Afterparty (31 page)

“My God. You’re messing with me so you won’t have to flat-out lie to me!”

Dylan says, “You should know.”

“What?”

“Not what I meant to say.”

I say, “Was it before or after we made up? And here’s a hint, the right answer is
after
.”

Long pause.

He says, “It wasn’t after.”

I wish I had the kind of old-fashioned landline where you can slam the earpiece into the receiver.

“So Siobhan knew before I knew? Were you
with
her?”

He shouts, “Jesus Christ! I cannot believe she told you about that! The second installment of the Siobhan Lynch setup and she tells you?”

Not what I was expecting. Not what I want to know about, hear about, process, or deal with.

He says, “We were broken up. It was bad. I was shitfaced. It was once. She’s evil.”

I say, “I’ve gotta go.”

My dad pops his head in. He says, “Ems, do you want to talk about it now?”

I do, but obviously, I can’t.

I can’t talk to anyone about anything.

NOT THAT DYLAN DOESN’T TRY.
He phones, But I don’t pick up. Then he texts.

Dylan:
The texting isn’t meant to be ironic. But I’m sorry.

Me:
No irony taken.

Dylan:
And?

Me:
And I just wish you’d have told me. But we were broken up. It’s not like we were married so technically you weren’t coloring outside the lines.

Dylan:
It wasn’t OK. I get it.

Dylan:
Emma?

Me:
I know I don’t get to play the you-shoulda-told-me-card with you. But you were back with Siobhan.

Me:
And you didn’t once think to say you applied to college?

Dylan:
Maybe I’m hardwired to treat women like shit

Me:
You didn’t treat me like shit. This all just kind of sucks.

Dylan:
Could we cut to the chase and skip forward to being OK?

Me:
I don’t want to be mean to you. I just want this conversation to be over.

Dylan:
Could I get you pancakes?

Me:
Maybe we need a break from pancakes.

Cutting to the chase, my life as Emma the Scourge of God has not left me in the world’s best emotional state. I don’t have a boyfriend, a best friend, or very good judgment. I seem to be going for an F in navigating moral complexity, not unlike everybody else I know, except for Megan, and she feels guilty about bagging groceries at a food bank with Joe, so that doesn’t really count.

I am in my closet, making lists of applicable clichés, in order of relevance. “Chalk it up to experience,” “Don’t count your chickens (or, for that matter, Candy Land happy endings) before they hatch,” and “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” being the top contenders.

On the other hand, I have completed every last damned item on my Afterparty prep list.

Every. Single. One.

(Minus Siobhan’s BS about carrying on in a glass elevator, etc.)

The year was not a total waste.

All right, I was completely in love with the idea of me being a good person in a heart-stopping relationship with another good person, and with a wild but good best friend.

Now, I’m not sure any of us qualifies.

I’m back to flying around solo, a flockless bird, and who even knows if I’ll know when to go south for the winter, or even where the south is located.

But I do know how to get to Afterparty.

• • •

My dad says, “Have you seen this letter from Miss Palmer about the dangerous party?”

About how going to Afterparty in a limo so you can cut out in style when the police shut down the party doesn’t make you safe. How many kids leave in ambulances due to their ingestion of large numbers of shots mixed with their friends’ prescription Xanax. And how its reputation as the best party ever held anywhere, ever, gives it an unhealthy allure that parents should counter with vigilant catastrophizing.

I say, “There was an assembly about it.”

Not that I attended. I snuck into the library because school is like an obstacle course. Siobhan is staring me down. Dylan I’m avoiding. Chelsea is snorting at me. And Arif keeps looking at me as if he pities me.

“Last year, the theme was Pimps and Ho’s!” He is apoplectic.

“Every high school in L.A. has had a Pimps ’n’ Ho’s afterparty. Except maybe Saint Bernadette. This year it’s Beyond the Grave. Do you like that better?”

“You know this how?”

Oh God.

“Common knowledge. Kids in K though 3 know. The secret location is what nobody knows.”

It’s at the Camden Hotel, a less-than-secret location so people can reserve rooms upstairs in advance, creating even more venues for bad behavior.

