Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m not.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  NOW THAT I’M TRYING TO sublimate my little heart out at the food bank (without a whole lot of success), I’m filled with ideas for repairing the world through acts of subversion.

  Megan says, “This isn’t going to work,” but you can tell she’s in love with the idea. I feel like the Sacajawea of girls who need to be led out of oppression.

  I check Joe in at the student volunteer desk. When he rolls the r& ’s in “Gutierrez–Ortega” and says that he goes to Loyola, the place goes (very subtly) batshit crazy over the arrival of more interfaith cooperation.

  I guide him back to Megan, where, according to plan, she says “Wait, don’t I know you? Haven’t I seen you at a mixer at Saint Bernadette?” Just in case she’s so knocked out she can’t completely pretend she’s never met him before.

  “Why, yes indeed, I have been to a mixer at Saint Bernadette,” Joe says. You can see why he’s in Model UN and not drama club. Also, you can see he wants to grab Megan right there in the canned fruit aisle.

  I whisper, “I am such an evil genius,” and they grin like crazy.

  Only then, when I go back to get a box of crunchy peanut butter jars to distribute in the outgoing grocery bags and I see them standing there, very close together, and he’s stroking her hair, I start to cry and I can’t stop.

  I’ve held out through weeks of shrinkish concern from my dad regarding my rapidly plummeting mood, which apparently even my clever methods for covering up the sound of crying (running water, online concerts by Stanford’s Japanese taiko drumming team, Beethoven’s Ninth) can’t disguise. I have faked cheer through a litany of shrink questions designed to see if I’m planning to off myself anytime soon:

  Did you enjoy anything today?

  Did you sleep though the whole night?

  Are you by any chance harboring persistent thoughts about hanging yourself? (All right, slight exaggeration.)

  But after he finds me trying to stop crying in the middle of the boxed pastas, I have to come up with a well-edited version of reality in parent-digestible form.

  When I try, when I say in truncated sentences that Siobhan is with a guy I like and I don’t know why it bothers me so much but it does, my dad is flabbergasted. You might think a rigorously trained psychoanalyst would have figured out that his daughter might someday like a boy, but apparently this is shocking news.

  We are huddled in the car, in the parking lot, and I keep dabbing my eyes and blowing my nose, creating a huge wad of Kleenex.

  I moan, “Dad?”

  He looks angry, which isn’t in the range of things I can even think about coping with.

  He says, “Okay, boiling it down, Siobhan is keeping company with someone you like?”

  And the way he says her name, you can tell that she’s the one drawing his wrath. He turns the key and guns the car out of the parking lot.

  “Nobody says keeping company.” Sob, sob, sob.

  My dad could just as well have a thought bubble over his head, with him throwing a party because he might have the rope he needs to drag Siobhan out of my life.

  “I’ve noticed you’ve been a bit down lately,” he says.

  “I don’t get to complain. I told her it was fine.” We’re zipping down Sunset, and I’m glad we’re in the car and he has to watch the road.

  “You told her it was fine because . . .”

  “Do not, I mean it, do not go all shrinkish on me.”

  It’s not that I don’t know the because.

  Because telling her how much I like him and how I’ve been hiding it from her since Day One seems like the ultimate humiliation. Because being her best friend is complicated, and because (other than this) she completely gets me.

  He says, “It was the beginning of a sentence. Ems, you also told her that you like him. Doesn’t some kind of girl code come into play here?”

  “Girl code? Is that what your patients tell you?”

  “Trying again. If you like him, and you told her that you like him, and it wasn’t fine for her to go with him, why do you think you told her it was fine?”

  “I don’t know.” At this point, I’m wishing that I hadn’t told him anything, because he won’t let go

  He says, “Sure you do.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  I just want to reach over and honk the horn, or pull the wheel out of his hands and steer into something loud and crunchy, and drown out the conversation.

  I say, “I know you hate her. I know you want me to say this is the end of life as we know it, but that isn’t it. She was drunk. He was drunk. She probably didn’t even realize it was him the first time.”

