“I thought the whole idea was for me to get a little bit messed up.”
Siobhan laughs, and I think, Go ahead. But I’ve been waiting for this day since I got here. There’s too much momentum to stop.
And then there’s my ear and my lips and the unhinged, sensation-ridden pit of my stomach.
Siobhan is snapping her fingers in my face. “Are you even paying attention?”
I say, “And listen, Jean-Luc, he can’t keep showing up all over.”
“Don’t look at me,” Siobhan says. “Kimmy was all freaked out that he didn’t come see you at Christmas, Yak-yak, I’m Kimmy, why, tell me why, how come, where is he, boo-hoo, why? What was I supposed to do?”
“He needs to disappear. Like now.”
Siobhan says, “What’s the big deal? It’s not like he’s real.”
• • •
After dinner, Dylan and I spend two and a half hours Skyping.
I say, “How was your day at the office, dear?”
He says, “Who knows? I was unusually distracted.”
“I thought that was your general state of being.”
Dylan says, “My goal at that place is to achieve distraction. Or get kicked out, but not by doing anything so gruesome that I don’t get into college. You made the achievement of distraction easier than usual.”
“You’re welcome.”
Periodically, my dad pops his head in at the door and I yelp, “Working on my physics lab! Group session!”
Dylan, his Latimer tie undone and hanging down in two bands of striped navy-and-maroon silk on either side of his neck, looks amused. His hair falling over his forehead, his cuffs unbuttoned and pushed halfway up his forearms, his shirt sliding around over his torso. Where, dear Lord, there is a tattoo—which my dad is not going to believe is an unusual blue-black birthmark in the shape of Chinese calligraphy on one side of my supposed physics lab partner’s chest.
He says, “Does your dad always look in on you every few minutes or am I a new guy to keep away from you?”
I say, “You might have to button your shirt really fast.”
Dylan does a twitch-at-the-left-corner-of-the-mouth smile facsimile. “My father hasn’t stuck his head into my room that many times since I was six.”
“Don’t get too jealous. He’s protective on steroids.”
He says, “I am jealous.” He buttons up his shirt.
“And he’s not going to be aware of any guy. In the interest of me ever leaving my house again.”
“This is so medieval, Jules!”
“That’s me, bringing medieval times to the Sunset Strip.”
“What if I were your physics lab partner?” he says. “Could you get in your car and come over?”
I say, “You have a very limited understanding of the concept of medieval. You’re male and it’s not broad daylight.”
“Would it be broad enough daylight Friday after school?”
“The old going-to-the-Beverly-Hills-Library-when-I’m-really-someplace-else gambit.”
“You have this down to a fine art,” he says.
“I have to.”
“So. I’m the beneficiary of all your cloak-and-dagger with the French guy? I should thank him.”
He makes a face. He says, “Don’t look at me like that.” He hold his hands up to the screen. “Not trying to upset you. Very poor Skype strategy. But how do I get you out of your cell?”
Tell him, tell him, tell him.
I say, “I’ll think of something.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MAYBE I’M THE ONLY PERSON on earth never to have picked up on this, but school with a boyfriend is completely different from school without one. It takes me a couple of days to realize this isn’t just the novelty effect. Dylan materializes next to me all the time. If I see him across the quad, there’s an obvious invitation to get over there.
It’s quite nice.
Even if people are shooting me odd and judgmental glances.
Siobhan says, “Don’t look now, Dorothy, but there’s a scarecrow and a tin man looking for you. It’s like you’re about to start singing with Toto.” She doesn’t say this as if it’s a desirable state of being, either.
“Excuse me, but whose idea was this, anyway?”
It’s as if I’ve developed amnesia where she’s concerned, where betrayal, being shot through the heart, and fury used to be. Now that I’m with him, all is forgiven. Almost.
“Can’t you just do it and get it over with? You’re so cutesy, it’s embarrassing.”
“It’s been two days. This is destined to be longer than a two-day relationship.”
