Afterparty (15 page)

Siobhan still wants to hang out after school.

“Don’t you want to hang with, you know, the boyfriend?”

She says, “What’s wrong with you? You never told me to hang out with Wade or Ian Heath or Strick or anybody. I’m the girlfriend, not the lapdog.”

I don’t know why I agree to it, but I’m so into pretending everything is fine that we go back to her house. I almost can’t bear to step into her bedroom, to see the bed where I’m pretty sure he’s been. I turn around and lead us back downstairs to the screening room without a word.

Twenty minutes into the movie, during an endless interlude of seabirds flapping around a depressed French couple, she says, “You know, he’s not the funnest person ever born. It’s not like I’m going to sit there and do worksheets while he practices violin or whatever.”

Another hideous image of togetherness.

“If he wants to be the boyfriend, he’s going to have to step it up. Just because he hates L.A. so much and he hates Latimer so
much and he hates his asshole brother so much, I don’t see why he can’t put on something nice and party.”

“Have you thought of asking him?” Said with only the slightest hint of edge.

She says, “Okay, we have to keep this Afterparty prep pact going or you’re going to stay single and clueless, and Afterparty is going to kill you. You don’t go, ‘Hey jerk, why are you so rumpled, have you ever noticed signs that say “dry cleaner,” and why are you such a freaking drag?’ and stay somebody’s girlfriend. Too bad we can’t double with Jean-Luc. You’d see what I mean.”

“I thought we were going to kill off Jean-Luc.”

“No! Why would you want to be the pathetic single girlfriend, when you
could
be the International Girl of Intrigue? It would be like going backwards.”

I almost can’t contain how much I want to slap her. Naturally, the film we’re mostly not watching has a tousled, brown-haired guy who pushes his hair behind his ear. Right then.

And it’s not as if I’m the only one who notices the novelty of them being together. Everyone who’s even marginally nice thinks it’s swell that Siobhan and Dylan have taken up with someone semi-normal, even though the two of them might not, at first glance, appear to be the same brand of semi-normal.

“You must be so happy!” Kimmy chirps. By this point, I can admit she’s a completely nice person whose horse I never should have touched, and if she finds out and hates me, I would, strictly speaking, deserve it. Kimmy is, as usual, all horse-sweaty and
enthusiastic. “Who’d have thought her and
Dylan
? Pretty strange, huh?”

I say, “It’s not that strange.”

Kimmy looks at me sideways. “Come on, it’s strange.”

I say, “It’s not strange, Kimmy!” As if ordering it not to be strange and ordering her not to think it’s strange would work.

“All right!” she says. “Sorry! I’m not saying it to insult her. It’s just that she usually goes for these big, macho lacrosse guys and that guy from Crossroads with the really big Harley—”

“Strick?”

“Fake biker, yeah. And Dylan’s so kind of
alternative
.”

I snap my head back. I don’t even mean to.

She says, “Don’t say you don’t know what I mean. He doesn’t throw, kick, or catch balls except for pickup basketball, and he has Kurt Cobain T-shirts. More than one.”

“Tell me you’re not serious.”

Kimmy shakes her head, and her braid whips over her shoulder. “It’s just that he’s never interested in anyone our age. When he came to my party, it was kind of a shock. He never parties. He never hangs with us. He never likes anyone that Aiden didn’t check out first.”

Does everyone know more than I do?

Kimmy looks away. “It’s just nice that he’s all happy. He
is
all happy, right?”

“You don’t think he looks happy?”

“You know what I mean,” Kimmy says. “Hard to know what Dylan’s thinking, except that he doesn’t want to be here.”

“How would I possibly know what he’s thinking?” I am, perhaps, shouting at her. She takes a tiny step back, as if preparing to bolt.

I say, “Sorry. I’m just having a weird day. Sorry.”

“Every day’s a weird day at Latimer,” Kimmy says. “But at least it’s the best-of-the-best-of-the-best weird day. . . . Are you all right?”

“I am spectacularly and outstandingly all right,” I lie. “I’ve never been better.”

Kimmy says, “If you say so.”

