Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “Watch this,” she says. “New game. It’s called shock-the-dork.”

  She walks over to two middle-aged guys who look a lot more clueless than the ones she usually likes going after. She waves a cigarette at them; they grope for their lighters, matches, whatever it takes to keep her happy. She’s all giggly and girly until one of them offers her another drink and she shrieks, “No! I will not meet you in your hotel room! I’m sixteen years old! What’s wrong with you!”

  The men throw money on the bar to pay for their half-drunk drinks and sprint toward the escalator.

  Siobhan turns back to where I’m sitting, on the verge of breaking my tomato juice glass with my bare hands by squeezing it so hard. I stare at the place where the two guys turned the corner and disappeared, and there is this moment of intense relief that there’s no sign that they were ever here.

  I wonder if the shocked dork was supposed to be them or me.

  Siobhan says, “Now I’m not bored. Are you bored?”

  I take another sip of the fake Bloody Mary. I say, “I seriously don’t ever want to play this game again.”

  Siobhan looks as if she’s going to say something, but then she doesn’t.

  I say, “Is there some way you could get me a real one of these?”

  Siobhan says, “No, but he could,” and walks off in the direction of a guy in a Cal T-shirt.

  • • •

  My dad says, “You’re late.”

  Fourteen minutes late from an afternoon I wish had never happened.

  I say, “It won’t happen again.”

  My dad looks at me quizzically. This is never good. He says, “Ems, have you been drinking?”

  I’m trying to set the table. A wineglass crashes into the salad bowl. The crystal rings for an eternity.

  “Of course not!” I swear, all I’m thinking about is the virgin Bloody Mary with the celery stalk—not the champagne and not the real Bloody Mary and not the fact that I’ve been drinking.

  My dad crosses his arms across his chest.

  I feel my cheeks beginning to go red. “I had a glass of champagne.”

  “You’ve taken to drinking and lying to me?” This in French, connoting a meltdown.

  “Dad! No! I think of drinking as, you know, a bunch of kids getting smashed. I mean, we have wine at dinner.” I nod toward the uncorked burgundy on the dining room table as deferentially as humanly possible while buzzed and being yelled at. “It was a glass of champagne.”

  “Siobhan’s parents served you alcohol?”

  “No! We were just”—I grope for something credible and redeeming—“celebrating something.” Something parent-friendly. Something believable that nevertheless didn’t happen. “Siobhan raised her Econ grade to A. Her mom went . . .” I grope for a polite synonym for “apeshit” that isn’t also a synonym for “crazy,” a word he’s sensitive about.

  He nods toward the landline. “Get Siobhan over here.”

  I think of Siobhan stretched out by the mall bar, crossing and uncrossing her legs as some middle-aged guy in a fake-suede blazer looks her over. I think of her lifting her glass and shouting something angry at him in Portuguese. I think of her in four-inch heels, sitting in my living room pretending she doesn’t speak English.

  “Now?”

  Yes, now.

  I panic.

  My dad has tried to get Siobhan and her family over before. And, okay, what I told him can be dressed up, spelled out in letters made of butterflies and emblazoned in fancy needlepoint on little velvet pillows, but the bottom line is: I straight-up lied.

  I told him the (completely fabricated) story that Siobhan’s mom rarely let her go out, where there might be R-rated DVDs, bad language, dangerous pit bulls, and unlocked guns lying around. I sent her entire family on (imaginary) church junkets to Tijuana to build (also imaginary) orphanages. I enrolled Nancy in a (fictional) Italian cooking class where she spent weeks gathering wild herbs in Sicily.

  Let me pause here to say, no matter what my dad is worried about, I do not lack a conscience, or a rudimentary concept of right and wrong, or an at least minimally functional moral compass. I could tell, as all these untrue sentences came cascading out of my mouth, that the needle of that moral compass was pointing toward wrong and untrustworthy and bad daughter and overall bad, dishonest person.

  But how could I tell him the truth without his head exploding?

  I dial Siobhan with blood pressure that’s highly elevated for a girl who doesn’t run marathons or do massive amounts of cocaine.

  I try, unsuccessfully, to sound normal. I say, “Hey, Siobhan.”

  She says, “Hello?”

  I say, “And congratulations again for that A. Way to go.”

  She says, “Have you been smoking something?”

  I say, “Yeah, we’re eating in a minute too. And I wanted to ask, do you want to come over tomorrow?”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  My dad mouths the words “Family Game Night.”

  I say, “Family Game Night.”

