Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (9 page)

I GRAB MY BOOKS AND HUSTLE TO SOCIAL STUDIES, WHERE
Mr. Kercher has already started droning hypnotically about Napoléon. I slide into my seat behind Mouth-Breather Leslie, hoping I remain invisible. Jason, Dylan, and—ugh—Gideon have taken to being a little more vocal in class lately. Over the last few weeks, Gideon has grown less startled and quizzical about why the Populars suddenly pulled him into the fold. When I watch him walk with Ashley down the hall, or make some messy ketchup-mayo-mustard concoction out of boredom at lunch with Jason and co., he’s undeniably happy. He’s one of them now.

“. . . few days after he married Josephine, he did . . . what?”

Dead silence.

“He . . . left . . . Paris . . . to . . . ?”

Still nothing. Mr. Kercher is one of the few teachers who
still bothers with this spaced-out-words “hinting” business in the hopes that someone read the textbook chapter assigned for the day. It is excruciating.

“Take . . . command . . . of . . .”

Imagine what would happen if he had a home intruder. (“Hi . . . 911? There’s a . . . man . . . in . . . my . . .”)

He was young once, which is weird. Maybe he wanted to be an astronaut.

“The . . . army . . . of . . .”

Nothing. Finally, he concedes, sounding dead as he ends with: “Italy, guys. The army of Italy.”

He looks around, clearly begging for just one person to be like,
Damn, Italy! It was right on the tip of my tongue.
We respond by staring at him with the glassy eyes of the truly, perhaps even fatally, bored.

“So then, in 1808, he declared that the king of Spain would be his brother, Joseph Bonaparte—”

Snickering from the first-tier popular boys in the back.

“Boner-aparte,” says Gideon, putting his comedic stylings to sophisticated use.

They openly crack up. As he laughs and leans back in his chair, Jason tosses his pencil down on the desk for emphasis and further disruption.

“Guys. Please. Please. I’m begging you,” beseeches Mr. Kercher.

The back of Mouth-Breather Leslie’s head lowers a little, guiltily. She’s a Girl Genius, so she knows the answer—but
it’s easier not to speak up. She’s one of those girls whose hair always seems to be hanging in her face in a half-literal, half-metaphorical sort of way. Even if she shaved her head it would still be like that. She does take pity on him, though, and raises her hand tentatively.

“Leslie. Yes.”

“Does the Napoleonic Code still affect certain regions of Europe?” she whispers. “I think I read that somewhere.”

Mr. Kercher looks at her gratefully.

“Excellent. Yes, Leslie. Some jurisdictions of Europe as well as Africa and . . .”

As he goes on, my pen begins to rattle as I feel Dylan Dinerstein start methodically kicking my chair. (We all sit in those awful Frankenstein-y metal desk/chair mash-ups from the eighties, so everything’s connected.) Eventually my pen rolls across the desk and falls.

Instead of telling him to cut it out, I choose the path of least resistance and yank my whole desk and chair farther away from Dylan. It makes a loud, rude noise.

“Yo, Scarlett, did you just fart?” yells Jason.

The other guys snicker, and there are some giggles around the room. Immediately my heart starts pounding like a
Biggest Loser
contestant’s, but it’s better to ignore him than to dignify it with a response.

I turn around very slightly to look at Gideon, who is not laughing but stubbornly refuses to meet my eye. But then Gideon looks up, smirking, back in the game.

“Nah, I think it was Leslie, man,” he says.

Everybody laughs. Leslie slumps even lower, her head down.

Mr. Kercher holds up his hands. “Guys. Guys.” Nobody listens.

It’s one thing to pick on me, but Leslie can’t stand up for herself.

I wheel around and snap, “Nope! Totally me. Really impor-tant investigation, Jason. Thanks for spreading awareness.”

“Everybody just calm down,” says Mr. Kercher.

Jason just gives me a
Crazy bitch
stare, infuriatingly blank and slack-jawed.

