Afterparty (7 page)

She is picking up and putting down everything in my room. The silver brush and comb from Montreal. The small framed photo of my mother with me as an infant in a pom-pom hat. Snow globes from every city where we’ve ever lived.

I want to scream, “Don’t touch that!” every time she picks up something else, I want to scream until I don’t feel anything but the vibration of screaming. So it’s not like she’s the only screwed-up person in the room.

My dad keeps knocking on my bedroom door, offering us snacks, I’m pretty sure so he can make sure Siobhan isn’t shooting heroin into my veins. When he leaves for a night meeting at
Albert Whitbread, he kisses me on both cheeks at the front door, looking toward my bedroom where Siobhan is sprawled on my bed, leafing through my collection of
Vogue Paris
.

He squeezes my hands, and even with my eyes closed, I would know these squeezes were a warning.

He says, “She’s out by ten. And don’t leave the house.”

YOU KNOW HOW IN THE
morning, everything is supposed to look all shiny and better? It doesn’t.

My dad makes waffles with blueberry smiley faces, like he did when I was seven. I’m pretty sure this is because (1) he wishes I were seven and (2) he wants me in the best possible mood so he can tell me that following our (trashed) Family Game Night, courtesy of my (trashed) best friend, he wants me to stay home more. I am not supposed to mistake this for being grounded; it is intended more as extreme family bonding. Or of me bonding with the inside of our house. Or of me bonding with anybody other than Siobhan.

And I understand his concern, I do. He’s not being mean, he’s being worried. I get that. But people change, right? She was a wrecked twelve-year-old, but it’s not like she’s still in that same wrecked place. Not everyone who screws up is doomed to be, well, doomed forever, right?

I wish I could explain this to him, but he’s so shaken up, I’m afraid if I add even one tiny sliver of unpleasant information, it will be the straw that got the camel sentenced to fifty years to life in solitary.

So I eat breakfast and I don’t say a word. Which, just to be clear, is not the same thing as lying. It’s more like not being argumentative. Not being confrontational. Not being completely stupid. Not being completely honest.

By the time he drops me at school, I feel so wrung out from the past two days, I just want to sit under a tree. Alone.

Dylan, walking up from the parking lot, says, “You look wiped. You liberate more quadrupeds last night?”

All right, possibly not alone.

I say, “You torment any bipeds? Other than me.”

Dylan tsks. “Somebody tormenting you, Seed?”

I pull a tiny pumpkin bread out of my backpack and break it in two. It’s difficult to think of my dad, who baked this still-warm pumpkin bread and tucked it into my pack, as the tormentor.

Dylan says, “You bake? If you baked this, forget school and open a bakery.”

“My dad.”

“The man’s a baking genius.”

I am in such a state of pathetic reverie, I am actually marveling at how the crumbs of pumpkin bread that fall onto his white shirt before he flicks them off match the rusty brown flecks in his eyes. I am watching him push his hair behind his ear and actively holding myself back from touching that hair. I am speaking to
myself in command sentences: Do not touch hair. Keep breathing. Say something conversational.

I say, “The man seems to be threatening some form of benevolent house arrest. Eating baked goods may soon be my sole form of recreation.”

I realize that we are drifting toward the quad while everybody else is drifting toward class.

“That doesn’t sound so benevolent.”

We’re sitting on a bench, out of sight, behind the library, but I have no idea how we actually got here.

I say, “It’s my own fault. I virtually waved a Bloody Mary in his face. Then I waved Siobhan in his face.”

“And people come down on me,” he says. “One whole Bloody Mary and Siobhan.”

“Do you enjoy making fun of me?”

“At least I have the sense to drag home a respectable friend.”

I say, “Not all of us get to have the secretary general of the UN as our best friend. I heard he’s already taken.”

Dylan laughs, an outright laugh.

He says, “Gotta go.”

I start to say something, but he’s already half sprinting across the quad, and not in the direction of class.

• • •

“Tell me,” Siobhan says when we’re standing outside homeroom.

“Am I an honorary Lazar yet?”

I shake my head.

