks toward us. I’m suddenly conscious of what I’m wearing: a T-shirt, baggy jeans, a headband I borrowed from Dawn’s Blair Waldorf–inspired headpiece collection hastily pushed over my two-day-unwashed hair.

When Ashley draws close enough, she leaps into Gideon’s arms and curls up. She is like the opposite of those animals who puff up to scare away predators; she shrinks herself into something as delicate and girly and palatable as possible to snag her prey. My stomach starts to burn. Crushes are so stupidly physical sometimes, like colds.

“Hiiii-yyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeee,” she croaks, torturing out the salutation into seven million syllables, then slides down him like a pole and looks at me. “Hey, Divider!”

“Hi.”

She turns to Gideon. “Did I ever tell you this? Sophomore year I was driving to a party, and I saw Scarlett on Route 9 by the Walmart, dancing on the divider.”

(This is what actually happened: Dawn called me crying after some guy dumped her in the parking lot of Stop-n-Fresh. I had to take the public bus from the stop on our street to that strip mall that lets out on the highway, and then was running—not dancing—down the divider toward the parking lot to physically drag her away from a lonely pink-drink bender at a shitty bar. Ashley was making an unfortunately timed turn into the parking lot when she saw me “dancing.” The good news is that I now know the stories behind every tattoo inked on some dude named “McG.”)

“I wasn’t dancing,” I say, for the twentieth time, bracing myself as I feel her slowly pulling the guillotine up.

“Oh, hey!” Her sea-green eyes sparkle maliciously. “Can you tell your mom she did such a good job cleaning our bathroom?”

My head rolls down the hall.

She laughs, tinkly like a fairy’s cough. “Sorry, I’m so random, it’s just that we’ve had so many housekeepers, but she’s really above average. She even speaks English!”

“It’s true!” I say.

“Maybe the hotel staff in Cabo can pick up some tips from her when we’re there!”

I’m confused. “In . . . Cabo?”

“Yeah, she better have her bag packed! She—” Her face drops. “Oh my God, I’m sooooo sorry. My mom organizes this trip to Cabo every year for people who live in the Manor and have kids in Drama Club . . . but you guys don’t live in the Manor, do you?”

“Sure don’t!”

Melville Manor is not as rich as it sounds, but Dawn would call it comfortable, which is her euphemism for “richer than us.” Almost all the popular girls at school live there, two minutes apart, and throw house parties every weekend. Every year since 2012, when Megan Mullen died in a car accident biking home from one of those parties, local cops have staged a graphic bike-car accident on the football field for us all to internalize. Last year, Natalia Zacoum lay on the five-yard line in front of a Ford Taurus, half-on and half-off a Schwinn, smeared with fake blood. All the popular girls cried. Jessicarose Fallon passed out. It was hilarious.

“Sorry, ugh, I’m sooooo awkward,” she says, leaning casually against Gideon’s shoulder as if she is too top-heavy to support herself on her own, and asks him, “Are you going to the Halloween dance?”

He shrugs.

“I was on the decorations committee. So much drama, I can’t even.” (From overhearing snippets of conversation since freshman year, it seems that Ashley has a chronic condition of not being able to even.)

He glances down at her, then looks away and rolls his eyes in sort of a fond way, with an enigmatic little laugh. She links her arm through his and starts pulling him away from me like a determined little tugboat wearing Tory Burch flats. He turns back, once, and points at me.

“Hey. Don’t forget. Sam Kieth.”

“I wo—”

“You’re such a dork,” Ashley tells him sweetly, stepping on my words.

“You’re a dork,” he teases her back, their flirting irritatingly effortless. They start walking away, linking up with a bunch of other popular kids, Gideon looking irritatingly at home with them.

But then he turns around and looks back at me one more time.





Chapter 8


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.