Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (3 page)

With that, she slid into the driver’s seat of her BMW, where Gideon was already waiting. Behind the tinted black glass, I saw he was looking straight ahead, blank. They glided out of the parking lot and onto the highway.

I got in the car. Dawn glared at me, shaking her head.

“Don’t pull this shit with me, Scarlett. I already have enough to deal with.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to stay in that moment where Gideon was up there doing something so much better than just fitting in. Or in that moment on the curb when he came close enough that I could see the little flecks of brown in his green eyes.

Dawn yanked on the stick shift until it got into the right gear, and we headed home.

I stared out at the moon drifting alongside us, darting behind telephone poles and back out, but all I saw was the way Mrs. Maclaine had looked at me, like I was a speck of dirt on her countertop. I thought about how families like the Maclaines have big empty spaces between one another, while families like me and Dawn are smooshed on top of each other, hearing everything the other one’s doing, barely being able to breathe our own air. The Maclaines have the latest, sleekest cars and phones. Nothing’s ever an old model, something straining or squeaking or clicking, nothing about them ever invokes the ultimate embarrassing concept of
trying
. They have a beautiful silk curtain over the various awkward, rusty embarrassments of being human, and we don’t.

That was the night the Maclaines decided, definitively, that I was a bad influence, and also when I realized that Gideon never seemed to contradict them. For the first time, I felt a wedge between us. He wouldn’t stick up for me, I worried, for reasons that felt bigger than our friendship, reasons that had to do with how his mom looked at my mom in the parking lot. And honestly, just thinking that made me mad at him—that worst-case scenario I’d assembled in my mind.

After that, our friendship reversed—the conversations trickled backward into generic pleasantries, then nothing. We went from best friends to just faces that passed each other in the hallway. In the years since we’d drifted apart, Gideon got taller
and fitter, going from soft and chubby to large and solid in a man-ish way that makes my hormones do a Mexican hat dance.

I stayed the same. Size six and five-foot-seven in heels (that I do not own). I pretty much wear a couple of different varieties of Old Navy clearance items and my dad’s baggy dress shirts with leggings. I still wear the bras and underwear I’ve worn since, like, seventh grade. And every time I try on bras or jeans in a department store and some saleswoman says they fit me “right,” they feel so tight I can’t breathe, so I size up, because the patriarchy.

I have dark hair and gray-brown eyes. My dad’s Jewish, and Dawn is half Mexican, so I either have skin you’d call olive or skin you’d call “jaundiced yellowy but with a great dark tan in the summer.” My face is, I don’t know, face shaped? I have to wear glasses, which sucks, but I did pick some bomb pink plastic grandma glasses from the Walmart Vision Center.

Gideon may not broadcast it like I do, but he’s still weird. I know he is. Not like one of those kids who skulks around the band hallway proclaiming their strangeness with T-shirts, but a quiet, unshowy weird, like a slightly crooked picture frame. There’s only one other guy I’ve liked, and it was Coach Taylor from
Friday Night Lights
, so that wasn’t gonna end with a spring wedding.

The problem is, even though so much time has gone by since we’ve been friends, whenever I’m around him, I still feel entitled, demanding, and greedy, kind of like Veruca Salt from
Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory
. I might miss social cues
occasionally, but even I know that
We’re supposed to be together. There’s no reason I shouldn’t come right out and say it, we’ve already wasted a lot of time, and would you like to do everything-except-sex with me?
is not an ideal opener.

But mostly it’s scary because thinking about how I felt when I hung out with him is really close to how I feel when I’m writing. Like there are a million pegs but only one that fits in this weird hole, and I’m the hole, and writing is the peg. And Gideon is like another, um . . . peg. Hi, metaphor.

After skimming the boards—more bad fix-its, more nosy bloggers—I decide to Gchat Loup about my problem.

xLoupxGaroux: What do you mean? You can’t write anymore?

