Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  The outcome of the scandal was me.

  Not to mention, the fact my mother liked drugs better than me (despite all the free, on-site psychiatric help from my dad) was a disaster. And it’s not reassuring to know she stayed clean through the pregnancy because that’s how much she loved me.

  How much she loved me before she left me.

  Even when my mom died—which I don’t remember, not her, not her dying, not having her and then not having her—people didn’t feel sorry enough for my dad to save what was left of his completely wrecked career. She was gone, I was a screaming baby, and he was the embodiment of bad judgment, well-known as a screwup all over the province of Quebec.

  You read The Scarlet Letter in ninth grade. You write a paper about poor, ostracized Hester Prynne who screwed up and produced baby Pearl, evidence of all her badness. Not whining, but try being Pearl. Only Hester OD’s and you end up with the buttoned-up dad whose goal in life is to keep you from turning out anything like her.

  Like Fabienne.

  That was her name.

  I look exactly like her. Blue eyes, auburn hair, everything.

  Possibly explaining why the Lazar clan is stomping around Canada, unhappy I exist. And no amount of repairing the world, good deeds, and candle-lighting will make them see me as anything but a shiksa, a goya—which means a girl who’s not a Jew, but coming out of their mouths sounds like dirt, or worthless, or spawn of Fabienne.

  As for my dad, any move I make that reeks at all of Fabiennishness—a bottle of Corona at a Fourth of July party in Chicago, a vintage Bob Marley T-shirt with a faintly stenciled ganja leaf in Washington, D.C., or any hint I might have what my dad quaintly calls unsavory friends anywhere—and he has visions of me morphing into her. Wandering off into adulthood in a substance-induced haze. Saved only by the all-purpose parental unit, squelcher of all hints of rebellion, fully capable of making everything fine.

  What part of this is fine?

  It’s as if he’s blundering though life in the misguided belief that she’s missing in the fine-and-dandy-let’s-burst-into-song way the Little Mermaid’s mom is missing. As if he overlooked the fact she’s missing in the succumbed-to-craziness, OD’d-behind-a-strip-mall-in-Ottawa, shot-up-and-left-me-behind-without-saying-good-bye, it-hurts-to-think-about-it kind of way.

  “I can’t believe you were keeping that from me,” Siobhan says, rooting around in the pocket of her blazer for a cigarette. “Sorry I got weirded out.”

  I wipe my face against my sleeve. Siobhan smooths the long grass and sits down next to me.

  “No wonder you can’t piss off your dad,” she says. “The whole rest of your family sucks. Excuse you for being born. Don’t forget to leave your country and your language and your freaking religion at the door on your way out. And by the way, if you don’t stay corked in this magic lamp, you’re going to turn into a dead addict.”

  I can’t stop crying. I say, “And my name at the door, too.”

  “What?”

  “My name. Amélie.” I can hardly say it. “My name. It got turned into Amelia in St. Louis and Emmy in Philadelphia and Emma in D.C.”

  “You didn’t even get to keep your name? It’s not like you’re in fucking witness protection, Amélie.”

  Hearing the name in someone else’s mouth makes me crack open, when all I want to do is close back up. I say, “Don’t call me that. It’s like she’s someone else.”

  In the knowing-exactly-why-I-picked-her-for-my-friend department: because she gets it in five minutes. Whereas sixteen years later, some people still don’t.

  Siobhan lights a Gitanes, a French cigarette that smells like rotting garbage. “It’s not that bad. My mother is a crazy slut and I turned out great.”

  “Don’t call Nancy a slut.”

  “She gets new ones before she gets rid of the old ones. How slutty is that?”

  “Well, it’s not like she’s going to die with a needle in her arm behind a mini-mart in Ottawa.”

  Siobhan pauses, the cigarette halfway to her lips. She says, “Do you want me to tell Miss Roy you have cramps and go to my house?”

