Afterparty (14 page)

“Wow. No plane. You might have been at Latimer too long.”

“One day was too long.”

I say, “I would seriously die here without you.”

“Slain by the evil Chelsea in the flower of her youth, when still a virgin. Pathetic.”

“Could you please yell ‘virgin’ louder?”

She opens the lid of the old-timey wooden desk, a historical
artifact that helps give Latimer its movie-set, classic prep-school feel, and lets it fall with a bang. Everyone turns around.

She says, “There. That was loud.”

• • •

Loudness is the theme of the day.

Siobhan and I are sitting in the snack bar at the Beverly Hills Public Library, where we can’t find the references we need to prove our environmental sensitivity.

Siobhan looks disgusted with the entire operation.

A woman who is making a great deal of noise crinkling a giant newspaper, and anyway, this is a snack bar, says, “Shhhhhh!”

Siobhan says, “Don’t you want to know about my weekend?”

I am keeping myself awake with coffee. I can barely focus on anything other than not falling off the chair. The food bank took beyond forever on Sunday, and then I had to finish Monday’s homework. Which was voluminous. Latimer, in addition to its other charms, is hard.

I say, “I already know about your weekend. You went to awesome parties while I was prisoner of goodness.”

The woman turns in her seat to glare at us.

“Madame,” Siobhan says, “if you continue to make a racket with that newspaper, I will be forced to ask Security to escort you from the premises.”

She waves as the woman scurries back into the library proper.

“People suck,” she says. “Have you noticed that? I can’t even get William to call back, which, unless his phone got run over by a car, means he’d better be dead.”

“Maybe he’s in a Swiss canyon. No reception.”

“No, he just sucks.” She takes a long drag on the straw in her iced coffee. “And this coffee sucks.”

I say, “You suck.”

She says, “No, you. And about my weekend, don’t freak out on me, but I test drove Dylan Kahane for you, and
he
sucks.”

She goes back to sipping her iced coffee as if this were just a fun, ordinary, ho-hum conversational gambit. As if it were nothing.

“You
what
?”

“I know. It was Kimmy’s party, and this one didn’t have Kent and his Stanford boys, and Strick didn’t show. If you’d have come, it never would have happened.”

“This happened
two nights ago
?”

I look at her and it’s as if I’m seeing someone else, as if my actual friend has disappeared and I’m sitting in the snack bar, shaking and completely friendless. As if I’m standing on the bottom of the ocean and there’s no one else here.

“Say something,” she says.

While I’m figuring out what I can possibly say, she says, “It’s not like I was sober at the time. I doubt he even remembers because I don’t think his mommy ever told him beer has alcohol in it. Or that the
boy
brings the condom.”

It’s as if Siobhan is gone and Dylan has turned into someone else, because the Dylan I’ve wanted since the first day at Latimer doesn’t fall down drunk on top of Siobhan in Mandeville Canyon.

How could this even happen?

But what comes out of my mouth is “Whatever. It’s not like I’m hooking up with him.”

And then I’m looking at her through a landscape of dark water. I’m pushing away long strands of kelp, pushing through beds of rubbery green seaweed. I am remote and cold and flailing and alone down here.

She says, “I know. I’m just saying.”

Just saying the hell
what
?

I say, “Get real. It’s not like I’m on his speed dial.”

Completely true, although it leads to the completely wrong conclusion. But there’s no way I can say out loud, can formulate the sentences, can send out into the universe, how much I want him, and I kind of told her, I more than somewhat kind of told her, that he was the one. And yet she took him.

She says, “Are you sure?”

I shake off the salt water that is stinging my eyes, and the cold, and the ropes of kelp, and the sensation of drowning, and I outright lie to whoever she is.

I say, “He’s yours, for all I care.”

And Siobhan says, “
Quel
relief. Because it wasn’t anything, but turns out, he’s nice. I wouldn’t mind some nice. You have excellent taste in childhood crushes.”

I am close to losing it completely.

It wasn’t childhood, it was yesterday, and also this morning. “That’s all it was,” I lie. I will myself not to feel or think.