Scarface: i just sit there and stare at the screen like the missing link. I need STRUCTURE. I need you guys!

xLoupxGaroux: Whoa. You weren’t kidding about that PMS, were you, sweetie? Look. It was comfortable writing
Lycanthrope
fics because it was a pre-built world, with pre-built characters. But maybe you’re having trouble building your own because . . . well

Scarface: uh yes?

xLoupxGaroux: You don’t seem to get out much. I mean,
you have to LIVE in order to write well about life, you know? Tolstoy didn’t spend the first 30 years of his life on the sofa watching Hulu Plus and then out of nowhere write
Anna Karenina
.

Scarface: i get your point.

xLoupxGaroux: Do something crazy. Go ask out a boy.

Scarface: oh shit. no way.

xLoupxGaroux: Yes way. I will if you will!

Scarface: it’s SO much worse in high school! people talk about who’s dating with such GRAVITY, like they’re talking about wikileaks.

xLoupxGaroux: If you don’t I’ll jump ship, swear to God. Lots of good slash OTPs for that CW show
Imaginary Detectives
 . . .

Scarface: JESUS. Okay. Fine, I’ll do it.

xLoupxGaroux: Good. Honor system.

I MARCH OVER TO GIDEON, MY HEART POUNDING, FEELING
all the blood rush up to my head as I get closer. What the hell. After all, the first time Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath, she bit him on the cheek, and he married her anyway. And they lived happily ever after.

“Hey,” I say. He looks up from his phone.

“Oh, hey,” he says in that neutral, accommodating voice you get when some stranger’s about to ask you for directions. When I don’t say anything, he asks, “Um, do you, like, need something?”

“It sucks about the show, right?” I blurt out.

“What show?”

“Lycanthrope High.”
For the first time, the name of the show sounds dumb and cringey coming out of my mouth, like how I’d imagine it would feel if I said the title of something I wrote myself.

“Oh.” He sort of shrugs. “Sure, I mean, I watched it when it was on. I wasn’t, like, a superfan or anything.” It is hard to tell whether he’s being honest or following the high school commandment of
Thou shalt not show thy uncoolness by openly caring about something
, which I have never been good at
.

“Okay, look. Imagine your life without access to comedy. That’s what it feels like. It’s so boring that even small, momentary escapes are in full Technicolor, like flirting with an older guy with a big calf tattoo at the gas station. It’s worse than boring, actually, because it’s not like you’re sitting in a waiting room, flipping through
Redbook
. I mean, that’s boring, but at least you’ll eventually get called in to your appointment. Whereas life is boring, but unless you’re suicidal or a Scientologist, the waiting and the appointment are the same thing—you know? Isn’t that how you’d feel?”

—What I want to say.

“Oh. Dope.”

—What I actually say.

Another weird long silence, the opposite of the knowing ones we used to have when we were kids, during which I pray for Aaron Sorkin to swoop in and write my life for the next two minutes (sans the cis-hetero-white-male-on-a-soapbox part).

“I—do you want to do something sometime?”

He looks surprised. “Uh . . .”

“I know it’s been a really long time since we hung out, but I think we still, you know, we like the same stuff, and we’re both . . .”

The look in his eyes stops me, like I was about to say “serial killers” or “Coldplay fans.” Shit. Come on, try again. I can be articulate. Go.

“You know, like how you and I both . . .” His blank look makes me falter again. I wave to vaguely indicate the hallway, the school, the town, the world. “Don’t you still feel like you don’t really . . .”

“What? Fit in?”

“I mean . . . yes? No. Sort of.”

A mix of confusion and annoyance clouds his face. Why did I think this was a good idea?

“I don’t feel like that.”

“Okay, um, I’m sorry.”

“That was a long time ago. You know? I mean, we haven’t hung out in, like . . .” He is so weirded out, he can’t even finish the sentence.

“Yeah, no, totally,” I mumble, backing away.

