“Oh, her,” Siobhan says, glancing over. For a minute, I’m afraid that she’s dumping me for Kimmy. “No offense, Kimmy, but Emma doesn’t do high school parties. Em can’t stand immature boys.”
Which makes me sound a lot more interesting than saying my dad won’t let me go unless her mom, her dad, and a large contingent of precision-trained chaperones imported from Victorian England are swarming the place, and by the way, I’m grounded forever, so even that won’t work. I give Siobhan a thank-you kick under the table.
“I really appreciate the invitation,” I say.
“You and Dylan Kahane,” Kimmy sighs. “Ever since his god awful brother Aiden graduated, he hardly goes anywhere either.”
This is not, strictly speaking, true. I know this because now that I’m too embarrassed by the kiss that didn’t happen to talk to him directly, I’m stuck somewhere between straight-up Facebook-stalking Dylan and merely being very, very interested in everything he ever did, does, or will do.
He would appear to have spent the better part of the summer in resorts on the Mediterranean with Arif, who does a lot of waterskiing on an unidentified European lake, Dylan (literally) in tow, and eating dinner with twenty-seven other people somewhere that houses have extremely large dining rooms. Somewhere the women wear Chanel or hijabs. Or both.
There he is in London with an arm around Arif and his other arm around a woman wearing a dress so short the jacket she’s thrown over it falls below the hem. Dylan and Arif look quite pleased with themselves, and the girl looks to be ecstatic. There he is in Mexico with Sam Sherman, eating taquitos.
Lately, he is tagged all over Westwood with a recurring set of girls in UCLA sorority tees covered with interlocking triangles, one feeding him a Diddy Riese cookie. You can’t see who she is, only her arms, and hands, and manicure.
Kimmy smiles at me. “Well, I hope you come anyway.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SIOBHAN SAYS, “I TOLD YOU it was going to get better.”
“For you!”
“Come on. You have to find a way to come to this stuff.”
“It’s never getting better. My life completely sucks. You can’t even call my life a life.”
Siobhan says, “We just have to get you out of here. Big-time. That’s all it would take. For starters.”
“Not happening.”
She says, “It’s completely happening. You want a pact? Okay, here goes: If things aren’t looking a whole lot better for both of us by the end of the year, we should jump off a tall building.”
“Sign me up.”
“You’re in,” she says. “Pact.”
I say, “Sure, whatever, pact. If it doesn’t get any better than this, we should light each other on fire.”
“That’s not the pact. It’s acrobatic, not incendiary. If things still suck.”
Things do suck all weekend.
While Siobhan is at Kimmy’s party and at a club on the Strip with Wade, the tennis guy from Burton’s club, my only recreational activitiy is playing with Mutt and Jeff, the dogs from next door. Then it turns out that I wasn’t supposed to venture into the backyard, as “grounded” means locked inside the house. My dad says if I keep testing the limits, this really will last until I’m forty.
I say, “I was trying to cooperate. It’s not like I was sitting in the house thinking, ‘Hey, when he goes to the grocery store, I’m going to test the limits by petting some bulldogs.’ ”
My dad says, “Very funny. I believe you. Now get in the house.”
Megan: He said until you’re 40???
Me: Yes maam. I might have screwed this up.
Megan: Asking for a car while drunk? You might have. Why were you drinking anyway? You shouldn’t drink.
Me: Don’t rub it in.
Siobhan: U won’t believe where I am.
Me: Where?
Siobhan: Skybar. Kid at Crossroads party knows someone having other party on the roof.
Me: What Crossroads party? What happened to Kimmy’s party? I otoh am spending my Sat night studying for SAT.
Siobhan: U cd be here. Studying for life of fun.
Me: Don’t rub it in.
• • •
On Monday, after school, Siobhan is sitting on my bed, bouncing. She’s not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be languishing in solitary. But I feel as if, having shown no attitude (seriously: none) all weekend, I deserve some minor bending of the rules. And I didn’t get to see her at school because Nancy took her to get hair extensions instead, which is evidently time-consuming.
