Afterparty (3 page)

I say, “I’m not too optimistic about
Latimer’s
bossness. But my dad says I catastrophize.”

“No way,” she says, tightening her grip. “This place is the cradle of catastrophic boredom. Look around.”

But some of us are not bored.

Some of us are saved from the scourge of catastrophic boredom.

By her.

THE QUAD EMPTIES SLOWLY. I
have never seen so much blondness, or a school with students so unconcerned about getting to class on time.

I say, “Eventually, we’re going to have to do this.” I am likely the world’s expert on knowing what I have to do and doing it.

She says, “Yes, Mommy.” But we don’t get up.

Siobhan tears off a hibiscus flower and lodges it behind her ear, the side of her face shadowed with red petals. Then she takes the barrette, mother-of-pearl, from Montreal, out of my hair. Bangs in a state of droopy tendrils fall over my forehead and ears, leaving the ballerina bun moored at the nape of my neck.

She says, “You can thank me later.”

Miss Palmer, the guidance counselor, doesn’t seem at all perturbed that we’re an hour late and don’t have the ID cards she sent us to get. She delivers an unsettling pep talk about how wearing the Latimer uniform means we’re the best of the best
of the best (as stated, in Latin, on the school crest), marches us across the quad to a building modeled after a Greek temple, only with air-conditioning, and ditches us inside the carved door of our French class.

Siobhan whispers, “I already speak French. You’d think they’d ask.”

“
Bonjour
, Siobhan Lynch
et
Emma Lazar.” The teacher, M. Durand, is an authentic Frenchman, slightly graying, slightly put out to be here. He looks us over with an unabashed stare and asks for two volunteer hostesses to show us (“How you say?”) the ropes.

The girls in the front row are busy examining their fingernails, the wood-grain surfaces of their desks, and the floor. Equestrian Girl from the bookstore rolls her eyes so far back in her head, it seems that our mere presence in her lair has precipitated a seizure. Nobody raises her hand to volunteer.

Siobhan twirls a lock of hair around her index finger and glares at
la classe
.

“No worries,” she tells M. Durand. “
Je m’en fous de
hostesses.” Roughly translated: I say screw you to the hostesses.

She really can speak French.

M. Durand raises one thin black eyebrow.

“Emma and I will show ourselves around,” Siobhan says in French spoken so slowly that even first-years could follow. “We could, no doubt, show you one or two things.” (There is no perfect translation, but it is so suggestive that M. Durand turns crimson all down his neck.)

“Oh, and
Monsieur
,” Siobhan continues, “
s’il vous plaît
, assure
these girls that even though Emma and I are
un peu
intimidating, we hardly look down on them at
all
.”

The entire front row looks up. It’s like the Wave people do at baseball games, only with bobbing headbands sparkling with a dizzying array of tacky rhinestones.

A boy leaning against the window turns slowly and looks at me, nodding in almost imperceptible approval.

Dylan, but I don’t know that yet.

And I full-on smile back.

Welcome to California, land of boys. I have just dissed an entire class that no doubt thinks I’m smiling about how much I look down on them by beaming at one.

He is worth beaming at.

I distract myself by cataloguing concrete details: hazel eyes, that wide mouth, slightly long brown hair, unbuttoned cuffs, his right arm hanging over the back of his chair. The wicked laugh he swallows just before the point he’d have to have a coughing fit or leave the room.

He looks as if the uber-prep clothes blew onto his body by mistake when he fell into a wind tunnel on his way someplace a lot more interesting. Which could explain why his hair is mussed and his shirttail has escaped from his pants and why he isn’t wearing socks.

He is the most attractive person I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Siobhan and the guy at the beach club, who was more of a fleeting mirage in the sad, overchaperoned desert of my life than an actual person.

At Latimer, on the other hand, I am surrounded by all manner of boys. And it’s clear that even in a lush forest of boys—their minute differences, the rich variety of their faces and shoulders and hands, emphasized by the fact that they’re all wearing the same thing—this is
the
boy.

It occurs to me that if I don’t stop staring at him, if I don’t suppress my desire to follow him out of the room and basically anywhere, he will probably notice.

