Afterparty (2 page)

Not a chance.

We have reservations in the dining room, where the waiter hovers over us, keeping our water glasses perfectly full and whisking away the appetizers like a magician before bringing even more food. Of course, Mrs. Karp has long since given up on trying to maneuver me across the sand to meet other kids. She has practically given up talking to me altogether, ever since she kept trying to shove surf ’n’ turf down my throat over my (extremely polite) protests. Then she clammed up, horrified that maybe she was trying to force lobster on a kosher person who can’t actually eat shellfish.

I am not a kosher person. It isn’t even clear if I’m a Jewish person. My dad claims he wants me to make spiritual decisions when I hit adulthood. I just don’t like lobsters. They’re like giant bugs that stare up at you from the plate. I keep telling her that it’s okay, but Mrs. Karp looks stricken, even when my dad reassures her that we left all that (kosher food? religion? all vestiges of our past life?) behind in Montreal.

I am starting to feel as if I’m a walking, talking motherless-girl vacuum that nice women who so much as spot me across the
room are inexplicably drawn to fill with helpfulness and insects of the sea.

I wander off in search of the ladies’ room, in search of five unsupervised minutes during which I plan to chew some contraband gum, which my dad thinks is a disgusting and therefore unacceptable habit. I am visualizing a moving truck carting our stuff across the Rocky Mountains.

When I see him.

The guy is in a gray Latimer Country Day football tee, worn almost to transparency, and tight but not disgustingly tight jeans, ocean-soaked around the ankles. I am at a dead end in the maze of hallways and unlabeled doors where the ladies’ room is supposed to be.

The guy has a corkscrew and two wineglasses dangling from his fingers. He has a face you could draw from memory a second after you first see it, a line drawing of hard-edged, witty symmetry. He looks like an underwear model who also attends Yale, and is deeply amused by the world but not so much so that you’re distracted from the cheekbones, or the eyelashes, or the long upper lip, or the mouth.

The mouth.

There is a bit of toasted marshmallow at the corner of his mouth. Which he licks off.

He says, “So. Were you looking for me?”

I watch his tongue trace his lower lip, possibly in search of remnants of marshmallow and possibly flirting.

He has the best hair. Light brown, shiny, slightly spiky from
having been in the ocean recently enough to still be damp and only just shaken dry.

He says, “Did I miss something?”

“What?” I am leaning against one of the unmarked doors, which is cold and slippery, as if it’s sucked up all the air-conditioned air and left the hallway balmy.

He says, “You’re looking at my mouth.”

I am.

I say, “Marshmallow.”

He tilts his head. He is bemused, and also gorgeous.

I say, “I’m trapped up here in the dining room with surf ’n’ turf, and I want marshmallows.”

He says, “Poor you. Avoid the clams. Unless you like rubber. You could stick them together and use them for handball.”

I say, “Not my game.”

He rests the back of his head against the wall opposite, but it’s a very narrow hall. “What
is
your game?”

Oh God, a line! I’ve been here for less than twenty-four hours, I’m just wandering around looking for a quiet place to chew a stick of gum, and I’m two feet away from a tan guy who is feeding me a line.

The guy leans forward. He smells like salt water and smoke from the bonfire down by the lagoon. He slips the hand that isn’t holding the corkscrew and the glasses into the small of my back and then he pauses, and I smile, and he’s kissing me.

Welcome to California.

I do not hook up with random guys in prep-school tees, and I don’t flirt, and I don’t kiss them back—not that I’ve ever had the opportunity to kiss them back—and I don’t put my hand on their shoulders in tacit acknowledgment of how much I want to be doing this strange, random, surprising thing.

There are footsteps, but he doesn’t stop until he’s finished kissing me. Doesn’t look back at the blond girl in the black bikini top and sarong who is looking at me over his shoulder. I didn’t know that people even actually wore sarongs. It might just be a really well-draped beach towel.

She says, “Right. Well, don’t get any ideas about sister-wives, jerkoff. Just give me the corkscrew.”

He is smiling, apparently capable of smiling intensely at two girls simultaneously.

