“Who’s the new dude?” I ask.
“I have no idea, Scarlett,” Ave informs me in the sweetly patient tone she always uses when I’m looking for Ashley intel, like how you might talk to a three-year-old. “I’m not on whatever review board she presents her biweekly meat to.”
“You know who your sister reminds me of?”
Ave nods, waiting.
“Patience. Hot, popular valedictorian. Secretly a three-thousand-year-old demon bent on world destruction.”
That’s one of the things I liked most about the Lycanthrope universe: Everyone who is beloved here, you can bet they’re evil there. That works in reverse too. John took trope-y archetypes and turned them upside down; nobody’s ever what you’d expect them to be.
Ave humors me. “What happens to her?”
“She gets beheaded by a giant pair of ancient scissors.”
“Uh, really?”
“Yeah, they’re the only thing that can—just forget it, okay?”
As close as Ave and I are in some ways, there’s a layer of our friendship way underneath where we split apart. She lives inside rules, angles she can draw with a protractor or determine with her graphing calculator. Sometimes I miss having a best friend who totally gets me.
Chapter 3
GIDEON’S BEEN IN THE SAME CLASS AS ME SINCE PRE-K, THE chubby boy in the XL Old Navy polo sitting way in the back, doodling manga on the back of his English tests, but like me, he’s invisible.
My crush on him began in second grade, which is not quite as creepy as it sounds. It was circumstantial, initially—my dad spent afternoons working on his book, and Dawn’s shift at TGI Fridays started at two P.M. Mrs. Maclaine offered to pick me up with Gideon and watch me after school. Neither of us were outgoing, and at the center of both of our friendlessness was an overlap, like a Venn diagram: He was weird because he was shy, and I was weird because I was poor.
Initially, the arrangement was cool only because Gideon’s family is rich. They live in a big house, similar to the ones Dawn cleans, and his dad’s a plastic surgeon in the city. We could hang out in his giant rec room, or float in the swimming pool, or plunk in front of the flat-screen TV while devouring his mom’s homemade snacks. (That alone was a treat. The Maclaines eat farm-to-table; the Epsteins eat freezer-to-table.)
As I got older, I became more embarrassed about how Dawn was always twenty minutes late to pick me up, smelling like mozzarella sticks, with her tchotchke-pinned apron slung over the passenger seat. Then I’d feel guilty for dreading it. That was when I first started writing, trying to unravel feelings I couldn’t really talk about.
By eighth grade, Gideon was still a foot shorter than every other boy in class; he trudged and wove through the hallway like a Frogger nobody paid attention to. I still got straight Cs and had no idea how to talk to other people. School was just a forced, lame interlude between our real worlds, our various obsessions, and our friendship. We both watched Lycanthrope religiously. We’d even Gchat after each episode, incredulous about what we’d just seen—but I never told him about my fanfic friends. I was afraid that would cross some invisible weirdness line.
The turning point was the swelteringly hot summer between eighth and ninth grade, the year our parents left books on our beds with titles like Your Body Is Changing and It’s Normal (Not Witchcraft). It was the best summer of my life, probably—the last one before we drifted apart freshman year, for a number of reasons, many of which were established on this one particular day.
We were sitting on the giant leather couch in his cushy central-air-conditioned basement, eating Oreos and watching a stack of old Saturday Night Live “best ofs” from the 1970s that Gideon slowly built up through Christmas and birthday presents every year. Gideon was the only person I could share that kind of comfortable silence with, without feeling compelled to make dumb jokes to fill it.
Neither of us understood a bunch of the references on old-school SNL episodes, but it felt dangerous somehow, different from anything we’d seen at the movies. The way Gideon watched John Belushi hurl himself at a wall reminded me of how I’d always read my favorite lines from books out loud, savoring the taste of them. That day, after a particularly long vintage Steve Martin binge, I finally asked him.
“Is this what you want to do?”
He turned bright red. “What do you mean? I don’t know,” he stammered, then asked again, as if he was short-circuiting, “What do you mean?”
“Like, comedy?”
“I . . . sometimes think I want to. But it’s so silly. It’s not a viable career path.”
It really bothered me when he did that, echoed things his dad said to him like they were gospel. As far as Mr. Maclaine was concerned, anything that wasn’t med school wasn’t a viable career path.
“It’s just dumb,” he said softly.