“I finally get why this godforsaken place doesn’t just sink into the ocean,” she says. “Parties!”
I say, “It was that good?”
“Compared to what I was expecting: legendary. And this was Kimmy’s party. This is what their average parties look like. Because then Grey Burgess, this kid from Crossroads, took me to this other party in Santa Monica with these other Crossroads kids. OMG, as we say in L.A. It was like metrosexual youth on steroids. Not actual steroids.”
“Do not say OMG,” I say. “I mean it. Next you’ll start wearing headbands.”
Siobhan is bouncing on my bed and off the walls.
I say, “Sibby, are you all right? Did you, like, take something?”
“Don’t be such a baby! If I’m happy, I must be on coke? Is there a hole in my septum? Are my nostrils bleeding? Oh no, I’m having a heart attack!”
“I never said coke.”
“Listen to me. Latimer is famous for parties. Constant parties. Holiday parties. Beach house parties that defy description. And an afterparty in the spring that beyond defies description. Oh my God. This afterparty. Last year it was in a warehouse in the toy district. There was a bar at the center of a maze. It was smoking. Actual smoking, special effects.”
“There’s a toy district?”
“It’s industrial. It’s downtown. It was incredibly cool. Until the police closed it down, but by then it was four a.m., so no one cared anymore. Don’t you get it? I finally found something good for us to do!”
Siobhan holds up her phone and shows me a fuzzy YouTube video of flashing lights and smoke and dusky glamour, almost like a riff on the unspeakably romantic black-and-white nightclubs in old movies.
“This is from Grey, from last year,” she says. “You have to get out of this house. The entire Strip is down the street from you. We have to go to Afterparty. This will be so good for you! Your coming-out party of cool. We can go in an all-girl limo, and we can pregame, and then we can dance in a circle and guys can fall over dead crawling to get to us.”
“Dream on. I’m never getting out of here.” It’s pretty clear that the magnitude of crackdown following my foray into, all right, moderate badness, but still no boys or drugs or parties or orgies or arrests, precludes any fun whatsoever.
I’m not even allowed to go to the food bank, where by now the computer has probably shut itself down in protest against being abused by well-meaning volunteers. And no amount of going, “Dad, wait, what about ‘Enter the gate of the Lord, if you’ve fed the hungry’?” “What about ‘You shall leave the gleanings of your fields for the poor’?” gets any response beyond, “You shall keep your kid safe, even over her protests,” which I’m pretty sure he made up.
But still, that video, the pulsating bursts of light, the hints of music and the kids all in each other’s arms, the limo and dancing in a circle in a dress that refracts light like a prism . . .
Siobahn says, “Think of this as a math problem. How hard can it be to get you from point A to point B in a field of moving taxis?”
“How about impossible?”
Siobhan starts shaking my shoulders, bouncing higher and higher on the bed, which has more trampoline potential than I’d ever realized. She yells, “Wake up! Look at this window! It’s perfect. Opens out, no screen. We need a pact. We have to get you party-ready by Afterparty. We are so going—and you’re completely unprepared. Do you want to be the lamby at a wolf
orgy? You like lists; we’ll make a list. Make out. Do shots. Get stoned. Climb out window. Go to many, many parties. Hook up. Hook up all the way. Finish and we go to Afterparty.”
“You are seriously losing it.”
“Get a pen. We’ll make this list right now. The Afterparty prep list. Let’s go in a limo and you have to stand up through the sunroof and scream.”
This sounds quite tame.
“But before then, check marks. Many, many check marks. We’ll start slow and work up. Do you have kissing on there?”
“Top of the list.”
“Okay. Beer pong. It’s disgusting, but you’re the last kid in this country who can’t play. And you have to win. And you have to flash someone, and you have to smoke some weed and you can go harder from there.”
“Siobhan, I might possibly want to avoid the pharmaceuticals.”
