Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  In the morning, my room smells like fresh paint and the aroma of my dad baking me pumpkin bread in his belief that motherless girls need fathers who know their way around a mixing bowl.

  He pulls my uniform out of its box and rubs the fabric of one more plaid pleated skirt between his fingers. The other Lazars—the ones who, unlike him, did not go to medical school and then scandalize Montreal by marrying the spectacularly wrong woman and producing me—are the kings of Canadian imported silk.

  He says, “I’ve never felt so much synthetic. If someone flicks a live ash, your skirt will melt off.”

  I imagine myself standing skirtless in a puddle of navy blue and burgundy. You can guess who I imagine flicks the ash. (Hint: He is wearing a worn-out Latimer football tee.)

  My father, gazing at me slouched in the doorway in the stiff white blouse and dinky little tie, as I pin up my hair, says, “Ems, you look just like her.”

  It is the first time he has mentioned her—She Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken, the unmentionable junkie otherwise known as my mother—since Baltimore, two cities ago.

  And it’s not that I haven’t been waiting for an opening to have this conversation with him since Baltimore, because I have. It’s just that I’d like to make it to my first day of school without snot and mascara streaming down my face.

  I pretend that I am suddenly fascinated by our neighbors’ English bulldogs, Mutt and Jeff, who have tunneled under the fence between our houses and are currently wagging their stubby tails and panting, noses to our French doors, watching us.

  My dad grabs the backpack he has filled with brightly colored plastic school supplies, well suited to the carefree twelve-year-old I never was, and we wind down to Sunset, past the flower beds on the median strip at Sunset Plaza, past the Viper Room and the Roxy, back into the hills toward Latimer.

  We can see the ocean dead-on from the parking lot despite the gray-blue haze.

  The landscaping belongs at a luxe tropical resort (not that we go to luxe tropical resorts: we fight off bloodthirsty Canadian mosquitoes in a cabin in Quebec near Lac des Sables; we take nature walks in the hills, facing due north, away from Montreal).

  The buildings are palatial, the pathways wide and curved and swept immaculate.

  And in the middle of all this, there is a sign pointing to the stables. The stables?

  I was prepared for swank, but not this level of swank. I panic, but now that we are (sort of) Southern Californians, my dad shows no inclination to protect me from all this K-12 ocean-view opulence. He half drags me down the perfect path toward the awe-inspiring administration building.

  Our hands are shaken firmly and repeatedly by well-dressed Latimer administrators, juggling the words “welcome” and “elite” and “fit right in.”

  I am sent off to get my student ID photo taken in the student store, which has Latimer-logo clothes, school supplies, and every kind of ball, oar, paddle, fencing jacket, and athletic headgear known to man.

  A girl in riding clothes—boots no doubt sewn together by Italian shoemakers while her calves were encased in the cordovan leather, and jodhpurs so tight across the back, you have to wonder how she got her thong so lined up with the seam—is complaining about the brand of saddle soap and the fact there hasn’t been any mink oil for her bridle for a week.

  The kid behind the counter keeps trying to end the tirade by offering abject apologies, but the tirade is endless. When there’s the slightest pause, I say, “Excuse me, is this the right place for the photo?”

  The girl turns on her heel (literally); she pivots toward me. She says, “I was talking about my bridle. So unless you have something to add . . .”

  I suddenly recall why girls without Miss Teen Universe potential should never be the new girl. Then she does a double take and looks me over in a horrified state of disbelief.

  She says, “Didn’t you, like, babysit the Karp brats at the beach club?”

  I am about to descend into my own state of horrified disbelief, but even though she is tall and blond, she is not the girl in the bikini top. I say, “I was having dinner with the Karps.”

  “I’ll bet you were,” she says. “Anybody can go as a guest. Barbeque Wednesday is turning into freak night. But who knew Latimer was slumming it too?”

  I am standing there, counting the number of maroon balloons floating upward from the WELCOME BACK, LATIMER LIONS! banner. So much for a fresh start with boys in it, and maybe some friends who don’t remember me with knee socks covering unshaved legs through middle school.

