Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  I say, “But you heard her. You know what she calls me. You were there.”

  But apparently I have stumbled into no-talk territory. He goes back to glazing the chicken.

  Me: I did it!!!!! I yelled at him.

  Siobhan: Shit. R u walled in your room? Shd I call 911?

  Me: Stop it. He was nice. Never going again. Going to St Barts next time!!!!!

  Siobhan: No fucking way. You so owe me.

  Me: I know.

  The next day, in the parental-guilt-so-deep-that-the kid-gets-the-pet-monkey vein, he gets me a car.

  It’s the oldest Volvo still running in Los Angeles County. It belonged to Mrs. Loman-from-the-food-bank’s late husband, and it’s been on blocks in her garage for fourteen years. It’s canary yellow, a very poor color for sneaking around. The mechanic says it appears never to have been driven over forty miles an hour, or further than Ralphs market.

  Mrs. Loman hugs me and tells me to drive it in good health.

  My dad has me drive him home, to prove I can, and then back to pick up his car. We have a lengthy conversation during which I mostly say “Thank you” and he mostly says, Watch the road; no driving other kids for six months; no tickets or you’re toast; it’s a privilege; it’s 3,000 pounds of surging metal; it’s a canary-yellow instrument of death.

  I cannot wait for him to get out of my car.

  All I want is to drive all the way down Sunset to the beach, all the way up the coast to Point Dume. I want to drive up and down canyons with the windows open and the radio blasting. I want to lean toward the window so the wind messes up my hair, like a happy hound with windblown ears.

  None of which is actually going to happen unless I somehow get a tool for jimmying odometers.

  My dad sits in the passenger seat while I demonstrate how well I can drive back and forth to school. Twice.

  On the first day of second semester, I get my car a parking pass. I put it on the windshield, and I have a half hour of pure joy.

  Until I see Dylan and it starts again.

  He nods at me with perfect neutrality, the kind that makes you wonder if you’re supposed to say hello or just walk by.

  I say, “Hey. How was Vail?”

  I know how Vail was. Okay, it was like sticking pins in the back of my hand, but when I was in Lac des Sables texting Siobhan in Barbados, I sandwiched in asking how Dylan was. And she texted back: Complain complain complain.

  He says, “Not great. Apparently I was so surly to Aiden, the prodigal son went back to college early.”

  “Wow. Surliness of biblical proportion. Impressive.”

  “Thank you. I aim to impress. Yours?”

  “I filled in at the food bank at Beth Torah. I got battered by relatives I’m never going to see again in Canada. Oh! I got a car!”

  “Welcome to L.A.” he says “You’ve gotta have a car. Don’t tell me. It’s a fancy French car with bulletproof windows.”

  “It’s a fourteen-year-old Volvo.”

  Dylan says, “That’s very proletarian of you.”

  “I love that car. Don’t dis my car.”

  No, no, no. I stop dead in the middle of reaching out to touch his arm. I can’t be reaching out and touching his arm.

  I say, “I forgot something in my car, sorry,” and I walk away.

  • • •

  Siobhan says, “You wouldn’t think so to look at him, but Kahane is clingy.”

  I don’t want to know, but I so want to know.

  “How clingy is he?”

  Second day back.

  The compass says, This is getting creepy and your motives are highly suspect.

  Me: Shut up.

  We’re sitting in Siobhan’s Jacuzzi, which has the advantage that if I feel my face turning colors and freezing into a fake, horrified smile, I can slide under the hundred-degree water, simmer, and hide.

  “I don’t know what shit his mommy did to him in Vail, but he wants to sit around and do homework together. He wants me to come with when he walks his dog. And it smells.”

  I say, “I think that’s normal boyfriend-girlfriend stuff.”

  “You think I’m not normal ? How would you know about normal boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, anyway? Let’s think. Oh. From me.”

  I regroup quickly. “I think you’re not average. Seriously. Do you?”

