Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (20 page)

I LOOK DOWN AT THE SMALL CLUSTER OF FOLD-OUT CHAIRS
below me, where Ruth’s family and a couple of her friends sit. From the front row, Dawn gives me an encouraging nod.

I take a deep breath.

“Okay, so the problem is, it’s impossible to write a eulogy because nobody is really honest about who they’re writing it for. Theoretically, it’s supposed to be for the person who passed away, right? You talk to them in heaven—or, if you’re agnostic, you imagine them sitting in the front row with popcorn and Mike and Ikes or something—and tell them how much they enriched your life, how kind and wonderful they were, what a joy to be around. But at their core, eulogies are selfish. They’re not for the dead person; they’re really for the rest of us, so we can say goodbye the way we would have if we’d seen it coming.

“Which is especially tough in this case because one of so
many things that made Ruth special is that she wouldn’t want me to give myself that pass, to turn her into a saintly little old lady whose only interests were fresh Toll House cookies and lumbar back pillows. I think I understand now why people do that: because the pain is less acute if you blur out the idiosyncrasies and specifics of this person you loved and make it more like a generic grief template, like you’re saying goodbye to some neutral, safe stranger made out of geriatric Mad Libs.

“The word
eulogy
comes from a combination of the Greek words for praise and elegy. Ruth would call bullshit on both. She’d probably ask for a Viking funeral instead. You know, that kind where you put the body in a canoe and push it into the lake and set it on fire. And she’d want it to scare the crap out of the Melville Prep boys’ crew team in the next boat.

“In fact, though, in Judaism, it’s sinful to eulogize the dead with attributes they didn’t possess. It’s considered mocking them. I’m Jewish, so I’m really not allowed to bullshit about her unless I want to be infested with locusts or become a pillar of salt or whatever. So here’s the no-BS truth. Ruth was old, and weird, and sometimes super-cranky, and not a lot of people in the neighborhood understood her. Honestly, not a lot of people close to her did, either. I sometimes didn’t, for sure. She had a way of knocking people off balance, and if you didn’t fall down like most other people, if you rode the wave and kept standing, you were in forever. If you didn’t fit in anywhere else, it’s almost like she had a you-shaped hole just waiting.

“She was a lot of things to a lot of people who meant more
to her than I did. Before I met her, she was a rebellious daughter and a brave friend. If Ruth’s life were a book, I only read the last chapter, except it was upside down and in Esperanto. And she seemed like she was losing it, sometimes. Last year she came over to my house at, like, eight
A.M.
, knocked on my door, and told me, “I’m going to talk to the president.” It was her way of trying to tell me that everything would be okay, and I shouldn’t worry. She was handling it. But to just tell me that, plainly, like everybody else was telling kids—that everything would be okay—felt like the lie to her. And if she had chosen you as a person in her life, she knew you’d see through it too.

“That was another one of the amazing things about Ruth: She
never
underestimated anybody around her, even when it would be so easy to. And when you’re as smart as she was, that’s a really incredible, rare way to be.

“It’s a little devastating to think about this now—
devastating
is a melodramatic word, I know; I tried a bunch of other ones:
sad
,
depressing
,
disconcerting
, but none of them felt as right—because I wrote off so much of what she said when she was still here without really listening to her, when the whole time she was really telling me everything. She just refused to do it in the typical way. She knew, or at least hoped, everybody she knew was better than that. And we were. But some of us probably didn’t know it until now. This isn’t fair of me, but I’m mad at her. She was supposed to sit in the waiting room and feel bad for herself and let the rest of us have a proper goodbye. But just because she knew she was about to get called into her
appointment, she wasn’t about to waste the years she had left. If she didn’t, nobody should. And yet, here we are. Right? Using our valuable time just to sit in the waiting room and complain about how bored we are.

“This is the part that she would hate, and I know she’d hate it because during our first-ever conversation, she told me that she didn’t want to be thought of as some wise old person, only still alive to teach us all valuable lessons. But maybe the most valuable thing Ruth taught me is the importance of trying to understand people who are different from you, even though it’s so much harder than writing them off, because it might make you admit something to yourself that’s painful. Sometimes you won’t be able to understand, and that’s okay. It’s the trying, and realizing the importance of trying, that makes a person really special.”