  A girl behind me says, “Who are you?”

  I’m afraid that she’s talking to me, but she’s not.

  The girl in the equestrian cat suit doesn’t take her eyes off me. “Here’s a tip,” she says. “This is Latimer Day. You might want to stop interrupting people like you do at Walmart, or wherever you got that cheap barrette. You might want to lose the tacky vintage thrift-store look and get over yourself.” She pats my arm. I want to hit her, but more than that, I want to not cry. “There, there. There’s always Halloween.”

  I am not even fully enrolled yet, and it’s starting.

  “And here’s a hint for you,” the voice behind me says to Equestrian Girl. “You might want to get some pants that fit so the cellulite in your butt doesn’t show. And you might want to bone up on cheapness, because, guess what, you dress like a hooker with a trust fund.”

  The kid behind the counter is frozen in reverential awe and wonder.

  The voice behind me asks, “So where’s the transfer photo place?”

  I turn around, and there is Siobhan.

  Only without the sarong or the bikini top or the necklace with the tiny diamonds. Without her index finger hooked through the belt loops of a guy’s pants.

  She says, “Hey, sister-wife.”

  She is blond and slouchy and tapping her foot. The sleeves of her jacket are pushed up almost to her elbows; her hair is coming out of the wood bead bracelet she is using for a rubber band; and her socks are pushed down to the rim of high-top sneakers that are not, strictly speaking, part of the uniform.

  She doesn’t look messy; she looks perfect.

  I wait for her to slink away in search of someone cooler, but she doesn’t. She stares down at my feet, in pointy black Mary Janes from the fifties and frilly white anklets that are, in fact, part of the uniform if you’re in K through 3.

  I say, “Listen, at the beach, if that was your boyfriend—”

  “Not. At this very moment”—she looks at her watch, which is wafer-thin and stainless steel and Swiss—“he’s probably playing two or three other girls in college somewhere. His loss.”

  It feels more like my loss. I have been waiting for him to come jogging up from the gym in that old T-shirt, or brush against my entirely synthetic navy sweater in the hall.

  I say, “Admit he was a really good kisser.”

  “Ooooh yeah.”

  We head into the exceptionally green quad that smells like freshly cut grass. We have linked arms. People heading in the opposite direction have to go around us.

  “Thank God, another human,” she says, pressing her arm against my arm. “All the clone girls here have fruit-scent lip gloss and headbands. Jesus. It looks like they all just sucked on the same lollipop.”

  “Headbands?”

  “Exactly. Where were you when school started? I was in Africa. You’re not from here, right?”

  As it turns out, she was in Africa because her mother, Nancy, and Nancy’s flavor-of-the-month husband, Burton Pratt, were carting Sibhoan around Zimbabwe on an arguably educational safari, and her mom doesn’t believe that school should interfere with pretty much anything.

  “I’m from Montreal,” I say. “Kind of. I haven’t been there since I was five.”

  “J’adore Montreal! You speak French, right?” We walk past the administration building, where we’re supposed to be, toward a wooden bench that backs onto a hedge of red hibiscus. “I hate it here,” she says. “I just g
ot used to some crap school in New York and now my mom’s squeeze wants to be in Hollywood and I have to go to school with nasty clones in headbands.”

  “He’s an actor?”

  “He’s too old to be anything. But my mom used to live here. She says L.A. is boss. Boss. Who even says that?”

  So far, this is the main thing we seem to have in common, our parents’ use of outdated vocabulary. That and the ability to speak French. And kiss the same boy.

  I say, “I’m not too optimistic about Latimer’s bossness. But my dad says I catastrophize.”

  “No way,” she says, tightening her grip. “This place is the cradle of catastrophic boredom. Look around.”

  But some of us are not bored.

  Some of us are saved from the scourge of catastrophic boredom.

  By her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE QUAD EMPTIES SLOWLY. I have never seen so much blondness, or a school with students so unconcerned about getting to class on time.

  I say, “Eventually, we’re going to have to do this.” I am likely the world’s expert on knowing what I have to do and doing it.

  She says, “Yes, Mommy.” But we don’t get up.

