Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “If Jews had Hell, I’d be going straight there,” Dylan says. He looks down at me. He’s a good eight inches taller than me. “As are you, Juliet. A disgrace to your tribe.”

  Arif says, “Are you dissing this girl’s tribe?” He is fake-incensed. He says to me, “You’re Moroccan, right? Would you like me to go get him kicked out of school for cultural insensitivity? They’re very keen on that.”

  “I’m part Moroccan. How does everybody suddenly know where my grandmother comes from and my family feuds and how my tribe’s pissed off about my boyfriend?” There, I have completely accidentally said it out loud. “My boyfriend.” In front of Dylan, who must think I come in a slightly rosy pink color given that I’m in a constant state of blushing in front of him.

  “Too bad,” Dylan says. “If you were whole, he probably could have gotten me booted out of this swamp.”

  • • •

  Siobhan says, “Calm down. If you don’t want a cool French boyfriend, we can always kill him off. He’s an interim measure. It’s not a big deal.”

  It’s a pretty big deal.

  I’m suddenly a mysteriously tragic figure, languishing in California, texting the increasingly hot Jean-Luc, my romantic absentee imaginary boyfriend. One day after conception, he’s up and running and pining for me on the banks of the Seine.

  Poor Jean-Luc, from whom Siobhan’s imagination has separated me because I’m a Capulet and he’s a Montague. Sort of. Jean-Luc and I have passionate yet heartbreaking trysts when he lurks in the forests of Canada tossing pebbles at my cabin window, evading death at the hands of my dad, who—our family elevated to the status of the somewhat Moroccan Kennedys of Quebec—is into dynastic feuds.

  I say, “No one is going to buy this.”

  Siobhan and I are sitting in the student lounge, eating candy bars from the vending machines. Siobhan says, “Are you questioning my brilliance? You’re not, right? Because I already told Kimmy, and she’s a broadcasting tower.”

  A highly effective broadcasting tower.

  Chelsea says, “How do you know this guy isn’t stepping out with a French model?”

  I say, “Really, Chelsea. We are so far beyond that. He’s not a child.”

  Siobhan and I exchange a quick glance, a fast, private, motionless high-five and set up Jean-Luc’s Facebook page.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “FACE IT,” SIOBHAN SAYS. “JEAN-LUC is cool, but this whole Afterparty prep list is only going to work if you find someone not imaginary that you think is hot and get going. Wasn’t there one single guy at Strick’s you wanted?”

  “You want me to cheat on Jean-Luc with a drunk guy I don’t even know?”

  “What about Kimmy’s water polo brother? He’s at Stanford, you’d never have to see him again.”

  “No!”

  “You’re too picky. There has to be someone you could try out your training wheels on.”

  And I’m thinking, What the hell. I’ve been mad about him since Day One, and if Siobhan has some sort of mysterious how-to for casting spells on boys, this would be the moment for her to dish up the instructions.

  I hold my breath. I say, “Dylan Kahane seems kind of interesting.”

  Siobhan frowns. “That’s random.”

  “You don’t think he could like me?”This sounds a lot more heartfelt than intended.

  Siobhan pantomimes silent screaming. “Kahane thinks he’s above doing high school girls, all right? He’s probably saving it for some artsy college bitch who writes incomprehensible poetry. You should lose it with some willing man-slut so then, when you get it on with a complicated, arrogant asshole like Kahane, you’ll know how things work.”

  All I want in life is five minutes of romance with the complicated, so not arrogant Dylan Kahane. I don’t care how things work.

  “And there’s his whole fucked-up thing with Aiden.”

  “Aiden?”

  “The creep older brother. You need to pick out someone else.”

  I want to know more. I want to ask five hundred questions. I want to shake her and demand to know why this not-uninteresting topic never came up before. Unfortunately, there’s a limit to how crazed and ridiculous I want to look in front of her on the boy front or I would have told her about Dylan way before now. But at first I was afraid that if I revealed the true extent of my geekiness with boys, she’d go find a cooler person to be friends with. And now it’s too late.