“Jesus. Not heroin, coke. One little line of coke and some itty-bitty pills. And sex, obviously. And you have to get totally shitfaced. At a party. And you have to dance and you have to take off some major clothes and sext.”
“Siobhan, are you all right? You might be getting a little bit hyper.”
“I’m psyched! I’m hyper-psyched! Have you got anything to drink? I might need something to calm down.”
“Iced tea. This is Chez Lazar House of Detention, remember? I can’t even have you over.”
“Jailbreak! Say you’ll do it! Say ‘pact’!”
“You dare me to go out this window?”
“I don’t dare you to do anything. A pact is something you want to do. Dares are stupid. Pacts are when you want it and you say ‘Screw it’ and do it. Don’t you want to have fun? We’ll work out all the details later. Say it.”
“Sib—”
“You should be more enthused!” she says. “You’re going to thank me later. This pact could save your life. There you are in college, getting it on with some total loser—”
“There’s something to look forward to.”
“After endless kissing, he whips off his clothes. Just when you’re about to jump into his naked arms, you get a good look at him and you pass out from shock. Oh no! You collapse! You hit your head on the corner of his desk on the way down, and you die a virgin.”
“This keeps getting better and better.”
“Be that way,” Siobhan says, “but you can’t keep up Emma the Good forever. This Afterparty list is the ultimate pact.”
“A pact to drug my dad’s tea?”
“Admit he’s asleep by eleven,” she says. “Picture this: You wait a whole year. You’re seventeen in this exact spot with cobwebs hanging off your body. Nice?”
I can see it. Me turning into Megan Donnelly only without the boyfriend (no tiny image of Joe waving from my iPhone), alone in my room Facebook-stalking Dylan, permanently grounded, playing Angry Birds for an entire year.
“You’re coming with,” Siobhan says. “And soon. This is for your own good.”
“Because my dad will never notice.”
“Out the window, missy,” Siobhan says. “Pact!”
“Sib—”
“Will you freaking say it?”
I’m so wound up, I’m on the verge of saying it, I almost say it, when there’s the horrifying sound of the front door opening.
My dad, having skipped out on his afternoon meeting at Albert Whitbread, no doubt to check up on me, is home. (Not that I get to moan about this in the don’t-you-trust-me vein of moaning, given that, obviously, he can’t.)
Siobhan says, “I was dropping off notes.”
Our sweaters, shoes, books, and remnants of a two-person, two-plate snack are all over my room. By the time she gathers up her stuff and leaves (quickly), my dad is pacing around, all but throwing things.
He says, “I take it being grounded didn’t suit?”
I don’t even know how to answer this. I mean, yes, but what would happen if I said yes. I stare down at my shoeless feet.
He says, “Look up. I cannot believe you’d do this. You were supposed to be home alone. You know that.”
He’s scanning the room as if it were strewn with AK-47s and the spoils of my most recent bank robbery. The Afterparty prep list is wadded up in plain sight in my wastebasket.
I say, “I know this looks bad—”
“Looks bad? How can I hope to keep you safe if I can’t trust you? Help me out here, Ems, because I’m mystified.”
“All right, this is really bad.”
He is so anguished when he looks at me, I want to hit myself on the head with a hammer. I’m back to watching my toes squirm.
He shakes his head. “Give me your phone.”
I feel around in my bag for the phone, terrified he’s going to find a way to read my deleted text messages and trashed email. I hand it over.
“I want your laptop and your iPod and everything that has a battery, a charger, or a plug except a reading lamp. I want your house keys and your keys to my car and the garage opener. And the credit card.”
“Geez, dad, do you want my shoes?”
He says, “Does this amuse you?” Oh God, in French. So I apologize in French, which is a lot more dramatic, involving regret and begging pardon and a certain amount of groveling.
He says, “You’ve become untrustworthy. Crying and apologizing aren’t going to make you trustworthy.”