He makes me sit there while he shares more scraps of Afterparty lore from Miss P. He says, “I hope your friends aren’t planning to do this.”

Not that I have friends at school at the moment, but if I did, they would be planning to do this. Even though anyone caught selling, buying, or stashing tickets on campus is automatically punished in some unspecified way that shows up on your permanent record, everybody has one.

I ask Arif, “Are you going to this thing?”

“My mom tore open Palmer’s letter, and five minutes later, my father was taking me to a Dodger game that night. In San Diego.”

Walking past my locker, Siobhan says, “Just so you know. The limo is full.”

I say, “You knew that was never going to happen. Like I could jump into a limo and ride around town, and my dad would buy that I was studying at your house the night of Afterparty?”

She says, “I thought a lot of things were never going to happen. Like my
formerly
best friend wasn’t going to mistake me for a burnout.”

“That shit makes twelve-year-olds have heart attacks. I get to be concerned.”

“Your level of ignorance is awesome. Have fun sucking up to your dad while
I’m
at Afterparty. No all-girl dance at the Camden for you, young lady.”

“I’m going to be there,” I say. “Just really late.”

“Sure you are. Do we even still have pacts? Can I trust you for
anything
? Can I even count on you to do what you said?”

“I do what I say I’m going to do, Siobhan,” I say, “whether or not we’re BFF’s. So yes.”

God help me, I say yes.

THREE HOURS TO AFTERPARTY, AND
my dad wants to play Scrabble. I think about hypnotists in old black-and-white movies who go,
You are getting sleeeepy, very, very sleeeeeeeeeepy.
As my dad keeps making word after word, I admire those hypnotists’ skills.

But eventually he yawns and I pad down the hall to my room in the buttoned-up blouse and prim skirt I’m about to change out of, a girl on the verge of uncorking her own damn magic genie lamp.

Here it is: absolute proof that even without Siobhan coaxing me out of the lamp and into the land of wrong decisions, I am perfectly capable of doing all manner of wrong things all by myself. And I don’t need some lame boyfriend by my side to go for it, either.

Capable of planning, prep, and execution.

I bought the dress on sale at Kitson, a filigreed silver skin with a skirt that flares just a little and stops dead mid-thigh. It
isn’t vintage, but I still feel like a slightly glammed-up version of myself in it. The silver sandals were borrowed from Nancy a long time ago, very high, very glittery. I plan to return them, ignoring the drizzle and the mud just outside my window, and how delicate the tiny silver straps are, and how they need to go to the shoe hospital before I hit Sunset.

I have perfect makeup, the kind that shows.

I don’t care if the theme is Beyond the Grave, I’m not going as the Bride of Frankenstein. I bring a bloodred lipstick-liner pencil I can use to draw a couple of drops of blood on my chin if it turns out I’m the only girl there who can’t pass as a nonliving creature. I have a cheap umbrella that I plan to ditch as soon as I arrive. No coat because it doesn’t sound as if the Camden has a coat-check room or a concierge or a high level of sanitation, organization, or safety.

Which is kind of the point.

The taxi driver says,
“The Camden?”
as if I’m asking to be dropped off at the gates of Hell.

The Camden is built in the style of a make-believe Spanish castle, with giant wrought iron chandeliers, whitewashed walls, and a red tile roof with turrets. It got famous for splashy Hollywood trysts in the twenties and choked-on-barf rock star deaths fifty years later. All these events happened during parties in the dimly lit ballroom, which has balconies and staircases leading to derelict roof gardens, roped off but still in use.

There are celebrity trivia websites that document who blew whom on which Camden balcony. But now the Camden is
mostly famous for not checking ID’s all that carefully and letting kids rent suites.

It’s a place where no one’s parents would even dream of going, but not a warehouse in a sketchy part of town where a kid could get mugged between the limo and the front door. And not too particular about hundreds of kids showing up half plowed as long as they can pay for corridors of seedy rococo suites: big musty beds with satin comforters, tufted club chairs missing buttons, and, weirdly, a couple of either feral cats or some guest’s hapless lost pets prowling the corridors.

An unexpected doorman with a giant umbrella, the same green as the derelict awnings that extend from the sidewalk to the front door and arch over the ground-floor windows, helps me up to the lobby—grand and too dark to show cobwebs and dust, filled with kids I know, kids I’ve partied and gone to class with, but who are transformed by the grandeur of the decadence.

I am trying to figure out if the distinct odor of mold and the way it constricts my throat as I step into the lobby is a sign.

The compass says,
Fucking A, it’s a sign. Get back in the taxi.

I don’t grace this with a response.

Everyone is slightly off. Without shoes, or with their hair messed up, or with eye makeup bleeding into raccoon eyes, or with a whole lot of bra showing, or with the entirely wrong guy, or with nipples more than shadowed through the near-transparency of tissue-paper-thin tops.

Maybe half the guys hanging on the edges of the lobby look like severely stoned members of the overgrown ten-year-old-boys
club, ready to slide across the slick, polished paver floor in their sock feet, ready to slither down banisters and play catch with girls’ underwear. But the rest of them look to be slouching through in between doing whatever kinds of drugs have got to be here somewhere and instigating acts of extreme perversion.

Charlene comes through in a semi-formal dress with a senior guy I don’t know, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder. She nods to me.

Charlene says, “It’s all going on upstairs. Just a bunch of dancing down here.”

The boyfriend says, “Except the bar.”

“I’m not going in there,” Charlene says. And to me, “Don’t go in there.”

I am so going in there.

There are kids heading in every direction, including toward walls and circling pillars and falling into dark corners, in slightly impaired party entropy. Up on the landing of the staircase, there are shadowed bodies undulating, a leg draping down the stairs, an occasional arm emerging from the huddle, rotating like the blade of an off-kilter windmill. People are sweeping up and down the stairs, wandering past the front desk and down the rank, mildewy hall toward the ballroom, where there is a truly terrible loud band of undeniably cool but musically backward senior guys.

I hand over my ticket, and the back of my hand is stamped with something visible only under the bouncer’s ultraviolet light beam. The room is black with intermittent pops of faint light that makes people’s faces take on a momentary beyond-the-grave
pallor. And everywhere dancing of the too-cool-to-move-much, already-dead-and-no-muscle-tone variety.

There are water misters lodged somewhere overhead, tiny droplets of water drizzling out of the darkness, making everything slick and clammy. There are actors with shredded clothes and makeup suggesting that they would be unspeakably gruesome were the lights to be turned up. They wander through, muttering softly, the living dead, staring out with big, blank eyes. They are the pathetic, pleading kind of living dead, only when they reach out their hands and clamp onto your shoulder, there is a second of terror.

Not fun terror.

Just terror.

And it doesn’t feel like Halloween, it feels like a sick ball in a teenage world where living-dead wraiths get their hands stamped with invisible ink.

Declan Hart, who was supposed to be with Kimmy (evidence of her tendency to choose mean players), takes my hand when I’m too distracted by the living-dead hand on my upper arm to resist. Declan starts to dance with me, a riff on stiff seventh-grade cotillion ballroom dancing. Either I’m paranoid or he’s sneering at me. Or sneering at the world at large, and I happen to be the one he’s feeling up.

I say, “Declan, do you have moves besides the box step?”

Declan calls me a bitch and walks off, leaving me standing there on the edge of the dance floor, where there
is
some all-girl dancing, in a loose circle with a bunch of juniors I recognize and
a living-dead girl I don’t. Mara is in the middle of it, in costume, and we’re not talking a pretty, glam costume; we’re talking layers and layers of cheesecloth that are supposed to represent a shroud in a state of postmortem disintegration.

I am in the circle. I am right there. I am sparkly silver Afterparty girl.

Then Declan walks by and says, “No wonder. Bitch likes girls,” and I return to my quest for the bar. Edging along the outer wall and trying not to bump into people, steering away from anywhere that has anything close to the familiar party aroma of barf, or a paid zombie.