After school, when Siobhan wants to go down to the Strip for iced coffee, I tell her I have to be at the food bank. Lie, lie, lie. Then I actually take the Latimer bus that goes into Hollywood to the food bank, and I help Mrs. Loman, who is too old to be lifting more than one can of tomato paste at a time, but is very gung ho. When my dad calls to find out where I am, since, obviously, I’m not at home dutifully studying, and I tell him I’m at the temple working and I lost track of time, he think’s I’m a wonderful, world-repairing person.

I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m not.

NOW THAT I’M TRYING TO
sublimate my little heart out at the food bank (without a whole lot of success), I’m filled with ideas for repairing the world through acts of subversion.

Megan says, “This isn’t going to work,” but you can tell she’s in love with the idea. I feel like the Sacajawea of girls who need to be led out of oppression.

I check Joe in at the student volunteer desk. When he rolls the
r& 
’s in “Gutierrez–Ortega” and says that he goes to Loyola, the place goes (very subtly) batshit crazy over the arrival of more interfaith cooperation.

I guide him back to Megan, where, according to plan, she says “Wait, don’t I know you? Haven’t I seen you at a mixer at Saint Bernadette?” Just in case she’s so knocked out she can’t completely pretend she’s never met him before.

“Why, yes indeed, I have been to a mixer at Saint Bernadette,” Joe says. You can see why he’s in Model UN and not drama club.
Also, you can see he wants to grab Megan right there in the canned fruit aisle.

I whisper, “I am such an evil genius,” and they grin like crazy.

Only then, when I go back to get a box of crunchy peanut butter jars to distribute in the outgoing grocery bags and I see them standing there, very close together, and he’s stroking her hair, I start to cry and I can’t stop.

I’ve held out through weeks of shrinkish concern from my dad regarding my rapidly plummeting mood, which apparently even my clever methods for covering up the sound of crying (running water, online concerts by Stanford’s Japanese taiko drumming team, Beethoven’s Ninth) can’t disguise. I have faked cheer through a litany of shrink questions designed to see if I’m planning to off myself anytime soon:

Did you
enjoy
anything today?

Did you
sleep
though the whole night?

Are you by any chance harboring persistent thoughts about
hanging
yourself? (All right, slight exaggeration.)

But after he finds me trying to stop crying in the middle of the boxed pastas, I have to come up with a well-edited version of reality in parent-digestible form.

When I try, when I say in truncated sentences that Siobhan is with a guy I like and I don’t know why it bothers me so much but it does, my dad is flabbergasted. You might think a rigorously trained psychoanalyst would have figured out that his daughter might someday like a boy, but apparently this is shocking news.

We are huddled in the car, in the parking lot, and I keep
dabbing my eyes and blowing my nose, creating a huge wad of Kleenex.

I moan, “Dad?”

He looks angry, which isn’t in the range of things I can even think about coping with.

He says, “Okay, boiling it down, Siobhan is keeping company with someone you like?”

And the way he says her name, you can tell that she’s the one drawing his wrath. He turns the key and guns the car out of the parking lot.

“Nobody says
keeping company
.” Sob, sob, sob.

My dad could just as well have a thought bubble over his head, with him throwing a party because he might have the rope he needs to drag Siobhan out of my life.

“I’ve noticed you’ve been a bit down lately,” he says.

“I don’t get to complain. I told her it was fine.” We’re zipping down Sunset, and I’m glad we’re in the car and he has to watch the road.

“You told her it was fine because . . .”

“Do not, I mean it, do
not
go all shrinkish on me.”

It’s not that I don’t know the because.

Because telling her how much I like him and how I’ve been hiding it from her since Day One seems like the ultimate humiliation. Because being her best friend is complicated, and because (other than this) she completely gets me.

He says, “It was the beginning of a sentence. Ems, you also told her that you like him. Doesn’t some kind of girl code come into play here?”

“
Girl code?
Is that what your patients tell you?”

“Trying again. If you like him, and you told her that you like him, and it
wasn’t
fine for her to go with him, why do you think you told her it
was
fine?”

“I don’t know.” At this point, I’m wishing that I hadn’t told him anything, because he won’t let go

He says, “Sure you do.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

I just want to reach over and honk the horn, or pull the wheel out of his hands and steer into something loud and crunchy, and drown out the conversation.