“It’s a relationship?” Her head jerks back in a dramatic rendition of annoyance. “What about ‘quick in and out’ sounds like a relationship?”
“Unfair! I put up with you and how many guys?”
“At least nobody was lapsing into sugar shock because I was skipping around singing. Kahane, too. He was bad enough before. This is pathetic.”
I put my hand on her shoulder, but she pushes it away. I try to think of what I can say that will get her off this particular tangent and calmed down, and I say, “Sib, if I could do this stuff quickly, we wouldn’t need a list.”
Which has so little to do with why I’m with him, it’s ridiculous.
She says, “Could you at least show some restraint? You are way out of character.”
• • •
Next in line, we have Kimmy.
I am reading on the terrace by the publications suite when Kimmy comes up behind me, reeking ever so slightly of horse.
I say, “Hey, Kim, you here for newspaper?” Kimmy is the features editor, resulting in a column written from the perspective of Loogie, called “Horsing Around.” Kind of like Gossip Girl meets Mr. Ed, which for people whose dads don’t force them to watch classic TV with talking horses because classic TV is supposedly more wholesome than shows from, say, the twenty-first century, will make no sense. So if Mr. Ed means nothing to you, consider yourself lucky.
Kimmy, of course, knows who Mr. Ed is, and also National Velvet, My Friend Flicka, Misty of Chincoteague, and the Water Horse.
Kimmy says, “O-kay. You and Dylan?”
I say, “Uh,” which sort of gives it away.
“Oh. My. God.” Kimmy, sweaty in her jodhpurs and a dirt-streaked polo shirt, sniffs the air and frowns, I assume due to the fact that she needs a shower and not because of the me-and-Dylan thing. “Twenty-four-hour turnaround, why don’t you?”
This is the exact moment it occurs to me that this might not look good to people besides Siobhan. People who are somewhat reasonable.
And that beyond not looking good, it might not be good.
That twenty-four-hour turnaround with your best friend’s boyfriend might look, be, and feel weird because it is weird.
Kimmy looks devastated. “Okay, it’s none of my business and you know I have god awful taste in men, but isn’t your other boyfriend in love with you? Think about the camellias. And the UN is heroic. It’s not like he’s in Afghanistan on vacation.”
Afghanistan?
“Kimmy, oh God, I just remembered something.”
Such as I might look like, or possibly be, a girl code violator of epic proportion. And that I need to go smack Siobhan.
She is on the hill, smoking in the rocks.
“Why is Jean-Luc in Afghanistan? First you stuck him in Africa as some kind of a joke. Well, ha-ha, five minutes later, he’s in Afghanistan! And what’s with the camellias?”
Siobhan says, calmly and slowly, as if talking to a child, “He’s on a UN mission in the Khyber Pass. You should be proud. And he’s been sending you camellias every Tuesday since Christmas.”
I say, “I’m not proud because he’s not real.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Why are you doing this?” I am determined not to raise my voice, not to shout or grab her. “What am I supposed to say to Dylan?”
“I know!” she says. “Wh
y don’t you tell him you made Jean-Luc up? Now that you have a relationship.”
“Don’t you think I know I have to tell him? But if Jean-Luc becomes prime minister of France over the weekend, it’s going to make it a lot harder.”
“Get real. You’d better not tell him. I’m not going down over this. Just shut your mouth and hurry it up. He looks obsessed.”
“You told him I was in mad love with him! What did you think was going to happen?”
Siobhan shakes her head in a pantomime of disbelief and bug-eyed shock. “You were just supposed to make a check mark with him. I was done with him, and he was the only guy in North America you were willing to make check marks with.”
“That didn’t tell you something?”
It comes out with an edge, the sharp kind of edge that can cut right through your flesh, your friendship, to the breach in your friendship that left you with a somewhat gutted heart.
“Oh shit,” Siobhan says.
At first I think, no way, not going there. But I’ve already said it, I can’t take it back. “Yeah, it was kind of a problem.”