  Siobhan tears off a hibiscus flower and lodges it behind her ear, the side of her face shadowed with red petals. Then she takes the barrette, mother-of-pearl, from Montreal, out of my hair. Bangs in a state of droopy tendrils fall over my forehead and ears, leaving the ballerina bun moored at the nape of my neck.

  She says, “You can thank me later.”

  Miss Palmer, the guidance counselor, doesn’t seem at all perturbed that we’re an hour late and don’t have the ID cards she sent us to get. She delivers an unsettling pep talk about how wearing the Latimer uniform means we’re the best of the best of the best (as stated, in Latin, on the school crest), marches us across the quad to a building modeled after a Greek temple, only with air-conditioning, and ditches us inside the carved door of our French class.

  Siobhan whispers, “I already speak French. You’d think they’d ask.”

  “Bonjour, Siobhan Lynch et Emma Lazar.” The teacher, M. Durand, is an authentic Frenchman, slightly graying, slightly put out to be here. He looks us over with an unabashed stare and asks for two volunteer hostesses to show us (“How you say?”) the ropes.

  The girls in the front row are busy examining their fingernails, the wood-grain surfaces of their desks, and the floor. Equestrian Girl from the bookstore rolls her eyes so far back in her head, it seems that our mere presence in her lair has precipitated a seizure. Nobody raises her hand to volunteer.

  Siobhan twirls a lock of hair around her index finger and glares at la classe.

  “No worries,” she tells M. Durand. “Je m’en fous de hostesses.” Roughly translated: I say screw you to the hostesses.

  She really can speak French.

  M. Durand raises one thin black eyebrow.

  “Emma and I will show ourselves around,” Siobhan says in French spoken so slowly that even first-years could follow. “We could, no doubt, show you one or two things.” (There is no perfect translation, but it is so suggestive that M. Durand turns crimson all down his neck.)

  “Oh, and Monsieur,” Siobhan continues, “s’il vous plaît, assure these girls that even though Emma and I are un peu intimidating, we hardly look down on them at all.”

  The entire front row looks up. It’s like the Wave people do at baseball games, only with bobbing headbands sparkling with a dizzying array of tacky rhinestones.

  A boy leaning against the window turns slowly and looks at me, nodding in almost imperceptible approval.

  Dylan, but I don’t know that yet.

  And I full-on smile back.

  Welcome to California, land of boys. I have just dissed an entire class that no doubt thinks I’m smiling about how much I look down on them by beaming at one.

  He is worth beaming at.

  I distract myself by cataloguing concrete details: hazel eyes, that wide mouth, slightly long brown hair, unbuttoned cuffs, his right arm hanging over the back of his chair. The wicked laugh he swallows just before the point he’d have to have a coughing fit or leave the room.

  He looks as if the uber-prep clothes blew onto his body by mistake when he fell into a wind tunnel on his way someplace a lot more interesting. Which could explain why his hair is mussed and his shirttail has escaped from his pants and why he isn’t wearing socks.

  He is the most attractive person I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Siobhan and the guy at the beach club, who was more of a fleeting mirage in the sad, overchaperoned desert of my life than an actual person.

  At Latimer, on the other hand, I am surrounded by all manner of boys. And it’s clear that even in a lush forest of boys—their minute differences, the rich variety of their faces and shoulders and hands, emphasized by the fact that they’re all wearing the same thing—this is the boy.

  It occurs to me that if I don’t stop staring at him, if I don’t suppress my desire to follow him out of the room and basically anywhere, he will probably notice.

  “That was beyond good,” I say to Siobhan when we are sitting in the empty cafeteria after French, when I’m supposed to be in Math and she’s supposed to be in Econ.

  “And it’s going to get better. I hold on to grudges for an unusually long time.”

  “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

  “How could you be on my bad side?” she says, wide-eyed. “You’re my best friend in America. Aren’t I your best friend in America?”

  I have several semi-friends scattered across North America, in cities where we lived when I was little and you make friends fast. They post sneezing panda videos on my Facebook wall and send chain letters threatening doom.