  “You could have anyone you want,” she says.

  Anyone except Dylan.

  I say, “Am I missing something? Have you noticed guys following me around?”

  “Because you don’t come on to them. You’re gorgeous.”

  “Maybe I’m not that gorgeous.”

  “You think I’m a gorgeous girl with an ugly-ass best friend to make me look better? And you’re the ugly-ass friend, so even if you put it out there, jerks are going to throw up in trash baskets? Because that’s not what’s going to happen.”

  She pushes me toward the round mirror that hangs over her dresser. “Look at you,” she says. She runs her fingertips along my eyebrows, arching them a little. “I don’t see projectile vomit in your future.”

  I say, “I’m sure Jean-Luc will be very happy I’m not cheating on him with jerks.”

  Siobhan sighs, “I’m so bored. You want to go to Century City?”

  No.

  I say, “Could we just go shopping? And not mall shopping.”

  We head down to Third Street, where I find a cream silk blouse that looks exactly like Ingrid Bergman’s in Casablanca at Party Like It’s 1949, and Siobhan tries on a cigarette girl outfit.

  I say, “Does Ian smoke?”

  “I am so over him,” Siobhan says. “I’m going out with Wade the Tennis Pro, and there’s nothing Nancy can do about it. Tonight. I told him to come get me and Nancy can just suck it up.”

  Given my life experience, the concept of a parent sucking it up doesn’t compute.

  And Nancy doesn’t.

  When Sib and I get back to her house, Nancy is all but sitting in Wade’s lap on the living room couch, and one of her high heels is dangling from her toe.

  Siobhan hurls her shopping bags toward them. Phillip Lim ankle boots fall out of their box and skid across the floor.

  “He’s too old for you,” Nancy says in a weirdly level voice as Wade sprints back to his car.

  I hear Siobhan screaming, “I can’t believe you!” when I’m upstairs in her room with a pillow on my head. “What kind of excuse is that? You let my boyfriend grope you for my own good? What’s wrong with you!”

  “I don’t want to see you with one more boy past high school!” Nancy yells. “I mean it Siobhan! No grown-ups.”

  “You’re supposed to be a grown-up?” Siobhan screams. “On what planet do grown-ups do this?”

  I don’t hear what Nancy says next, but it involves a lot of shrieking.

  “There you have it,” Siobhan says, yanking the pillow off my head. “My mother is officially the world’s richest trailer trash.”

  “Sibby, Wade is a jerk! Wade has an old-person fetish. Wade is crap.”

  “It’s not Wade,” she says, “it’s her sorry ass. She probably made a video of it for Burton.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “You know what? Screw Wade! It’s you and me, babe. We’re spending the entire weekend partying like it’s 1949—you can wear the blouse, just without the top button. We’re going to Missy Roger’s thing on Friday and we’re going to Kimmy’s Saturday, and then we’re going to this thing at Strick’s beach house in Malibu Sunday.”

  “Kimmy’s thing is this Saturday? Is there a continuous party over there?”

  “Yeah. Late. I could pick you up on Sunset, like at Pink Taco.”

  I say, “I can’t do it. I have a dinner with my father on Friday, and Saturday I’m keeping Megan company while the parents go to a fund-raiser.”

  “Is your dad, like, dating the Donnellys?” Siobhan is ranging bac
k and forth across her room, swiveling in her desk chair and getting up again. “Can’t you ditch her? Ditch her.”

  “We could hang out during the day Saturday, but I can’t get out of any of this. Come on. You know I want to go with you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Siobhan says. “A likely story. And you’re not coming to Malibu Sunday either, and why would that be?”

  “Food bank, it’s my first day back. Inventory, and it lasts forever. And I have to do homework sometime.”

  Siobhan is out of her chair, yelling. “I can’t believe you! You’d rather count jars of peanut butter than go out with me! I’m supposed to be your best friend and you don’t even care. It was supposed to be a pact. I can’t count on anyone!”

  I’m watching to see if she’s joking, but there’s nothing resembling a joke here.

