I say, “As long as you brought it up—”
He sits up. He raises his hand. He says, “I’m done hearing about bad absentee boyfriends.”
“But that’s not what it’s about!”
He says, “That’s never what it’s about.”
He pulls me back down with him to the surface of the picnic table. My cheek seems to be resting on the remnants of potato chips or some other crunchy thing I can’t identify. He moves his hand so it’s under my face, and he tilts my face toward his. I don’t care if the snarling cat sees me.
I kiss him for a very long time.
He says, “Friday.”
Oh yeah.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Siobhan: Did u fall off the planet?
Siobhan: I texted like five hours ago. Are you MIA?
Siobhan: Don’t be like that
Me: Like what? Like the person you shoved?
Siobhan: Boo hoo. Tough love. U need to speed it up.
Siobhan: Where were you?
Siobhan: Oh. Do Emma and the boy toy have a widdle secret?
Me: Shut up. We were hiking.
Siobhan: Well don’t. You’re not in this to hike. Quick in and out. Check. Just hurry up and get there.
Siobhan: Before he finds some trivial thing he doesn’t like about you and you’re toast.
Me: I’m trying to tell him about Jean-Luc first. Takes time.
Siobhan: I TOLD U NOT TO! You’ll be fucked and I’LL be fucked.
Siobhan: U can screw up your life all u want but u can’t mess me up! I’m not going down w yr boat! Like I want the horse bitches to know I made you up? I don’t think so.
Me: This is between me and him. It’s not even about you.
Siobhan: It’s about me and you. And if you’re thinking about fucking me over don’t.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
FRIDAY, EVERY TIME I’M NEAR Siobhan, she walks away.
Friday, Dylan attends an unusually high number of classes and keeps looking over at me (which I know because I keep turning around to look at him, and there he is with this laser gaze trained on me).
In English, he says, “So. Have you thought of something? Do you have a sudden need to pretend you’re at the library?”
So after school, when I am supposedly lost in the stacks at the BHPL, I follow his car to his house, a giant pseudo–country mansion with ivy growing all over it. He is waiting in the driveway, and he takes my arm and nods toward a small shingled building behind an oleander hedge.
“Guesthouse,” he says. “I live in there.”
I’m good with this for about thirty seconds. The coolness of the cottage is immediately apparent. Then, as I walk toward it, every terrifying thing I’ve ever been warned boys do to girls blows through my mind in a gale-force hurricane of paranoia. Until the guesthouse, which is sweet and has blue-painted French doors and shingles and a welcome mat, starts looking like a human-trafficking dungeon for careless girls.
Dylan says, “What’s wrong?”
Panic is what’s wrong. Well-indoctrinated, no-basis-in-reality fear of the known. Because I know him. And it’s the middle of the afternoon. And it’s the flats of Beverly Hills.
Dylan says, “Emma? Hey. Seed. You want to walk the dog?”
The dog is a large, unclipped Airedale named Lulu, rolling around on the lawn beyond the guesthouse, chewing a high-top sneaker. She has to be chased because she thinks that Dylan wants the shoe. He looks so goofy loping around the backyard, grabbing for her collar, that I come fairly close to calming down.
Then, once he has the leash on her, she lies down and barks at him, and has to be dragged toward the driveway.
He says, “So. What was that?”
“It was really nothing. Please.”
He says, “Did I do something?”
“No, totally not.”
“Then what?”
“Let’s just walk, okay, please? Take a walk. Walk.”
But Lulu doesn’t get the concept of a walk. She doesn’t get that she’s supposed to travel in a straight line, that it isn’t good to sit while crossing the street, and that walking up to a car with people getting out of it and peeing against the tire is frowned upon. Dylan pauses for her to sniff grass and other dogs. Lulu is very popular with other dogs.
I say, “How long does it take you to go around the block?”
“Hours.” I really wish he’d grin or something, because I can’t read how much I freaked him out. “If it gets too bad, I carry her home.”
We are standing on the corner while Lulu digs a hole on what would be the front lawn of a house that is being torn down and has gone to weeds and dirt.
I say, “Have you always lived here? It’s beautiful.”
He says, “My dad grew up in this house. Then he stuck my grandma in a nursing home and took it over.”
He is absolutely blank. No emotion at all.
I wait for him to say something else, to enlighten me about what’s going on between him and his dad, but nothing happens.
“And you moved here from Montreal?” he says. “You don’t seem like an L.A. type.”
“I don’t seem cool enough to walk around your block?”
“You don’t seem nasty enough to go to the same school as Chelsea, okay?”
“Okay.” I give him the extremely expurgated version of my life, which covers moving a lot, but not much else.
He says, “Siobhan said something about your mom?”
“Jesus! Is there anything about me that she didn’t tell you?”
He says, “I asked. I wanted to know.”
He holds my hand. It would be a sweet, romantic moment if Lulu weren’t pooping over as wide an expanse of front yard as the leash will allow, and also howling, apparently for fun.
Lulu is now wriggling in the dirt on her back, squealing and barking. I say, “We have English bulls next door that play dead when you pretend to shoot them.”