  We spend the day sitting in Siobhan’s Jacuzzi, sunning ourselves on top of a wall of river rocks, immersing ourselves in steaming, bubbling water, cooking ourselves, eating Cheetos, and drinking. The skin on my fingers wrinkles in exact inverse proportion to the unfolding of the furrows in my brain where all the sludge has lodged, until my mind is a blank plane that stretches like the flat blue California sky, all the way to the almost invisible horizon.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WANT to tell me about school?” my dad asks when I’m sitting in my room with chlorinated hair before dinner. “Such as why you weren’t there today?”

  He could pass for eerily calm if he weren’t punching his left hand with his right hand.

  I say, “I had cramps.” I lie without even planning to or thinking about it. I keep reaching new lows without even trying.

  “I know that. Two phone calls. Since when do you leave school and go to a friend’s house and not call me?”

  Once I start to lie, there is no limit to my creativity. “When I need Advil? If I had my own car, I could have just run home.”

  “Not a wise moment to ask for a car.”

  I wonder if being slightly drunk at lunchtime still shows after dark.

  I say, “Please let this one go.”

  “Should I let yesterday go, too? When your best friend tells me she sold Adderall in grade school!”

  “She was joking! I don’t know why she acted like that.”

  He shouts, “You know exactly why she acted like that! You know why you were drinking and why you walked out of school and you know if you ever planned to tell me.” He shoots me a look of pure parental devastation. “Did you?”

  The slippage of Emma the Good into the gutter of parental disappointment is painful to watch. I look at my feet. I think, What would Emma the Good say?

  The moral compass, spinning in horror, squawks, She wouldn’t have to say anything, moron. She wouldn’t be found in a hundred-yard radius of shit this deep.

  “No.”

  This is supposed to make me feel good: moral victory.

  It doesn’t.

  My father looks at me with massive, unjustified relief at that one brief, honest syllable.

  He says, in a much gentler voice, “Ems, is there anything you’d like to tell me about school? Which is the only place you’re going outside this house, by the way.”

  “How long?”

  “Until you’re forty. School, Ems. We’re moving into honor-your-father territory here. Now.”

  “Please don’t slam me with the Ten Commandments. Please!”

  “Now.”

  “All right, but it isn’t pretty.”

  But who wants to tell her father that she’s outside the mainstream of human interaction except for a scary best friend and a lunch table of boys weirdly attracted to the friend, given that she spends lunch abusing them and eating their chips?

  And what would I say about Dylan? How when he says, “So, Emma, did Napoleon win?” as I hand him my notes, I want to fall over, preferably into his arms?

  How it takes a great deal of restraint and jamming my fingernails into the palms of my hands to keep myself from pressing my face against his chest?

  How Dylan says, “Thanks. You’ve saved me from watching the Battle of Waterloo on the History Channel.”

  This is not a conversation my dad would appreciate.

  I tell my dad the highly-edited-for-parental-consumption saga of Chelsea Hay.

  He looks pained. “Is this Chelsea bullying you?”

  I patiently explained this isn’t bullying, this is normal life at Latimer Day.

  “High school is a hard time for a lot of kids,” he says.

  I patiently explain that it is not a hard time for me because my best friend has my back and if he did anything to separate me from my best friend, I would no doubt curl
up in a sad, depressed ball.

  • • •

  In homeroom, Siobhan won’t look at me.

  “What?”

  She does not look up.

  “What?”

  “Way to not return my texts last night,” she says.

  “I was busy spending three hours getting yelled at and grounded.”

  She twists to face me. “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t tell your dad we cut out, did you?”

  “Of course not! School called him. I thought they weren’t supposed to do that.”

  “Shit,” Siobhan says. “What’s the point of being attendance-totally-optional if they call home? Not that Nancy would care.”

  “Well, he cared. A lot. I feel like swallowing ground glass.”

  Siobhan clamps her hands over her ears. “Like I forced you to cut school and now you want to die a slow death—really? You sat in a hot tub and you didn’t go to Physics. Big fucking deal. You have no sense of proportion!”

  It occurs to me, in what could be a complete making-excuses-and-deluding-myself moment (or could be a breakthrough of reasonable thought), that I might not have that great a sense of proportion.

