Afterparty (6 page)

PEOPLE DON’T THINK I’M COOL.
I actually check out French Club and Lia looks away, as if she’s searching for a rock-hard, day-old baguette among the fake-French snacks so she can chase me with it.

Mara, maroon-haired and infinitely cooler than Lia will ever be, says, “So what if sign-ups are over? Why can’t you let her in?”

Lia makes a disgusted noise, aimed more at Mara than me. She sits down on a table directly in front of Mara, her butt on Mara’s notebook, blocking her altogether.

But the next day, when I take a chair next to Mara in the student lounge, thinking to bond over vintage hair clips, admiring her orange Bakelite bracelets and her Felix the Cat ring, she won’t even talk to me beyond monosyllabic frost. She swings her head around, facing away from me so fast, my face is slapped with a hank of maroon hair.

Arif, getting Orangina from a vending machine, watches her slouch away.

I say, “Wow. Was it something I said?”

Arif shakes his head. “She’s a bit prickly. The Global Studio scandal? That was her father. Lost the spread in Bel Air. Had to move to the Valley.”

“
That’s
why Lia treats her like dirt?”

“Don’t worry about her,” he says. “She still has the Beemer. It was rough for her last year, though. The pony pals wouldn’t let her forget it. Latimer has an obsession with good families—no one will utter the word ‘class,’ but you know what ‘good family’ means—and when the mighty fall . . .”

And I feel bad for her, I do, but mostly what I feel is even more doomed. At least her father’s scandal was a good-family kind of one—a glam studio power grab he lost. (I looked it up.) The kind without a junkie in it.

What if everyone knew about
me
? No palace in Bel Air, no Beemer, no horse,
and
my mom?

After school, I sit in Siobhan’s screening room, munching a day-old Taco Bell burrito, grateful as hell. She punches the remote and the screen fills with sheets of rain pounding the window of what looks to be a Parisian bedroom.

I say, “Bad French movie?”

She says, “I
know
. That one from yesterday? I watched the ending last night and they all said haute-pretentious things and then they got
shot
.”

“Thanks for finishing without me!” I say, not entirely upset
that I don’t have to slog through any more haute-pretension. “You want to watch another Bogie and Bacall? Or
Roman Holiday
or something?”

“You just want to watch that old stuff for the clothes. Let’s get out of here.”

I look at my watch. “Dinner.”

“So what if you walk though the door five minutes late?” she says. “Is he going to scalp you?”

“That would be a yes. We won’t even have time to get dressed, and I’ll have to go home.”

“Come on!” she says. “Let’s play. You know you want to.”

“Why do I want to again?”

Siobhan sighs. “Because when these asshole boys figure out their dicks mean more to them than what freaking Chelsea thinks, they’re going to want to go out. With
us
. And when they do, you should know how to talk to a guy without fainting.”

“Sib!”

Two girls are going at it on screen, making alarming noises.

“Don’t be so literal.” She twirls the ends of her bangs. “By ‘dick,’ I don’t mean dick. You know what I mean.”

“The ‘go out’ part? We’ll have to drug my dad first.”

“Jailbreak!” Siobhan says.

I’m kidding, but I can tell she’s not.

She says, “I don’t even feel like playing dress-up. I’m so bored. Let’s just go.”

We leave for Century City dressed as ourselves, following the ritual consumption of champagne with Cheetos. (“It’s
champagne,” Siobhan says. “It has an alcohol content of like zero point zero. And”—she holds up a Cheeto—“it’s not like we’re drinking on an empty stomach.”) This puts me, somewhat buzzed, in a well-preserved fifty-year-old swishy skirt and a beaded sweater and pink flats, and Siobhan in a mini and the black camisole and diamonds. We sit at the outside bar drinking tomato juice with celery sticks popping up over the rims of the glasses because, when we go dressed as ourselves, Siobhan’s fake ID is useless.

“Watch this,” she says. “New game. It’s called shock-the-dork.”

She walks over to two middle-aged guys who look a lot more clueless than the ones she usually likes going after. She waves a cigarette at them; they grope for their lighters, matches, whatever it takes to keep her happy. She’s all giggly and girly until one of them offers her another drink and she shrieks, “No! I will not meet you in your hotel room! I’m sixteen years old! What’s wrong with you!”