“Nothing?” My eyes dart over to Gideon, who still refuses to look at me. I get louder.

“You have nothing to say?”

Mr. Kercher finally loses it, banging his palm down on his desk.

“Scarlett, that’s enough!”

He sends me to the front office, where I get a pink detention slip to forge Dawn’s signature on.

As Ave, the Girl Geniuses, and I walk past the Populars to get our lunch trays, Ashley studiously pays no attention to Ave. You’d think they were strangers, not sisters, but there is no sibling loophole for breaking the MHS caste system.

Gideon heads for a table at the nuclear center of a group of loud jock guys, chatting with Mike Tossier in the dulcet tones
of loud bro. He glances at me, and I give him my best glare. He looks away. I wonder, again, what the hell is going on—why Ashley would pick Gideon, loaning her much-curated social life to him. Either he struck some kind of Faustian bargain or Ashley is actively trying to ruin my life.

We sit down at the designated Girl Genius table with the other lady misanthropes. A few fey, antisocial boys who look twelve sit here too, for good measure.

“Yes, this is my cheap-ass poor-person lunch,” I announce when I sit down with my tray, and they laugh, like they do every time. I used to try to hide swiping my reduced-lunch card, but eventually I realized I can neutralize it with jokes, make people feel more comfortable and less like I’m some walking PSA.

“Hey, Ave?” I ask.

“Yeah?” She pulls out a bag full of almonds and pops one in her mouth.

“Have I told you lately . . . that I love you?”

Avery rolls her eyes, crunching. “What do you want?”

“Can you do my take-home test? It’s due next period.” I yank it from my folder and hand it to her. She pulls out a ballpoint—the true sign of a math genius, not picking a pencil—and starts efficiently scribbling in answers, moving from equation to equation without missing a beat.

“One of these days I’m gonna tell my parents about this,” she threatens, then rolls her eyes. “Actually, it wouldn’t matter. You could murder a drifter and they’d still love you.”

She might act cranky, but she likes doing it. She told me once that it’s relaxing to do my tests because they’re so easy that it’s like a form of supersmart-person meditation. Not that she said it in those words, she’s always been way too modest. (If Ave had invented fire, she’d introduce it to the Cro-Magnons by whispering, “Um, hey, I made this thing, it’s kinda cool, it might be sorta helpful for our continued evolution, if that makes any sense.”)

As Ave whizzes through my test, occasionally sipping one of the many cans of Diet Coke she guzzles all day, there’s a shuffling behind us, then a shadow over poor Got Her Period on Her Pants and Nobody Told Her Leslie like one cast by the side of a mountain.

It’s Mike Neckekis, a tree-trunk-neck jock who in the days of yore might have been called “simple.” Ave doesn’t notice.

I nudge her. “Um . . . Avery?”

She glances up and around. Looks at Mike. Waits expectantly. Generally speaking, the Populars approach Avery only if they want to buy Adderall, pay her to write their college essay, or ask if she and Ashley are
really
sisters.

“I wanted to say that uh, uh . . .” He breathes heavily, in what would seem like a sigh if it was not just his natural state of Pop-Tarts-infused mouth breathing. “Uh . . .”

We all stare.

“I agreed with you in sociology when Mrs. Donovan was talking about Twitter outrage, and you argued that was a privileged point of view.”

“I didn’t . . . did I argue that?”

“Well, you sort of mumbled it. You mumble stuff.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, you mumble stuff, and you scratch your forehead with your pen, and sometimes the cap is off, so you get, um . . .” He runs his finger over his hairline. “Ink stains. Not right now, but sometimes.”

Avery stares at him for a second, touching her forehead self-consciously. She looks perplexed, but sort of . . . happy? How can she not be laughing her ass off at him right now?

“Anyways, I agree with you. I think, like, Twitter totally scares snobs like Mrs. Donovan who live in, like, mansions in Short Hills and commute here to teach because they want to feel like they’re helping out less rich people without actually having to, like, think about them all that much. So. Yeah.”