  Siobhan says, “I am so mad at your dad!”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  Siobhan yells, “Stop screaming at me! I’m not the one who made you want to swallow ground glass! I’m the one who wants you to have fun!”

  She storms out of class in the direction of the hill, pulling a cigarette out of her pocket before she’s out of sight.

  I start to get up, but I slam into Dylan, standing behind me by Arif’s desk. A full body blow. He catches me as I’m bouncing off him, his hands on the back of my head and on my arm.

  I just stand there, blushing, with a bruised head.

  Arif, looking distractingly good even to someone who just got hit on the head, says to Dylan, “After you almost run her over, you might want to get her some ice.”

  Dylan makes a face at him and takes my arm.

  “I’m sorry if I almost ran you over,” he says, when I’m sitting in the deserted cafeteria looking like an idiot (across from the person to whom I least want to look like an idiot) with melting crushed ice, wrapped in napkins, on my forehead.

  “It’s possible I almost ran you over.”

  “Either way, I won this round,” he says. It almost feels buddy-like. Although buddy-like is so not what I have in mind.

  There is a long silence as I try to mop up the rivulets of ice water running down my face. I keep repeating to myself, Do not act embarrassed. It will be so much more embarrassing if he knows you’re embarrassed. Make conversation. Talk.

  I say, “I have a question for you. You’ve been at Latimer forever, right?”

  “Since I was five. Nothing I can do to get out of it. I spent middle school desecrating the uniform, carried a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black around in my backpack, plus a roach clip instead of a tie tack, and I’m still here.”

  Oh.

  “How did that work?”

  “They kept saying, ‘Mr. Kahane, do you want to attend Latimer?’ I kept saying, ‘No, I don’t.’ ” He shrugs, the palms of his hands flipping upward, almost as if he were reaching for me, except he isn’t. “Maybe they kept me here to spite me. That and my brother was Mr. Three Varsity Sports, most valuable asshole. They were probably hoping I’d develop team spirit and become a slimebag.”

  “No sports?”

  “Also no slime. And no school spirit.”

  “So you would know,” I debate asking him and then I just ask him. “When you cut out of school, when do they call home?”

  “They phoned home on you?”

  “Not my best evening ever.”

  He walks over to the ice machine and scoops up ice chips with a paper cup. He says, “At least this won’t leak.”

  I realize my collar is soaked in front, sticking to my chin and dripping down the navy blue sweater that’s such plasticky synthetic, it’s virtually waterproof.

  He says, “Did you sign out?”

  “Sib signed me out.”

  “If you sign yourself out, they don’t care.”

  This makes no sense whatsoever, but is nevertheless very good to know.

  He tilts his head. “So. Are you planning to stop attending? Are you and your evil twin planning to become full-time horse thieves?”

  “Do you take a special interest in my life of crime?”

  “Ballerina by day, felon by night. Sometimes I wonder if we’re on the same misguided path.”

  “Still not a ballerina. And what path would that be?”

  “Trying to get out of here.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Then you might want to rethink your life of crime.”

  And then his hands are in my hair, pulling out a hairpin. He says, “Your bun is coming down.” He works his fingers from the nape of my neck up to the sides of my face, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to kiss me. He runs his fingers down my forearm from the elbow to the wrist, until his hands cover my hands.

  He says, “Are you going to be okay?”

  I nod. I bend my face toward him, my mouth toward his mouth.

  He gets up and he walks out of the cafeteria, saluting me from the door.

  I am in a state of did-that-just-happen, and what the hell, and I want him, and what was that? In a state of acute longing, sandbagged by something that has to be what temptation feels like, except that the object of temptation has left the building. And even if I were to succumb to that temptation, which I totally would, there’s no point because he’s not here to be tempted by.

  Megan: Some guy did what?

  Me: I know. I don’t want to see him again until I stop blushing. Which could take years. No idea what to make of it.

  Megan: Do you want me to ask Joe?