The men throw money on the bar to pay for their half-drunk drinks and sprint toward the escalator.

Siobhan turns back to where I’m sitting, on the verge of breaking my tomato juice glass with my bare hands by squeezing it so hard. I stare at the place where the two guys turned the corner and disappeared, and there is this moment of intense relief that there’s no sign that they were ever here.

I wonder if the shocked dork was supposed to be them or me.

Siobhan says, “Now I’m not bored. Are you bored?”

I take another sip of the fake Bloody Mary. I say, “I seriously don’t
ever
want to play this game again.”

Siobhan looks as if she’s going to say something, but then she doesn’t.

I say, “Is there some way you could get me a real one of these?”

Siobhan says, “No, but he could,” and walks off in the direction of a guy in a Cal T-shirt.

• • •

My dad says, “You’re late.”

Fourteen minutes late from an afternoon I wish had never happened.

I say, “It won’t happen again.”

My dad looks at me quizzically. This is never good. He says, “Ems, have you been drinking?”

I’m trying to set the table. A wineglass crashes into the salad bowl. The crystal rings for an eternity.

“Of course not!” I swear, all I’m thinking about is the virgin Bloody Mary with the celery stalk—not the champagne and not the real Bloody Mary and not the fact that I’ve been drinking.

My dad crosses his arms across his chest.

I feel my cheeks beginning to go red. “I had a glass of champagne.”

“You’ve taken to drinking
and
lying to me?” This in French, connoting a meltdown.

“Dad! No! I think of drinking as, you know, a bunch of kids getting smashed. I mean, we have wine at dinner.” I nod toward the uncorked burgundy on the dining room table as deferentially
as humanly possible while buzzed and being yelled at. “It was a glass of champagne.”

“Siobhan’s parents served you alcohol?”

“No! We were just”—I grope for something credible and redeeming—“celebrating something.” Something parent-friendly. Something believable that nevertheless didn’t happen. “Siobhan raised her Econ grade to A. Her mom went . . .” I grope for a polite synonym for “apeshit” that isn’t also a synonym for “crazy,” a word he’s sensitive about.

He nods toward the landline. “Get Siobhan over here.”

I think of Siobhan stretched out by the mall bar, crossing and uncrossing her legs as some middle-aged guy in a fake-suede blazer looks her over. I think of her lifting her glass and shouting something angry at him in Portuguese. I think of her in four-inch heels, sitting in my living room pretending she doesn’t speak English.

“Now?”

Yes, now.

I panic.

My dad has tried to get Siobhan and her family over before. And, okay, what I told him can be dressed up, spelled out in letters made of butterflies and emblazoned in fancy needlepoint on little velvet pillows, but the bottom line is: I straight-up lied.

I told him the (completely fabricated) story that Siobhan’s mom rarely let her go out, where there might be R-rated DVDs, bad language, dangerous pit bulls, and unlocked guns lying around. I sent her entire family on (imaginary) church junkets to Tijuana to build (also imaginary) orphanages. I enrolled Nancy in a
(fictional) Italian cooking class where she spent weeks gathering wild herbs in Sicily.

Let me pause here to say, no matter what my dad is worried about, I do not lack a conscience, or a rudimentary concept of right and wrong, or an at least minimally functional moral compass. I could tell, as all these untrue sentences came cascading out of my mouth, that the needle of that moral compass was pointing toward
wrong
and
untrustworthy
and
bad daughter
and
overall bad, dishonest person
.

But how could I tell him the truth without his head exploding?

I dial Siobhan with blood pressure that’s highly elevated for a girl who doesn’t run marathons or do massive amounts of cocaine.

I try, unsuccessfully, to sound normal. I say, “Hey, Siobhan.”

She says, “Hello?”

I say, “And congratulations again for that A. Way to go.”

She says, “Have you been smoking something?”

I say, “Yeah, we’re eating in a minute too. And I wanted to ask, do you want to come over tomorrow?”

“You’re shitting me.”

My dad mouths the words “Family Game Night.”

I say, “Family Game Night.”

“Oh. Is this a hostage situation? Does someone have a knife to your throat?”

“Something like that.”

“Cool. Sure. Family Game Night. Are you okay? You sound kind of slurred.”

“Yeah! My dad thinks so too! He can’t wait to meet you.”