“Cool. Do they have an agent?” He sounds pissed off and not as if he’s kidding. Then he slaps his cheek. “That was surly, right? Shit. I probably shouldn’t maul you if you criticize my dog.”
“Who says you’re surly?”
Dylan shakes his head. “My father and I have a limited set of repeating conversations.”
“That sucks.”
He has nothing more to say on this subject. I retreat.
He says, “We have radically different family lives. I can go for days without seeing my parents, let alone being told what I can’t do.”
“Literally for days?”
“No. But I probably could if I tried.”
“That’s sad.”
He says, “You wouldn’t think so if you knew them. Emma, did I do something to scare you before?”
We are leaning against palm trees along the curb while Lulu eats grass that’s growing through cracks in the sidewalk. All this time of wanting to hold him, wanting to grab him when I couldn’t, and now here we are, on this quiet street with the occasional decorous dog jogging by with a power-walking human, and I actually could, but I can’t.
I hear Siobhan’s voice going, You know you want to. Your turn: Make a move.
I know I want to.
I walk from my palm tree to his palm tree; he is discernibly pleased. I reach for him, and he pulls me in, and we disgrace the Latimer uniform some more by engaging in more public kissing until, when my hands are in the small of his back, under the untucked tail of his shirt, Lulu’s howling gets so loud we have to take her home.
He leans back against the blue French doors, the doorknob in his hand.
He says, “Coming in?” Very carefully. There’s a chance that he’s figured it out.
I say, “I have to be home for dinner. On time.”
He says, “Saved by the bell.”
• • •
I spend the weekend in a state of crazed longing.
I don’t go out the window to Malibu on Saturday with Siobhan. In a flat voice, she says, “You
wouldn’t. Have fun taking sample SATs and reverting to type.”
I don’t say “What’s that supposed to mean?” because I already know.
Restocking the shelves at the food bank on Sunday, Megan says, “Are you sure being with this guy is good for you? You’re acting kind of bizarre.”
“Like you didn’t act bizarre when Joe first showed up here?”
“That’s not a fair comparison. You have lunch with a table full of football players dripping testosterone on their burgers. I have lunch with Sister Mary Eunice. It isn’t the same.”
At the food bank, I am actually dropping things, even though, apart from being consigned to PE (as opposed to actual) ballet, I’m not generally known for klutziness. After I land a twelve-pound bag of rice on his foot, Joe tactfully suggests that I go log things in, or put food into grocery bags, or get a drink of water.
Megan leads me out into the parking lot. She says, “Well?”
“Well, nothing. We’re walking around Latimer staring at each other and nothing. We kiss all the time.”
“That counts.”
Except I want to jump him all the time.
Megan leans against the hood of Rabbi Pam’s car. She says, “You don’t have to do anything you’re not ready to do.”
Oh God, I’m getting romantic advice from Megan. “Is this where you tell me where babies come from?”
She says, “You’re tripping over things.”
“Tell me something new. Now I have to start working on getting to his house so I can trip over things there. Like at night. I thought Siobhan would cover, but she’s acting weird.”
“Siobhan acting weird is something new? You are way too forgiving.” Megan sighs. “Have you considered telling your dad that you like like this guy and seeing where it goes?”
“Really?”
“All right, I realize that I’m living in a similarly tangled web, but what a tangled web we weave—”
“It’s getting so I can’t keep it all straight.”
“At least you’re done with Jean-Luc.”
“I wish! Dylan is obsessed with him, and half the people at school are pissed off that I broke his heart. People are looking at me funny.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re dropping things.”
Or maybe it’s because they’ve never seen me acting like such a love slob, faux French boyfriend notwithstanding.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
IN A SHAMELESS ATTEMPT TO make up for all my weirdness and confusion, I bring Dylan a slab of Sunday night’s dense flourless chocolate cake on Monday morning. He says, “You might not be that bad a seed.”
There’s nothing like the combination of extreme lust and constant guilt to make a girl unusually nice to her boyfriend.
I say, “You have no idea.”
Chelsea, who naturally pops up at the exact moment I’m feeding him cake, says, “Interesting. Disgusting, but interesting.”
Dylan looks her up and down. He says, “Disgusting and uninteresting.”
She flounces away.
In English, he doodles me in the notebook he doesn’t take notes in. Large enough to be visible to Ms. Erskine, standing, beady-eyed, in front of the room, making William Shakespeare less intriguing than an ad for auto parts. Who says, “Mr. Kahane, we all know Ms. Lazar has a lovely profile, but we’re focused on Henry the Fifth if you’d care to join us.”
Dylan looks up, recites the “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” speech, and looks back down to my penciled profile.
It is one of the weirdest, most humiliating, most satisfying moments of junior year.
Siobhan sticks two fingers down her throat and makes a face, and it’s not because Ms. Erskine’s take on Shakespeare is making her ill.
Then, when I’m sitting outside the music room during Dylan’s orchestra practice, Arif slides onto the bench next to me.
He says, “So, you’re with Dylan now.”