  I say, “Sib, I’m sorry. You know you can count on me. I completely love you. But I have to keep my grades up or he’ll brick up my window.”

  “Oh,” she says. Not even looking at me. “That’s right. You’re the good one and I’m the wild one. Except that—what was that? Right—you can count on me.”

  At school, she will barely look at me, and all weekend, it’s as if she lost her phone, or my number, or any interest in talking to me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It’S NOT THAT I DON’T enjoy my weekend, I do, it’s just that with twenty-four weeks to Afterparty—my list composed of low-hanging fruit, ready to fall into my hand if I’d just reach out the window—it’s hard to be locked into good-girl propriety until Monday.

  “You don’t think I’m a terrible person, do you?” I say to Megan, when our parents are gone and we’re alone at her dining room table, staring at stacks of college brochures she’s been accumulating since she killed her PSAT.

  “Maybe you should check your texts—I was the one egging you on.” Megan sighs the sigh of doomed Rapunzel. “Think about it. I can’t even get that close to Joe at dances. The nuns will break his fingers if he slides them too far down my back.”

  I say, “This might be weird, but what do you think about losing your virginity on purpose in advance?”

  “In advance of what?”

  “Real life. College. Not being the last one standing.”

  “You mean like with anyone, just do it? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not a random stranger.”

  Megan hands me her laptop. “Show him to me.”

  I am so not ready for this.

  I click onto Dylan’s Facebook page. His status is: “Not here, in preparation for not being here.”

  “That’s a bit cryptic,” Megan says. “He’s not affected, is he?”

  Megan starts clicking through his photos. “Are you sure he’s your type?” She keeps scrolling through, clicking, expanding, examining. “I admit he’s smoldering, but who’s that girl falling out of her dress? Is that in London? Wait, is she a hooker?”

  “Is this your mother speaking?”

  “Just shoot me,” she says absently. “Look at him. How tall is he, anyway? Does he only smile when drunk? He kind of smirks. He doesn’t smirk at you, does he? Is this the stupid one who uses your notes?”

  “Megan! I’m not in love with some stupid guy who smirks at me, all right?”

  Megan says, “You’re in love with him?”

  Oh God.

  “You should go for it,” Megan says. “You should go out with this guy.”

  “He hasn’t asked me.”

  “You should make him ask you.”

  “Did you make Joe ask you?”

  Megan shakes her head. “I have that so-near-yet-so-far unattainable pure thing going. He’d kill to get within a hundred yards of me.”

  “This guy thinks I’m making mad love to an imaginary older guy from Paris. The ship has sailed on the pure thing.”

  I sigh.

  Megan sighs.

  There’s something so lame about the two of us sitting here among the college brochures, having a purely theoretical conversation about boys.

  I say, “You should invite Joe over.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not? I showed you mine, now show me yours.”

  “A picture of yours!” Megan says. “Why don’t we ask yours over?”

  “Maybe because yours would kill to come over—you just said so—whereas so-called mine doesn’t even kiss me when he has the chance.”

  “You need to encourage him more,” Megan says.

  I hand her her phone.

  • • •

  Joe, it turns out, is sitting with a bunch of guys, post–basketball game, at the Los Feliz House of Pies. Which is maybe five minutes from Megan’s house. Megan is somewhat terror-stricken, except she can’t stop grinning.

  “I’m just born to be wild,” Megan says. “Which in my case has Joe sitting in my living room, eating Rice Krispies Treats. With a chaperone.”

  “I could hide in your garage! You could completely be knocked up before Doctor, Doctor, and Doctor get to the dessert course.”

  “Stay!” she says. “You should check him out in case he’s awful and I missed it.”

  But when he gets here, when he gets out of his car and comes up the walkway, I might as well not exist. Megan is one happy Rapunzel and Joe is quite well suited for his role as smitten prince. Smitten normal prince. Compared to Dylan, he has a Twitter feed of his every thought and feeling embedded in his forehead.

  I have seen Joe on the tiny screen of Megan’s iPhone, but apparently gawking, mad love is easier to discern in person. Also, tall, dark, and handsome don’t come across in this much glory on a three-inch screen.

