Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(35)

“You’re dating a Miss Ordinaria because someone told you to. You’re hanging out with that human defect Jason Tous because someone told you to. When’s the last time you made a decision by yourself?”

He was speechless.

“Exactly!” she yelled at him, emotion welling up in her eyes. Then she squashed it, and her tone was businesslike again. “If you came out as anti-Ordinaria, it would be huge! It would be, maybe, one of the only ways to stop this before it gets totally out of control.”

“I don’t get any of this. Just tell me, what don’t I remember?”

She looked close to tears, which didn’t make him feel that removed guilt he usually did when a girl cried. This time, he felt like he was close to tears.

“I’m sorry; I just don’t remember!”

With wild eyes, she reached into her purse and pulled out a long screwdriver.

“You don’t remember this?” she asked, her voice rising.

She raised her arm up as far as she could and slammed the screwdriver into her thigh.

Even before it came down, this thought popped into his head: The screwdriver hits metal.

As soon as that came back to him, with a click that felt like a brief migraine, he remembered everything. How they were drawn together as kids and didn’t really know why. They’d spend every day together.

“You’re Scarlett, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

He remembered when she’d told him, crying, that her mom had simply stopped blinking. She said in that moment, the truth just occurred to her, even though she’d sort of known it all along. It was too crazy to believe. Gideon said maybe her mom had had a stroke. It sounded serious; her mom needed to go to the hospital.

She’d shaken her head slowly, looking around the room, eerily calm, then reached into his parents’ junk drawer. Grabbed a screwdriver. Gideon had jumped up to stop her, but before he could she jammed it, hard, into her own leg.

The screwdriver hit metal.

They stood there, staring at each other.

“That’s not possible. No.”

“Wouldn’t it make sense if we were drawn together for a reason?” she had asked. She told him—insisted, actually—to sneak a look into his parents’ room late at night. Maybe it won’t be true, she said, but either way, you have to know, don’t you?

So that night at three A.M., he’d crept down the silent, echoing hall to the master bedroom to find out the truth. He’d cracked the door open, which thankfully didn’t creak or moan—nothing in his house made noise—and peered in. His father was sound asleep in the king bed. His mother was standing up against the wall, her head tilted slightly down, shut off for the night to reactivate in the morning.

It was all coming back, even the memory wiping—shortly after he’d walked into their bedroom, his father had taken him to the family doctor, and then it all went blurry, his past reinvented.

Gideon shook his head vehemently.

“No. That’s not possible. No way.”

He heard himself echoing exactly what he’d said before. And he’d been wrong. She looked pained to make him so upset, but her voice was firm.

This was the reason rental Ordinarias were always sent across the country from renter to renter: Some visceral memory, like a moment, or even a sound, could bring it all back. Gideon’s father had been very, very careful about it in business—but when it came to his own son, not careful enough.

“I’m half-Ordinaria,” she said.

He closed his eyes.

She finished: “And so are you.”

“How is that even possible?” he yelled.

“Brief, unfortunate flirtation with installing a reproductive system in the first-gen models. Only a handful of those models exist. And there are only two of us half-Ordinaria that I know of. We’re freaks.”

He hung his head, devastated. For a minute they just sat there, him processing and her waiting; the only noise was the rush of cars wetly speeding past them down the damp road.

Finally he said, “I’m sorry I hung out with those guys.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry you did too.”

“What can I do to make it up to you?”

She thought about it. Then she said, softly: “Don’t forget again and leave me alone here.”

Cerebrally, Gideon knew he should be wary of this girl who’d seemingly come out of nowhere. But in his heart, he knew that they were allies and needed each other to survive. At least for now.

He nodded, grave. “I promise.”

They were both silent for a while.

“So then,” he said, “you’ve just had that screwdriver in your purse for, like, years?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

He laughed a little. “That’s weird.”

She slowly turned to look at him, incredulous.

“That’s weird?”

“I see your point.”

Then they just sat there on the curb, all the shared history back, feeling as comfortable with each other as they’d felt uncomfortable with each other twenty minutes before, staring out at the highway that seemed to go nowhere.

“I hate it here,” he whispered.

“Me too.”

“You know, we don’t actually have to do anything about this. I can pretend I still don’t remember. Maybe I don’t want to choose to be different.”