I finish reading, my paper blowing a little in the wind at its well-worn crease. To my surprise, almost everybody is in tears, including some of Ruth’s family that I’ve never met and Dawn. Even Avery looks a little tearful.

I flinch when I see my dad in the very last row, sitting straight up like he knows he’s in trouble and doesn’t want to make it worse. As I climb down from the podium, it’s over. Everyone disperses. I stay to help fold and stack the chairs.

Dad jumps in front of me as I carry some chairs to a van, saying, “Scarlett, I know you’re furious with me, and I completely understand why.”

I say nothing.

“I was just . . . I was a different person. I was really unhappy. So was your mother. And it just happened. I swear I tried to take those lines out, but the editors insisted I leave them in, keep everything as pure and raw as the original manuscript was at the time.”

Puuuuuuke.

“I really . . . I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Please, you need to forgive me. I’m devastated.”

There are a lot of things I could say to him. Like: Yeah, you were devastated when you got a book deal. You were devastated when it got optioned by a major movie studio. And you were
really
devastated in that online magazine profile that included glossy photos of your apartment and your new wife and daughter, in which I was not mentioned once. But if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that life is short.

“You’re not a good writer,” I say and then walk away.

In the car on the ride home, I feel like a raw nerve. Once the floodgate opens, it turns out it’s hard to shut it off. It’s begun to rain. Dawn keeps looking at me nervously, like she has for the last few days, checking to see that I haven’t disappeared or died or something.

“I really hope this doesn’t ruin your relationship with your dad,” she says tentatively.

“
Wha
—give me six months and maybe a frontal lobotomy, then tell me that.”

She nods. We drive in silence, and I flip the radio on. “Fire and Rain,” James Taylor, in case I wasn’t already in the mood to weep.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“I asked Dad once, but it occurred to me that I never asked you. . . . Why did you marry him?”

She says nothing and keeps driving, for a second making me think she didn’t hear me.

“He was different than other men I’d dated.” She sighs. “Smart. It made me feel special that he picked me.”

I feel my heart break more, if possible.

“You didn’t need Dad to make you special,” I whisper.

She shrugs. “I was working all the time, just so we had money, and I mean
any
money at all, and I guess I couldn’t really understand why he couldn’t go out and get a job too, just to help me, instead of sitting in there writing every day. But I never said anything, you know? I’d just come home in a really bad mood, and I was angry a lot.

“And the truth is—I’m not just saying this to make you feel bad, because I really don’t want you to—when you got older, it was hard because you two were so much alike. You could talk about books, and you had the same crazy imagination and even talk in a similar way, and I just . . . couldn’t keep up. I didn’t even have the energy to, if I could. I guess it felt sometimes like he was always the good one. And I was always the bad one.”

We just drive for a minute, letting it hang there. What can you say that’ll make up for years? Nothing adequate.

I just mumble: “It’s not like that. I can see now, I was really little, and I was just, I was dumb. I didn’t realize.”

She nods and says quietly, “I know.”

We sit there for a minute, and she says, “He called to explain about the book.”

“How could he possibly explain that?”

“I understood. He was mad at me when he wrote that, Scarlett. I was mad at him too, obviously. It wasn’t a good situation.”

“And you just said it was okay?
Is
it okay?”

“That’s not an easy question to answer, really.” She keeps her eyes steady on the road. “I mean, yeah, it’s fine. I guess there’s a lot I have to worry about that’s more important than some character based on me ten years ago in a book I won’t read. I’m much more upset that he’d do that to you.”

I stare out the window.

“You’re wrong, though,” I say. “I’m more like you than like him.”

She shakes her head.

“I am! I work really, really hard. Not at school, but at the stuff I like to do. My eyes are gray like yours. Our voices sound exactly the same on the phone too. Even people we’re really good friends with can’t tell the difference.”

My voice wavers a little bit as I see her start to tear up, but I keep going.

“And I know now how important it is to try your best to understand people. Even people you don’t like, or people you don’t have anything in common with. And that’s all from you. All of that stuff? That means you’re smart as hell. Dad’s the stupid one.”

She swallows hard.

“I’m really sorry, Mom.”

A tear rolls down her cheek, and she brusquely wipes it away with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara.

“You don’t have to apologize for anything,” she says. “I’m so proud of you—exactly who you are, every single day.”

