Afterparty (10 page)

At breakfast, my dad says, “Can I trust you to stay at school?”

“Obviously not. I’m the worst person in the world. Why don’t you chain me to the piano?”

In a cold, increasingly familiar voice, he says, “Fine, stay here.”

“Dad! I’m sorry! It’s school! I have to go to school.”

“And where were you again last Wednesday?” He walks over and unplugs the TV, purely a symbolic gesture, but I get it, and he leaves for work. I’m stranded here, not sure if it’s okay to turn on the den computer to do homework, or what I have to do to make this end, and no doubt talking back was yet another poor choice.

I say, “Screw it,” and I go outside to lie in the grass with Mutt and Jeff. I look at the sky, which is brilliant, blue and cloudless. But I feel too guilty to enjoy it.

When he gets home from work, I say, “Seriously. Please. Is this how you tell people to treat their kids?”

He says, “You’re
my
kid. It’s a different situation.”

“What about: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you’?”

He says, “Nice try.”

I feel terrible, but not terrible enough to want to deal with much more of this.

By Monday, at school, I say, “I’m no doubt going to regret this forever, but I fished that list out of the wastebasket and it might be the new story of my life.”

Siobhan intones, “You have used your dungeon wisely, grasshopper. Reject the path of Emma the Good and hop out the window.” Then she hands me a prepaid cell phone.

I say, “It’s not just that. It’s everything.”

Because enough disappointment, restriction, confiscation, punishment, confinement, and paternal rage can wear a person down. Tucked away in the hills, shielded from Sunset only by the treetops in the canyon, and the path from point A to point B can get a whole lot easier to navigate.

Also, it’s the only slim shot I’ve got for even one single unsupervised evening of something resembling normal teen life.

I say, “Pact.”

SO THIS IS IT.

A clear, cloudless night with big, fat stars and hazy light rising in glaring whiteness from West Hollywood. The cries of coyotes in the canyon and horns honking down on Sunset.

My dad whispers, “Night, Ems,” to the pillows arranged under the covers of my uninhabited bed. The moral compass rotates toward the pillow where the longitude and latitude of where my head should be converge.

I’m in the closet.

The compass mocks,
Night, Ems
, watching me slide into the dark unknown. I’ve heard my dad say
no
a hundred times to the specific geography I plan to explore, the land of unchained kids doing their thing under the watchful eye of no one.

But it always comes back to the unasked question: Dad, do you think if you let me out of your sight, I’m going to score some heroin, develop an incurable addiction, find myself a mini-mall,
and curl up and die between two Dumpsters with a needle in my arm?

If he were honest, he would say
yes
to that one.

That stepping across the threshold of a party-lit tennis court can make a girl succumb to fatal carelessness. That the minute my kitten heels slide out the window and touch down in the wet grass, I’m lost.

No. Just no.

The compass says,
Yeah, you just tell yourself that.

But even in fairy tales, princesses climb out windows, shimmy down vines and dance all night in diamond shoes. Hot princes vault their castle walls and climb their hair, all to spring them from their parents’ lockdown hell.

Seriously, if a fairy-tale princess had lived in a one-story Spanish house with a screenless bay window in the Hollywood Hills, would she have sat there pondering whether she should have a guilty conscience?

I unlatch my window. It’s so fast. First I’m inside, and then I’m ankle-deep in a bed of impatiens, and my kitten heels have sunk into the planting soil.

I leave my bag inside.

The moral compass is re-energized:
Could this be a message from your highly moral, totally non-functional conscience calling, Go Back? Hmmm? Well, is it?

I ignore this. I’m an analyst’s kid. I was raised on this stuff, and I’m not climbing back through the window, peeling off my jeans, and retreating into bed.

I grab the bag and streak across the lawn. Siobhan keeps texting:
Where ru? RU still coming? U didn’t chicken out did u? Where the helllllllll r u???

I silence my phone.

