Afterparty

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Afterparty Page 20

by Ann Redisch Stampler


  He says, “Answer. The question.”

  And here I am with my back to the wall. All right, pressed between a car door and a bucket seat. Seat-belted in and brushed with body glitter, no doubt shedding sparkles in the very spot where I am trapped.

  My heart is beating too fast, and I’m so clammy that I’m sticking to the leather seat. We’re driving along Mulholland now, at the part where it gets curvy and narrow—we’re whipping around and it doesn’t feel as if there’s any choice.

  If I don’t tell him, he’ll be with someone who isn’t actually me—someone he thinks is me, and looks, and sounds, and smells like me, but isn’t.

  If I don’t tell him, I’ll hate myself with really good reason.

  Even the most morally challenged person could tell what has to happen.

  I say, “There is no Jean-Luc.”

  “Don’t play with me, Emma.”

  “No, literally. There’s no Jean-Luc.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  DYLAN SEEMS TO BE SWERVING off the road, but, in fact, we are turning into the circular driveway of a serious palace. We are on the threshold of what has to be the splashiest Valentine’s Day party in the history of the world, in a black suit and a perfect scarlet dress, yet I have just dragged us into the eye of another shitstorm.

  Hell’s Gate must be taking a break, because the speakers are blaring a hideous reggae version of “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

  Dylan stands there glaring at me, after which he stomps off and we end up on the side of the house, which is terraced, strung with paper lanterns, and studded with astonishingly well-dressed people of the I-have-a-bazillion-dollars-and-this-dress-is-made-of-spun-gold-thread variety.

  Dylan says, “I don’t. Fucking. Believe you.”

  “I’m sorry! I tried to tell you last week, but you were in such a bad mood.”

  “Last week! That’s how long it took you to figure out you should stop making a fool of me?”

  “I tried to tell you at the Griddle. I really did.”

  Dylan says, “You should. Have. Tried. Harder.”

  “Dylan—I know.”

  “Did you have fun when I was fucking jealous of him?”

  “Please let me explain.”

  Dylan leans back against one of the many random Greek pillars dotting the landscape all over the place, festooned with red ribbon and hearts that look a lot like little pincushions. He says, “Great. Explain. This should be interesting.”

  He looks as if he wants to string me up. And in the absence of a workable lie, I blunder into the unfamiliar truth.

  “Okay, this is it. I thought that maybe you’d prefer to be with a girl who wasn’t, all right, lying about basically everything. Because you would, right? But when it started to seem as if you might possibly like me, I was just afraid you wouldn’t like me if you knew. Obviously, I blew it.”

  I just want to rewind. I want to be back at Strick’s party and for Siobhan to say, Yo, Chelsea, Em has a boyfriend, and for me to seize possession of my right mind and go, Good one, Sib—as opposed to finding Jean-Luc an apartment in Paris with a view of the Eiffel Tower and making him a Facebook page.

  Dylan says, “Why?”

  There’s no way to say it without drowning in humiliation, no way to paddle in the general direction of decent human being without saying it. So I just say it. “At the time, International Girl of Intrigue with the romantic French boyfriend seemed like a better plan than Virgin Geek Girl from the Frozen Tundra.”

  Dylan whistles. “You think I’m a jerkoff who’d like you better if you’re cheating on some guy from Montreal with me?”

  “He was from Paris. And I broke up with him before I touched you.”

  “Great. Paris. That changes everything.”

  Then we look at each other and I hear the ridiculousness of what I just said and he just shakes his head. “Jesus, Emma.”

  He sounds so bitter. And angry. And justified. And I have no idea what I can say or do to make this better.

  He says, “Every time I talked about him, you stood there and let me? Were you laughing at me behind my back?”

  “I would never! I just didn’t think you’d exactly admire me if you knew I was . . .” (This is the place where I don’t want to say “lying” again, or “a liar,” or “pathologically dishonest,” and I just stand there silently until I come up with something slightly less awful yet true.) “. . . making him up.”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t.”

  I try to touch his arm, but he tenses as if he’s repulsed by my fingertips.

  I say, “Don’t do that. If you’re breaking up with me, just break up with me.”

  “This isn’t us breaking up,” he shouts. “This is us having a big-ass fight.”

  We would appear to be heading toward the far reaches of a patio where we can fight in private when Dylan stops dead and takes out his vibrating phone.

  He says, “Not tonight. Aiden. He will not quit.”