  Megan jumps up to get him a glass of water and crashes into the coffee table.

  I say, “I’ll help you carry,” and follow her into the kitchen.

  Arranging the Rice Krispies Treats on a plate with some difficulty, she says, “He’s great, right?”

  “Come on! You’ve got Prince Charming waiting on your sofa. Let him climb your hair, already.”

  “That was a different prince,” she says over her shoulder because she’s charging through the louvered doors into the living room.

  So I sit there in the kitchen trying to concentrate on math. All I can think is, Why can’t I sneak Dylan into my living room and make out on my living room couch?

  Oh yeah, because Dylan doesn’t idolize me.

  Even when he would appear to be about to kiss me and I’m sitting there in a fully cooperative state of complete longing and receptiveness, leaning forward so he could accomplish this feat by moving his lips maybe six inches, he doesn’t.

  Does he check my Facebook every day? Is he even, in a rudimentary way, stalking me back? I think not.

  Siobhan doesn’t even think that he’s a realistic check mark. If Siobhan is even thinking about me at all. She hasn’t texted back for two days.

  I listen to Megan giggling on the other side of the louvered doors, and I’m thinking, This is truly pathetic. I’m jealous of Megan’s love life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ON MONDAY, IT’S CLEAR AND cold. For here. Driving in the hills toward school, we pass a misplaced maple tree with leaves that have turned colors and are falling to the ground, all yellow and red, among palm trees and birds of paradise.

  “Autumn in California,” my dad says.

  I say, “I like it. I like endless summer.”

  My dad says, “I do too, I admit it.”

  “Oh no! What’s next? A pair of shorts?”

  My dad swats at my arm, but we’re both smiling.

  “How did I raise such a fresh kid? It’s California. I’m getting you to Lac des Sables at winter break.”

  “In the cabin?”

  “Of course the cabin.” As if the nightmare aspects of the cabin are forgotten, the way dreams disappear from memory when you’re jolted awake, bolt upright in bed, with no recall of the wretched hunchbacked thing that was just chasing you.

  “I thought we were building a shelter in O
axaca. You know, ‘You shall take the poor into your house’? Repair the world? Emma gets a nail gun.”

  “I was with you right up to the last sentence,” he says. “No nail gun.” Then he says how much he respects my commitment.

  I’m not even sure if my commitment is to world repair or to staying the hell, yes, “hell,” I use the world advisedly, hell, hell, hell out of the unadulterated Hell that is the Lazar family cabin at Lac des Sables. Siobhan had better be talking to me, because no way will my dad have an honest conversation about this.

  She’s sitting there in homeroom, looking great. Unusually great. Unusually calm and unusually pleased with the world.

  I say, “Hey, Siobhan. Lost your phone?”

  “It was one weekend,” she says. “To quote Miss Goodypants.”

  “Because we have to do the carbon footprint assignment.”

  “This is bullshit,” Siobhan says. “Why is homeroom even allowed to assign homework? My house has solar panels. Marisol drives a Prius. We don’t own a plane. How small is my carbon footprint supposed to get?”

  “Wow. No plane. You might have been at Latimer too long.”

  “One day was too long.”

  I say, “I would seriously die here without you.”

  “Slain by the evil Chelsea in the flower of her youth, when still a virgin. Pathetic.”

  “Could you please yell ‘virgin’ louder?”

  She opens the lid of the old-timey wooden desk, a historical artifact that helps give Latimer its movie-set, classic prep-school feel, and lets it fall with a bang. Everyone turns around.

  She says, “There. That was loud.”

  • • •

  Loudness is the theme of the day.

  Siobhan and I are sitting in the snack bar at the Beverly Hills Public Library, where we can’t find the references we need to prove our environmental sensitivity.

  Siobhan looks disgusted with the entire operation.

  A woman who is making a great deal of noise crinkling a giant newspaper, and anyway, this is a snack bar, says, “Shhhhhh!”

  Siobhan says, “Don’t you want to know about my weekend?”