“So the whole time I was hooking up with him, you were hating on me and you didn’t tell me?”
“That’s putting it in the extreme.”
Sort of.
“You have murky depths,” she says.
But I’m thinking, No, it’s more on the clear and predictable, follow-the-arrows-to-the-exit side. That when your best friend is locked in romantic embrace with the man of your dreams, you might reconsider naming your firstborn child after her.
“Did widdle Megan know you hated me?” she asks in a baby voice, pursed lips and poison. “Does she hate me, too? I bet your daddy hated me.”
“Nobody hated you.”
“So nooooobody knew you were upset?”
“He’s a freaking psychiatrist. The man can tell when people are upset.”
“He has no idea when you’re upset! I couldn’t tell and I know you way better than he does.” Her voice is pressured and insistent. “I know you better than anyone, right?”
I say, “Of course you do.”
All I know is that I have to say it or she’ll lose it, and I have to fix it. I don’t even know if it’s true or false or all of the above.
I don’t seem to have fixed it all that well, either. Because when Dylan walks by, looking at me quizzically when he sees I’m standing with her, even though he’s seen me standing with her like this every day since my first day at Latimer, she pushes me toward him, yelling, “Hey, lovebird bitches, why don’t you go share some freaking worms?”
I stumble toward him and he catches me in flight.
Dylan says, “Jesus, Seed, what’s wrong with her?”
I look down, trying to figure out how to summarize the parts of this that don’t include Jean-Luc. Or how much I liked Dylan from way before I knew him well enough to like him that much, and how it killed me that he was with Siobhan. And how Siobhan is massively ticked off that I’m in girlfriend mode and not emotion-free checkmark collection mode.
There’s not a lot left over to tell him.
But when I look up again, he’s smiling at me. And without comment, I watch Siobhan and all that drama slouch away until she’s out of sight.
He says, “You going to History?”
“Can you live without my brilliant notes?”
“Your OCD notes? Maybe this once.” We are walking toward the path leading onto the hill. It is sunny, cold and clear, and you can smell the pine and eucalyptus from the edge of the quad. “Do you have gym shoes?”
Which seems like an odd question, as I kind of thought we were headed onto the hill to make out, as opposed to shooting hoops. But the fact is, I do. In the trunk of my car, with my earthquake preparedness kit full of packets of water-purifying chemicals, nutrition bars, and waterproof matches.
I say, “I’m prepared for everything.”
Everything involves driving west on Sunset and into a neighborhood where houses are far apart and hidden in foliage. At the end of a cul-de-sac, a hiking trail leads back into the hills, a dirt path that widens and narrows through canyons of wild grass and the occasional jolt of wildflowers.
Fifteen minutes up, there’s a clearing with some metal picnic tables and a view straight across to the ocean, turning slate blue as the afternoon darkens.
He says, “Hike much?”
“Franklin Canyon. Hollywood sign. Nothing major.”
We’re sitting on the picnic table closest to the edge, alone except for the occasional hiker with dog, and a woman with a cat on a leash that pauses, snarls at us, and continues up the hill.
“You’ve never been here?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Major make-out spot.”
“If you don’t mind attack cats.”
He says, “After dark, very few attack cats.”
“I take it you’ve been here after dark. Is this an invitation to ask questions, or are you just planning to torture me with curiosity?”
“It was a different kind of invitation. But ask. Unlike some people, I’m an open book.”
“You are so not an open book!”
He says, “Ask.”
“All right, rumor has it that you were running around town with some elderly college girl.”
Dylan looks surprised, and then impenetrable.
“You didn’t just say that to Lia Graham to look cool, right?” This is supposed to come out jokey, but it doesn’t. I regret it as soon as it’s out of my mouth.
“I never tell anybody anything so I’ll look cool. Again, that would be my brother. Face next to the word ‘liar’ in Wikipedia.” He stretches himself out on the picnic table. “Not me, I don’t fuck with people.”
“Sorry.”
“Your lack of gossip is shocking.”
More like no one ever tells me anything.
