“Um, yes?”
“All I’m saying is, Ashley has horrible taste,” Avery tentatively begins as I sweat all over Ruth’s tea roses. “I mean, Kevin Rice? Hello?”
Ruth furrows her brow. “Who’s Kevin Rice?”
“A tool,” Ave and I say simultaneously.
“No. This is a tool.” Ruth holds up her spade. “I don’t know how either of you expect to get into good colleges if you can communicate only in street.”
“Sorry, in street?” I say, aghast. “Tell me, then—what is the appropriate word?”
“Asshole,” Ruth incants sagely and turns back to her petunias.
“Scarlett, maybe Ashley liking him is an indication that he sucks.”
“Inconceivable.”
“You only quote The Princess Bride when you’re afraid I’m right.”
“You’re dismissed. The real question is, why would he even like her? Aside from looking like a Hollister model and getting perfect grades”—I wilt a little but continue—“her whole personality is put on.”
Ruth shrugs, relighting the last of her J. “Sure. It’s usually a phase. Girls figure out what boys want, they do it for a while, then they stop. Trust me, I used to see it every year when I was teaching.”
“If she knows what boys want, I wish she’d tell me,” Ave mumbles under her breath, then trills sardonically, “As my parents would say, we’ve both been ‘blessed with our own gifts’! Here’s mine”—she points to her head—“and here’s hers.” She pantomimes big boobs, then instantly looks guilty and stops talking. That’s what happens whenever she rags on Ashley to me.
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “She’s not entirely devoid of personality. She just fakes being all awkward and shy and nerdy. Maybe it’s just what guys want now. Fake-awkward. She pretends to not know what she’s doing when she’s doing it.”
Avery reluctantly nods.
“But that’s what I mean,” says Ruth. “You’re genuine. There’s no artifice in you.”
“Often to your own detriment, bro,” mumbles Ave. I glare at her. She looks away innocently.
“You’re not the way you are and you don’t talk the way you talk because you think that’s what other people want from you.” Ruth shrugs. “It’s better. If you keep acting a certain way just because guys—or anyone—want you to, you’ll regret it.”
“It’s like she’s intentionally trying to make things—oh my GOD.” I drop my rake, struck with a massive realization.
“Are you okay?” Ave asks, alarmed.
“I’m Anne Hathaway and she’s Jennifer Lawrence!" I exclaim.
They both look at me like I’m insane.
“No, hear me out. Anne Hathaway is a celebrity. But she’s a real person—like, nerdy and loud and enthusiastic and excited about stuff, and people think she’s abrasive and they hate her.
“Whereas Jennifer Lawrence is, like . . . Anne Hathaway 2.0. I mean, she’s the new and improved version. Her PR team COULD make her come off totally perfect. But she’s designed precisely to seem like she’s been programmed with similar ‘real person’ bugs—but in a super-appealing way, nothing too weird or unrelatable or abrasive. She sort of just seems to not give a shit. And everyone loves her because she’s such a ‘normal person,’ even though she’s not. You know?” I proclaim triumphantly. “Well, other than me.”
There is a long pause.
Avery rolls her eyes and says, “You are just, like . . . an endless font of bullshit sometimes.”
“Do those girls go to school with you?” Ruth asks, confused.
I’m about to reply when my phone signals I’ve received a text. I reach into the back of my shitty gardening jeans and pull it out. It’s from Dawn, and it says: Emergency. Come home right now.
Chapter 6
AS I RUN UP THE STAIRS OF OUR HOUSING COMPLEX TWO BY two, a gaggle of eleven-year-old boys start snapping those little dollar-store firecrackers in the parking lot. I flail. They laugh. Mission accomplished.
We’re not poor, but after people at school—people whose families have refrigerators with water dispensers and ice makers built into them, or in-ground pools, or houses with an upstairs and a downstairs—started bitching about how the “middle class” is ignored by financial aid packages, I concluded that we are lower-lower middle class. Springsteen class, if you will, although I failed my written driver’s test and therefore have avoided the highway jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.
I stick my keys in the door and slam hard against it—it’s always jamming. This time it gives way easily, and I stumble inside. Dawn’s sprawled on the sofa still wearing her baby-blue house-keeping uniform. Bridget Jones’s Diary is on in the background.
“What is it?” I’m gasping from the running.