  He holds up the phone; on the screen, there is a text that says, Look what I’ve got, with a photo of Beach Club Boy, dressed up and wrapped around Siobhan with one arm, aiming his phone at the two of them with the other.

  “That’s Aiden?”

  “He’d be the perfect man for you. Liar, meet liar.”

  How much that hurts, how deep that cuts, and how much I probably deserve it is mitigated by my urgent need to get us out of there. Because that’s freaking Aiden. Because why didn’t I know that that was freaking Aiden????? Because why didn’t I tell Dylan about last night, say, last night? Why didn’t I fix this before what Siobhan set up (only I went along with it, and what kind of excuse it that, anyway?) plays itself out in the form of a train wreck?

  Aren’t brothers supposed to freaking resemble each other so an unsuspecting girl gets some slight hint of what she’s doing when she accidentally kisses more than one of them?

  “Let’s leave. Dylan! Could we please go? I really need to talk to you.”

  “First we find them,” he says. “Then we leave.”

  “But they could be anywhere.” Such as Siobhan could be clubbing with Strick or Wade or anyone but Aiden on the Sunset Strip, and Aiden could be back in Scotland.

  Dylan says, “They’re in the pool house. I’ve been there fifty times.”

  I say, “Could we please talk somewhere? Like now!”

  Dylan is racing forward, through crowds of tipsy dancing grown-ups. Waiters are trying to waylay us with offers of food and drink. This would be quite the glamorous party if it weren’t the end of the world.

  I race after Dylan with a skewered jumbo shrimp kebab in one hand and his sleeve in the other. I am trying to slow him down without actually tearing his jacket, to stop him before we reach the pool house, before we reach the point of complete hopelessness and relationship doom.

  But we are there.

  They are not in the pool house. They are laughing their way down the stairs from the upper patio toward us, Aiden still wrapped around her, Siobhan with huge pupils, and barefoot, and wearing a tiny red dress, hanging off his side.

  Even though anyone with half a brain would know in advance that this was going to be a disaster of immense proportion, the actual unfurling of the immense disaster is just as surprising as if I hadn’t imagined it so many times, with ever-changing details and a lot of imaginary screaming.

  I say, “Dylan, before—”

  Aiden says, “Hey, Amélie!”

  Even when he’s lurching, he’s got swagger. Swagger that says, Hello, see this girl under my arm? I own her. I own this night, and this party, and the Western Hemisphere, and you. Or, in the alternative, I’m a completely ridiculous macho drunk guy that you never should have touched, because now you’re toast.

  My mouth. Dry, bitter burnt toast.

  Dylan says, “Shit, Aiden. Do they all blend into each other? This is one” (by which he means me) “you haven’t wrecked yet.”

  Siobhan shakes herself loose of Aiden and gapes at
me. I scream at her, “What are you doing here? What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She says, “You stupid bitch, you didn’t tell him, did you?”

  Aiden says, “Amélie. Where’s your Bert-and-Ernie slippers?”

  “Her name is Emma and you’ve never seen her slippers,” Dylan says. Then he gestures at Siobhan, and shakes his head. “Drop the girl and get on a plane. I had her and now you’ve got her. You’ve made your point with her, now fly away.”

  Siobhan yells, “I’m not anybody’s point!”

  I say, “Dylan, we need to leave.”

  “A-mé-lie,” Aiden crooks his finger at me. “C’mere. Sibby doesn’t mind. She didn’t mind before.”

  People coming down the staircase from the upper deck have to forge a path around us at the foot of the stairs. Make spectacle of self at big, glam party: check.

  Dylan turns to me. “Please tell me you don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  I don’t say anything.

  Dylan turns and walks back toward the dark side yard.

  Aiden shouts, “D.K.! Don’t go over there.”

  Dylan raises his arm in a one-fingered salute, but doesn’t turn around.

  I am on his heels, clamoring for attention, like Mutt chasing a macaroon.

  “It’s my French name. I don’t use it. It wasn’t anything.”

  He stops short. “Then what was it?”

  God, it’s no wonder I haven’t been telling the truth all along—beyond my more obvious moral failings and complete tumble off the Emma the Good horse—because it’s hard, it’s just so hard, and also painful.

  “Dylan, it was one random kiss before I even knew you. It was anonymous. It was nothing.”

  “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

  “I didn’t even know it was your brother. You don’t look that much alike. Your eyes aren’t even the same color, and he’s taller—” This is not going well. “And then when I saw him again—”

  “When?”