When I get home, for the first time since Ruth died, I feel like writing. But not the way I have been. I always rush through stuff. When I read the old installments now, everything seems so flippant, surface-y. Especially the first fic: I cringe when I reread it. How could I have been so catty? And if I stop writing like that, can I even write at all? It’ll be hard, but I have to try.

The Ordinaria

The Mullens had no language for it until this year. Its anniversary, if you’d call it that, was coming up—six years—and they’d suddenly begun to discuss it for reasons that Sheila did not like. That night, for instance, over their usual haphazard dinner schedules. She ate at six, then he came home and ate at ten; sometimes she sat with him and had some wine.

Steve sighed heavily, put down his fork down, and said, “It’s been . . . you know . . . so long that we’ve been trying to come to terms with the thing.”

They referred to it as “the thing,” as in the drive-in movie or some as-of-yet unidentified bumps you’d anxiously notice on your body.

They hadn’t said her name in the house for four years. They’d never verbally agreed outright not to, but to say it out loud to each other seemed crude, like an unexpected emotional slur tossed at the other person.

Steve had become a workaholic, spending fifty-five hours a week at the lab developing and then overseeing the global release of the Miss Ordinarias. But, blind with grief he hadn’t adequately dealt with, he’d accidentally wound up giving the new products dangerously high levels of empathy, feelings, and life, to somehow make up for the fact that his daughter’s had been taken away. Some he focused on more than others.

Sheila mostly just cleaned. She tried to drink enough to develop a problem but wasn’t very good at it. After she gave up on that, she’d sometimes go sit by the lake that their daughter used to hang out at, drinking and crushing PBR cans with her friends. In fact, that’s what they did that night. In fact, that is why it happened.

She would be twenty-four now, but she made it to only eighteen. For Sheila, the clock stopped right when they saw how slowly the paramedics were walking to the car. She remembered thinking:
They should at least fake running around, moving quickly. We shouldn’t have to know before someone tells us who’s a professional at telling people.

This year, though. Almost regularly, with everyone from acquaintances to relatives, The Thing arose. Last weekend it did at Sheila’s book club. They were discussing Jodi Picoult,
after Sheila was warned that it was a “triggering” book, and a friend of a friend named Gabrielle had too much pinot grigio.

“This is probably inappropriate,” slurred Gabrielle. “It’s definitely inappropriate, actually, but you’ve just been so . . . it’s been, you know, bad for a really long time.” Gabrielle took a deep breath. “I’m not trying to say this way is the best way, but your husband could probably get a good deal on—”

“Do not.”

So Sheila wasn’t in the mood when Steve said, out of nowhere, even though they both knew exactly what he was talking about, “Sheil, I’m not saying we have one
custom
-made.”

“‘Made’? Jesus, do you hear yourse—”

“Look. There’s a surplus right now of about ten thousand, and a lot of them are in need of a good home.”

“In need? Steve, they’re like . . . blenders.”

“Well . . . they’re . . . we went a little too far on this one with the ‘human qualities.’” He purposely did not say “I,” even though it was utterly his fault and he’d probably get canned any day now.

“So what are you saying? There are ten thousand silicone
orphans
now?”

“Listen to me. Okay? Please, please list—”

“No. Steve? No. Absolutely not. You really think it’d be better if some random . . . robot came in here and slept in her bed and wore her clothes?”

“Nothing else has worked! We’re not in a good place!
We haven’t been for years, Sheil. It’s been . . . just, no talking, no intimacy. Nothing.”

Her face fell in horror.

“Oh my
God
, are you using this to try to get a teenage sex robot into our house?”

How could he explain it to her? Why he—vice president of the company, in charge of this new and highly scrutinized product development—irresponsibly tossed out valuable market research results and data and survey feedback on Miss Ordinarias from eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old men left and right. Why he recklessly deleted notes from the server like “pushiness didn’t score well” and “no crude language unless prompted” because all he could hear was his daughter’s unique snort-laugh after she told a “your mom” joke, and all he could see were her freckles and the weird way she drank through a straw, sticking it between her index and ring finger and sipping on it. He’d never get his daughter back, so he made her again, in small ways, by the thousands. Sheila would never forgive him.

He dropped his fork with a clatter and put his head in his hands.

Sheila’s voice was measured when she asked, “What?”