  I don’t expect him to respond to the “you hate her” part. Which he doesn’t.

  He says,” That paints a very attractive picture.”

  “Megan thinks I should wash my hands of both of them.”

  “Sensible girl, Megan. Who is this boy?” He says the word “boy” as if it’s a federal crime to be one.

  I try to think of how to reframe Dylan as the teddy-bearish kind of harmless boy who doesn’t scare the shit out of your father, the sweet, respectful kind who wears a tie without the roach-clip tie tack, but I don’t make much progress. So then I pick out the upstanding citizen bits. Music lover! Religious Convo! Really high GPA!

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I say.

  But it turns out, I don’t.

  “I’m thinking how unfortunate your best friend fell for him too.”

  A clear invitation to a complete losing-control moment.

  “Unfortunate! It’s a fucking disaster! I don’t know how I’m going to live through it.”

  “Emma!”

  “Sorry! A total disaster. A total unmitigated freaking disaster.”

  He says, “It was the living-through-it part that struck me.”

  “Stop it! I don’t have suicidal thoughts and I sleep through the night and I enjoy eating cheesecake, all right? I am not clinically depressed or suicidal or insane. I just want to kill Siobhan, is all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ALL I WANT TO DO is hide, and all anybody else wants to do is keep talking.

  Megan calls to apologize. Repeatedly. “That was so insensitive of us!”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  She says, “Maybe you’re right. Because it will totally cheer you up to see Prince Charming stick his hand down my blouse.”

  “Joe stuck his hand down your blouse?”

  “Of course not,” Megan says. “Your dad was there. Those two cute middle-school girls and a rabbi and fifteen women dying to talk to authentic Catholics were there.”

  “Like Los Angeles isn’t crawling with large numbers of Catholics.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You’re so argumentative. I called to say sorry.”

  “I don’t want to argue. I want to scream.”

  Megan says, “You just have to ride it out. How many people has she been with already this semester? How long do you think she can keep this up?”

  I say, “Yeah, and I don’t see how it can actually get worse.”

  “I’m sorry about the food bank. You’re the genius who got us there together. I didn’t mean to upset you like that.”

  I say, “I’m fine. Just don’t tell me how cute and adorable Joe is for a while.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  Siobhan, meanwhile, calls to complain. “Does he really think I want to go listen to that bitch Mara and her goth girl band sing in a bowling alley in the Valley?”

  I put the phone down and start hammering a pillow.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she says. “He’s sweet, but he’s so demanding. And he doesn’t want to go anywhere nice.”

  “Isn’t Disney Hall nice?”

  “Not nice like a nice building, nice like fun. Nice like cool. Nice like everyone there isn’t fifty years old and they drove i
n from Anaheim. And do you know how long it takes to get out of there when you refuse to use a handicap placard? While listening to his incessant complaining.”

  “He’s an incessant complainer?” I can’t stop myself.

  “Oh yeah,” she says. “Although for someone who hates school and everyone at school so much, he spends a lot of time hanging out with juveniles in Lakers hats.”

  He goes to basketball games?

  She says, “It’s not like I want to break his heart. I just don’t want to eat someplace three steps below Koo Koo Roo and dance someplace that smells funky. He’s got ID. He could go anywhere, but nooooo.”

  “Don’t break his heart!” I say, in a brief, stunning appearance of Emma the Good, popping up through the muck, sincere but with mud in her hair.

  I am deathly afraid that somewhere down there, in the least admirable corner of myself, I want my best friend to break the heart of the boy of my dreams, whom I don’t even know, apparently.

  “What about my bored heart?” Siobhan says. “You should come out with us, Em! You’ll see what I mean. I could tell him you’re pining away for Jean-Luc and you need male attention or something. I’ll tell him you won’t eat at dives, so at least you won’t have to pretend you like pita at some crap falafel place.”

  I like pita.

  The moral compass intones, Screw pita! Do you seriously want to drown in muck? Say no and walk away. Running would work, too.