I would jump back, but I’m already pressed against a closed door. I say, “Oh God, is this your boyfriend?” She looks as if he’d be her boyfriend. She is wearing a thin chain with a tiny diamond every few inches that is pooled between her breasts, and she has the same wet hair and the same potential for a lucrative career modeling tiny pieces of lingerie while glaring.

She says, “You can have him. He’s a shit kisser, anyway.” She hooks a finger through his belt loop and pulls him away, down the hall.

I go back to the dinner party, but it’s hard to pay attention.

Three weeks later, we live here.

I HAVE STARTED AT NEW
schools on days that weren’t the first day often enough to know the drill.

This time I wake up in a Spanish Colonial house covered with night-blooming jasmine a half mile above the Sunset Strip. At night, we see its colors filtering skyward through the pine trees in the canyon at the edge of our backyard, spotlights sweeping the too-bright sky. If I open my bedroom window, I hear traffic and coyotes and wind.

In the morning, my room smells like fresh paint and the aroma of my dad baking me pumpkin bread in his belief that motherless girls need fathers who know their way around a mixing bowl.

He pulls my uniform out of its box and rubs the fabric of one more plaid pleated skirt between his fingers. The other Lazars—the ones who, unlike him, did not go to medical school and then scandalize Montreal by marrying the spectacularly wrong woman and producing me—are the kings of Canadian imported silk.

He says, “I’ve never felt so much synthetic. If someone flicks a live ash, your skirt will melt off.”

I imagine myself standing skirtless in a puddle of navy blue and burgundy. You can guess who I imagine flicks the ash. (Hint: He is wearing a worn-out Latimer football tee.)

My father, gazing at me slouched in the doorway in the stiff white blouse and dinky little tie, as I pin up my hair, says, “Ems, you look just like her.”

It is the first time he has mentioned her—She Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken, the unmentionable junkie otherwise known as my mother—since Baltimore, two cities ago.

And it’s not that I haven’t been waiting for an opening to have this conversation with him since Baltimore, because I have. It’s just that I’d like to make it to my first day of school without snot and mascara streaming down my face.

I pretend that I am suddenly fascinated by our neighbors’ English bulldogs, Mutt and Jeff, who have tunneled under the fence between our houses and are currently wagging their stubby tails and panting, noses to our French doors, watching us.

My dad grabs the backpack he has filled with brightly colored plastic school supplies, well suited to the carefree twelve-year-old I never was, and we wind down to Sunset, past the flower beds on the median strip at Sunset Plaza, past the Viper Room and the Roxy, back into the hills toward Latimer.

We can see the ocean dead-on from the parking lot despite the gray-blue haze.

The landscaping belongs at a luxe tropical resort (not that we
go to luxe tropical resorts: we fight off bloodthirsty Canadian mosquitoes in a cabin in Quebec near Lac des Sables; we take nature walks in the hills, facing due north, away from Montreal).

The buildings are palatial, the pathways wide and curved and swept immaculate.

And in the middle of all this, there is a sign pointing to the stables. The
stables
?

I was prepared for swank, but not this level of swank. I panic, but now that we are (sort of) Southern Californians, my dad shows no inclination to protect me from all this K-12 ocean-view opulence. He half drags me down the perfect path toward the awe-inspiring administration building.

Our hands are shaken firmly and repeatedly by well-dressed Latimer administrators, juggling the words “welcome” and “elite” and “fit right in.”

I am sent off to get my student ID photo taken in the student store, which has Latimer-logo clothes, school supplies, and every kind of ball, oar, paddle, fencing jacket, and athletic headgear known to man.

A girl in riding clothes—boots no doubt sewn together by Italian shoemakers while her calves were encased in the cordovan leather, and jodhpurs so tight across the back, you have to wonder how she got her thong so lined up with the seam—is complaining about the brand of saddle soap and the fact there hasn’t been any mink oil for her bridle for a week.

The kid behind the counter keeps trying to end the tirade by offering abject apologies, but the tirade is endless. When there’s
the slightest pause, I say, “Excuse me, is this the right place for the photo?”

The girl turns on her heel (literally); she pivots toward me. She says, “I was talking about my
bridle
. So unless you have something to add . . .”

