Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(51)

“I’m so sorry!”

“It’s fine.”

“Ashley’s been crying in her room for like an hour.”

I’m taken aback by this. “What?”

“You really hurt her feelings, Scarlett.”

“I hurt her feelings?” I’m aghast.

Ashley’s been hurting my feelings for the past seven years. But everything feels different now. I’ve been a bully too, just in a different way. I guess good writing is like an X-Man power, a magic trick, and I abused it.

“What are you gonna do?” asks Avery.

An excellent question, considering the only real choice I have is to move to the People’s Republic of Totally Screwed. Gideon must be so weirded out by this, and nothing’s worse than freaking out the person you like; it’d be way less embarrassing to just be hated. A burst of fear crashes in on me, as if it’s coming from outside my own body, the first tidal wave of a panic attack.

“I have to go.”

I hang up on her.



Dawn’s car is idling in neutral in the desolate parking lot of the Melville stop when I get off the train at a little past two in the morning. As soon as she sees me, Dawn jumps out and slams the door, her North Face jacket hastily thrown over pajama pants, and starts screaming.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Wait, stop, I—”

“Your dad and Kira have been looking for you all night! I thought you were lying dead in some bar bathroom! How could you do this?”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, echoing Avery, but about something so much bigger that two words can’t begin to cover. The tears I held in in front of Dad and Kira at that awful book party finally start to fall and don’t stop.

Dawn is astounded, the anger melting off her face.

“What happened? Please tell me. You’re scaring me. Did somebody hurt you?”

This time she’s the one working the Gilmore Girls/Jeopardy! technique on me, trying her best to get me to open up so she can suck the pain out of me like it’s poison. But all I can do is cry harder.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I sob as she wraps me in a confused hug. “I’m sorry.”



Waking up for school on Monday feels like I’m taking doomed steps up a few rickety wooden stairs to a guillotine.

I always thought part of the reason I didn’t like school was that nobody knew what I was actually good at. Turns out, it’s the opposite. Now that I know at least three people read my stories who are sort of in my stories—and, oh God, if his reading level is above picture books, Mike Neckekis makes four—what needs to happen today is that I avoid them at all costs, even if it means cutting class. Which I do. Mr. Radford’s class is the first I bail on to hide in the library stacks instead.

The library remains a safe haven for approximately three minutes until I realize that Gideon is sitting at one of the computers with his arms crossed, watching me crouch behind the astrology section like a nervous rodent.

This is a nightmare.

But then I get a little indignant. He’s the one who’s been running hot and cold with me for months. He’s the one who flirts with me in private, then ignores me in public. At least I told the truth. I mean, I told the truth in a speculative fiction serial on the Internet, but I told the truth. How hard could it be to tell the truth to his face?

I tentatively slink out from behind astrology, wondering if my horoscope this week was “Pisces: Your World Will Implode,” and confront him.

“Hey,” I say.

His expression remains ice-cold.

“‘Hey’?” he repeats. “Really?”

“Well . . .” I scuff my sneaker against the linoleum, ashamed. “There’s not really a handbook for this.”

He looks lost. Angry and lost.

“I just don’t really know what to say, you know?”

Actually, I don’t know. He’s acting like I’ve been calling the shots this whole time and all he’s done is react to my insanity. I have a memory-flash of something Dawn said in a family-therapy session, right before my dad split—He’s calm but wrong, and I’m loud but right, but since he’s calm, it always seems like he’s right.

“Did you talk to Ashley? She’s really upset,” he says in the same placating voice.

“Why do you like her? You’re supposed to be with me,” I blurt out.

His eyes widen. All the kids at the computer cubicles put on very intent fake-not-listening faces, like they are way too engrossed in copy-pasting a Wikipedia article about feudalism to pay any attention to this ridiculous live-action telenovela we’re performing in the middle of the library.

“Are you kidding right now?” he asks with ice in his voice, raising his eyebrows.

“No! You’ve been—”

The librarian glares at me and raises a passive-aggressive two fingers. (When the faculty want us to quiet down, they have this infinitely irritating peace-sign gesture that means “quiet,” occasionally supplemented by the specific and immensely irritating phrase “Heads up, hands up.”)

I lower my voice incrementally. “You keep jerking me around. And I’m not just talking about the past couple of weeks. You’ve been trying to play both sides for a really long time, and I can’t just keep sitting around waiting for you to choose me, Gideon.”