I keep trying to convince myself that it wasn’t anything, and that I’m
fine, and that it doesn’t matter, and I’m happy for her. I tell myself I never totally told her, I actively hid it from her, and that time he almost kissed me, there was no kiss, proving he never liked me that way. I tell myself it would be stupid to be gutted, and no self-respecting girl would be gutted, it’s drama-queenish to feel gutted, and I Am Not Gutted.

It doesn’t work.

MEGAN SAYS, “NO WAY.”

I am sitting in her room, eating an entire tin of chocolate chip cookies.

I say, “Oh yeah. They’re at a classic film festival she thinks is crap. Tuesday, they went to Stravinsky. He takes her to hear a band and dance in Silver Lake, and she totally doesn’t get how cool it is. She wants to be on the roof at Skybar.”

“No way,” Megan repeats. “And how can she even pretend she likes Stravinsky? I don’t even like Stravinsky, and I like classical music.”

There’s nothing to say. Siobhan is telling him she longs to sit with lavender-haired ladies who beam at them while they listen to Firebird because they look like such an adorable young couple. One of whom likes Firebird. (Hint: not Siobhan.) She is going on my weird dream date and pretending to like it. I don’t even get it.

Siobhan
: Why do people like this shit again?

Me:
Read the program notes.

Siobhan:
And y is there a line around the block for the ladies room?

Me:
Why don’t you just tell him you’re not up for this?

Siobhan:
I might hv told him I like it. So stupid.

Me:
Why did you tell him that?

Siobhan:
Stop interrogating me. Duh. Bc I like him.

When you consider the fact that she couldn’t even stand him right up until she started dancing her way across L.A. in his not unwilling arms, it’s completely breathtaking. In the hardball-hits-you-in-the-chest-and-knocks-the-breath-out-of-you kind of way.

“Have you considered dumping her?” Megan asks. “Everybody knows that girls can’t do this to their friends. It’s an axiom of high school.”

“This is my best friend.”

She looks at me.

“You know what I mean, my best friend
at school
. It’s different with someone you go to school with every day.”

“Different like you get to see her making out with your boyfriend every day.”

“He’s not my boyfriend! It’s not like you can call dibs on someone.”

“Yes you can. Isn’t there anybody else you could hang out with over there?”

I catalog the junior class, as if I could conjure up someone exactly like Siobhan (except not with Dylan) and make her manifest in homeroom. But I just end up thinking about how Siobhan is stuck to me like gum under a desk.

“At least he’s not nibbling her in public, which might actually make me have a heart attack and die. And get this, she keeps telling me all about how nice he is and how she’s still planning to marry William when she’s thirty.”

Megan says, “Yeah, and I’m planning to run away with Joe to Barbie’s dream house on the Magic School Bus.”

I say, “I don’t think she’s joking.”

“You just sit there and listen?”

I pretty much do. While pretending that I never wanted him.

“Do you still
like
him?”

I do my sick-lamb noise in the form of a “yes.”

Megan, who almost never swears, says, “Damn.”

“What am I going to do?”

“A whole lot of homework. Sort cans of tomato paste. You know, sublimate.”

Sublimating, for those who lack a psychiatric parent, is when instead of getting in touch with your debilitating longings, misery, and sexuality, you throw everything you’ve got into things such as overstudying for Precalc, competitive ice-skating, and sorting cans of tomato paste. It’s what our parents want us to be doing at all times, day and night.

I ask, “Will you come sort with me?”

“Sort canned goods in the basement of a temple?” She sounds quite enthusiastic. “I think I could get out of my house for that.”

• • •

Siobhan, of course, wants to talk about him. A lot. It is difficult to pretend I don’t care, to make myself nod attentively and eat salad at the same time.

“You could eat lunch with
him
,” I say as casually as possible, in the interest of extricating myself from a thicket of misery. “You don’t have to babysit me.”

“He’s at Religious Convo lunch.”

“He goes to
Convo lunches
?” Only people who are actually
into
Convo, aka Religious Convocation for Interfaith Dialogue (as opposed to people who just want Convo on their college applications in the brotherhood-of-man category) go to Convo lunches. How did I not know this about him?