“Nothing,” he said.

* * *

What Steve didn’t know was that there was not actually that big of a surplus. Parents had started purchasing the wiped, refurbished Miss Ordinarias—not for their sons but for their
friendless daughters. The blinding-white Miss Ordinaria rental places had become as accessible as any Apple Store, and it was unexpectedly lucrative. (There were rentals for one day, one week, one prom date, one school year, one four-year college roommate, one wedding. . . . )

If you were a middle-class seventeen-year-old girl who was weird or different or had health issues, or even were just flat-out unlikable, it was highly likely your parents rented a robot slumber party friend for you that year. If you were upper-middle-class, maybe you kept one through high school. If you were rich, you got yourself a lifetime friendship.

* * *

Scarlett learned this when her father rented her one. His visit was an unexpected surprise. He lived pretty far away, with a whole new family. But as soon as she saw the large white box on the lawn, she knew.

“I just wanted you to see how different you are from—that.” He looked encouragingly at Scarlett, and she winced inside thinking about her Ordinaria mom. “Just for a day! And then, if you like it, maybe I can swing a four-year college roommate rental for a graduation gift.”

Scarlett looked down, her face burning with humiliation.

“Besides,” he asked, “it’ll be nice to spend time with someone your own age, won’t it?”

“Technically,” she said, trying not to let her voice waver, “she is, at the oldest, six.”

He left, and Scarlett sat on the lawn with the unwrapped
box and cried, like the biggest spoiled baby ever. Was she that big of a loser? And for that matter, which half of her was the loser—the Ordinaria half or the human half?

She untied the ribbon and opened the white box. The girl inside it immediately sat up, with pale skin and thick straight hair the color of leaves in autumn. Scarlett recognized her from school: She’d belonged to Gideon. She was his eighteenth-birthday present, until his father used Gideon’s high profile (this year in
TIME
it was “heir to the Ordinaria Inc. fortune” and “young playboy,” a phrase that could not apply to Gideon less) to rent her out for astronomically high rates.

“Hey!” said Ashbot.

Scarlett realized that if Ashbot was a rental now, her memory had been wiped, and she had no idea who Scarlett or Gideon were anymore.

“Um . . . hello.”

“So, we’re hanging out today, I think, right?”

Scarlett nodded, getting the vague sensation that this interaction wasn’t a one-way street: Ashbot was sizing her up too.

“Wanna go to the bookstore?” suggested Ashbot. “Or—oh!—they’re playing that French subtitle movie in an art house movie theater in Hamilton; we could go there.”

Scarlett wondered if Ashbot was programmed with some background info on Scarlett’s likes and dislikes . . . or if Ashbot was just into that stuff. She thought for a moment, bit her lip, and shrugged.

Even Scarlett surprised herself when she asked, “Want to go see that stupid Nicholas Sparks movie?”

“Okay.”

After the movie, they sat on a rusty set of kids’ swings overlooking the white behemoth of Ordinaria Inc., and together they watched it become dusk. Scarlett felt odd, maybe even a little nauseated. Something was shifting inside her, like someone had put braces on her worldview.

“Do you . . . feel stuff?” asked Scarlett. She was sure the Miss Ordinarias started out uncannily human in the first place . . . but they gained more unique personalities and speech patterns only over time.

Ashbot shrugged and looked away. “Not really.”

But it sounded less like a robot’s answer and more like the answer of a girl who doesn’t want to admit that she does, in fact, have feelings.

“Did you feel stuff today?”

Ashbot thought about it. “Today right before your dad came in, four girls were rented as bridesmaids,
for the same bride
, because she seemed awful and I guess nobody wanted to be in her wedding party, and I felt, maybe angry? And I didn’t want to be angry! Only creepy guys rent the angry ones.” She shuddered, then looked thoughtful. “I think we sort of feel like . . . always the second-best thing. Like our roles are already decided for us when we’re rented, even if it’s just for a day.”

Scarlett had been so very wrong. She had been wrong
from top to bottom, left to right, her wrongness splattering everywhere like a Pollock painting.

“I’m sorry,” Scarlett said.

“For what?” Ashbot asked.

“I, um . . .”

. . . 
Militarized an angry mob to chase you off the Pembrooke campus and probably short-circuit you if they had the chance. Underestimated your worth.

