Afterparty (5 page)

IT WOULD MAKE LIFE A
lot easier if I were the kind of bad seed with a hard, protective shell and thorns that leave splinters if you try to crush them in your hand. The kind Chelsea wouldn’t mess with.

But in the absence of a shell, there’s Siobhan.

“We should burn her at the stake,” Siobhan says.

We’re reading
Saint Joan
in English class, and Ms. Erskine insists that what happened to Joan (hint: she pissed off all the important men in France and then they burned her at the stake) is the perfect metaphor for the fate of women in the cruel, cruel modern world. Discuss.

A large number of boys grab hall passes and don’t come back. Dylan is out of there in five.

And every time I speak, Chelsea mimes an imitation of me with the added touches of protruding tongue and hands clenched like two claws in rigor mortis.

Kimmy, the horsiest of horse girls, mouths, “Stop it, Chels,” but Chelsea doesn’t stop.

I try to gut it out, but I choke on my words. What I was trying to say about the Bishop of Beauvais is lodged in the back of my throat, like a mouthful of gristle.

“My
horse
has more interesting things to say,” Chelsea mutters after class, falling into her little brigade with Mel Burke and Lia Graham.

Siobhan keeps saying that it’s going to get better, but I don’t believe her.

For me, better is when Sib and I are alone together somewhere else. When we’re sitting in the screening room at her house, semi-watching a French film
Paris Match
said was stupendous, which I guess it is, if you like attractive naked people who can’t act.

Siobhan is trying to get her laptop to Skype-connect with William, her best friend on all continents except North America, where I am the reigning best friend. She can see him, but there is no sound.

Whenever I look away from Siobhan’s laptop to the movie screen that spans the front of the room, I get an eyeful of full frontal nudity.

Siobhan says, “You need a drink, right?”

I say, “Thanks. I’m fine.”

“Oh Jesus, don’t go all American on me. Montreal is practically France. Say you haven’t been guzzling wine with dinner since you were eight.”

All right, I have, liberally cut with water, but I am unprepared for high-octane vodka in orange juice.

“Better, right? Wait!” She lunges for her laptop, which has started to make dial tone noises. “William! Where the fuck are you?”

Siobhan and William are bound by years of little-kid pacts. It is difficult to reconcile her stories of their childhood—jumping into fountains in Milan, riding scooters down staircases at his country house in Umbria—with chain-smoking, insomniac William, who is always up no matter what time it is in Switzerland. His boarding-school buddies, half passed-out, dispense crude comments in three languages in the background.

Siobhan and William have pacts from when they were twelve to get married at thirty and become gamekeepers in Africa, pacts filled with adventure and secrecy and a long-remembered rush that will keep them friends forever.

“A gamekeeper?” I say when she tells me about it.

Siobhan says, “It’s a pact. We’re stuck with it.”

Then, over the din of the grunting French actors, Siobhan screams, “Fuck this laptop!”

William’s face freezes. The connection turns to static and then silence. William’s image, heavy-lidded eyes staring straight out, fades to grey.

“You want a pact?” Siobhan says. “Let’s mess with Chelsea. Let’s mess with her creepy horse.
I’m Chelsea and Sir Galahad only performs for meeeee
.”

Of course I want a pact.

She says, “Can you ride English?”

It’s hard to tell, sitting in the half darkness of the screening room, if what we are planning is adorable teen hijinks on the order of pasting a mustache on the statue of Charles Emmett Latimer in front of the administration building, or more of a late-night felony by reckless rich kids with no morals, conscience, or sense.

I come down on the side of hijinks.

Which is how I find myself in a basic black breaking-and-entering outfit when my dad thinks I’m sleeping over at Siobhan’s house so we can practice our Joan of Arc oral report and get up early to wrap each other in tinfoil suits of armor. I have never done anything remotely like this, told my dad a lie of this magnitude to cover up something that is no doubt fourteen kinds of illegal, and also kind of wrong. But somewhere between trying to talk myself into the idea that this is hijinks and ordering myself to bail, I climb over the stone wall near the dark paddock.

“How long before Security shows up?” Even fortified by brandy that Siobhan claims is good for quelling fear but seems to have left me slightly uncoordinated, I’m pretty sure we’re doomed.