  I say, “Yes.”

  Eventually Miss Palmer finds us, draws us a map of where we’re supposed to be for all of our classes (just in case we’d planned to spend the whole rest of the day eating frozen yogurt), and shepherds us to PE.

  Siobhan and I have checked our schedules, and we have four classes together, but PE isn’t one of them. I say, “Miss Palmer. I don’t think I’m supposed to be in PE. My schedule says ‘PE Alternative Dance.’ ”

  But apparently I’m trapped playing field hockey until I’m assigned to a ballet class.

  “No worries,” Siobhan says when we are rifling through the leftover gym clothes they lend people who need them. “I’ll get us out of this.”

  First, she tries to convince the teacher we can’t run around because of our periods.

  “We’re synchronized,” she says. “It’s a scientific fact that best friends synchronize. You can look it up.”

  “Suit up,” he says.

  “This would never happen in Italy,” Siobhan says, ostensibly to me. “I lived in Milan before New York. There are old ladies who think you shouldn’t take a bath during your period in Italy.”

  Mr. Tinker points to the hockey sticks.

  Naturally, nobody wants us on her team. They stand there, leaning on their sticks, ignoring us as much as possible given that we’re ten inches away from them. When Mr. Tinker blows his whistle, we go trotting after them, trying to blend in. Thirty seconds later, Siobhan is on the ground and you can’t even tell who put her there, which girl is saying “whoops” over her shoulder.

  “Whoops?” Siobhan says, rubbing her thigh. “Really?”

  Siobhan, it turns out, is the poster girl for “Don’t get mad, get even.” Or, more accurately, “Get mad and get even.” Soon, half the girls on the field would have bruised ankles and battered shins if they weren’t wearing monster shin guards.

  Equestrian Girl, who has been slashing her way up and down the field, cornering the little ball and slamming it into the goal, plants herself in front of us.

  She says, “What the hell.” It isn’t even a question. “Did somebody forget to lock your cage?”

  “I’m sooooo sorry,” Siobhan says. “Maybe I’m swinging too wide.”

&n
bsp; The girl snorts, a horse’s whinny kind of snort, appropriate because it turns out she’s the queen of the eleventh-grade horsey girls. “Right,” she says. “Well, I’m Chelsea Hay, and you can’t just do whatever you want.”

  Siobhan says, “Watch me.”

  The whistle blows. I careen, half pushed, half stumbling, into a petite girl who elbows me as if I’d jumped her. Chelsea takes off with Siobhan at her heels, swinging (maybe at the ball and maybe not) and yelling, “Take that, bitches!”

  Mr. Tinker blows his whistle until Siobhan can no longer pretend she doesn’t know it means she’s supposed to stop trying to shed blood.

  “I don’t know what you did at your old school,” he says. “But at Latimer, we don’t swear at our teammates.”

  “They’re my teammates?”

  Mr. Tinker rubs his shaved head. “Do you play lacrosse?”

  “Eastside Episcopal,” Siobhan says. “Boys’ team.”

  “Varsity tryouts,” he says. “Tomorrow. Give me that stick.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “SO,” DYLAN SAYS ON THURSDAY, walking past my desk in homeroom. “I hear you’re violent for a ballerina.” You can’t tell from his face or tone or posture if he thinks this is a good thing or a bad thing.

  I say, “Not a ballerina. The bun is for PE Alternative Dance, not actual ballet.”

  When he rests his hand on the back of my chair, there’s a chill at the nape of my neck under the ballerina bun, in the same general category as tingling, or a cold wind, or waves of high-frequency vibration, or possibly lust.

  “I heard you got a lot of help slashing from your friend over there.”

  Dylan nods toward Siobhan, who is sitting at her desk admiring her manicure, full-on lacquered gold in a room full of frosted pastels studded with small yet hideous jewel stick-ons.

  “I don’t know what you heard, but all dismemberment was purely accidental.”

  Dylan is too deadpan to smile, but the corners of his mouth do a little twitchy thing that’s just as good. “So. Did you grow up playing ice hockey in a Canadian street gang, or do you just have a bad temper?”