I try for a she-didn’t-miss-a-beat kind of a grin, but my face feels more or less frozen. I say, “Yeah, guess so.” I’m going for cheerful here, but my tone of voice is also moderately frozen, because this is so clearly the opening line of an interrogation.
“You guess so?” Sitting this close to him, it’s hard for even a nervous, frozen person who’s obsessed with someone else to miss what his allure is all about. “That won’t do. I don’t know that I can let him wander around walking into walls over a girl who guesses so.”
I’m being checked out by the best friend, who wants to be certain I’m besotted.
“Just want to make sure you ladies aren’t passing him from hand to hand like lip gloss.”
“Arif, nobody shares lip gloss.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be engaged to some guy twice your age in France?” he says. “Are you still seeing him?”
I find myself wondering if Siobhan has actually told people that Jean-Luc got down on one knee and proposed by Skype from Jalalabad. Or Kampala. Or someplace I don’t even know she’s put him.
And I think, All right, diversion. Right now.
“What are you, the breakup police? Is your boy still seeing Montana?”
“He told you about that?”
Dylan sticks his head out of the music room and does the Dylan equivalent of a double take, which involves blinking.
“Arif,” he says. “What are you doing?”
“I told you I was going to look her over.”
“From afar,” Dylan says. “Like in class, you can look over the back of her head.”
I say, “Give him a break. He just wants to make sure I’m not two-timing you.”
Arif grimaces.
I say, “Well, I’m not. Maybe you’d like to share that with the world at large. I’m not cheating on anybody, I’m not engaged, I’m not a bad friend, and I’m not” (ripped from my dad’s vocabulary) “a tart. Anything else?”
Arif looks as if he deeply wishes he were somewhere else, and Dylan is snickering.
Arif says, “No, I think that covers it.”
Dylan, in front of everyone, says, “Do you want to come to my house again after?”
I, in front of everyone, say, “Yes.”
• • •
So after Orchestra, when I’m supposed to be at the library again, I’m lounging in Dylan’s garden in Beverly Hills. This time he doesn’t even lead me toward the door, he gestures to the wooden lawn chairs, and we sit there, side by side, looking back through his mother’s fruit trees to the wall of pine trees at the far end of the property. Drinking lemonade from a glass pitcher. Lulu stretched out in the grass, chewing her neckerchief.
The whole scene, the early sunset, the darkening afternoon, the long shadows and unseasonable heat, Dylan pouring lemonade into a heavy, cut glass tumbler (as apparently these are the only kind of glasses they own) is so sweet that the sweetness of it actually aches.
Dylan says, “Sorry about Arif.”
“Demerits at Convo. I think that constituted interfaith interrogation.”
“Don’t laugh at Convo. Arif and I are riding Convo into Georgetown, and it can’t happen soon enough. We’re pillars of interfaith dialogue. Ask Miss Palmer. Arif wants to quit, but his dad will kill him.”
“His dad should meet my dad.”
“I like his dad. I spent elementary school at his house. My Superman sheets are on the top bunk of his bunk bed.”
“I knew you guys were close, but your sheets on his bunk bed?”
“I lived there. I speak conversational Arabic.”
“What was wrong with your house?”
“My brother lived at my house. Funny thing about that.”
“He was that bad?”
“My parents thought we should work things out between us. Not the best approach when one kid outweighs the other kid by fifty pounds and thinks strangling people is fun.”
“You couldn’t tell them?”
“The last time I told them, Aiden told the whole third grade at Latimer I pee
d in the school pool. And . . . other things. Didn’t go over well.”
“All the same people, age eight?”
“It was brutal. You don’t want these people getting dirt on you. Pretty soon, I was barely there.” He shrugs. “I’m still barely there.”
I think about what my dad would have done if I’d zoned out for eight years, and it does not involve me moving into someone else’s house.
“My dad’s a director,” Dylan says. “Commercials. But he likes to direct everything, and I don’t take direction well. They had me evaluated for learning disabilities, deafness, blindness, a conduct disorder, and juvenile psychosis. But the Saads like me fine. Where would you live?”
“On my best friend’s top bunk.”
He reaches over and touches my hand. “So now are you going to tell me?”
“What?”
“Arif said you got all weird when he mentioned French Face. Has he been kidnapped by Al Qaeda or something?”
French Face? Oh God, Siobhan, what did you say?
“Would that be funny for you?”
“Hilarious.” He looks over. “Wait. Is something happening with you and him? You have to be honest with me. Once burned. All that.”
I’m thinking, Tell him. Tell him, tell him, tell him. But he looks so fond of me. And even though I know how wrong/weak/bad/stupid/morally backwards/shortsighted it is to want to keep that—to not want to jeopardize that by being, all right, honest—I don’t.
I say, “There’s nothing there.” How much I hate myself for this is almost totally eclipsed by how much I want him.
He touches my face and pulls me toward him. Oh God. The kiss.
I say, “I have to go. I have to be on time for dinner.”
“Phone your dad. You might be unavoidably detained.”
“Dylan, he’s old-school. Really, really old-school. I can’t.”
“How does this work? How do you go out at night? Do I need written authorization to pick you up or old-school dad comes after me or what?”
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