“Get a grip, grasshopper. They’re playing cards in the gym.”

“How do you even know that?”

“Midnight football,” she says. “Remember? If you’d give up the boo-hoo, Daddy-I’ll-be-sooooo-good shit, you could be tackling Ian Heath.”

“Wow, I could be hooking up with a functional illiterate.”

“Or Sam Sherman. You could be hooking up with him. Football
and
he’s the only guy in Mara’s so-called band. Man of your dreams.”

“Could we possibly concentrate on what we’re doing? I haven’t ridden since I was six.”

She pulls open the unlocked double doors to the stable. “We are so in.”

I am staring down Kimmy’s horse, named Loogie by her brothers due to his giant, snotty horse nose, at least eliminating the pretentiousness factor. Loogie stares back in round-eyed confusion.

“You
said
you wanted a horse that’s a big puppy,” Siobhan says. “Do you need a leg up or what? Shit. I hope I remember how to tack them up.”

But she does it, perfectly.

Also, it turns out, you don’t forget how to ride a horse, especially the part about how you’ll fall off if you aren’t gripping with your thighs. Which I am, hard. But heading onto the trail that leads away from school, through the dry creek bed, through rustling leaves and confused birds that chirp in the dark, I get what the horsey girls have been going on (and on and on) about.

“Best pact ever,” Siobhan says, even though Chelsea’s horse, Sir Galahad, looks like he bites and keeps wiggling his horse butt as if he wishes she’d fall off. “Cool, huh?”

“Beyond.” I want to whip off the black breaking-and-entering ski cap, shake loose my hair, and canter. “Doesn’t it make you kind of want one?”

“Hello. It’s me. If I wanted one, I’d have one.”

It’s true. I can see her going, Hey Marisol, let’s fly down to Kentucky on Sunday and get me a horse. And Marisol, the housekeeper who is always there when Siobhan’s parents are away doing whatever they do, booking the flight.

“You’re just down on horses because Galahad is nasty and Loogs is Mr. Cutie.”

“Don’t go all horse whisperer on me,” she says. “They’re just buff cows you sit on. All I want is one little video of Galahad going over a fence with me on his back. He only
performs
for you, Chelsea? We’ll see about that.”

“Siobhan,
no
! Security will be down here in ten seconds if you turn on the lights in the paddock.”

“Boo! Hiss! I’m trying to cheat with Galahad and you’re spoiling our special moment.” Siobhan waves her cell phone at me, but I don’t take my hand off the reins.

She chucks it at me from a foot away. We hear it hit the ground.

“Shit!” Siobhan says.

We hear Sir Galahad crushing what turns out to be the plastic case. Siobhan dismounts and gets her battered phone, scooping up shards of the gold plastic case from the walkway just outside the stable.

She says, “Don’t freak! It’s not like it’s purple and my name’s bedazzled on it or anything.”

“I’d be just as happy not to get my name bedazzled onto a police report!”

Or whatever kind of document wrecks your permanent
record when you leave evidence of horse rustling strewn all over Latimer.

“Kill the mood, why don’t you?” Siobhan snaps as I slide off Loogie’s back onto another plastic fragment that crunches under the heel of my boot.

• • •

“So,” Dylan says when he’s standing by my locker, waiting to collect my notes. “Get much work done last night?”

I say something that sounds a lot like “gark.”

He says, “I heard somebody went riding.”

“Really?” I deserve the Oscar for best performance by a girl pretending not to jump out of her skin. Not just because he
knows
but because what if the idea of criminally insane girls is a turnoff for him, not unlike all other boys in their right minds?

“Kimmy is pissed,” Dylan says. “McKay bawled out her and Chelsea for not grooming their trusty steeds after they rode them, and Siobhan’s trash-talking Galahad. So I’m thinking, Hmmm. I didn’t know you rode.”

I haul Siobhan to the bleachers at the end of the field. She is abnormally serene.

I say, “Excuse me, was this a pact to get expelled? Because I missed that part.”

“Stay calm. Surrender sharp objects.”

“Sib, this could mess up our lives!”

“
I’m
messing up your life? Because your life is
sooooo
perfect without me? Your life
sucks
without me.”

“Not what I said.”