He shrugs. “So, I’m good now. Plenty o’ friends. Thanks for your concern, though.”

My face feels like it’s on fire. I back off and hurry away. In the back of my head, though, I’m thinking,
Nobody who has plenty of friends would say “plenty o’ friends.”

Just when I’m about to speed-walk around the corner, I glance back at Gideon, and with my head turned, I smack directly into Ashley.

“Oh, sorry,” I mumble.

“No, I am soooo sorry,” she says, knitting her on-trend thick
eyebrows with overwrought concern, and continues down the hall. She has less of a walk than an easily imitable busty glide, leading with the kind of boobs that prompt dim boys like Mike Neckekis to deem her “really smart” or “really funny.”

And then she takes a running leap into Gideon’s arms.

RUTH IS DYING LAUGHING, WHICH IS EVEN MAKING AVERY
crack up a little, and I don’t appreciate it.

“It’s not funny.” I shove the bulb into the crude trowel hole I made a few moments ago. “First the show, now this. All of a sudden my whole life is just a shit salad.”

“Pointed side
up
, milady!” Ruth shouts from her end of the garden, wiping sweat off her brow and accidentally replacing it with dirt. She grabs her lighter—a gold one, with an engraving I’ve never dared get close enough to read—and sparks up a J.

Ruth is seventy-three. Did I mention that?

I roll my eyes and turn the bulb right-side up. Avery’s curled up in the hanging chair on the porch with a calculus workbook, having put in her thirteen minutes of gardening before an “asthma attack” struck. (Ave actually does get asthma attacks, but when
asked to participate in light-to-medium physical activity, she has “asthma attacks.”)

“You do share DNA with her, so I’m sure you have some insight on this,” I say, wheeling toward Avery. “Out of all the boys in school, even Mike Tossier, who looks like Ryan Gosling when you squint from a few paces away, why
Gideon
?”

I keep replaying it in my head—Gideon’s arms around Ashley as he stared at her, charmed by her fake awkwardness as she laughed at his jokes, twirled her hair, sprayed her pheremonal glands or whatever—and berating myself with arrows and circles, like I’m examining a bad Super Bowl play.

“Is this what PTSD is like?” I whine.

In the middle of lighting the joint, Ruth gives me her patented
Shut up, you millennial twit
glare. I give her a hopeful
Pass that weed, brah!
smile. She firmly shakes her head, and I am secretly relieved. This is our usual dance.

“I just messed it all up,” I mumble, turning back to the remaining bulbs.

“Oh, right, because before this, it absolutely looked like you guys were heading for homecoming court,” deadpans Avery without looking up from her calc book.

“Shut your face, Wheezy.”

Ruth clears her throat. “Well,
I
think”—she waits for both of us to give her due attention and respect—“
I
think it went better than you could’ve possibly imagined.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Would you say it was ‘unforgettable’?”

“No, because I’d like to forget it as quickly as possible.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“Actually, it was. You just have Alzheimer’s.”

Ruth doubles over and laughs so hard that the joint almost falls out of her mouth. She holds up her hand, signaling for us to give her a second to catch her breath. Sometimes I forget how old she is—I don’t like to think about it. To be honest, these “being adjacent to mortality” moments are a bummer. I know it’s strange to be friends with a seventy-three-year-old, but like most unlikely friendships, ours has kind of an origin story.

Back in freshman year social studies, I had to interview a senior citizen. All my grandparents had already shuffled off this mortal coil, and I didn’t want to hit up the Melville Retirement Community because nursing homes creep me out. They’re like drive-throughs for death.

The old lady across the highway, in the dilapidated house with the beautiful garden, seemed like the most convenient option. I didn’t know her at all, but Dawn and everyone else on Leshin Lane seemed to think she was nuts—not just old lady nuts but ageless, mentally imbalanced, “she was like this when she was twenty” nuts.