Suddenly illuminated houses (no doubt with girl-sensitive motion detectors) signal my descent into civilization. Cats meow, dogs bark, and I imagine that somewhere along the way, there’s a chatty talking parrot that’s about to rat me out to his suspicious owner. By the time I reach the Strip, I’m convinced everyone my dad has ever met is, at this moment, driving down Sunset and speed-dialing him.

Naturally, the Chateau Marmont is flanked by paparazzi. I think, Really bad plan. Why didn’t I go to the Standard? But the Chateau is the plan and I’m too wigged-out to cross the street.

I ask one of the guys in the motor court if he could get me a cab. I wait for him to look me over—so much mascara my eyes threaten to seal closed, kitten heels slightly caked with mud—and go, “Who the hell are you?”

But he doesn’t. He looks me over and gets me a cab.

It’s on.

• • •

The streets near the top of Beverly Hills are pitch-black and empty.

“You’re not going to regret this!” Siobhan says. She’s standing at the bottom of Roy Warner’s driveway, shivering in jeans and Nancy’s gold mesh top. She smiles into the taxi while I pay the driver. Cash isn’t a problem. My credit card might be confiscated, but I haven’t spent one cent of birthday money for sixteen years.

She says, “Of course, you’re
you
, so you might a little.”

“Are you sure this is okay? I don’t even know Roy Warner.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Her necklace catches light from the cab’s open door. “He’s so trashed, he wouldn’t recognize his sister. I mean, she’s here and he didn’t.”

Roy Warner goes to Winston and this party seems like a better plan than staging my first adventure in normal teen life at a Latimer party where I could end up acting bizarre around people I know. Still, I’m shaking so hard, Roy’s driveway starts to resemble the trail up Mount Everest.

“I want to throw up.”

“Breathe,” Siobhan says. “Don’t geek out on me. Everyone will think you’re cool because you’re with me. Don’t blow it.”

She pushes me up the driveway toward the house.

“Roy’s parties suck,” she says. “It’s only stoners from Winston. You can throw up all you want.”

By now, we are standing outside the front door, which is hanging open; there are fumes. I’m thinking, What was I thinking? How could this even vaguely be a good idea, there must be something seriously wrong with me.

Siobhan pulls notebook paper folded into origami squares out of her bag.

“Kiddie pool,” she says brightly. “I even brought the list. You’re going to drink a beer and take a reasonable number of hits on a joint and you’re going to hook up with a guy. A half hour from now, you’ll have three things checked off.”

She sounds like a cheerful camp counselor explaining how
much fun it’s going to be to rappel down a cliff when, to me, the whole idea of rappelling down a cliff has a lot in common with jumping off the cliff.

“I’m hooking up with a random Winston stoner? Think again.”

“He won’t even remember; they’re comatose. Some of them might be dead.”

“I thought I was
observing
the first time.”

“Noooo, you’re going to participant-observe, like a cool anthropologist participant-observing in the wilds. Like Jane Goodall if she got it on with apes.”

There’s the sound of something crashing inside, and someone saying “Shit,” but not sounding that upset about whatever it was.

“Do you ever worry something bad could happen?” (Because even Totally Bad Emma can’t get all the way away from the images of looming danger I’ve been raised to entertain.)

In the yellow porch light, Siobhan’s pupils are so dilated, they fill her irises, and her lipstick is smudged. She does not look worried.

“Sib, how much did you pregame? Want to wait out here for a minute?”

“I’ve been here for a while,” she says. “I
gamed
. And now you need to game.”

In the powder room off the front hall, there is a gold sink with faucets in the shape of scary swans, and wallpaper with flowers that look like Venus flytraps.

Siobhan says, “Frightening, right? No wonder Roy gets loaded.”

She spreads the list on the counter. “Oh, I might have updated it,” she says. “Don’t freak. ’Shrooms is a joke. I might have gotten carried away.”

“Seriously? A threesome? And
LSD
?”

“I was just having fun. Don’t be a baby.”

“What did you do to my list? Where’s beer pong? Wait, a
biker
bar? Have you ever
done
any of this stuff?”

“You have no sense of humor. Why would it be so bad if I had, anyway?”