“Shit.”

I nod to my dad. I say, “Tomorrow.”

He says, “Good. I’ll be sure to lock up the assault rifles and pit bulls.”

“HOW COME HE WOULDN’T THINK
I’m your perfect friend, anyway?” Siobhan says over a spiked Big Gulp in her kitchen after school. “Don’t you think I’m presentable?”

“Of course you’re presentable! It’s just . . . I don’t know . . . he wants me to be more like Megan. Which means maybe
you
could be more like Megan. Just for tonight.”

Siobhan and Megan met once during my effort to make the pieces of my life converge over a pedicure. Megan thought Siobhan was too wild of a wild child. Siobhan thought Megan was suffering from metastatic dullness and I was lucky to have Siobhan at Latimer to save me from succumbing to the same sorry fate.

“Siobhan,
promise
you’ll be good.”

But when she’s sprawled in my living room, fifteen minutes into Family Game Night, it’s clear that Siobhan being good isn’t that good.

The evening starts with me and my dad playing French
Scrabble before she arrives. We’re eating his potato cheesy puffs, the perfect food, crunchy and gooey and somewhat addictive.

He says, “We’ll switch to English when she gets here.”

I say, “We might not have to. Her French is great.”

My dad heads into the kitchen, humming, to get another bottle of Pellegrino. He calls back, “Don’t you steal my
x
when I’m gone,
ma princesse
, or I’m impounding that zed.”

“I’m hiding it right now! You’ll never find it!”

My dad cackles, “Ve have our vays,” in a mad scientist accent.

I yell, “Child abuse!”

My dad cackles some more.

I get maybe a half hour of him not worrying about being a good example, not worrying about me, not worrying about how, if he doesn’t stay on top of things, I’ll go from perfect to degenerate in three seconds flat.

Then Siobhan knocks on the door, and he starts worrying again.

It would probably help if she hadn’t fortified herself with a whole lot of vodka and orange juice before she got here. Or if she weren’t sharing tidbits of random information, which start off great before swerving toward the parental terror zone.

For example, given that she speaks many languages, she wants to become a translator at the UN. This sweeps the tension off my dad’s face like a giant windshield wiper. Until she adds, “And then, if the delegates get testy, I can screw with their negotiations.”

There is a gasp he doesn’t even try to hide.

Then she jostles the table and catches her Scrabble tiles in flight, one-handed, as they pitch toward the floor, demonstrating how she can play lacrosse, all right, slightly impaired.

She says, “I might not have the patience for Scrabble. I might have ADD.”

I say, “But you don’t take anything for it.” Big mistake.

“Don’t like the pills. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, bags under the eyes.”

My dad is switching rapidly into doctor mode, getting his game face on.

“But not everyone feels that way,” Siobhan says cheerfully, “so I sold them.”

“You’re selling Adderall?!” my dad says.

I am one hundred percent certain I would know if Siobhan sold pills, if her Econ project involved marketing pharmaceuticals. My dad, on the other hand, looks completely unnerved at the possibility I’m hanging with a drug dealer and future obstacle to World Peace.

“No worries,” she says. “Long time ago.”

I kick Siobhan under the table. Hard.

“Whoa!” She kicks me back. “Just kidding. I have a very dry sense of humor.”

We play out the rest of the game very, very fast in almost absolute stone silence.

When we finally decamp into my bedroom, behind a closed door, Siobhan starts giggling, rolling around on my bed hugging a pillow.

“That went well,” she says. “But he still loved me, right?”

I don’t even know what to say.

“Stop looking at me like I run a
cartel
!”

I say, “Sib, you don’t do drugs, right?”

Siobhan throws the pillow. “Right, because vodka in a Big Gulp is the gateway drug to
more
vodka in
bigger
gulps. And you’re asking me because . . .”

I shrug.

“Because I was a screwed-up
twelve
-year-old?” she says. “Have you ever
seen
me take drugs? Do I have sacks of drugs lying around my bedroom? Oh no, is it the Oxy I put in your orange juice? Because sixth grade, it was the third stepfather, the pervy one she ditched in two weeks,
and
we moved back to New York
and
Nancy started dating freaking Burton
and
she tried sending me to freaking boarding school. So I had some extra pills. Get over it!”