I knocked on her door at around four thirty in the afternoon, figuring old people didn’t go to bed until at least five. No response. I knocked again.

A voice, sounding surprisingly like a sprightly fifty-year-old’s, snapped, “I’m not interested!”

“Um, I’m not selling anything.”

She cracked the door just enough that the chain on the latch was taut. All I could see was a sliver of her face. “Go on, then.”

Talking in that way you do when you know you have to sell somebody on your pitch in the next five seconds, I rushed: “I’m Scarlett Epstein your neighbor I have to do a project for school about studying American history on a personal level and I was wondering if you might have the time to—”

She shut the door in my face. I was flabbergasted. I knocked again, more insistently, and I heard her agitated footsteps slamming on the hardwood as she came back to the door. She swung it wide open so hard that the breeze blew my hair back.

Ruth was—is—what an old-fashioned novel would call a “handsome woman,” almost six feet tall with thick gray-streaked hair piled on top of her head. She wore a crisp white short-sleeved shirt buttoned up all the way to the top, with the sleeves rolled like James Dean, and thick wool trousers. She didn’t look like anyone else in town. In other words, she looked cool as hell.

“You Dawn Epstein’s kid?”

“Um, yeah.”

“I’ve seen her at Superfresh. Where’s your dad at?”

“New York,” I said, then for some reason felt compelled to add, “New wife.”

Ruth looked at me for a minute, slouching in the doorway and sucking in her cheeks thoughtfully, her body language
uncannily similar to the burnout kids at my school who hung out near the Stop sign just outside the school zone. Then she glanced conspiratorially around, even though it was just us in front of her empty house.

“You go to MHS?”

“Alas and alack, I do.”

“Do you know where I could find some pot?”

My eyebrows shot up before I could control them.

“Pot like
pot
? Like marijuana?”

“No, pot like for tea. It’s hard to get your hands on ceramic cookware,” she deadpanned, looking exasperated. “Yeah. You know. Ganj. Whatever you’re calling it now.”

“I missed the last teen-slang standardization meeting, but I think we’re calling it weed. You don’t, like, have a person?”

“I think he graduated. I’ll tell you, being retired and running out of your stash is kinda like having a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich without the peanut butter. Or the jelly. Just two dry pieces of bread.”

Gamely attempting to roll with this, I agreed faintly, “That sounds like . . . not a good sandwich.”

“Don’t look so shocked. Getting high is just about the only good thing about being my age. Which is seventy-one, by the way. If there’s some kind of crone age requirement for your project.”

“That’s a great age for my report, and you’re not a crone,” I told her firmly, trying and failing to feel out where all this was going.

She gasped like I insulted her. “Don’t say that! I love being a crone.

“I don’t know who came up with the stupid idea that we appreciate the little things, like domestic chores or sitting and watching the sun set like it’s a goddamn Bourne movie. And you can use that in your report, by the way—if you help me out and track down a new dealer.”

“Um, I don’t think I know anybody.”

She snorted derisively, reaching up to adjust the cockeyed tumble of gray hair looped up in a claw clip.

“What are you, sixteen?”

“Fifteen.”

“In this town? Every other kid in your class probably has a hookup.”

“I don’t really—”

“Those are my terms, lady. Take it or leave it.”

We sized each other up for a minute. She tilted her head up high, like she was challenging me. For a second I felt like Al Pacino in that scene in
The Godfather
where he shoots all those guys in that restaurant and then flees to Sicily and marries that girl who doesn’t speak his language but has really nice breasts and then she gets blown up in a car.

Finally, I relented. “You’re on.”

Things I am extraordinarily good at locating: public restrooms, novels about hedonism and angst at exclusive private schools,
quickly canceled cult TV shows, and free bagels. Controlled substances are not, and will never be, one of those things. Even picking up antibiotics for an ear infection at CVS makes me feel vaguely shifty and hyper-self-conscious, like a minor character on
The Wire
.

