Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(30)
By around ten I’m lying in bed and lulling myself to sleep chatting with Were-Heads about random stuff, because that’s the thrilling life I lead.
I’m half-asleep when I turn my head toward the window and see some movement across the highway, in front of Ruth’s place. I sit up and pull my curtain aside to see four small, dark figures standing—posturing, really—one of them holding a nearly empty squarish bottle by its long neck, glinting in the porch light. Their steps, somehow, are barely making any noise.
Simultaneously two rolls of toilet paper soar in an arc against the dark sky toward Ruth’s roof, and then comes the splat of an egg. I realize they’re in the garden, their Sperrys mashing and ruining Ruth’s flowers. That’s why their sneakers are padding silently on the ground. Ruth is almost certainly sound asleep by now; she has been going to bed earlier and earlier. If this wakes her up, she’s sure to be wrecked tomorrow.
Suddenly I’m so angry I can hardly feel my body, other than my face getting so hot it feels like my head might explode. My body, meanwhile, is jumping out of bed, yanking on Dawn’s Uggs by the front door and leaving it wide open behind me as I fly down the stairs and march toward them with a flashlight. I barely check for cars before I’m tearing across the highway.
“Hey!”
Jason Tous stands there casually, like he’s waiting for a bus, but the other three—who I can’t make out—take off, winding around Ruth’s house and running into the pitch-black woods that crawl almost all the way up to her side door. I take off after them. We are all quickly swallowed up by the darkness and the quiet, every branch snapping under our shoes sounding like gunshots.
“Yo!” I shout.
One of the guys drops an empty bottle in his haste, and I snag it, barely slowing down. Jack Daniels—of course, patron saint of boys who try too hard to be Men. I hurl the bottle at the slowest boy as hard as I can, and it glances off his shoulder blade with the whack of glass on bone.
“Fuck!” he yelps, stopping to crouch and massage his shoulder. One of the other two keeps running, but one slows to a stop, looking back to see if the injured one is okay. I shine my flashlight in that guy’s face and actually gasp—as if I am on a soap opera and just caught my estranged evil twin making out with my husband—because it’s Gideon. I mean, of course it is. I’m surprised, and not surprised, and that combination takes my voice away for a few seconds, but fortunately I get my words back.
“Seriously?” My voice verges on shrieking. The injured boy—it’s Dylan Dinerstein—is still rubbing his shoulder and looking sullen, but I’m addressing Gideon. “What’s wrong with you?”
He shakes his head minutely, and I think I see a flicker of something in his face—guilt maybe—but he says nothing.
“That’s the problem with you *s,” I snap. “You have nothing to say. So you pick on people who do.”
I can’t look at Gideon anymore—with him it’s way too complicated. But the other guys? They’re anything but. The words fly off my tongue before they’re filtered by my brain.
“Know what? I hope you get monster boners when you wreck an old lady’s house, or when you make Leslie Barnes feel like shit for raising her hand. In ten years, Leslie Barnes will be running a million-dollar company—but you’ll still be here, still doing this, for the rest of your life. She won’t even come back for reunions. And neither will I, bitches.”
From behind me, Jason walks into my line of vision, keeping his head down. It seems like I may have struck a chord, but I’m too high on adrenaline to really know. He gestures to the other guys, and they stalk out of the woods in the direction of a stretch of main road where kids always park their cars when they come to drink.
I trudge the opposite way, resisting every temptation to look back at Gideon, and end up at the edge of Ruth’s wrecked garden, surveying the damage. A line has been crossed. He’s just not the same person anymore, right? He wears their dumb clothes and teases their weak targets. Still, the same little hopeful recorded message plays over and over in my head: Maybe the short, chubby comedy nerd is still in there somewhere! At what point do you start writing off the only person who you thought really got you?
I hear the shutter door bounce twice, and before I can warn her, Ruth pops out, wide-eyed, in an uncharacteristically feminine kimono with her hair in a scrunchie high on her head.
“Are you okay?” I ask Ruth.
“I’m fine. I was sleeping.” She surveys her garden.
“Do you want me to . . .” I helplessly sort of move my hands around in a way that feels appropriately sympathetic. She shakes her head.
“We can’t do anything about it tonight. Besides, it’s easy to grow them back.”
Still, I’m mad on her behalf. “Ugh, those guys are—”
“Those aren’t guys; they’re kids. Please, go to bed. You can help me take care of it tomorrow if you want. This is way too much late-night excitement for someone past menopause.”
She sighs, a brief cloud passing over her usual laissez-faire attitude.
Even if she’d never admit it, I know how much she loves looking at her garden.
Back in bed but wide-awake, I wonder if I even know Gideon, or know anyone really. Is this the moment I’m supposed to realize Gideon’s actually a shitty person who just happens to have excellent taste in comedy? Or is this the moment I realize I’m too judgmental and living in my own weird cerebral universe and have unrealistic standards for boys, or just for life?