  Joe is the boyfriend Megan only ever gets to see at mixers presided over by hypervigilant nuns. There is some chance that Joe is somewhat less perfect than he seems to be, given the extremely small amount of time they’ve actually spent in the same room.

  Me: NO!!!!!!

  Megan: You wanted him to right?

  Me: Still do.

  Megan: This is the guy you do the notes for?

  Me: Same guy.

  Megan: Why doesn’t he take his own notes? He’s not stupid right?

  Me: Not.

  Megan: You could always ask him.

  Me: NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Megan: Isn’t Siobhan supposed to be the world’s expert on men? Ask her.

  Me: NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Megan: You might need to breathe into a paper bag.

  Me: I’m going to pretend it never happened. Maybe I should just wear the bag over my head.

  Me: Even Siobhan’s starting to think our chance for normal human life around here is nil.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WHAT WE DON’T KNOW IS that Latimer mean girls have simmering feuds that boil over with infighting and constantly shifting alliances, meaning there’s always a popular suddenly left out, shunned, or tortured. And that this has an upside. For us.

  It’s kind of terrible for everyone else.

  Siobhan says, “What’s with these skanks? People are crying in the bathroom. It’s embarrassing to pee.”

  The first popular reject we get is Kimmy.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” she says. “If I have to sit with that god awful pack of bitches and watch them drip venom off their big, ugly god awful canine incisors, I won’t be able to keep down this god awful mystery meat.”

  She says this loud enough for the godawful bitches two tables over to hear.

  “You should be a poet, Kimmy,” Siobhan says.

  Kimmy, too distraught over being shunned to notice much else, doesn’t even care if Siobhan is being sarcastic.

  Mel Burke, passing our table, gapes. “Seriously, Kimmy?”

  Kimmy locks eyes with Siobhan. “I don’t see how anyone can
stand transferring into this god awful place,” she says. “Were you someplace better? Has to have been. Were you at Spence?”

  Siobhan says, “Eastside Episcopal. You can’t imagine how much better.”

  This would be the crap school Siobhan hated.

  “And Roedean,” Siobhan says. This would be the boarding school Siobhan says was a penitentiary. “In England. That wasn’t half bad. Except they play field hockey like a pack of crazed hyenas.”

  Kimmy says, “I’m getting frozen yogurt. You want something?”

  She walks past Chelsea, Mel, and Lia, who says, “Hey, Kim,” and is instantly shut down by a look from Mel so cold it could freeze Hell on impact.

  I lean across the table toward Siobhan. I hiss, “Be nice. She’s going to cry.”

  “She deserves to cry,” Siobhan says. “Where was she when we got here—making out with Chelsea?”

  “She said hello in Physics. The first day.”

  “I’m soooo impressed. Let’s kiss her feet.”

  I’m thinking that if someone with Kimmy’s assets can land in Social Siberia, we are permanently consigned to the gulag. Kimmy has a Teen Vogue face; a horse that people carry on about like addled fan girls; and a pack of older brothers who like her well enough that after school, they yell, “Hey, Kimster, you and your friends want a lift to Westwood?” Or wherever they’re going to carbo-load.

  Also, having grown up in a house full of boys, Kimmy has a bunch of male buddies and looks perfectly comfortable climbing all over them, socking them, and showing them up in Physics. You get the feeling that Kimmy could watch boys light farts on fire and maintain her composure.

  “You know,” Kimmy says, “my parents are going to a wedding in Houston and my brother, Kenny, is having a party Saturday.”

  “Is that the water polo one?” Siobhan says.

  “The soccer one. The water polo one is in college.”

  “Maaaaybe,” Siobhan says. “Actually, very likely.”

  “And it won’t be like one of those god awful back-to-school keggers, either,” Kimmy says loudly for her not-that-distant audience.

  Then she looks at me. I am holding up a french fry that is dripping ketchup onto my tray. There is no possibility whatsoever that my dad will agree to a high school party in a house with no parents home. This is in the you-can-go-when-pigs-fly range of not happening.