Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(38)

“What if it’s bad? Like, what if we have nothing to talk about, or dancing is awkward, or he tries to have sex with me?”

“Is he gonna?” I ask, startled.

“I have no idea! That’s the point!”

Ashley dips backward through the doorway, grabbing the frame for support, and chirps, “You tell him I said you can’t.”

“But maybe I want to!”

Ashley gets an odd look on her face and says, “I had sex for the first time after a school dance when I ‘maybe’ wanted to, and it was awful.”

Ave and I both look at her, taken aback. She shrugs, sort of sadly. The moment ends when Avery’s phone chimes.

“Oh, it’s him again.”

She opens the text and reads it: “Where letter-R letter-U.”

I roll my eyes. “Right out of Jane Austen.”

“Please come, Scar. I’ll owe you. I’ll watch a whole season of Lycanthrope with you. I’ll do your take-home math tests.”

“You already do that.”

She stops pleading and looks a little indignant. “Yeah. I do. So actually, you owe me.”

I think of what Loup said about writing myself brave. Its accuracy is irritating. By staying inside and fantasizing instead of actually going out and doing something normal teenagers do, I accidentally Mary Sue’d myself to the first degree in front of my friends, writers that I respect. It’s so humiliating. And it stops now.

“Okay,” I say.

“Really?!” she squeals, jumping up and down.

“Yes.”

Avery scoops up the makeup bag and tosses it to Ashley, who semi-begrudgingly catches it and comes back inside, shutting the door behind her.

“Your turn!”





Chapter 15


MY DAD HAS THIS EXPRESSION: IF YOU’RE GONNA BE A BEAR, be a grizzly bear. So I blew out my hair and borrowed an outfit from Dawn, and now I’m a grizzly bear in a short, tight red bandage dress that rides obscenely up my thighs when I get in the back of Ashley’s car. I’d never admit it, but this dress makes me feel weirdly powerful and Kardashian-esque. It figures that I’d have to channel a totally different person in order to work up the nerve to go to this dance.

We pull into the class parking lot, and Ave and I both sort of take a second to regroup. Ashley reapplies her lipstick in the rearview mirror, visibly impatient to get inside already. Avery shakes her head in awe.

“I can’t believe your boobs right now,” she says.

“It’s Dawn’s bra.”

In the interior rearview mirror, Ashley’s green eyes creep predatorily over to me, a spider crawling toward a fly.

“I didn’t know Victoria’s Secret had good clearance prices!”

She shuts off the car.



A touching amount of time and effort has been spent making the gym look Halloween-y. Big black crepe paper covers the walls, and the backboards and basketball hoops are draped with cobwebs. I immediately zero in on Gideon—and so does Ashley, darting over in her tight black dress to back him (with him quite willing) into a corner. I watch them and hate myself for feeling like I’m at that first free fall on a roller coaster and my stomach has just dropped out of my body. He glances at me once, then again in a flickering up-and-down glance. Actually, I am either insane or I feel a lot of eyes on me.

“Oh my God, Scarlett, people are staring at you,” says Avery.

I focus on the floor, yanking the bottom of my dress down.

Jason Tous saunters by with his little dude-cadre, reeking of Abercrombie Fierce. We glare at each other. I wonder whether he was even a little bit affected by what I said to him outside Ruth’s house. It’s hard to tell, since his expression is consistently at some unreadable early point on the Darwinian evolution chart.

Mike Neckekis appears from the refreshments table with two Solo cups of punch. He’s wearing a nice gingham shirt and looks higher on the human-evolution chart than usual. He smiles at Avery and hands her a glass.

“Hey! You look really nice.”

“You too,” she says, seeming to relax a little, then lowers her voice: “Tell me this is alcoholic.”

“Maybe a little,” he says, and she makes a “score!” sign with her fist. He turns apologetically to me. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get one for you. Wait a second.” He disappears again to get a punch for me and returns with one. I sip and say thanks.

“So, like, you want to dance or something?” he asks Avery. She nods hesitantly and looks at me.

“Yeah, go! I mean, if nobody dances to the Black Eyed Peas, do they even exist? Just food for thought.”

She laughs. “Okay. But listen, please don’t feel weird that you came; you’ll have fun. And you seriously look amazing. Everybody’s staring at you.”

I roll my eyes.

“I’ll be back in a little bit.”



The bleachers are reminiscent of Diane Arbus, smattered with a handful of homely Girl Geniuses and a couple of weird guys with pube-y facial hair who haven’t had a growth spurt yet. As soon as I sit down way up on the highest bench, I feel a lot more like myself, in my natural habitat, but in keeping with today’s little forum trauma, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.