I say, “I know you hate her. I know you want me to say this is the end of life as we know it, but that isn’t it. She was drunk. He was drunk. She probably didn’t even realize it was
him
the first time.”

I don’t expect him to respond to the “you hate her” part. Which he doesn’t.

He says,” That paints a very attractive picture.”

“Megan thinks I should wash my hands of both of them.”

“Sensible girl, Megan. Who is this boy?” He says the word “boy” as if it’s a federal crime to be one.

I try to think of how to reframe Dylan as the teddy-bearish kind of harmless boy who doesn’t scare the shit out of your father, the sweet, respectful kind who wears a tie
without
the roach-clip tie tack, but I don’t make much progress. So then I pick out the upstanding citizen bits. Music lover! Religious Convo! Really high GPA!

“I know what you’re thinking,” I say.

But it turns out, I don’t.

“I’m thinking how unfortunate your best friend fell for him too.”

A clear invitation to a complete losing-control moment.

“Unfortunate! It’s a fucking disaster! I don’t know how I’m going to live through it.”

“Emma!”

“Sorry! A total disaster. A total unmitigated
freaking
disaster.”

He says, “It was the living-through-it part that struck me.”

“Stop it! I don’t have suicidal thoughts and I sleep through the night and I enjoy eating cheesecake, all right? I am not clinically depressed or suicidal or insane. I just want to kill Siobhan, is all.”

ALL I WANT TO DO
is hide, and all anybody else wants to do is keep talking.

Megan calls to apologize. Repeatedly. “That was so insensitive of us!”

“No it wasn’t.”

She says, “Maybe you’re right. Because it will totally cheer you up to see Prince Charming stick his hand down my blouse.”

“Joe stuck his hand down your blouse?”

“Of course not,” Megan says. “Your dad was there. Those two cute middle-school girls and a rabbi and fifteen women dying to talk to authentic Catholics were there.”

“Like Los Angeles isn’t crawling with large numbers of Catholics.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re so argumentative. I called to say sorry.”

“I don’t want to argue. I want to scream.”

Megan says, “You just have to ride it out. How many people has she been with already this semester? How long do you think she can keep this up?”

I say, “Yeah, and I don’t see how it can actually get worse.”

“I’m sorry about the food bank. You’re the genius who got us there together. I didn’t mean to upset you like that.”

I say, “I’m fine. Just don’t tell me how cute and adorable Joe is for a while.”

“Whatever you want.”

Siobhan, meanwhile, calls to complain. “Does he really think I want to go listen to that bitch Mara and her goth girl band sing in a bowling alley in the Valley?”

I put the phone down and start hammering a pillow.

“What am I supposed to do?” she says. “He’s sweet, but he’s so demanding. And he doesn’t want to go anywhere nice.”

“Isn’t Disney Hall nice?”

“Not nice like a nice building, nice like
fun
. Nice like cool. Nice like everyone there isn’t fifty years old and they drove in from Anaheim. And do you know how long it takes to get out of there when you refuse to use a handicap placard? While listening to his incessant complaining.”

“He’s an incessant complainer?” I can’t stop myself.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “Although for someone who hates school and everyone at school so much, he spends a lot of time hanging out with juveniles in Lakers hats.”

He goes to basketball games?

She says, “It’s not like I want to break his heart. I just don’t
want to eat someplace three steps below Koo Koo Roo and dance someplace that smells funky. He’s got ID. He could go anywhere, but nooooo.”

“Don’t break his heart!” I say, in a brief, stunning appearance of Emma the Good, popping up through the muck, sincere but with mud in her hair.

I am deathly afraid that somewhere down there, in the least admirable corner of myself, I want my best friend to break the heart of the boy of my dreams, whom I don’t even know, apparently.

“What about my
bored
heart?” Siobhan says. “You should come out with us, Em! You’ll see what I mean. I could tell him you’re pining away for Jean-Luc and you need male attention or something. I’ll tell him you won’t eat at dives, so at least you won’t have to pretend you like pita at some crap falafel place.”