  “Oh. Is this a hostage situation? Does someone have a knife to your throat?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Cool. Sure. Family Game Night. Are you okay? You sound kind of slurred.”

  “Yeah! My dad thinks so too! He can’t wait to meet you.”

  “Shit.”

  I nod to my dad. I say, “Tomorrow.”

  He says, “Good. I’ll be sure to lock up the assault rifles and pit bulls.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “HOW COME HE WOULDN’T THINK I’m your perfect friend, anyway?” Siobhan says over a spiked Big Gulp in her kitchen after school. “Don’t you think I’m presentable?”

  “Of course you’re presentable! It’s just . . . I don’t know . . . he wants me to be more like Megan. Which means maybe you could be more like Megan. Just for tonight.”

  Siobhan and Megan met once during my effort to make the pieces of my life converge over a pedicure. Megan thought Siobhan was too wild of a wild child. Siobhan thought Megan was suffering from metastatic dullness and I was lucky to have Siobhan at Latimer to save me from succumbing to the same sorry fate.

  “Siobhan, promise you’ll be good.”

  But when she’s sprawled in my living room, fifteen minutes into Family Game Night, it’s clear that Siobhan being good isn’t that good.

  The evening starts with me and my dad playing French Scrabble before she arrives. We’re eating his potato cheesy puffs, the perfect food, crunchy and gooey and somewhat addictive.

  He says, “We’ll switch to English when she gets here.”

  I say, “We might not have to. Her French is great.”

  My dad heads into the kitchen, humming, to get another bottle of Pellegrino. He calls back, “Don’t you steal my x when I’m gone, ma princesse, or I’m impounding that zed.”

  “I’m hiding it right now! You’ll never find it!”

  My dad cackles, “Ve have our vays,” in a mad scientist accent.

  I yell, “Child abuse!”

  My dad cackles some more.

  I get maybe a half hour of him not worrying about being a good example, not worrying about me, not worrying about how, if he doesn’t stay on top of things, I’ll go from perfect to degenerate in three seconds flat.

  Then Siobhan knocks on the door, and he starts worrying again.

  It would probably help if she hadn’t fortified herself with a whole lot of vodka and orange juice before she got here. Or if she weren’t sharing tidbits of random information, which start off great before swerving toward the parental terror zone.

  For example, given that she speaks many languages, she wants to become a translator at the UN. This sweeps the tension off my dad’s face like a giant windshield wiper. Until she adds, “And then, if the delegates get testy, I can screw with their negotiations.”

  There is a gasp he doesn’t even try to hide.

  Then she jostles the table and catches her Scrabble tiles in flight, one-
handed, as they pitch toward the floor, demonstrating how she can play lacrosse, all right, slightly impaired.

  She says, “I might not have the patience for Scrabble. I might have ADD.”

  I say, “But you don’t take anything for it.” Big mistake.

  “Don’t like the pills. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, bags under the eyes.”

  My dad is switching rapidly into doctor mode, getting his game face on.

  “But not everyone feels that way,” Siobhan says cheerfully, “so I sold them.”

  “You’re selling Adderall?!” my dad says.

  I am one hundred percent certain I would know if Siobhan sold pills, if her Econ project involved marketing pharmaceuticals. My dad, on the other hand, looks completely unnerved at the possibility I’m hanging with a drug dealer and future obstacle to World Peace.

  “No worries,” she says. “Long time ago.”

  I kick Siobhan under the table. Hard.

  “Whoa!” She kicks me back. “Just kidding. I have a very dry sense of humor.”

  We play out the rest of the game very, very fast in almost absolute stone silence.

  When we finally decamp into my bedroom, behind a closed door, Siobhan starts giggling, rolling around on my bed hugging a pillow.

  “That went well,” she says. “But he still loved me, right?”

  I don’t even know what to say.

  “Stop looking at me like I run a cartel!”

  I say, “Sib, you don’t do drugs, right?”

  Siobhan throws the pillow. “Right, because vodka in a Big Gulp is the gateway drug to more vodka in bigger gulps. And you’re asking me because . . .”

  I shrug.

  “Because I was a screwed-up twelve-year-old?” she says. “Have you ever seen me take drugs? Do I have sacks of drugs lying around my bedroom? Oh no, is it the Oxy I put in your orange juice? Because sixth grade, it was the third stepfather, the pervy one she ditched in two weeks, and we moved back to New York and Nancy started dating freaking Burton and she tried sending me to freaking boarding school. So I had some extra pills. Get over it!”

  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.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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 b
est 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.