  I spend so much time trying to formulate an answer that will satisfy both the (completely rational) compass and my (hot mess) desire to sit next to Dylan at a dinner on a date, even if it isn’t, strictly speaking, my date, that soon it’s too late to answer.

  To make things even more excruciating, Dylan starts cornering me at school in his quest for inside info I don’t have. He arches forward, his hand above my head, pressing against the locker above mine.

  “Do you know what your friend has against Mara’s band?”

  “Not ever having heard them play, how would I know?” This conversation is at once innocuous and surreal. “Are they bad?”

  “They’re an acquired taste.”

  “Like olives?”

  “Like tone-deaf Dixie Chicks risen from the grave.”

  “That could explain it.”

  And I’m thinking, Dylan Kahane, do you have no idea I like you? Is this some form of torture being meted out by the Universe?

  And it goes on. There’s no end to how useful I could be in deciphering the mysterious and ever-fascinating ways of Siobhan. He wants to know if she ever tried to give up smoking and why, given her professed love of Gershwin, she can’t recognize Rhapsody in Blue.

  I say, “Was it a culture quiz?” I feel so loyal, yet so sick to my stomach.

  He says, “Oh. That’s not how I meant it. Do I strike you as someone who gives culture quizzes?”

  He stalks off without waiting for the answer, and I think, Yeah, Kahane, you do.

  Then he finds me taking a book up on the hill. He’s with Arif, but he peels off, and Arif keeps going.

  “Here’s a quiz,” he says, following me up the path into the trees. All right, Dylan Kahane is following me into the trees. He probably wants to know Siobhan’s favorite restaurant now that he’s discerned she hates falafel. All I have to do is stay calm and not trip on a pinecone.

  Before I can more fully develop the fantasy of me twisting my ankle on a pinecone and Dylan carrying me away (a scenario in which twisted ankles require a tourniquet, so Dylan has to tear off his white shirt and rip it into strips), he brushes against my arm. I am riveted to the absolute present, preoccupied with the issue of getting a grip.

  I say, “Okay, are we moving on to Aaron Copland? I can do quizzes on anybody who ever composed a ballet. Hit me with Tchaikovsky.”

  Dylan says,“What does your Canadian boyfriend think of your dynamic duo?”

  I say, “What?” Then I say, “Why?” Then I say, “He’s French.”

  Dylan says, “That’s not on the quiz.”

  I want to reach up and touch his face, he’s standing so close to me, and I’m thinking, What are you doing? This is your so-called best friend’s boyfriend and you should probably take a pass on this quiz and stop considering creative uses for his shirt involving shirt removal.

  I am so not the moral-high-ground, compass-compliant person of this situation.

  I say, “He’s never met her.”

  There are very few true things to say about Jean-Luc, whose impending death is becoming more urgent by the second, but I’ve managed to find one.

  Dylan nods. “Probably a wise move.”

  Then he pats me on the shoulder. He. Pats. Me. On. The. Shoulder. Perhaps I could audition to be mascot of his True Romance with Siobhan, whom I’m pretty sure he hasn’t been patting on the shoulder all that much.

  What is this, anyway?

  Is he just shooting the breeze, only after years of total indifference to people at school, he’s really bad at it? Is he, even slightly conceivably, looking out for me, and if so, is this some weird paternalistic thing where he and Jean-Luc protect me from his bad, bad girlfriend, who happens to be my best friend, and if so, am I just a magnet for paternalistic weirdness?

  My thoughts are in chaotic disarray.

  I check my heart.

  Still broken.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  BY THE MIDDLE OF DECEMBER, I am actually looking forward to break. Which is saying a lot, in light of the dystopian bloodbath otherwise known as vacation in the Lazar family cabin at Lac des Sables, in a foresty part of Quebec, north of Montreal.