I suddenly recall why girls without Miss Teen Universe potential should never be the new girl. Then she does a double take and looks me over in a horrified state of disbelief.

She says, “Didn’t you, like, babysit the Karp brats at the beach club?”

I am about to descend into my own state of horrified disbelief, but even though she is tall and blond, she is not the girl in the bikini top. I say, “I was having dinner with the Karps.”

“I’ll bet you were,” she says. “
Anybody
can go as a guest. Barbeque Wednesday is turning into freak night. But who knew Latimer was slumming it too?”

I am standing there, counting the number of maroon balloons floating upward from the
WELCOME BACK, LATIMER LIONS!
banner. So much for a fresh start with boys in it, and maybe some friends who don’t remember me with knee socks covering unshaved legs through middle school.

A girl behind me says, “Who
are
you?”

I’m afraid that she’s talking to me, but she’s not.

The girl in the equestrian cat suit doesn’t take her eyes off me. “Here’s a tip,” she says. “This is
Latimer Day
. You might want to stop interrupting people like you do at Walmart, or wherever you got that cheap barrette. You might want to lose the tacky
vintage thrift-store look and get over yourself.” She pats my arm. I want to hit her, but more than that, I want to not cry. “There, there. There’s always Halloween.”

I am not even fully enrolled yet, and it’s starting.

“And here’s a hint for
you
,” the voice behind me says to Equestrian Girl. “You might want to get some pants that fit so the cellulite in your butt doesn’t show. And you might want to bone up on cheapness, because, guess what, you dress like a hooker with a trust fund.”

The kid behind the counter is frozen in reverential awe and wonder.

The voice behind me asks, “So where’s the transfer photo place?”

I turn around, and there is Siobhan.

Only without the sarong or the bikini top or the necklace with the tiny diamonds. Without her index finger hooked through the belt loops of a guy’s pants.

She says, “Hey, sister-wife.”

She is blond and slouchy and tapping her foot. The sleeves of her jacket are pushed up almost to her elbows; her hair is coming out of the wood bead bracelet she is using for a rubber band; and her socks are pushed down to the rim of high-top sneakers that are not, strictly speaking, part of the uniform.

She doesn’t look messy; she looks perfect.

I wait for her to slink away in search of someone cooler, but she doesn’t. She stares down at my feet, in pointy black Mary Janes from the fifties and frilly white anklets that are, in fact, part of the uniform if you’re in K through 3.

I say, “Listen, at the beach, if that was your boyfriend—”

“Not. At this very moment”—she looks at her watch, which is wafer-thin and stainless steel and Swiss—“he’s probably playing two or three other girls in college somewhere. His loss.”

It feels more like my loss. I have been waiting for him to come jogging up from the gym in that old T-shirt, or brush against my entirely synthetic navy sweater in the hall.

I say, “Admit he was a really good kisser.”

“Ooooh yeah.”

We head into the exceptionally green quad that smells like freshly cut grass. We have linked arms. People heading in the opposite direction have to go around us.

“Thank God, another human,” she says, pressing her arm against my arm. “All the clone girls here have fruit-scent lip gloss and headbands. Jesus. It looks like they all just sucked on the same lollipop.”

“Headbands?”

“Exactly. Where were you when school started? I was in Africa. You’re not from here, right?”

As it turns out, she was in Africa because her mother, Nancy, and Nancy’s flavor-of-the-month husband, Burton Pratt, were carting Sibhoan around Zimbabwe on an arguably educational safari, and her mom doesn’t believe that school should interfere with pretty much anything.

“I’m from Montreal,” I say. “Kind of. I haven’t been there since I was five.”

“
J’adore
Montreal! You speak French, right?” We walk past
the administration building, where we’re supposed to be, toward a wooden bench that backs onto a hedge of red hibiscus. “I hate it here,” she says. “I just got used to some crap school in New York and now my mom’s squeeze wants to be in Hollywood and I have to go to school with nasty clones in headbands.”

“He’s an actor?”

“He’s too old to be
anything
. But my mom used to live here. She says L.A. is boss.
Boss
. Who even says that?”

So far, this is the main thing we seem to have in common, our parents’ use of outdated vocabulary. That and the ability to speak French. And kiss the same boy.