Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(32)

“Oh. That sucks.”

“She snorted too much Molly.”

“I don’t think you snort Molly.”

“Well, she snorted too much something.”

“Who even snorts things anymore? Like, just take it with water. Who are you, Bret Easton Ellis?”

“Scarlett, she died,” snaps Ruth very uncharacteristically. “Everything is a joke to you.” It startles me enough to shut me right up. I scrape egg in silence for a minute. She sighs and rubs her temples with two fingers each, nails painted bright green. She wears zero makeup but lives for gel manicures—one of the zillion Ruth contradictions I’m obsessed with.

“Sorry. All I’m trying to say is . . . you know. Live in the moment. Get a little nuts. Life is short.”

I shrug. “To be honest, it kind of feels like my life hasn’t started yet.”

“Kiddo,” Ruth says, “your life started the minute you put pen to paper.”

I roll my eyes. But maybe she’s right. She is seven thousand years old.



After I’ve returned home and washed the egg off my person, Dawn and I sit on the sofa and devour a large half-mushroom pie. Every local takeout guy is more or less a member of our extended family at this point. On TV, some Real Housewives or another flickers on mute.

“I think next week we should have dinner with Brian,” she says mildly, blotting her second slice with her French-manicured hand.

“Which one is that? Bald or Balder?”

She eyeballs me. “Brian. Brian. The only guy I’ve been dating for the last two weeks.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

She props her arm on the back of the couch, leaning in toward me, a worry line creasing her forehead.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Fine,” I mumble.

She brightens. “Guy trouble?”

“No! Guys aren’t the only thing girls are sad about. Jesus.” (I’m mostly irritated that she’s right.) “I was just asking.” She sounds hurt, and I feel a twinge of guilt.

My cell phone rings. I beam.

“Dad!” I say, holding up the phone and already hopping off the chair. She nods blankly, the usual reaction, and I walk away from the kitchen table into my room. I shut the door, intentionally fueling her paranoid—and mostly inaccurate—suspicion that all I do when I’m on the phone with him is complain about her. I sometimes do, but he never does. Honestly, Dawn worries that he talks tons of shit on her to me only because she talks tons of shit on him to me.

I slide my thumb over the phone to accept the call. “Hi!”

“Hey, Scarlett!” Just hearing his familiar, comforting voice is calming, especially when he says, “How ya holding up?”

I don’t even have to ask what he means by that: He knows the Lycanthrope cancellation broke my heart. If you want humor and understanding, you go to Dad. If you want to determine if a Louis Vuitton bag you bought on eBay is real or not, you go to Dawn.

“Other than my abject devastation, I’m okay.” I sigh.

“I know,” he says warmly. “Hang in there.”

“I’m trying.”

“I just keep thinking how unfair it is that it never won an Emmy,” he says, sounding genuinely incredulous. “Just because it’s not some hour-long HBO miniseries. Those pretentious idiots.”

“Yeah, that’s what a lot of the fandom has been saying. Indignation Central over there.”

He laughs quietly. “What other responses have there been?”

I shrug. “Most people are moving on. I think mostly the migration is to that CW show Imaginary Detectives.”

“And you?”

“I’m sticking around.”

“Loyal.”

“To a fault.” I sigh, fake-dramatically.

“Have you started my present yet?” he asks.

“Oh, you mean that doorstop full of papers?”

Dad sent me some books—The Corrections and Infinite Jest—for my birthday.

“I haven’t gotten around to it,” I admit, “but I will really soon, I promise.”

I wonder if I should tell Dad about the Gideon situation. We don’t usually talk about guy stuff outside the weird metaphorical father/daughter talks based on TV shows and novels we’ve read, but it’s still bothering me a lot, and maybe he has advice.

“So, Dad, I—”

“I’ve got some news!” Dad cuts me off, then makes a fuzzy noise that I realize is a deep breath.

“Oh. Bad or good?”

“Good.” He clears his throat. “Great, actually.”

“John St. Clair’s wife actually had a hysterical pregnancy, and the show will be back on next season?” I ask hopefully.

“My book launch party is a couple of weeks from now. Friday, the eighteenth.”

I shriek with joy.

“Jesus. Scarlett, my ears.”

“Oh my God! Are you serious? Dad, that’s awesome! God, it’s been years!”

“That’s the funny thing. I mean, I wrote it years ago, obviously. In fact, when I was still married to your mother. Ha-ha!” He laughs nervously. “Although Kira helped me quite a bit with the last revision.”