She claps her hands over her mouth with sort of fake
amazement, but sort of not. “Was I a shit Bo Peep? I didn’t get you in more trouble, right?”

“Here’s a helpful hint. In general, the sheep shouldn’t be cooking meth.”

We are walking toward the wooded hillside that forms a semicircle behind Latimer. We’ve been cutting junior class assembly, anything related to pep, and the occasional boring class on this hill since we figured out Latimer’s completely lax attendance policy.

When we are lying in a stand of twisted scrub oak, Siobhan says, “That girl in the picture with that baby is your mom, right? What is she now, like thirty?”

Oh.

It occurs to me that in addition to not telling Siobhan about the extent of my geekiness, the fact I like Brahms, and my irrational devotion to Dylan Kahane, I might have skipped the story of my life.

I mean, she knows she left and never came back, but that’s pretty much it.

I want to be doing anything other than having this conversation.

Siobhan snaps her fingers in my face.

I say, “Did anybody ever tell you that’s annoying?”

“What’s annoying is people who zone out and don’t come back when their best friend is talking to them.”

“Sorry. I’m preoccupied. I have to do physics lab.”

“Not due until Friday. What’s wrong with you? Why are you changing the subject? Is that your mom or not?”

I do not, in the worst way, want to be doing this, but I don’t see a way out.

My dad says that most human misery can be staved off by a deep breath followed by ten seconds of rational thought. I don’t actually believe this works, but I take several deep breaths while Siobhan sits there staring at me, anyway.

I say, “All right. The thing is that she’s dead.”

“Shit!” Siobhan says. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. Why would you do that to me?”

“The way it happened—really personal.”

She starts punting eucalyptus pods, shooting up clouds of dirt. “Like I haven’t told you
personal 
? Like I didn’t tell you how Missy Rogers tried to kiss me in the locker room?”

She storms down the path toward the stable, and I go after her.

“Why would you
hide
things from me?” She faces me, damp tendrils of hair sticking to her forehead. Her fingernails dig into the flesh of my upper arms through my blouse. “You’re
supposed
to be my
best friend& 
! Do you want to be or don’t you?”

But Missy in the locker room is an after-school special. My parents’ marriage gone bad, gone worse, and gone, is an oldie-but-goodie film that melts off the reel as soon as it starts running.

It begins as flaky girl meets buttoned-up guy, opposites attract, springtime in Montreal, cue the French music. Except that, in my parents’ case, it didn’t exactly work out.

Probably it would have helped if the flaky girl hadn’t been clinically insane.

It would have helped if the guy hadn’t been her psychiatrist.

Because psychiatrists are
not
supposed to get it on with their patients. They are
not
supposed to fall in love and have a baby. And, when they do, all hell breaks loose and there’s a giant scandal.

The outcome of the scandal was me.

Not to mention, the fact my mother liked drugs better than me (despite all the free, on-site psychiatric help from my dad) was a disaster. And it’s not reassuring to know she stayed clean through the pregnancy because that’s how much she loved me.

How much she loved me before she left me.

Even when my mom died—which I don’t remember, not her, not her dying, not having her and then not having her—people didn’t feel sorry enough for my dad to save what was left of his completely wrecked career. She was gone, I was a screaming baby, and he was the embodiment of bad judgment, well-known as a screwup all over the province of Quebec.

You read
The Scarlet Letter
in ninth grade. You write a paper about poor, ostracized Hester Prynne who screwed up and produced baby Pearl, evidence of all her badness. Not whining, but try being Pearl. Only Hester OD’s and you end up with the buttoned-up dad whose goal in life is to keep you from turning out anything like her.

Like Fabienne.

That was her name.

I look exactly like her. Blue eyes, auburn hair, everything.

Possibly explaining why the Lazar clan is stomping around Canada, unhappy I exist. And no amount of repairing the world, good deeds, and candle-lighting will make them see me as anything
but a
shiksa
, a
goya
—which means a girl who’s not a Jew, but coming out of their mouths sounds like
dirt
, or
worthless
, or
spawn of Fabienne
.