  Usually, by Thanksgiving, I’m imagining scenarios in which Canada seals its borders, possibly as a result of a twenty-first-century plague. Which is what it would take to get me out of spending two weeks being reminded that I’m daughter of the messed-up, out-of-control, wrong-religion, wrong-French-accent woman who catapulted my father out of Quebec and into the wilds of the States. No wonder I can’t do anything right—including speak French. Not that they speak French anymore; my aunt married a guy from Toronto. By the time I (not politely) tell my aunt Geneviève to put a sock in it, precipitating the annual name-calling jamboree, the damage is already done. My dad gets us out of there, roaring off to a dingy lodge on the other side of the lake. We always come home early. I always feel entirely beaten up. And we never talk about it.

  • • •

  This year is no different. By the time the red-eye we take to get out of Quebec begins its descent into L.A.—after I’ve spent six hours in near-silence sitting next to my dad, who feels the need to protect me from the plane’s R-rated movie but not his sister’s mastery of insults—my need to talk with someone who’ll get it more than outweighs how upset with Siobhan I am.

  “No way,” she says when we’re sitting in her Jacuzzi comparing vacations, and hers wins. Even though all Burton did in Barbados was sit in a chair and sleep, which made life in the villa less than amusing.

  “Explain to me why you go back to that lake,” she says, plying me with screwdrivers.

  “Because my dad is a glutton for punishment?”

  “You have to stop going there,” she says. “They call you names. Is shiksa like the n-word?”

  “Not really, not that bad, but from them, it isn’t good. It’s like, ‘We’re us and you’re you, and you could run the food bank at Beth Torah and be Good Emma forever, but you’ll never be good enough to be one of us, because your mother sucks and your dad doesn’t even think you’re good enough to take to temple.’& ”

  “So it’s like a religion thing?”

  “It’s like a my-dad-isn’t-in-Montreal-anymore-and-it’s-all-my-fault-for-existing-and-my-mom-was-Satan thing.”

  “You can tell they’re stupid bitches, right?” she says, peering at me. “And you’re trapped in a cabin with them why?”

  “Because my dad is a glutton for punishment! All right?”

  “He’s the one sleeping through the punishment. You’re
the one he’s subjecting to the punishment. Just say no.”

  I point out that we cut those assemblies.

  “Not all of them.” Siobhan shrugs. “We could do a pact where you yell at him. You know you want to.”

  I do want to yell at him. I’ve wanted to yell at him from the moment he chucked my duffel bag through the door of that cabin right up to now. I have to force myself not to slam around the house and yell at him when I get home from Siobhan’s, and I don’t do that well with the not-slamming.

  “Ems,” he says. “That’s bordering on rude. Do you have something to say?”

  I say, “Sorry,” in a tone of voice that’s bordering on even ruder. And then I can’t stand it. I follow him into the kitchen.

  “All right. I have something to say.” He looks up, perfectly attentive. I wish he’d just keep glazing the chicken and not see my face, which is pretty far past just bordering on anything he generally tolerates. “I don’t want to go to Lac des Sables again. Ever.”

  I stand there during the second of silence, waiting for the ground to open up and swallow me whole.

  He says, “Are you sure?” He looks pained. If he says a word, one single word, about disappointment, I’m going to burst into flame and explode in a fiery ball.

  “Completely sure. I’ve been completely sure for years.”

  “For years?”

  “Please don’t repeat what I say back to me, and don’t ask me if I’m exaggerating, and don’t ask me how I feel. I feel like, if you want to go, I’ll stay with Megan. Because I’m not going.”

  He does not look back down at the chicken. “What I was going to say is, I wish you’d told me. I know Geneviève is difficult.”

  “She’s a freaking witch! She hates me! Have you never heard what she says to me?”

  He says, “That’s enough. I’ve heard. It’s done. We’ll go to Saint Barts instead.”

  That’s it?

  I am having a surreal, my God, why-didn’t-I-ask-for-a-pet-monkey-and-a-solid-gold-tiara moment.

  He rests his head in his hands. He says, “I’m so sorry, Ems. I wish you could tell me these things before years go by.”