  “Why’s he even with me if he wants a dog-walking kind of girl? I mean, he totally wants me. So why is he all whining that I’m not walking his dog when I’m Skyping William, which is, news bulletin, a lot more interesting than walking a dog? Why is he all whining that I want to go to a party instead of listening to some sucky Bulgarian string quartet or some band that isn’t even signed yet?”

  “What string quartet?”

  “Why would that possibly matter? Do I care? That’s the point. I went to Disney Hall how many times last semester? It’s a new year! Could we have some reciprocity and go to a decent club or some kind of a party?”

  “I thought the whole essence of his being is, he doesn’t do high school.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be a high school party. It could be a college party. It could be any party that isn’t in Mara’s garage.”

  I’m really trying hard here. “Maybe you’d like Mara’s garage.”

  “I was already friendly to Lia-freaking-Graham and Paulina at the Lakers game. I am not going to torture myself listening to some hideous girl band with people who look down on me and I couldn’t care less about. Not happening.”

  Trying, trying, trying. “Maybe they’re good.”

  “He says they’re laughably horrible. He says you have to strain to keep a straight face. And he wants to play chess.”

  “But you like to play chess.” Chess is the only activity Siobhan cops to liking with Burton. She likes creaming him.

  “With a hundred-year-old man who’s too infirm to get out of his chair without hanging onto the armrests. Why are you fighting me on everything I say? Stop criticizing me! There’s nothing wrong with me!” She stretches out so that she’s floating on the surface. “Maybe I’m just not the traditional girlfriend.”

  I give up. I slide under the water.

  When I have to come up for air, she says, “He’s just going to have to get used to it.”

  The jets turn off, and Siohan climbs out of the Jacuzzi to turn them back on. “And he wants to talk about you,” she says.

  I say, “Sib! The welcome-back assembly is ending in ten minutes. I can’t miss Physics! Get dressed!”

  Because if I said, “Huh?” or “What did he say?” or “Tell me every detail of this conversation immediately so I can I hang on every syllable, inflection, and pause,” I would have to hide underwater so long I might drown.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I MANAGE TO AVOID DYLAN for the rest of the week. Greatly facilitated by the fact that his New Year’s resolution appears to be never to attend a full day of classes ever again.

  Then there he is. Coming up from behind the gym, where he plays pickup only when there’s no class, team, uniform, or coach involved.

  (Siobhan says, “Really? He’s standing on principle by not joining a team? I’m on a team. Do I seem ‘overregimented, overcompetitive, and stupid,’ to quote him? I mean, he’s completely into me, so how is that even logical?”)

  He says, “Where’s your friend?”

  “Her name is Siobhan.” I so don’t want to sound this irritable. But I don’t want to sound too chummy. I want to sound friendly yet distant. Charming yet unattainable. Irresistible yet . . . all right, just irresistible.

  He says, “She says you don’t think men and women can be friends.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, because Jean-Paul Sartre said so.”

  We’re walking through the patio by the cafeteria, and he sits down at a table. He just sits and I’m standing there, clutching my books.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That men and women can’t be friends. According to her, you’re a big fan
of Jean-Paul Sartre, and he says they can’t.”

  I say, “I’m pretty sure that’s from an old movie and not a French philosopher. Maybe she got confused.”

  No way she got confused. He wants to be friends with me and she used a fake quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to talk him out of it. Then I think, Stop jumping to conclusions. Who was completely there for me over vacation?

  This has gone so far beyond too far, all I want is to grab him, for the buttons to pop off his white, untucked shirt. I want to stop imagining her grabbing his shirt, and I especially want to stop imagining him grabbing her.

  Dylan is paying a great deal of attention to the french fries on the next table. He says, “Do you want some?”

  I say, “Sure.”

  I think, This is Siobhan’s boyfriend. You do not want to be having a slightly suggestive conversation about whether men and women can be friends with Siobhan’s boyfriend, no matter what starkly stupid thing she told him you said.

  But he wants to be friends. There’s no biblical injunction that says you have to turn down friendship.

  I think, Give it up, you don’t want to be his friend—you know what you want from him, and it isn’t just friendship.