“That was beyond good,” I say to Siobhan when we are sitting in the empty cafeteria after French, when I’m supposed to be in Math and she’s supposed to be in Econ.

“And it’s going to get better. I hold on to grudges for an unusually long time.”

“Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

“How could you be on my bad side?” she says, wide-eyed. “You’re my best friend in America. Aren’t I your best friend in America?”

I have several semi-friends scattered across North America, in cities where we lived when I was little and you make friends fast. They post sneezing panda videos on my Facebook wall and send chain letters threatening doom.

I say, “Yes.”

Eventually Miss Palmer finds us, draws us a map of where we’re supposed to be for all of our classes (just in case we’d planned to spend the whole rest of the day eating frozen yogurt), and shepherds us to PE.

Siobhan and I have checked our schedules, and we have four classes together, but PE isn’t one of them. I say, “Miss Palmer. I don’t think I’m
supposed to be in PE. My schedule says ‘PE Alternative Dance.’ ”

But apparently I’m trapped playing field hockey until I’m assigned to a ballet class.

“No worries,” Siobhan says when we are rifling through the leftover gym clothes they lend people who need them. “I’ll get us out of this.”

First, she tries to convince the teacher we can’t run around because of our periods.

“We’re synchronized,” she says. “It’s a scientific fact that best friends synchronize. You can look it up.”

“Suit up,” he says.

“This would
never
happen in Italy,” Siobhan says, ostensibly to me. “I lived in Milan before New York. There are old ladies who think you shouldn’t take a
bath
during your period in Italy.”

Mr. Tinker points to the hockey sticks.

Naturally, nobody wants us on her team. They stand there, leaning on their sticks, ignoring us as much as possible given that we’re ten inches away from them. When Mr. Tinker blows his whistle, we go trotting after them, trying to blend in. Thirty seconds later, Siobhan is on the ground and you can’t even tell who put her there, which girl is saying “whoops” over her shoulder.

“Whoops?” Siobhan says, rubbing her thigh. “Really?”

Siobhan, it turns out, is the poster girl for “Don’t get mad, get even.” Or, more accurately, “Get mad
and
get even.” Soon, half the girls on the field would have bruised ankles and battered shins if they weren’t wearing monster shin guards.

Equestrian Girl, who has been slashing her way up and down the field, cornering the little ball and slamming it into the goal, plants herself in front of us.

She says, “What the hell.” It isn’t even a question. “Did somebody forget to lock your cage?”

“I’m sooooo sorry,” Siobhan says. “Maybe I’m swinging too wide.”

The girl snorts, a horse’s whinny kind of snort, appropriate because it turns out she’s the queen of the eleventh-grade horsey girls. “Right,” she says. “Well, I’m Chelsea Hay, and you can’t just do whatever you want.”

Siobhan says, “Watch me.”

The whistle blows. I careen, half pushed, half stumbling, into a petite girl who elbows me as if I’d jumped her. Chelsea takes off with Siobhan at her heels, swinging (maybe at the ball and maybe not) and yelling, “Take that, bitches!”

Mr. Tinker blows his whistle until Siobhan can no longer pretend she doesn’t know it means she’s supposed to stop trying to shed blood.

“I don’t know what you did at your old school,” he says. “But at Latimer, we don’t swear at our teammates.”

“They’re my teammates?”

Mr. Tinker rubs his shaved head. “Do you play lacrosse?”

“Eastside Episcopal,” Siobhan says. “Boys’ team.”

“Varsity tryouts,” he says. “Tomorrow. Give me that stick.”

“SO,” DYLAN SAYS ON THURSDAY,
walking past my desk in homeroom. “I hear you’re violent for a ballerina.” You can’t tell from his face or tone or posture if he thinks this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I say, “Not a ballerina. The bun is for PE Alternative Dance, not actual ballet.”

When he rests his hand on the back of my chair, there’s a chill at the nape of my neck under the ballerina bun, in the same general category as tingling, or a cold wind, or waves of high-frequency vibration, or possibly lust.

“I heard you got a lot of help slashing from your friend over there.”

Dylan nods toward Siobhan, who is sitting at her desk admiring her manicure, full-on lacquered gold in a room full of frosted pastels studded with small yet hideous jewel stick-ons.