As for my dad, any move I make that reeks at all of Fabiennishness—a bottle of Corona at a Fourth of July party in Chicago, a vintage Bob Marley T-shirt with a faintly stenciled ganja leaf in Washington, D.C., or any hint I might have what my dad quaintly calls unsavory friends anywhere—and he has visions of me morphing into
her
. Wandering off into adulthood in a substance-induced haze. Saved only by the all-purpose parental unit, squelcher of all hints of rebellion, fully capable of making everything fine.

What part of this is fine?

It’s as if he’s blundering though life in the misguided belief that she’s missing in the fine-and-dandy-let’s-burst-into-song way the Little Mermaid’s mom is missing. As if he overlooked the fact she’s missing in the succumbed-to-craziness, OD’d-behind-a-strip-mall-in-Ottawa, shot-up-and-left-me-behind-without-saying-good-bye, it-hurts-to-think-about-it kind of way.

“I can’t believe you were keeping that from me,” Siobhan says, rooting around in the pocket of her blazer for a cigarette. “Sorry I got weirded out.”

I wipe my face against my sleeve. Siobhan smooths the long grass and sits down next to me.

“No wonder you can’t piss off your dad,” she says. “The whole rest of your family sucks. Excuse you for being
born
. Don’t forget to leave your country and your language and your freaking religion at the door on your way out. And by the way, if you don’t
stay corked in this magic lamp, you’re going to turn into a dead addict.”

I can’t stop crying. I say, “And my name at the door, too.”

“What?”

“My name. Amélie.” I can hardly say it. “My
name
. It got turned into Amelia in St. Louis and Emmy in Philadelphia and Emma in D.C.”

“You didn’t even get to keep your
name
? It’s not like you’re in fucking witness protection,
Amélie
.”

Hearing the name in someone else’s mouth makes me crack open, when all I want to do is close back up. I say, “
Don’t
call me that. It’s like she’s someone else.”

In the knowing-exactly-why-I-picked-her-for-my-friend department: because she gets it in five minutes. Whereas sixteen years later, some people still don’t.

Siobhan lights a Gitanes, a French cigarette that smells like rotting garbage. “It’s not that bad. My mother is a crazy slut and I turned out great.”

“Don’t call Nancy a slut.”

“She gets new ones before she gets rid of the old ones. How slutty is that?”

“Well, it’s not like she’s going to die with a needle in her arm behind a mini-mart in Ottawa.”

Siobhan pauses, the cigarette halfway to her lips. She says, “Do you want me to tell Miss Roy you have cramps and go to my house?”

We spend the day sitting in Siobhan’s Jacuzzi, sunning ourselves on top of a wall of river rocks, immersing ourselves in
steaming, bubbling water, cooking ourselves, eating Cheetos, and drinking. The skin on my fingers wrinkles in exact inverse proportion to the unfolding of the furrows in my brain where all the sludge has lodged, until my mind is a blank plane that stretches like the flat blue California sky, all the way to the almost invisible horizon.

“IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WANT
to tell me about school?” my dad asks when I’m sitting in my room with chlorinated hair before dinner. “Such as why you weren’t
there
today?”

He could pass for eerily calm if he weren’t punching his left hand with his right hand.

I say, “I had cramps.” I lie without even planning to or thinking about it. I keep reaching new lows without even trying.

“I know that. Two phone calls. Since when do you leave school and go to a friend’s house and not call me?”

Once I start to lie, there is no limit to my creativity. “When I need Advil? If I had my own car, I could have just run home.”

“Not a wise moment to ask for a car.”

I wonder if being slightly drunk at lunchtime still shows after dark.

I say, “Please let this one go.”

“Should I let yesterday go, too? When your best friend tells me she sold Adderall in grade school!”

“She was joking! I don’t know why she acted like that.”

He shouts, “You know exactly why she acted like that! You know why you were drinking and why you walked out of school and you know if you ever planned to tell me.” He shoots me a look of pure parental devastation. “Did you?”

The slippage of Emma the Good into the gutter of parental disappointment is painful to watch. I look at my feet. I think, What would Emma the Good say?

The moral compass, spinning in horror, squawks,
She wouldn’t have to say anything, moron. She wouldn’t be found in a hundred-yard radius of shit this deep.