Afterparty (19 page)

“Don’t go casting aspersions on Siobhan! Siobhan was your girlfriend until yesterday! If not for her, we wouldn’t be
together
!”

“She was not my girlfriend yesterday. My new thing is, girls who go down on other guys and lie to me about it aren’t my girlfriend.”

“Don’t tell me this!”

“I’m done with the bullshit,” Dylan says. “No one who’s seeing someone else. Or in love with someone else. Or engaged to someone else. No one who’s touched my brother, is with my brother, or wants to be with my brother. Just so that’s clear.”

I say, “Completely clear.”

He tilts his head. He looks at me with the trademark intensity.
He leans forward, his fingers hooked over the edge of the table. He says, “So. We’re together?”

I can hardly hold my voice together. I can hardly hold myself together.

I say, “And by ‘together,’ you mean—”

Dylan shakes his head slowly. “Come on, Seed.”

I say, “Yes.”

The boy of my dreams and my make-believe self.

Dylan is grinning his punch-drunk, plastered-in-London face, which I’ve only ever seen before on Facebook. At least I think he was plastered in London. Maybe he had just eaten a delicious plate of pancakes.

I say, because I have to know, “You wanted me to flirt with you?”

Dylan looks at me sideways over his largely devoured stack of red velvets. “Is this a trick question?”

“No.”

“Yeah. Even when you were with the
French
guy and I was busy: yes.”

The compass screeches,  
Are you stupid AND morally impaired? Stop pledging undying devotion and tell him!

But my whole body is vibrating, and this demands attention.

“But that time in the caf. Your hands . . .”

His hands are in my hair.

“Like this?”

Exactly like that.

I say, “Hold still.” I wipe a drop of syrup off his cheek with a fresh napkin.

I am staring at his lips. He walks around the table and sits next to me, and I know what’s about to happen. I lean toward him and this time, he kisses me. At first, only our lips, just barely, just brushing, and then he is out of the chair, he’s pulling me to my feet, his hand is at the back of my head, and something that must be the tip of his tongue would seem to have caught fire.

First kiss with Dylan, right on the sidewalk, with traffic whizzing by on Sunset. It goes on and on, but I don’t think that there actually exists enough on and on in the world to suit me.

Dylan says, “So we’re good?”

I am completely I don’t even know what.

I have to say something: Hello? Thank you? Let’s do that constantly forever?

I am undone, done and undone, stripped of resolve and magnetically bent in the direction of Dylan Kahane’s lips.

AT LUNCH, SIOBHAN SLIDES IN
next to me at a table in the corner of the patio. “You look unusually smiley, missy.”

I hold my head down and try not to look too smiley. “It’s on. I told you.”

She rubs her hands together over her chef’s salad. “Checkmark city. You should be thanking me. Do you want the list? I crossed out LSD.”

“No.” She looks disappointed. I am trying to keep my voice down and my heart beating at a normal rate. “I think I can take it from here.”

“Just get in and out,” she says. “He’s not as cool as you think.”

Siobhan giveth and Siobhan taketh away.

“Weren’t you the one who said he was surprisingly nice?”

She frowns and starts stabbing cherry tomatoes, watching their mashed interiors gush out.

“You should listen to me,” she says. “He’s all,
I’m Kahane
and I’m too cool for school
, but he’s not. I don’t want you getting messed up.”

“I thought the whole idea was for me to get a little bit messed up.”

Siobhan laughs, and I think, Go ahead. But I’ve been waiting for this day since I got here. There’s too much momentum to stop.

And then there’s my ear and my lips and the unhinged, sensation-ridden pit of my stomach.

Siobhan is snapping her fingers in my face. “Are you even paying attention?”

I say, “And listen, Jean-Luc, he can’t keep showing up all over.”

“Don’t look at me,” Siobhan says. “Kimmy was all freaked out that he didn’t come see you at Christmas,
Yak-yak, I’m Kimmy, why, tell me why, how come, where is he, boo-hoo, why?
What was I supposed to do?”

“He needs to disappear. Like now.”

Siobhan says, “What’s the big deal? It’s not like he’s real.”

• • •

After dinner, Dylan and I spend two and a half hours Skyping.