I am staring at this bucket list of bad high school behavior, starting with baby steps and working up to an assortment of sex acts in settings other than a bed.

“Complete joke,” Siobhan says. “Look at the easy column. Check mark for passing a joint. You don’t even have to take a hit.”

“I’m supposed to find
Ecstasy
, is that what this
x
is supposed to be?”

We head down the massive hallway into a rec room where maybe thirty kids are sprawled on big, low couches. A couple of kids are playing pool in slow motion.

The weird thing is, I knew Siobhan partied. My phone is full of little video reminders of how much fun she was having and I wasn’t. But her in Roy Warner’s rec room is not what I’d visualized. Not thirty glazed-over kids passing a joint around, too far gone to even hook up effectively.

Siobhan leaves me sitting on the arm of a sofa and disappears into a knot of kids who might or might not be dancing. She
comes back with a red cup in one hand and a joint in the other. She is completely gleeful.

“Worst party ever. Even if you get
très
wasted and throw up
on
one of these kids,
tant pis
! You could get your freak on here, and no one would look up.”

“I don’t have a freak to get on. Can we go home now?”

I wait thirty minutes with a frozen smile, holding a red cup of warm beer. Occasionally, I pass a joint to the guy next to me. In slow motion, he tries to nuzzle the left side of my face. I flick him away. It doesn’t even seem sexual. He just seems to have an unnatural interest in the taste of human skin. I wait until he tries to stick his tongue in my ear, not getting a single check mark except for passing the joint.

Sib says, “All right. This one sucks. I just wanted to ease you into it, you know, kind of gradually.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“It’s going to work, all right?” Sib says. “We have a
pact
.”

“You want to share my cab?”

She says, “I’m giving it another hour. It can’t get worse.”

I make the taxi drop me off at the Chateau and I climb the hill to home. Everything happens in reverse: the barking dogs, the stalking cats, the security lights triggered by me walking past, Mutt and Jeff going doggie-berserk.

My house is dark and quiet, with no sign of the FBI or a canine search-and-rescue team or the entire juvenile division of the LAPD camped out in front. I push the window open, quietly, quietly, trying not to squash any more impatiens blooms than absolutely necessary to climb back into my room.

I strip down as fast as I can, and put on the big tee I left under one of the many pillows lined up in the shape of me under the covers. When I pull out my phone to recharge it, Megan (who, when I told her the plan, was surprisingly entranced) is texting.

Megan:
Are you having fun yet?

Me:
Why are you up?

Megan:
Are you?

Me:
Parties suck. You have no idea how not fun. So not worth it.

Me:
Bunch of stoners too wasted to move.

Megan:
Cheer up. It can only get better.

Maybe.

And it was
so
easy. I’m not even close to being in extra trouble.

Then there’s Siobhan’s text:
Next week. On Mulholland.

The time stamp says 3:00 a.m.

Five hours later, I text back:
Maybe.

Siobhan:
What took u so long?

I STUDY ALL DAY SUNDAY
and I am completely good.

But inside the good girl, sitting at the desk poring over excessively detailed history notes, is the kernel of a slightly different girl. The thing is, I can’t tell if the different girl is the bold fairy-tale princess who sneaks out and dances all night in diamond shoes (all right, didn’t dance, sat in a room full of comatose stoners), or if she’s Little Red Riding Hood, recklessly skipping through the woods (okay, Beverly Hills) just before the wolf eats her.

I creep down the hall with the pot-scented laundry basket. I dump the entire contents of a bottle of Febreze into the wash with everything I wore to Roy’s in case my clothes reek. When the contraband phone vibrates with a text message, I dive back into my room.

Siobhan:
Say yes.

Me:
Busy being grounded.

Siobhan:
Unground yourself. U know you want to. Only this time we have to pregame together.

Me:
????

Siobhan:
Don’t panic. Not substances, hair. Nails. We’ll pick out your outfit.

Siobhan:
Not that same jacket.

Me:
Jacket just fell apart. I put it in the washer.

Siobhan:
Come on. I’ll put pink streaks in your hair.