“I don’t know what you heard, but all dismemberment was purely accidental.”

Dylan is too deadpan to smile, but the corners of his mouth do a little twitchy thing that’s just as good. “So. Did you grow up playing ice hockey in a Canadian street gang, or do you just have a bad temper?”

In actual fact, I grew up eating homemade pie and watching wholesome teen movies from the 1980s where the worst thing anyone does is wear criminally gigantic shoulder pads.

“Bad seed,” I say.

“Maybe you should ditch the field hockey and stick with ballet. I play for their performances—orchestra does. Seems like a more stable gang of thugs.”

“What do you play?”

“Violin. Third chair, not exactly stellar. Only class I can stand to attend on a regular basis this year.”

“You’re making me regret giving up cello.” And not for musical reasons. “I love the music, but I suck.”

He says, “You’d fit right in.”

“Anyway, thanks for the advice. I always keep my eye out for bands of thugs. Coming from a Canadian street gang and all.”

Dylan shakes his head. “You know what they’re going to do to you, right?”

“What?” I say. “Embarrass us in front of the whole French class. Knock us down when we try to be on their lame field hockey teams. Not talk to us. Avoid us. Sneer when I talk in class. Stick needles in my eyes.”

“All of it,” he says.

This is not an incorrect assessment of the situation.

Siobhan and I are a two-girl island in a sea of bobbing mean girls.

I get into (somewhat remedial) ballet that meets just before lunch, and the girls tend to eat together. But in a room of stick-thin, aspiring ballet girls, I’m the Sesame Street, one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others, doesn’t-fit-in one who eats actual food. Because the ballet teacher here pitches a fit whenever anybody jiggles, even if they’re only there to get out of field hockey.

I am not giving up food.

Siobhan, who is apparently the most terrifying lacrosse player in the history of girls’ lacrosse, has teammates swarming her (grateful she has saved them from a season of endless defeat), but she says they’re all hormonal.

And boys.

She could be eating lunch daily with the football guys at the picnic table the unattached ones—the ones who don’t spend lunch making out with their girlfriends in between huge bites of burger—like. They go, “Hey, Siobhan!” and then, as an afterthought Siobhan insists is not an afterthought, “Hey, Emma!”

Within a week, she is playing midnight touch football with them, climbing the fence and evading Latimer security. And I, Emma Lazar, Canadian good girl, am eating lunch with the Latimer Day football boys.

Dylan is never around at lunch.

Siobhan says, “Who are you looking for? Not that jerk from
the beach club. I
told
you he’s not here. You should listen to me.”

I say, “No,” because I’m not. I don’t say who I
am
looking for, as this would involve pointing at Dylan and gnawing on my arm to keep from saying something truly embarrassing.

“Guy’s an arrogant dick,” she says. “Guy can’t go on a simple corkscrew run without sticking his tongue down some handy skank’s throat.”

“Making
me
the handy skank?”

She says, “How do you know how many other girls he kissed on his way to the maître d’? How do you know if he even kept it in his pants between the beach and the clubhouse? Oh, that’s right. You don’t.”

“How do
you
know I didn’t captivate him with my charm?” I don’t actually think this is what happened, but the thought of him kissing his way up from the beach, his lips landing on mine just because they were there, is not my memory of choice.

“Your charm and that dress. I love that dress.”

The football boys, catching a snippet of a conversation with “not keep it in his pants” in it, are suddenly attentive.

The mean girls walking past our table take note, but what are they going to do, dump their Fiji water down our backs?

“Us against them,” Siobhan whispers. “We win.”

• • •

In Math, Dylan walks past my desk even though his desk is in the farthest back corner, by the door. The blazer hanging off one shoulder brushes my arm, smooth and alarmingly electric for navy blue gabardine. “So. Any needles in the eye yet?”

I say, “I’ll let you know. If.”

“Not if. When.” He writes his number on a slightly used Post-it and sticks it on my sleeve. He says, “Text. They don’t confiscate cell phones. They say they do, but they don’t.”

I type his number into my phone.

I do not pay attention in class.

I feel an astonishing absence of guilt.