Avery breaks into a smile.

“I was wondering—I saw you talking to some older guy when you were getting off the Princeton bus, and I wasn’t sure if you were, like, dating . . .”

“We’re not,” Ave says, still smiling, seeming shell-shocked. “I mean. No. Nothing is—he’s not my boyfriend. Or anything. I was asking him if we’ll still have a free period.”

“Oh! Okay. Well. I guess, then, do you want to go to the dance with me?”

Avery’s jaw drops in the briefest expression of pure joy before she tamps it down, undoubtedly due to the numerous dating-advice listicles Dawn posts on our Facebook walls with
headlines like “17 Ways to Win at Love by Pretending You Don’t Give a Crap.”

“I wasn’t gonna go, but . . . if you think that would be fun, then sure, why not,” she says casually. Seriously, does everybody know how to fake unenthusiasm but me?

Mike actually does sigh this time, I think, of relief. “Cool. Okay. I got your number from Ashley.”

Our entire table simultaneously looks over at Ashley, who’s already been glaring at us with comical menace, like an owl antagonist in a children’s movie about mice.

“So, I’ll text you my number, and, like, then we can have each other’s . . . numbers? So we can text?”

Avery nods, smiles. “Sounds good.”

As soon as he walks away, I nearly blow a gasket finally letting my derision fly. “Mike fucking Neckekis?!”

“Chill out.” Avery lets out a breathless laugh and drops her head in her hands. I watch her shoulders shaking with laughter. But it’s not the derisive kind I expected. It’s more like “just got off a roller coaster” exhilaration.

I’m wounded. She’s been holding out on me.

“And you never told me abou—who’s the guy in your math class at Princeton?” Everybody else at our table is poker-faced because they are all basically feral brains without bodies.

“We’re auditing,” Ave says, pulling a lip balm out of her book bag’s front pocket and pouting to nonchalantly apply it. Two boys say hi to her, and suddenly she’s Lana Del Rey. “Technically none of us are in our math class at Princeton.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“Yes, he tested out of the math classes. Same as me.”

“Well, that makes a little more sense, doesn’t it?”

Ave looks pointedly at me. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? That means he’s smart, and probably more right for you than Mike Neckekis, who is Comic Sans in human form.”

She shrugs. “We obviously agree on some stuff.”

“Oh, so someone jerks you off intellectually, and now you’re into him? What are you, a
guy
now?”

The Girl Geniuses’ eyes dart back and forth between us, the two alphas of the table, like they’re watching a tennis match.

Ave slowly rolls her head toward me with wide, infuriated eyes, a sassy Linda Blair
Exorcist
move she does when I’ve really pissed her off.

“He’s nice, Scar.”

I almost scream.
Nice?
Nice is staying in Melville and planning a low-budget indoor wedding at the Freehold Gardens Mall Event Center to some guy from high school who works at Target. None of which I say out loud because her head would spin a complete 360 degrees, and I don’t want to lose the only real friend I have in my age bracket.

“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m being a dick.”

Avery softens a little, then, looking at my contrite face, melts the rest of the way. “It’s okay.” Then she smiles again, a smile I rarely see. “I have no idea what to wear. What do girls wear to this stuff?”

“Ask Ashley if she has any Taylor Swift crop-top formal-gown castoffs you can borrow,” I joke. (This is the precise ludicrous taffeta bullshit Ashley wore to junior prom.) And just like that, we’re friends again. That’s how we fight—intense and mean, and then it’s over in the blink of an eye. Maybe that’s how sisters are.

But one tectonic plate of our friendship has destructively scraped up against another. Like Ave’s finally been taken by the other team of Red Rover, and now I’m facing off against the whole senior class, their normal, optimistic, sexually active arms linked tight.

Sometimes my entire high school experience feels like being the only one who already knows the end of a movie, when everyone else you’re going with is so excited to see how the movie will end. Spoiler alert: a 20 percent discount at Target.