Fortunately, Ruth was right: Weed was as ubiquitous at school as folded brown-bag textbook covers with Drake lyrics scrawled on them. I located a hookup almost immediately when I sidled up to Mark Petruniak during Phys Ed and awkwardly said something like, “Hey, do you, like, I know you smoke, but do you happen to deal? I mean deal weed. Not, like, ‘with issues.’”

To my relief, Mark laughed.

“Yeah, dude,” he said super-nonchalantly, his eyelids drooping, and I caught a whiff that verified his honesty. “Hey, I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Well, sometimes,” I lied modestly, basking in taking a well-liked guy from school by surprise. “You know. Not a lot.”

(I smoked weed one time. It was at one of Ashley’s parties. I freaked out, locked myself in the bathroom, and sobbed uncontrollably until Dylan Dinerstein drunkenly climbed in through the window to pee.)

After Phys Ed, I handed Mark a fifty, and he gave me a small plastic bag with some green stuff in it that could totally have been Astroturf and I wouldn’t have known.

“Good shit,” I said, as if I had a Ph.D. in Discerning Shit Quality.

“You should come to over my house and smoke sometime,” Mark said casually.

“Yeah, definitely,” I lied.

In retrospect, I felt fortunate that a number of small miracles had transpired: I managed to purchase marijuana without asking Mark what exact unit of measurement was in a dime bag, without getting arrested, and without being so nervous about potentially being arrested that I
Maria Full of Grace
-ed it home in my vagina.

I stopped by Ruth’s house after school, just as the sun was setting, incredibly jittery from playing Pokémon with narcotics at school and hoping this stupid report would be worth all the anxiety.

She answered the door in the middle of my second knock.

“Yup.”

“Hi. I got the thing. The stuff. You know.” Beat. Nothing. “The stuff.”

“Oh, right.” A light clicked on behind her eyes. She looked mildly impressed but quashed it immediately. “Great, come on in.”

The foyer was warm and cluttered in an eclectic, lived-in way. Best of all, there were books everywhere, mostly very old ones, lined up on one single long shelf that looped around the room endlessly, like literature dominoes. I glanced a little closer and saw that a lot of them were feminist theory—some I recognized from my own late-night smart-girl Googles, but others I didn’t know.

“Dworkin is a loony tune.” Ruth pulled one book down from the shelf. “You ever read her?”

I looked down at the book.
Intercourse
, read its stark cover. Nothing you’d find between
He’s Just Not That Into You
and
Eat Pray Love
on Dawn’s bookshelf. I shook my head.

“She makes reality TV look like
The Partridge Family
,” Ruth said admiringly and handed the book to me. “Here. Keep it. I’ve read it.”

“You haven’t read, like,
all
of these, have you?”

“Yep.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah, well. Thirty-four years teaching women’s studies, you crack a book or two. Not that there’s ever any right answer to this stuff.” She shook her head with sort of a bemused smile. “It’s amazing how the more you read, the less you know.”

“I totally get what you mean,” I said instantly. A second later, I realized I actually did. It was the first time I ever felt understood by a grown-up.

I tucked the book in my backpack, feeling a little bit like I’d just found the coolest informal library ever.

Ruth plucked the dime bag from my hand and brushed past me, heading into the kitchen, all Formica and peeling wallpaper. I followed behind. She lifted the lid of a porcelain sugar jar and placed the new plastic bag of weed inside it. She opened a junk drawer, pulled out some rolling papers, and started making a joint. Or a blunt. I’m still unclear on the difference, maybe the latter just isn’t as polite at parties.

“You wanna start this Old Crone Report, then?” Ruth asked through gritted teeth, clenching the joint between them.

I nodded and took out my notebook.

“Okay.” She breathed in, held it, frozen, then exhaled. A plume of smoke rose and twisted in front of us like a belly dancer. “You should know I’m not gonna give you any
Tuesdays with Morrie
bullshit.”