Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(49)

One of the flannels is smirking at me. I don’t like the way they’re looking at me. They’re not leering—I’d almost prefer that. They just look smug.

“So what are you, seventeen?” asks Flannel B.

“Sixteen,” I say.

“God, I can’t imagine comprehending Infinite Jest at that age,” says Flannel A, shaking his head. The other two flannels nod, and they all look slightly envious, like, Yeah, totally, what an awesome thing to be a super-worshipped brilliant literary guy, he was so lucky other than the horrific mental illness that tortured him to death.

“You're a writer too, I heard,” Flannel B says.

“Yeah.”

“Fiction?”

“Fanfiction.”

Flannel A chuckles. Flannel B nudges him, like, She’s serious.

“About what?”

“Lycanthrope High.”

“Isn’t that that werewolf show?”

I bristle.

Dad glances over, senses some kind of tension, and comes back.

“Right now she’s reading The Corrections,” Dad says and puts a proud hand on my shoulder.

“I saw Franzen speak last year. He was brilliant,” says Flannel B. “How are you liking the book?”

“It’s bullshit,” I snap. “Are you aware that there’s a line, an actual line in that book, that goes: ‘At thirty-two, Denise was still beautiful’? At thirty-two. Denise. Was still beautiful.”

There is a moment of reproachful silence with jazz under it, as if I’d just crapped on the floor and only Duke Ellington did not seem to mind.

“And it’s not just Franzen! I tried to read Infinite Jest, but I had to stop on page 167 when Orin is screwing that single mom because he does that, because that’s indicative of how interesting and tortured and f*cked up he is? And it says in the paragraph—do you remember this?—that after they had sex, he traced an infinity sign on her back, and, to paraphrase, that she was so stupid that she thought it was an eight.”

“I don’t know if it says—”

“This woman is a single mom, holding down some awful job so she can feed her kid, and being judged for dating when she has the time, and just doing the best she can . . .” I get a little choked up. I can tell by Dad’s face he just figured out why I’m upset.

“—and she sleeps with a guy who thinks he’s smarter than her. And she knows that. Because she’s not stupid, even though he thinks she is, or even if everybody thinks she is. And he traced what could be an eight or an infinity sign on her back after they had sex. Of course she wouldn’t think it was an infinity sign. Because that would be romantic. It makes no sense that some * who doesn’t respect you would do that. She’s not stupid.”

I’m being too loud. People are looking over at us, but I don’t care. I don’t want to make a scene, I’m just a little tipsy and a lot sad and I just want to ruin everything that everyone in this room holds sacred.

Flannel C, the oldest, says gently but authoritatively, “Orin’s not supposed to be a nice char—”

“It’s not Orin saying he thinks she’s stupid, it’s the God voice saying she’s stupid. It’s not the character, it’s the writer. I understand the difference between omniscient narration and a close third. That’s your problem, you assume everyone else is stupid, but they’re not!”

Now everybody’s actively staring at me. Dad smiles briskly at onlookers, trying to pull me aside.

“Scarlett, calm down.” He looks pained, like he’s the prom queen and I’m dumping a bucket of blood on him. He gives the Flannels a look and tries to take me aside into a quiet corner, shushing me. “This is why I wanted to talk to you—”

“Leave me alone,” I yell, backing away, knocking over a pile of his display copies. A fierce burning behind my eyes threatens to spill out any second. I can’t stand it in here for another minute, and I stumble out into the street without my coat, my whole body tingling all over with panic, trying to breathe through the sudden tunnel vision, feeling like I might throw up.



I am waiting for xLoupxGaroux to come get me, in a very public Starbucks where I most certainly can’t get chopped into tiny pieces and hidden under his floorboards. Luckily, he was on Gchat when I logged in from my phone and put out an SOS call. It took me a while to persuade him to meet me. He kept saying he didn’t think it was a good idea. But finally he relented.

“Scarface?”

I look up, shocked by the voice. An attractive, bigger, thirtysomething woman in a cute cardigan is standing over me, a preppy-ish trench coat folded over her arm.

“Umm, hi,” she says.

I feel like I may have stumbled into an alternate universe. “What?”

“You’re Scarface, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Real name?”

“Scarlett. You?”

“Maura.” She breaks into a really lovely smile. “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”

We hug.

“Wow, I am just—I don’t know what I was expecting, but . . .”

Maura nods, understanding. “You assumed I was a gay man.”

“Kind of. Yeah.”

“There’s a really large contingency of lady slash fans, y’know.”