  I think, You are a crappy friend and a horrible best friend.

  Dylan slides a box of fries across the table, with a fistful of ketchup packets.

  I think, Say something.

  “If Jean-Paul Sartre did say that, he was wrong,” I manage. “Look around.”

  All over the patio, people who’ve been together since kindergarten, and are too brother-sister close to hook up, are crawling all over each other. Kimmy is in Max Lauder’s lap, trying to steal his milkshake. “Unless that’s Kimmy’s way of seducing Max, Sartre was clueless. Anyway, I don’t think it was him. Wasn’t he friends with Simone de Beauvoir and any other intellectual girl he could get? We got the censored version of this in French, which, not amazingly, you missed.”

  He says, “Isn’t she the one who thought men and women shouldn’t inhabit the same apartment? She was hooking up with Sartre for decades across town.”

  Perfect, he knows everything there is to know about Sartre’s private life, and I don’t.

  “So are you planning to marry a woman who lives across town?”

  “I’m not the one who believes this crap. My parents have been together having the same fight for twenty-five years. You’re the one into statutory rape with a boyfriend five thousand miles away.”

  “Did you just say that?”

  He smacks himself on the head. “I’m an idiot. Sorry.” He does, admittedly, look sorry, and kind of freaked-out. For him.

  “You think that covers it, Kahane?” I’m trying to stay as light and casual as possible under the circumstances. Which is not all that light or casual.

  “Douchy, inappropriate, none of my business?”

  I don’t have the slightest clue of what to say that wouldn’t make this worse.

  He says, “You want a fry?” He holds one out. To eat it, I’d have to take the death grip off my books. It hits me that I am not only conversing but—as my dad would say—outright carrying on with my best friend’s boyfriend, who has now moved into the realm of the explicitly suggestive and possibly insulting.

  Then I notice that Dylan is looking at me, expectant and kind of emotional for Dylan, and I think, What the hell?

  I take a fry.

  Then I take another fry.

  Then I eat all his fries while he smiles at me, presumably because he’s so relieved he hasn’t unhinged my mental balance by commenting on my (nonexistent) sex life to the point that I can’t eat fries. By the time I’ve finished off the container, it’s clear that I’ve shed the last vestiges of Emma the Good the way a molting newt sheds skin, and if I don’t stop myself, I’m going to do something seriously bad.

  I sit there sipping his root beer in a state of complete moral collapse. It’s hard to comprehend how a person could experience such extensive ethical decay, could ditch all scruples and the girl code, in the time it takes to polish off a box of fries.

  I grab my books and run into the girls’ bathroom. I sit in a locked stall through the rest of the period. When the bell rings at the end of the period, I am still in a bleak state of huh??? So I sit there through half of French, where M. Durand is so overjoyed to see me, a person who reads the books in French, that he doesn’t even care if I’m twenty minutes late.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  AFTER SCHOOL, SIOBHAN IS WAITING for me, perfectly happy.

  I feel nothing but dread.

  She says, “What’s wrong with you?”

  We were right out in the open. Everyone could see us, so it’s not like I was sneaking around. We were just eating fries and having a theoretical discussion about friendship. I was making things up about French philosophers in an effort to sound as if I knew what I was talking about. How bad could that be?

  Bad.

  Siobhan says, “Here’s something to cheer you up. Kahane was talking about you some more.”

  A wave of nausea radiates out from my sick stomach through the rest of me.

  I say, “Siobhan—”

  She says, “I know. Pretty twisted. You think he’s interested in some three-way action?”

  “No. Way.” I have no idea where this is going, but I’m completely sure I don’t want it to go there.

  “Oh yeah,” she says, “he wanted to talk about if I thought we could all be friends. Now he wants to be friends with you.” And by the way she says “friends,” it’s clear she means friends with three-way benefits.

  “No!”

  She snorts. “Of course no. Like that’s going to happen?”

  “I just don’t think that’s what he meant. At all.”

  “How would you know? Were you there? No. You weren’t.”