Then he says something else with the word “disappointed” featured prominently: how disappointed he is, how disappointing I am, how painful and heartbreaking it is when your kid is so disappointing, and what do I have to say for myself?
I shake my head.
He says, “Then you’d better stay out of my sight while I cool down.”
I curl up on the floor of my closet, waiting for some kind of epiphany to propel me to a higher plane of consciousness, or at least for some state of being in which I don’t feel like total crap, but it’s hard to achieve spiritual enlightenment between a pile of unwashed leotards and the hems of vintage skirts.
The moral compass spends a full twelve hours chanting, Shame, shame, shame.
Me: What the hell? My best friend came over when I was grounded. People are rarely guillotined for this.
Compass: Decent human beings are rarely banished to their rooms because their dads can’t bear to look at them. Think about it.
I try to think about it. Because, okay, how hard would it have been to ignore Siobhan banging on the front door? But I couldn’t even do that one small thing. I am completely incapable of being the girl I’m supposed to be.
This is when I reach the opposite of spiritual epiphany, a moment of wrung-out clarity: I don’t want to be the girl I’m supposed to be.
Duh.
Not being her was the point of California. All right, it was perhaps incompatible with keeping my dad happy. But given that a roasted chicken breast, green beans, and heirloom tomato slices were just slipped through my door, as if I were a prisoner whose crimes are so appalling that her gourmet jailer can’t stand to see her face, how realistic an option is Good Girl?
Afterparty, on the other hand, sheathed in glamour and Hollywood noir and decadent sophistication, glittering slightly in the darkness, sparkling as I turn it over in my mind’s eye, is beckoning and dreamy and alluring.
That is who I want to be, a not-afraid, cool, glamorous person, who yields to temptation on purpose and is happy about it.
The list of all the strange and scary things I have to do in order to become that person is crunched into a ball in the gilded Florentine wastebasket, tucked under my desk. If the choice is feeling like this versus being Afterparty girl, crushing the compass under my four-inch heels, it’s Afterparty all the way.
Because I just can’t do this anymore.
At breakfast, my dad says, “Can I trust you to stay at school?”
“Obviously not. I’m the worst person in the world. Why don’t you chain me to the piano?”
In a cold, increasingly familiar voice, he says, “Fine, stay here.”
> “Dad! I’m sorry! It’s school! I have to go to school.”
“And where were you again last Wednesday?” He walks over and unplugs the TV, purely a symbolic gesture, but I get it, and he leaves for work. I’m stranded here, not sure if it’s okay to turn on the den computer to do homework, or what I have to do to make this end, and no doubt talking back was yet another poor choice.
I say, “Screw it,” and I go outside to lie in the grass with Mutt and Jeff. I look at the sky, which is brilliant, blue and cloudless. But I feel too guilty to enjoy it.
When he gets home from work, I say, “Seriously. Please. Is this how you tell people to treat their kids?”
He says, “You’re my kid. It’s a different situation.”
“What about: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you’?”
He says, “Nice try.”
I feel terrible, but not terrible enough to want to deal with much more of this.
By Monday, at school, I say, “I’m no doubt going to regret this forever, but I fished that list out of the wastebasket and it might be the new story of my life.”
Siobhan intones, “You have used your dungeon wisely, grasshopper. Reject the path of Emma the Good and hop out the window.” Then she hands me a prepaid cell phone.
I say, “It’s not just that. It’s everything.”
Because enough disappointment, restriction, confiscation, punishment, confinement, and paternal rage can wear a person down. Tucked away in the hills, shielded from Sunset only by the treetops in the canyon, and the path from point A to point B can get a whole lot easier to navigate.
Also, it’s the only slim shot I’ve got for even one single unsupervised evening of something resembling normal teen life.
I say, “Pact.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SO THIS IS IT.
A clear, cloudless night with big, fat stars and hazy light rising in glaring whiteness from West Hollywood. The cries of coyotes in the canyon and horns honking down on Sunset.
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