“Yeah, they go to my school.”
She nods, a small reaction, because she probably guessed.
“What did you do last night?” she asks with a pointed tone that I don’t like.
“Lost my temper. You know what I did last night.” I busy myself picking flecks of egg off the gloves and flicking them away.
“You didn’t go out?”
I wrinkle my nose. “No.”
“What was Avery doing?”
“I have no idea. Probably studying for the SATs.” Probably studying for Mike Neckekis’s junk.
“You didn’t want to go out with the boys who came here?” She makes it sound like they came over to sip Arnold Palmers and play charades.
“Uh, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a douche.”
Ruth shrugs, vapes delicately with her pinkie in the air, and lets it go again. “When I was your age . . .”
“You prank called a stegosaurus?”
“Very funny. Actually, whenever we had a bad substitute teacher, I’d get the whole class to throw their textbooks on the floor very hard, and he’d reflexively duck under his desk—that’s what we were taught to do during the war if a bomb fell.”
“Dark.”
“You should take advantage of your youth while you’ve got it. Drink some whiskey. Spend some time with boys—or girls, if you want. Egg an old lady’s house.”
I make a Come on face.
“Not for you?” she asks, sounding amused.
“I’m not an asshole.”
“You’re sixteen. By the time you’re twenty-one, they’ll expect you to be a real person. This is your asshole window. It’s wide open.”
“Ew, don’t talk about my asshole window.”
“I just wish you’d raise a little hell! You know? Soon it’ll be too late.”
“Um, too late? I think I’ve got a while.”
“You really never know how much time you’ve got.” She looks off into the distance for a second, focusing on something far away. Then she snaps back into the present. “For instance, I read in the newspaper today that a lovely straight-A student at the Hun School passed away last week.”
“Oh. That sucks.”
“She snorted too much Molly.”
“I don’t think you snort Molly.”
“Well, she snorted too much something.”
“Who even snorts things anymore? Like, just take it with water. Who are you, Bret Easton Ellis?”
“Scarlett, she died,” snaps Ruth very uncharacteristically. “Everything is a joke to you.” It startles me enough to shut me right up. I scrape egg in silence for a minute. She sighs and rubs her temples with two fingers each, nails painted bright green. She wears zero makeup but lives for gel manicures—one of the zillion Ruth contradictions I’m obsessed with.
“Sorry. All I’m trying to say is . . . you know. Live in the moment. Get a little nuts. Life is short.”
I shrug. “To be honest, it kind of feels like my life hasn’t started yet.”
“Kiddo,” Ruth says, “your life started the minute you put pen to paper.”
I roll my eyes. But maybe she’s right. She is seven thousand years old.
After I’ve returned home and washed the egg off my person, Dawn and I sit on the sofa and devour a large half-mushroom pie. Every local takeout guy is more or less a member of our extended family at this point. On TV, some Real Housewives or another flickers on mute.
“I think next week we should have dinner with Brian,” she says mildly, blotting her second slice with her French-manicured hand.
“Which one is that? Bald or Balder?”
She eyeballs me. “Brian. Brian. The only guy I’ve been dating for the last two weeks.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
She props her arm on the back of the couch, leaning in toward me, a worry line creasing her forehead.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“Fine,” I mumble.
She brightens. “Guy trouble?”
“No! Guys aren’t the only thing girls are sad about. Jesus.” (I’m mostly irritated that she’s right.) “I was just asking.” She sounds hurt, and I feel a twinge of guilt.
My cell phone rings. I beam.
“Dad!” I say, holding up the phone and already hopping off the chair. She nods blankly, the usual reaction, and I walk away from the kitchen table into my room. I shut the door, intentionally fueling her paranoid—and mostly inaccurate—suspicion that all I do when I’m on the phone with him is complain about her. I sometimes do, but he never does. Honestly, Dawn worries that he talks tons of shit on her to me only because she talks tons of shit on him to me.
I slide my thumb over the phone to accept the call. “Hi!”
“Hey, Scarlett!” Just hearing his familiar, comforting voice is calming, especially when he says, “How ya holding up?”
I don’t even have to ask what he means by that: He knows the Lycanthrope cancellation broke my heart. If you want humor and understanding, you go to Dad. If you want to determine if a Louis Vuitton bag you bought on eBay is real or not, you go to Dawn.
“Other than my abject devastation, I’m okay.” I sigh.
“I know,” he says warmly. “Hang in there.”