I say, “How was your day at the office, dear?”

He says, “Who knows? I was unusually distracted.”

“I thought that was your general state of being.”

Dylan says, “My goal at that place is to achieve distraction. Or get kicked out, but not by doing anything so gruesome that I don’t get into college. You made the achievement of distraction easier than usual.”

“You’re welcome.”

Periodically, my dad pops his head in at the door and I yelp, “Working on my physics lab! Group session!”

Dylan, his Latimer tie undone and hanging down in two bands of striped navy-and-maroon silk on either side of his neck, looks amused. His hair falling over his forehead, his cuffs unbuttoned and pushed halfway up his forearms, his shirt sliding around over his torso. Where, dear Lord, there is a tattoo—which my dad is
not
going to believe is an unusual blue-black birthmark in the shape of Chinese calligraphy on one side of my supposed physics lab partner’s chest.

He says, “Does your dad always look in on you every few minutes or am I a new guy to keep away from you?”

I say, “You might have to button your shirt really fast.”

Dylan does a twitch-at-the-left-corner-of-the-mouth smile facsimile. “My father hasn’t stuck his head into my room that many times since I was six.”

“Don’t get too jealous. He’s protective on steroids.”

He says, “I am jealous.” He buttons up his shirt.

“And he’s not going to be aware of any guy. In the interest of me ever leaving my house again.”

“This is so medieval, Jules!”

“That’s me, bringing medieval times to the Sunset Strip.”

“What if I
were
your physics lab partner?” he says. “Could you get in your car and come over?”

I say, “You have a very limited understanding of the concept of medieval. You’re male and it’s not broad daylight.”

“Would it be broad enough daylight Friday after school?”

“The old going-to-the-Beverly-Hills-Library-when-I’m-really-someplace-else gambit.”

“You have this down to a fine art,” he says.

“I have to.”

“So. I’m the beneficiary of all your cloak-and-dagger with the French guy? I should thank him.”

He makes a face. He says, “Don’t look at me like that.” He hold his hands up to the screen. “Not trying to upset you. Very poor Skype strategy. But how do I get you out of your cell?”

Tell him, tell him, tell him.

I say, “I’ll think of something.”

MAYBE I’M THE ONLY PERSON
on earth never to have picked up on this, but school with a boyfriend is completely different from school without one. It takes me a couple of days to realize this isn’t just the novelty effect. Dylan materializes next to me all the time. If I see him across the quad, there’s an obvious invitation to get over there.

It’s quite nice.

Even if people are shooting me odd and judgmental glances.

Siobhan says, “Don’t look now, Dorothy, but there’s a scarecrow and a tin man looking for you. It’s like you’re about to start singing with Toto.” She doesn’t say this as if it’s a desirable state of being, either.

“Excuse me, but whose idea was this, anyway?”

It’s as if I’ve developed amnesia where she’s concerned, where betrayal, being shot through the heart, and fury used to be. Now that I’m with him, all is forgiven. Almost.

“Can’t you just do it and get it over with? You’re so cutesy, it’s embarrassing.”

“It’s been
two
days. This is destined to be longer than a two-day relationship.”

“It’s a
relationship
?” Her head jerks back in a dramatic rendition of annoyance. “What about ‘quick in and out’ sounds like a relationship?”

“Unfair! I put up with you and how many guys?”

“At least nobody was lapsing into sugar shock because I was skipping around singing. Kahane, too. He was bad enough before. This is pathetic.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, but she pushes it away. I try to think of what I can say that will get her off this particular tangent and calmed down, and I say, “Sib, if I could do this stuff quickly, we wouldn’t need a list.”

Which has so little to do with why I’m with him, it’s ridiculous.

She says, “Could you at least show some restraint? You are way out of character.”

• • •

Next in line, we have Kimmy.

I am reading on the terrace by the publications suite when Kimmy comes up behind me, reeking ever so slightly of horse.

I say, “Hey, Kim, you here for newspaper?” Kimmy is the features editor, resulting in a column written from the perspective of Loogie, called “Horsing Around.” Kind of like
Gossip Girl
meets
Mr. Ed
, which for people whose dads don’t force them to watch classic TV with talking horses because classic TV is supposedly
more wholesome than shows from, say, the twenty-first century, will make no sense. So if
Mr. Ed
means nothing to you, consider yourself lucky.

