Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(22)

It started with the douche-bags. Jason Tous, one particularly 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.