“I’m shockingly virtuous that way. You know, lashon hara. This Jewish thing with not gossiping. My dad is way into it; precludes most forms of interesting conversation.”
Dylan says, “I know what lashon hara is.”
Complete brain freeze. Of course he knows what it is, he reps Judaism at Religious Convo. Probably his idea in coming to a major make-out spot wasn’t to have a discussion of my dad’s completely cherry-picked precepts of religion.
Dylan says, “So. I could be making up a torrid affair with an older woman and you wouldn’t know the difference?”
Yikes.
“Were you having a torrid affair? If only I gossiped continually.”
Dylan blinks, which would appear to be his version of an eye-roll. “I hate to disillusion you, but guys in high school rarely get to have torrid affairs with older women.”
“Have you met Nancy?”
He closes his eyes. “Special case.”
“So what have you been doing while failing to meet your obligation to socialize at Latimer?”
“Aren’t you the girl who’s been with some bi-Continental guy that sends her French perfume and who probably doesn’t know where to find junior assembly?”
What French perfume?
“Have you ever noticed I was wearing French perfume?”
Dylan says. “Okay. When Aiden was a senior, he went out with this girl, Montana Gibson. She wrote a poem about him in Latimer Rambles that compared him to God. Roughly. Lasted all year. Then he left without saying good-bye.”
“Literally?”
“She went to Jackson Hole with her family in July. When she got back, Rambles was in the trash and Aiden was in Scotland. She went nuts. Came over and screamed at my mom. But this is Aiden we’re talking about. If Montana took his name in vain, no wonder he blocked her number.”
“He just left for college? He didn’t actually break up?”
“Moot point. Even when he’s with someone, he’s not with them. They can be at the same party, the girl is waiting for him to get back with her drink, and he’s locked in the bathroom with some whore who likes muscles.”
He peers at me. “Oh. Sorry.” He slaps his face. It’s not much of a slap. “I know. Don’t call women whores. Shit. Did I just finish us off?”
All right, so he’s not allowed to say the word “whore” ever again. But we are so not finished off. Because if it were dark, and if the hikers going up the hill weren’t going to come down eventually, and if I didn’t have to get back to school, what would I do? There are dark waves of urgency. Are un-whorish girls even supposed to feel like this? God knows, I’m not supposed to feel this or anything in the same general classification as this. I’m supposed to be up for a lovely picnic on the banks of the Thames wearing a flowered sundress from 1956, not for naked grappling in the hot, lush jungle where the Amazon veers off into rain forest.
Or on hiking trails fifteen minutes off a cul-de-sac near the 405 Freeway.
Not this.
Dylan is saying, “Yeah. I hung out with Montana a lot after that. Last year and this fall.”
I am trying to sound civilized, cool, and moderately under control. “Were you, like, her boyfriend? How old is she?”
“I was the Aiden substitute. Aiden was not happy. He comes home from Scotland for summer, he’s all over her. Then he breaks up with her for the second time in case the first time wasn’t bad enough. Montana starts hooking up with this other guy. And me.”
“Wow.”
“Aiden’s not a very nice guy. I was the revenge fuck. Not that I’m complaining. But it would have been considerate of her to tell me.”
“I’m no doubt going to be struck by lightning for gossiping like this, but your brother is a jerk.”
Dylan says, “Girls seem to like it.”
“Explains where your aversion to bullshit comes from.”
“Explains why I like being with someone honest, with no interest in running off with my brother. You have no interest in running off with my brother, I assume?”
I put my arm around him. “Let’s see. He lives in Scotland, so I could never actually see him, and he’s not a very nice guy. Bring it on. I’m hot for one of those.”
“I thought you had one of those,” Dylan says.
Holy shit.
I have officially lied to my dad about everything; to my best friend about how much I didn’t want her boyfriend; to everyone at Latimer about my nonexistent boyfriend; and now to this guy—who apart from calling women whores is kind of perfect, and who (hint) likes honest girls—about practically everything.
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