Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 tallerand 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 cuesoccasionally, 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: