Afterparty (33 page)

I’m thinking that I have no doubt been rendered psychotic by assorted substances if I think that’s what’s going to happen.

“Shut up, Mommy,” she says in a weird voice. “Look, here comes Daddy in half a suit.”

Apparently Dylan is following me up and down the halls of the Camden.

“Aren’t you going to kiss your boyfriend?” Siobhan says. “Aren’t you going to go, Oh, baby, let’s stay together forever and ever. No, let’s break up. No, let’s stay together. No, let’s break up.”

Dylan says, “Can we make this stop?” And then, “Shit. Is that guy shooting up?”

There’s a guy on the sill of a black, painted-shut window, and unless he’s busy staving off a diabetic coma with a whole lot of insulin, yes, he is.

Dylan says, “Emma, you need to get out of here. Will you please, for one second, let me help you out?”

“Stop following me! And you’re not who I’d turn to for help.”

He says, “Open your eyes.”

My open eyes are blinking and they sting a lot.

“What, is the happy couple having a widdle pwoblem?” Siobhan croons.

“Shut up, Sib,” Dylan says, and he heads toward a little settee with carved wooden arms in the back of the room. I could resist if I wanted to, I could break free of the loose grasp, but I go with him, sitting pressed against him, aware of my breath, my heartbeat, my pulse, the joint-induced burning sensation at the back of my throat.

He holds my face and he says, “You don’t hate me, right?”

“No. But you still suck.”

“I know,” he says. “You too. You were the virgin and I was the check mark?”

“Fuck and leave for college? That’s what was going on?”

“No.”

And then yes. In a smoky room with people in it, and the only feeling I feel is the intensity of wanting it, pushed harder against the wooden arm of the settee, no room, and here I am with him, in a completely private embrace, only in public, and on the other side of him, Siobhan, her hands under his shirt, her mouth on his mouth, a hand on my breast, I don’t know whose. Crammed against the arm, trying to rise, and Dylan saying, “Shit, Siobhan! Get off me!”

But she doesn’t get off until he pushes her off.

“Get over him!” she spits at me. “You can’t trust him. I’m the one who made you. Not him. But you just won’t listen.”

She looks crazy, hysterical crazy. Screaming and grabbing at my arm as I pull away.

Siobhan says, “Nothing got better! Don’t you get it? Everything got worse. You can’t rely on
anybody
. Stupid William! It was supposed to get better, but everything keeps getting worse. And you
know
what that means.” Then she yells, “I’m going on the roof! Who’s coming on the roof?”

Paulina pushes open the glass-paned door to the balcony. The air is laced with cold and rain.

I say, “You can’t go on the roof.”

“Watch me.” I almost can’t make out the words, it’s so noisy. And then she yells, “Pact, pact, pact, pact! You have to come or I’m doing it myself. And what’s the point of that?”

I don’t remember.

Then I do.

By then she is climbing the cordoned-off stairs to the loft. By then I’m chasing after her. By then I’m yelling “No!”

There are narrow metal stairs, curved in a corkscrew, from the balcony up toward the roof. The staircase ends with a door to a steep passageway that takes you back inside the building, along a corridor with taped-up pipes and discarded cleaning supplies, old brooms and paint cans, just below the roof. At the end of the hall, Siobhan pushes through a door marked
ALARM WILL SOUND
, but there’s just the sound of rain, and the night sky.

The roof is slippery and you can feel the wind, not enough to topple you, but enough that you have to pay attention.

She says, “Come on!”

I reach out for her, but I slip and she gets me by the upper arm. Not to pull me up, to pull me down. I try to steady myself, but my heels are too high and too fragile.

I yell, “Siobhan, stop it! This isn’t funny!”

“Pact!” she says. “You promised. So you have to do it. I am totally bombed, I am as mellow as I get, so mellow, and it isn’t working, is it? You know it isn’t. You’re a wreck and it’s never going to get any better for you.”

“Siobhan, I’m fine! That pact was stupid! We’re both going to be
fine
.”

“You need me! You know you do, you can’t cope without me, and I’m so out of here.” She is pulling on my arm, pulling toward the edge where the roof slopes down, across an expanse of tar paper and toward the tiles that are slick with mud and rain.

“No! Siobhan! Stop!”

“You can’t live without me,” she says, panting, pulling me along the roof, yanking on my wet hair. “Can’t live either way.” Her breath is labored as we struggle there, pulling and pulling away, pushing toward the edge as I maintain the wholly unrealistic hope that I can somehow talk her out of this.

Because I see where this is going.

This is going over the edge.

I am not going over the edge.

She is pulling me by my arm and by my hair, toward the edge of the roof. Each time I think I’m braced, that I’ve figured out how to balance myself, how to crouch down and push back with each new surface—tiles, and tar paper shingles that seem to tear like paper, and flat places covered with jagged little white stones, and then a slope that ends in puddled, muddy rainwater—we’re on another surface and I’m struggling again to keep my balance.

I yell, “Siobhan, no!” and I keep trying to pull her back, but she’s stronger and we go down onto the flat of the roof, crawling over stones. I am pulling away and her nails are cutting into the skin on my forearms as I pull away from her grip. Almost free, not quite. I fall on top of her and she seems to be rolling away. But she’s taking me with her toward the edge, where the roof swoops downward and the rows of broken Spanish tile are treacherous, and the surface can’t be mastered.

I yell, “Stop it! Siobhan, stop!” But I can’t pull away, she has my blouse and my hair and she’s on top of me now, rising to her knees and pulling me up with her.

She says, “It’s a pact! You said! You can’t back out!”

But I do. I back out. I end it.

I grab onto a drainpipe just before we reach the sharp incline of the overhanging eaves, and I hang on.

I’m crouched on the edge of the roof and I’m panting and soaked, and I’m not even cold.

I have been running and running uphill. I have been rolling to the edge of the roof, sliding down a precipice of Spanish tiles and planes of gritty tar paper. Between my fingers, there is slime and a brown paste of decomposing leaves scooped from the rain gutter.

From the rain gutter that saved me.

The rain gutter I grabbed onto, onto the pipe that braced the rusty gutter to the roof, when she rolled over me, when she closed her eyes and grabbed me hard, when she tried to pull me with her, pull me down, down over the edge, and then I couldn’t hold her anymore. I couldn’t hold her back. Couldn’t hold back the dead weight of her, pulling and falling. All I could do not to go over, not to fly down with her, not to plummet through the branches to the awning, down, down to the hard sidewalk, all I could do was to push her off me.

Was to push her over.

Was to brace myself and push her as hard as I could, push her off me, push her headfirst off the roof, before she could pull me down with her.

THE LAST TIME I SEE
Dylan that night, I am alone on the edge of the roof, and he is standing by the stairwell. He is coming out of the stairwell. He is pulling himself erect. He is pushing back his hair, but it sticks to his face. Or maybe he has been there, crouching there, just outside the door all along. Maybe he saw.

I’m pretty sure he saw.

Drenched with rain, dark strands of hair dripping down his face.

He peels off the wet black dinner jacket. And I think, Not here, what’s wrong with you, not here, not now, not again, not ever. He takes my arms and threads them through the wet sleeves, and he rolls the cuffs up just above my wrists.

I am breathing fog and rain. I am shivering in the cold, wet jacket, and the sleeves hurt where my arms are scraped raw from the elbows to the wrists, my arms encased in gabardine and blood and rain.

He says, “Go, you have to go.”

I am nodding my head but there’s nothing to say. I am breathing hard, as if I had been running miles and miles, running hard through a ravine of dark inclines.

He says, “Emma. Focus. We’re leaving.”

I say, “Get off the roof.”

There’s rain, and there’s breathing, and there’s the moment when he backs away.

He says, “Do you know what to do?”

“Just go away.”

He says, “Go down the stairs and out behind the ballroom. Walk down to Hollywood Boulevard. Turn east. In a couple of blocks, it’s the Mayfield. There’ll be a bunch of taxis. Get in. Go to the Chateau. Or in front of a club. Are you up to walking?”

I nod my head.

I say, “I have to go get her.”

Dylan says, “No. You don’t. Hear the sirens? Are you taking this in? I’ll walk you to the other staircase. At the bottom, there are people making out. Go out past the doorway, Hollywood Boulevard, east to the Mayfield, don’t hail a cab, just get one at the Mayfield. Do you have cash? Walk home.”

I say, “Okay.” It is hard to climb down stairs, and when I step over the bodies at the bottom, nobody looks up.

There are sirens and flashing lights and running.

I go out the door, I go back out into the night, and I’m not the only person in a wet dress walking through the rain, down to Hollywood Boulevard. When the streetlights hit my dress, it glows. But I am not the only glowing girl walking away.

CONSIDER THE VIGIL: I’M NOT THERE.

Three days after Afterparty. A hard rain is flattening magnolia leaves against my window, the sky is almost white between the branches. White and cold.

Eighty-seven people have said yes to the vigil on Facebook. They are standing outside Cedars-Sinai Hospital, holding hands in hypocritical fellowship with everyone else who treated Siobhan like an expensive form of dirt. They’re posting pictures of rain-sodden votive candles, waterlogged teddy bears, and helium balloons with her name on them.

Lia Graham recommends room deodorizer candles encased in pear-shaped glass to stay lit through the downpour, green for pine and yellow lemon zest. She is tagged on the event page in a knot of rain-drenched juniors singing inspirational songs. Waving their candles and praying for Siobhan to live. Waiting for her to die.

I, on the other hand, am sitting on the floor of my closet. The screen of my phone glows through the darkness with all of Dylan’s texts that say some variant of
Talk to me
.

And my one text message back that says
No
.

I have watched “Tickle Penguin” on YouTube one hundred and sixteen times. I have watched a goose play with a cocker spaniel. I have prayed for her to live for three days straight, but unless you believe in the saving power of the ratty hotel awnings and the giant hydrangea bush that broke her fall, you are stuck with Occam’s Razor, which our physics teacher likes so much: The simplest solution is the likeliest; I pushed her off the roof, ergo, she dies.

And no matter how many times emissaries of Religious Convo lead eighty-seven juniors waving room-deodorizer candles in chanting the Lord’s Prayer, it would take a huge number of screwdrivers to wipe out their ability to reason their way to the inevitable conclusion.

If they knew.

Even so, it seems highly unlikely that they’re going to start chanting,
Our Emma, who art hiding in her closet, you are so not a walking exemplar of badness, the she-devil of Latimer Country Day, the harlot of the Hollywood Hills.

Even I wouldn’t say that.

Because every bad thing that a person can do, I just did.

My dad, watching me sitting in the closet in the dark, but who knows nothing, is also trapped under the influence of Occam. I am sitting in the closet, ergo, I am sad because Siobhan has fallen.

He offers to drive me down to Cedars to visit her, but how do you visit with a person in a medically induced coma? Do you just stare at her unconscious face? Do you talk to her as if she could hear you, and pretend that she’s taking it in? Do you say, Hey, sorry I killed you, bye, but you don’t get to take me down no matter what asinine pact I accidentally said yes to?

If things don’t get better, we’ll jump off a tall building? No.

My dad is making soup: pea soup. Pea soup and French onion soup and chicken curry broth so far. This is as close to a mother as I’m going to get, a soup-making father who doesn’t understand a thing. And I think, Well, that’s pretty close.

And I start to wish I could tell him, but of course, there’s no way.

What happened that night and how hard it was raining and how it didn’t seem real and then it seemed like the only real thing in my life.

My dad sits down outside the closet. The door is open a crack; I can see the window and the tree and the sky. I can see a slice of his plaid shirt, and an oven mitt.

He says, “Ems, I know you aren’t ready to process this yet, and I understand, but I want you to hear me. Whatever happens to Siobhan, whatever she did and whyever she did it, it’s not your fault. Do you hear me? You’re a good friend, you’ve been very kind to her, and sweet, and you’re probably the reason she could cope for as long as she did.”

Oh God, oh God, oh God. I am so not what he thinks I am, and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

I say, “I’m not Emma the Good anymore, Dad, I’m sorry, I’m not.”

More soup.

He says, “Would you like to talk to Rabbi Pam? She’s worried about you.”

I have visions of my dad trotting out Rabbi Pam and a minister and a priest—like a slightly dirty joke with the same crew walking into a bar—and giving them all equal time.

This is who I am: A person who thinks of semi-dirty jokes in the middle of this. A person who keeps checking the computer, trolling for anything about what happened. For the nothing that means she’s still alive. For rumors and gossip and word on the street.