“I just . . . I wasn’t very nice to you.” Scarlett stared out into the sunset and said softly, “It was just because parts of me are like you. And I didn’t like those parts of myself. You know?”

“It’s okay.” Ashbot nodded. “There are parts of myself I don’t like either.”

* * *

Scarlett banged on Gideon’s door until his father answered. His face immediately curdled.

“My son is busy,” he snapped and attempted to shut the door in her face. But it was too late—Gideon was already running down the stairs. He pushed past his father, and he and Scarlett ran to his car. They got in, shut the door, and peeled off.

“What’s going on?!” Gideon asked, alarmed, as he turned out of the gated community and onto the main road.

“Do you want Ashbot back?”

“What are you . . . what?”

“Do you want Ashbot back? She’s at my house.”

“What? No,” Gideon snapped, not entirely convincingly. She just looked at him. Finally, he relented: “I don’t know.”

Scarlett felt the tears spring to the surface but tried to keep breathing.

“Were you upset when your dad took her away?”

Gideon’s face indicated that he was more than just upset. He pressed his lips together angrily as he stared out at the road. “My whole life, I swore I’d never be one of those guys who buys an Ordinaria, and now I’m one of them. I’m such a scumbag.”

Scarlett shook her head adamantly, and one tear fell—ricocheted, really. A selfish part of her wished she could agree with him that Ashbot was just a machine, that being with Scarlett was way more worthwhile. But it had clearly become a false binary.

“They’re not just robots like they used to be. They’re different. They’re, like . . . real. I don’t know how they have feelings, but . . . you didn’t do anything wrong. You like a real girl.”

“But I like you too.” He kept his eyes on the road, refusing to look at her.

She blushed. “Yeah . . . but . . . I mean, we’re half 1.0s. Which is just half, but a much older model. Ashbot is a 2.0. Cutting-edge.”

They sat there for a minute, both thinking the same thing, until finally she said it in a tiny voice:

“Maybe she’s more human than we are.”

Gideon didn’t respond—he just turned off the main road and merged onto the highway, heading to Scarlett’s house.

When they arrived at Scarlett’s, though, Ashbot was nowhere to be found.

“At the very least, the rental place is gonna charge my dad a small fortune,” Scarlett said, glancing frantically under the sofa’s dust ruffle.

“I’m not going to let her be rented out,” said Gideon. “I’m just not going to. I don’t know if I want to keep her forever, but—”

At that moment, Scarlett’s Ordinaria mom came home. She was an older model but a classic bleach-blonde, round-faced and buxom, her fan whirring loudly from overwork—a sound that used to bug Scarlett, but now she didn’t mind it. She passed Scarlett and Gideon and sprawled on the sofa. Her battery, as usual, was at 10 percent.

“Are you two talking about that beautiful Miss Ordinaria? Red hair?”

“Yes,” they said in unison.

“Oh, yeah, she was with me for a bit, and then she left. I guess your dad thought you needed a friend.” Scarlett’s mom rolled her eyes, then nudged Scarlett and side-eyed Gideon. “But clearly as long as you’re running around with this hunk of man . . .”

“Mom, do not.”

She turned to Gideon fondly. “I remember you when you were just a little toddler playing in the backyard kiddie pool
naked, waving your—”

“Okay, thanks, Mom. Do you know where she went?” asked Scarlett.

She shook her head.

* * *

Sheila answered the door to find an exquisitely beautiful redheaded teenage girl on her stoop, playing with her hair.

“I’m really sorry,” said the girl, “but I was hoping I could use your phone? Mine is dead, and I need to call my rental place.”

“Um . . . where’d you park, sweetie? Do you need to get triple A?”

“No, I mean,
I’m
the rental.”

And then she laughed
exactly
like her. Exactly.

Sheila felt her face tingle and got dizzy and placed her palms flat on her thighs while bending over slightly, something she’d been taught to do in the frequent moments she felt she might faint. The girl went on.

“’Cause, I think I want to quit, but I don’t know if they’ll let me. I don’t like being a rental anymore.”

Stunned, Sheila let her in.

“Do you want me to get you some water?” the girl asked. “I’m really sorry if I did something.”

“You didn’t.”

The girl anxiously filled a glass from the tap and handed it to Sheila.

“Why would you come here just to use a phone?”