Kimmy, of course, knows who Mr. Ed is, and also National Velvet, My Friend Flicka, Misty of Chincoteague, and the Water Horse.

Kimmy says, “O-kay. You and Dylan?”

I say, “Uh,” which sort of gives it away.

“Oh. My. God.” Kimmy, sweaty in her jodhpurs and a dirt-streaked polo shirt, sniffs the air and frowns, I assume due to the fact that she needs a shower and not because of the me-and-Dylan thing. “Twenty-four-hour turnaround, why don’t you?”

This is the exact moment it occurs to me that this might not look good to people besides Siobhan. People who are somewhat reasonable.

And that beyond not looking good, it might not
be
good.

That twenty-four-hour turnaround with your best friend’s boyfriend might look, be, and feel weird because it
is
weird.

Kimmy looks devastated. “Okay, it’s none of my business and you know I have
god 
awful taste in men, but isn’t your other boyfriend in love with you? Think about the camellias. And the UN is heroic. It’s not like he’s in Afghanistan on vacation.”

Afghanistan?

“Kimmy, oh God, I just remembered something.”

Such as I might look like, or possibly
be
, a girl code violator of epic proportion. And that I need to go smack Siobhan.

She is on the hill, smoking in the rocks.

“Why is Jean-Luc in Afghanistan? First you stuck him in
Africa as some kind of a joke. Well, ha-ha, five minutes later, he’s in Afghanistan! And what’s with the camellias?”

Siobhan says, calmly and slowly, as if talking to a child, “He’s on a UN mission in the Khyber Pass. You should be proud. And he’s been sending you camellias every Tuesday since Christmas.”

I say, “I’m not proud because he’s not
real
.”

She rolls her eyes.

“Why are you doing this?” I am determined not to raise my voice, not to shout or grab her. “What am I supposed to say to Dylan?”

“I know!” she says. “Why don’t you tell him you made Jean-Luc up? Now that you have a
relationship
.”

“Don’t you think I know I have to tell him? But if Jean-Luc becomes prime minister of France over the weekend, it’s going to make it a lot harder.”

“Get real. You’d
better not
tell him. I’m not going down over this. Just shut your mouth and hurry it up. He looks obsessed.”

“You told him I was in mad love with him! What did you think was going to happen?”

Siobhan shakes her head in a pantomime of disbelief and bug-eyed shock. “You were just supposed to make a check mark with him. I was done with him, and he was the only guy in North America you were willing to make check marks with.”

“That didn’t tell you something?”

It comes out with an edge, the sharp kind of edge that can cut right through your flesh, your friendship, to the breach in your friendship that left you with a somewhat gutted heart.

“Oh shit,” Siobhan says.

At first I think,
no
way, not going there. But I’ve already said it, I can’t take it back. “Yeah, it was kind of a problem.”

“So the whole time I was hooking up with him, you were hating on me and you didn’t
tell
me?”

“That’s putting it in the extreme.”

Sort of.

“You have murky depths,” she says.

But I’m thinking, No, it’s more on the clear and predictable, follow-the-arrows-to-the-exit side. That when your best friend is locked in romantic embrace with the man of your dreams, you might reconsider naming your firstborn child after her.

“Did widdle Megan know you hated me?” she asks in a baby voice, pursed lips and poison. “Does she hate me, too? I bet your daddy hated me.”

“Nobody hated you.”

“So nooooobody knew you were upset?”

“He’s a freaking psychiatrist. The man can tell when people are upset.”

“He has no idea when you’re upset! I couldn’t tell and I know you way better than he does.” Her voice is pressured and insistent. “I know you better than anyone, right?”

I say, “Of course you do.”

All I know is that I have to say it or she’ll lose it, and I have to fix it. I don’t even know if it’s true or false or all of the above.

I don’t seem to have fixed it all that well, either. Because when Dylan walks by, looking at me quizzically when he sees I’m standing with her, even though he’s seen me standing with
her like this every day since my first day at Latimer, she pushes me toward him, yelling, “Hey, lovebird bitches, why don’t you go share some freaking worms?”