“Calm down,” she says. “Chelsea thinks it was some guy on the soccer team who likes her. Nobody knows.”

Except that when I’m standing there in the carpool line, Dylan comes up behind me and hands me a neatly folded napkin with a rubber band around it and a big piece of Siobhan’s gold plastic phone cover in it.

He says, “Next time, try not to leave a trail of bread crumbs.”

First pact, and I have fallen off the Good wagon.

YOU’D THINK IT WOULD BE
a given that messing with Chelsea wouldn’t include letting her know we did it. But Chelsea thinks it’s proof that boys will go to any length to get her attention. She’s
happy
about it. Which is so not the reason we borrowed her horse.

“Don’t you want to see the look on her face?” Siobhan says. “If she
knew
.”

“I would love to see the look on her face. But not as much as I don’t want to get kicked out of Latimer and grounded for all eternity.”

“Boo-hoo,” she says. “I’m bored. Let’s go play at Century City.”

Usually, we go to Century City after playing dress-up in her mom’s closet. Which is the size of my house.

Back in the day, when naked ladies were found in magazines and not online, Sib’s mom, Nancy, was crowned the best Miss February ever. Posed across two full glossy pages, she was billed
as a sharpshooting, baton-twirling Texas cowgirl, with sparkly red cowboy boots, a Winchester, and a small quantity of strategically arranged red gauze.

She was already pregnant.

When Nancy showed up, still gorgeous, at a Playboy Mansion charity event a few months later, with the highest, tightest baby bump ever, someone from a porn channel stuck a mike in her face and asked what she’d been doing. She snarled, “I’m writing a memoir. I’m writing how to be pregnant and sexy, see?”

Two ghostwriters later,
Pregnant and Sexy
was born. So was Siobhan. Followed by
Sexy Mom
,
Sexy Mom at the Office
, and a host of other bestsellers that make Siobhan cringe.

Nancy’s taste in clothes still involves the absolute minimum of cloth.

Siobhan says, “You can’t wear
that
. That’s what she wore to church on Christmas. I’ll pick.”

Nancy has thirty-one pairs of sandals, each one high-heeled, with delicate thin straps and ties and buckles. I’ve tried on all of them.

My dad thinks malls are playgrounds of sick, unfettered materialism, thus eliminating any possibility that he’ll stumble on me teetering around in these sandals and small dresses while Siobhan screams at men who leer at her (this is the rule: they have to leer first) in languages other than English. Eliminating any possibility that he’ll see her poking me and saying, “Your turn, babycakes.”

“In the first place, no one is leering at me,” I tell her. “And in the second place, no.”

We are sitting on a wicker couch near the bar, sipping wine a guy in a turtleneck sent over.

Siobhan says, “Look at that one in the Ultrasuede blazer. Gross. He is completely leering.”

“Not at me. You might have one or two Miss February genes I didn’t get.”

She uncrosses her legs and extends one foot in front of her, rotating it as if she’s checking out whether her ankle works. A middle-aged guy in a sports coat looks her over. She lifts her glass and shouts something angry at him in what sounds as if it might be a real language, but isn’t.

“There,” she says. “Isn’t this so much more entertaining than if we were at French Club listening to those brats massacre French?”

The chasm between who I’m supposed to be and who I actually am, between Emma the Good and this person my dad
cannot
find out about, is growing daily. Siobhan is getting impatient that I won’t play more games with her, but even here, in the land of the impending earthquake, the ground can only fissure so fast.

I say, “I want to play, I do. Theoretically I get it, but I lack the skills.”

“You lack yelling-at-pervs skills? How can you walk down the street without yelling-at-pervs skills?”

I try to explain how I’ve spent my life chained up and left to rot without sounding geeky.

Siobhan says, “So basically, you’re like this inherently cool person who got corked in a magic genie lamp for sixteen years?”
She seems more intrigued than upset. “You can be my science project! We can
sloooooowly
raise your body temperature and ease you into the twenty-first century.”

“There aren’t a lot of outlets for coolness in a magic lamp. Just saying.”

She says, “People think you’re cool. And not just because you’re with me.”

Whenever Siobhan comes up with one of these completely untrue reassuring assertions, I want to invent an un-cheesy substitute for the matching friendship necklace and slip one underneath her pillow.