  I go home and sit in the closet. I sit there and all I want is for the image of Dylan and Siobhan, together, in her room, to go away.

  I want her to stop texting me every ten minutes to tell me how annoying he’s getting and expecting me to commiserate.

  Siobhan: Party Friday?

  Me: Aren’t you going out with the boyfriend? Or is this the fun threesome in which case no thank you.

  It almost kills me to type this, but I have to say something.

  Siobhan: Dylan doesn’t wanna party. So tough.

  Me: So do something else.

  Siobhan: Like I really want to hang out downtown and listen to Bach on xylophones when we could go to this Marlborough girl’s blowout? Girl school girls gone wild.

  Me: What about Dylan?

  Siobhan: What about him? I don’t need a permission slip to have fun. Are u in? Your window must be so sad and neglected.

  Me: My window is fine.

  Siobhan: Are u in?

  Me: Fine.

  How hard would it have been to go, “Nope, nuh-uh, not me, won’t go help you party without your damned boyfriend? We both know what’s going to happen.” But it keeps getting harder and harder to be even slightly direct with her about anything. As if she’s gone from being my perfect other to being my unpredictable, high-strung Doberman—the kind you love and take on walks, but bottom line, you don’t want to be within lunging distance when it bares its teeth.

  The moral compass quivers with indignation: Does the lunging-dog image not tell you something? Walk away!!!

  Me: I’m not walking out on my best friend. You can’t just walk out on people. She wants me with her, and I’m going with.

  The pissed-off, unleashed moral compass croaks, Feel guilty. Feel very, very guilty. Feel guilty as hell.

  Me: Okay.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ABOUT THE MARLBOROUGH GIRL’S BLOWOUT.

  I shoot out the window as if it were just another door to our house. I taxi from the Chateau Marmont, no longer worried that everyone my dad knows in L.A. has chosen this moment to cruise Sunset and is speed-dialing him.

  I can hear her party from a block away.


  Apparently, her parents are on their annual trip to Hong Kong and she thinks that they won’t notice she’s appropriated the entire contents of their liquor cabinet, and that the neighbors won’t tell them how they called the cops at 2 a.m. because it was the most noise they’d heard in Hancock Park since last year’s blowout.

  It gets very bad very fast.

  It starts with this guy, home from Penn for the weekend, who kisses the back of my neck when I’m standing by the keg, and I don’t actually hate it. He’s very drunk and he thinks my name is Merilee, so clearly he thinks he’s kissing the neck of an entirely different girl.

  This is so not my idea of what’s supposed to feel nice.

  I go, “Dude, I’m not Merilee. You’re really drunk.”

  He stumbles toward the tennis court where people are setting off firecrackers because, hey, that doesn’t draw any unwanted attention in the middle of the night in Hancock Park. I think, I’ve come a long way since the hair-nuzzling, repulsive guy at Roy’s. Now I have a neck-kissing cute guy from Penn who thinks he’s kissing someone else, and I’m not all that unhappy about it. Check mark for me.

  I fill a red cup with thin, sour beer.

  Sib is trotting around the yard. She is flapping her arms like a kid wearing a cape for Halloween, only there’s no cape.

  She says, “I am so high!”

  I say, “High on life, right?”

  “Shut up, Em.” She is looking around in the darkness. “Where the hell is Strick?”

  “Why are we looking for Strick?”

  “Strick is cool,” Siobhan says. “Strick doesn’t have a stick up his ass.”

  Someone staggers by, sloshing beer out of his cup.

  “Oh, damn.” Siobhan wipes beer off her leg, spins around, and heads toward a table dragged out of the house, the mahogany surface wrecked by liquid and cold bottles and a bowl of cracked ice with big silver tongs. There are half-full, giant-sized bags of corn chips and canned bean dip.

  I stand there, drinking my drink.

  When I look up, Siobhan is kissing the Penn guy. He has her leaned back as if they were dancing the tango, and he’s extricating a rose from her teeth with his tongue, only there’s no rose. Then he tilts her up and she leads him toward the house, toward the back door she came flying out of, flapping her arms.