Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(27)

“I wasn’t gonna go, but . . . if you think that would be fun, then sure, why not,” she says casually. Seriously, does everybody know how to fake unenthusiasm but me?

Mike actually does sigh this time, I think, of relief. “Cool. Okay. I got your number from Ashley.”

Our entire table simultaneously looks over at Ashley, who’s already been glaring at us with comical menace, like an owl antagonist in a children’s movie about mice.

“So, I’ll text you my number, and, like, then we can have each other’s . . . numbers? So we can text?”

Avery nods, smiles. “Sounds good.”

As soon as he walks away, I nearly blow a gasket finally letting my derision fly. “Mike f*cking Neckekis?!”

“Chill out.” Avery lets out a breathless laugh and drops her head in her hands. I watch her shoulders shaking with laughter. But it’s not the derisive kind I expected. It’s more like “just got off a roller coaster” exhilaration.

I’m wounded. She’s been holding out on me.

“And you never told me abou—who’s the guy in your math class at Princeton?” Everybody else at our table is poker-faced because they are all basically feral brains without bodies.

“We’re auditing,” Ave says, pulling a lip balm out of her book bag’s front pocket and pouting to nonchalantly apply it. Two boys say hi to her, and suddenly she’s Lana Del Rey. “Technically none of us are in our math class at Princeton.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“Yes, he tested out of the math classes. Same as me.”

“Well, that makes a little more sense, doesn’t it?”

Ave looks pointedly at me. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? That means he’s smart, and probably more right for you than Mike Neckekis, who is Comic Sans in human form.”

She shrugs. “We obviously agree on some stuff.”

“Oh, so someone jerks you off intellectually, and now you’re into him? What are you, a guy now?”

The Girl Geniuses’ eyes dart back and forth between us, the two alphas of the table, like they’re watching a tennis match.

Ave slowly rolls her head toward me with wide, infuriated eyes, a sassy Linda Blair Exorcist move she does when I’ve really pissed her off.

“He’s nice, Scar.”

I almost scream. Nice? Nice is staying in Melville and planning a low-budget indoor wedding at the Freehold Gardens Mall Event Center to some guy from high school who works at Target. None of which I say out loud because her head would spin a complete 360 degrees, and I don’t want to lose the only real friend I have in my age bracket.

“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m being a dick.”

Avery softens a little, then, looking at my contrite face, melts the rest of the way. “It’s okay.” Then she smiles again, a smile I rarely see. “I have no idea what to wear. What do girls wear to this stuff?”

“Ask Ashley if she has any Taylor Swift crop-top formal-gown castoffs you can borrow,” I joke. (This is the precise ludicrous taffeta bullshit Ashley wore to junior prom.) And just like that, we’re friends again. That’s how we fight—intense and mean, and then it’s over in the blink of an eye. Maybe that’s how sisters are.

But one tectonic plate of our friendship has destructively scraped up against another. Like Ave’s finally been taken by the other team of Red Rover, and now I’m facing off against the whole senior class, their normal, optimistic, sexually active arms linked tight.

Sometimes my entire high school experience feels like being the only one who already knows the end of a movie, when everyone else you’re going with is so excited to see how the movie will end. Spoiler alert: a 20 percent discount at Target.





Chapter 11


AS SOON AS I’M HOME FROM SCHOOL, BARELY IN THE DOOR, I throw my laptop on the nearest possible flat surface (this time, the side table) and check the Lycanthrope tabs. Days after I posted the second story, the number of readers—and Gidbot shippers—is growing.

I can’t decide if I’m flattered or deeply irritated.

I scroll through the gushing and hashtags and cries of “YAAAAAS” and roll my eyes.

The problem is that if I smash Ashbot with a crowbar, everyone will yell at me and only ship the couple more. And . . . to be honest, I’ll be sad too. I like her; she came out differently than I expected. I never knew original(-ish) characters could be sneaky like that.

I guess the only thing I can do is create a diversion. . . .

The Ordinaria

Part 3

Submitted by Scarface_Epstein

Creating Miss Ordinaria was a little bit like creating a women’s magazine. A ton of work was done, undone, and done again, and everything was based on endless studies and surveys and data, but somehow it always ends up as the lowest common denominator. Something that looks like no work was put into it at all.

But before the prototype went through the wringer and came out as the robot-girl equivalent of a beach read, one of the many studies involved handpicking a few teenage girls who embodied certain qualities that had rated well. The physical stuff was easy—testable. But building an appealing personality from scratch is way more subjective. So when they picked the girls, looks weren’t an issue. Maybe they didn’t have the glossy hair, the perfect figure, or the indiscriminating sexual freedom, but they had other skills: violin playing, perfect pitch, 4.0 GPA, years of grooming for the nationals in figure skating, and so on.