I’ve been obsessing about him since the first day I got to Latimer, yet she knows more about him than I do after like five minutes.

My whole semester is turning into a series of awful little shocks.

I take a deep breath and try to look amused. “He can’t be that religious.”

I try to visualize Dylan, two buildings away, holding hands with Arif and Lissi in a circle with all the Religious Convocation kids, watching documentary shorts about the Dalai Lama and singing “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” Every time I get to the place in the circle where I visualize him sitting, the image evaporates.

“Why can’t I be with a religious guy?” Siobhan says, dipping her carrot stick into my ranch dressing. “He’s not half as Jewy as William.”

“Wait a minute! William is Jewish? I thought his grandpa was a Nazi count.”

Now that I’m letting pretty much everything slide, I’m letting “Jewy” slide. Even though I’m feeling madly and protectively Jewish myself in the presence of “Jewy.” Even though according to some people with the same last name as me, I’m not even.

Who the hell says “Jewy,” anyway? People from Aryan Nation compounds? My best friend?

“That’s his other grandpa,” she says, again as if it’s nothing, as if it’s just how people chat while eating carrots. “William is Gramps-spent-World-War-Two-hiding-out-in-the-attic-of-a-monastery-in-Pisa-type Jewy.”

All right. Can’t take it.

“You have to stop saying that word. You’re going to get us kicked out of school for being anti-Semitic. Also, a tad offensive.”

“How can I be anti-Semitic if I’m going to marry William?” she says, stirring the lumpy dressing with a celery stick. “Think about it.”

Reflexively, almost on autopilot, I say, “What if he’s already married?”

“Then he’ll have to dump the bitch. It’s a pact. He can’t walk away from a pact just because he hooks up with some Eurotrash.”

Perfect. She’s still planning to marry an insomniac Swiss boy, while she’s sleeping with Dylan. While I pretend to be
cheerful and unconcerned and made of freaking construction-grade rebar.

“I can’t believe you’re seriously planning that.” Just to say something.

“Why wouldn’t I? I mean, he was my first. How romantic would that be?”

“Wait! You had sex with William? And I’m just now hearing about this, too?”

“Is this the Spanish Inquisition? We were super-young and I wanted to see what it was like. Are you happy now? It’s not like it’s the first time I saw one. Remember Paolo?”

Paolo was the pervy stepfather two stepfathers ago, who only lasted a couple of weeks because he pranced around naked in front of eleven-year-old Siobhan.

“I thought that was just once when he did that thing with the bath towel and you barely noticed anything.”

“Until Nancy noticed anything. Then she checked us into the Grand Hotel Swankissimo and divorced his ass and took me out in gondolas and bought me charm bracelets and bread to rip up for the nasty pigeons in Piazza San Marco.”

“Yay, Nancy.”

“Yeah, she has completely bad taste in men, but she’s not a total failure as a mom.”

Which is the polar opposite of Siobhan, who is turning out to have perfect taste in men but to be a total failure as a best friend.

EVERY TIME I WALK PAST
Dylan, I imagine him with her.

Stop it, stop it, stop it
is highly ineffective. There are still tiny little heart-stopping flashes: their fingertips, their lips, their hair against a white, starched pillowcase.

He keeps treating me as if everything is exactly the same.

Nothing is the same.

I can hardly bear to look at his face, even when he’s just one row over and completely absorbed in staring out the window. I want to jump into my locker to avoid having to deal, at the same time I can’t stop stealing glances.

I can hardly stand to watch his mouth move when he talks or how he shoves his hair behind his ear when it flops in front of his face when he’s drawing instead of taking notes due to the fact that
I’m
taking the notes. Except that whenever Mr. Auden calls on him, he sounds smart.

I can hardly stand it when Mr. Auden says, “That’s a very Hegelian take on it, Mr. Kahane.”

And Dylan, who is not very forgiving, says, “Yes, I’m almost as Hegelian as Aiden.”

When Dylan goes, “Hey, Emma, do you have something that could pass as review notes on the origins of Communism?” as if what happened in the cafeteria never happened, as if he weren’t completely stepping out of character and, say, sleeping with my best friend, I can hardly get the rings of my binder to open.