  “You have to believe me—”

  “No. I don’t have to believe you. I don’t believe you. When? ” Followed by a second so long and so painful, it feels as if it’s being stretched out on a medieval instrument of torture.

  “Yesterday, I’m so sorry!”

  “Yesterday.” He is shaking his head, as if marveling at how horrible and unexpected this is. “Is there anything I know about you that’s true? I don’t even know your name.”

  I grope for a list of true things, hard facts with no spin or shading, but as I’m trying to compile it, he is pulling me along by the arm as we traverse the dark lawn, weaving around plants and the occasional couple, in a shoe-wrecking shortcut to the valet parkers off the circular driveway.

  He says, “Hot damn.”

  We are facing a decades older, exact model of Dylan, presumably his dad, jumping to get his hand off Dylan’s mother’s ass. And I wonder, in the middle of all this, if his mom is the second wife, because she looks decades younger, as if either she’s had the best cosmetic surgery on earth or she had Dylan when she was twelve.

  In his I’m-actually-not-here-and-would-rather-eat-dirt-than-speak voice, Dylan says, “And here we have my father.”

  I stick out my hand, dutiful girlfriend, even though that’s going to last for maybe five more seconds. I go, “Hello, Mr. Kahane. Hello, Mrs. Kahane,” followed by stone silence.

  Dylan’s deadpan, it turns out, did not fall from the sky; it was inbred. He and his dad stand there looking at each other without any discernible facial expression between them, essentially without blinking.

  “This is not Mrs. Kahane,” Dylan says. “This would be . . . Who are you?”

  And I realize, of course I realize, that as horrible as this evening has been up to now, this is the main event.

  I say, “We should go.”

  Dylan says, “I wish I’d never met you.”

  I am pretty sure he’s talking to me.

  “Are you all right?”

  “You’re the third-to-last person on earth I want sympathy from.”

  He hands the parking ticket to the valet, not looking at me, not responding.

  All I want to do is make him feel better. But the only way to do that would be to turn into someone else, preferably a better person, because, as things stand, all I can do, beyond apologizing, is make him feel worse. Listening to me apologize probably makes him feel worse, too.

  In the car, every time I start to form a word, or a syllable, such as the “I’m” of “I’m sorry,” Dylan says, “I can’t. Talk. About this. While I’m driving.”

  We’re parked just beyond the driveway of his parents’ house, having more or less driven through the rock garden, stopping just short of a hedge of white roses.

  We just sit there and I watch him fume in profile.

  I am waiting for his eyes to narrow in the amused way and not the so-angry-he-can’t-even-speak way. I am waiting for some slight indication that he’s thinking, okay, well, that’s not so bad.

  And then I think, Sure, like that’s going to happen. Emma the I Don’t Even Know What, who did this to him on Valentine’s Day, who just couldn’t stop kicking his feelings down the road endlessly. The one who every time she had a chance to tell him, didn’t. In what universe do you get to lie this much, and then the person you’re lying to thinks it’s somehow okay because who cares if his girlfriend has been lying to him forever?

  I don’t mean to grab him, but I grab him, in what is likely the most awkward and unreciprocated hug ever offered to a boy who wasn’t dead. He’s so stone still, inhaling, exhaling, not holding me back, that it seems even more likely that I’m clinging to the last hug, or, more accurately, half hug, and it’s over, and I wrecked it.

  My forehead is resting on his shoulder, but he doesn’t move.

  He says, “Get out of the car.”

  He turns his head slightly to look at me, to look me over, and it’s the kind of look that Emma the Good would never, ever, in the furthest reaches of anyone’s imagination, ever have to look back at.

  This is us breaking up.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  I TEXT “SORRY” EVERY COUPLE of hours all day Sunday. I entertain brief, tiny delusional moments when I think, Hey, it’ll blow over, so he’s had a grudge against his brother since third grade and plans to cut off his parents as soon as he hits the Eastern Seaboard, but hey, he’ll forgive me.

  After six “sorries,” he texts back, “Good for you.”

  Over, over, over.

  Megan, who is visiting her grandparents in Pebble Beach, bicycles down the road and calls me from behind a tree in a scenic overlook.

  First I moan, and then Megan says, “Uh, Emma, you get that lying to him like that was really bad, right?”

  “Of course I get it! I get that he’s not a shithead for dumping me and I get that I’m a terrible person. Justice is served. Balance is restored to the universe. It would probably feel better, though, if I hadn’t spent every waking minute fantasizing about him since September and if he wasn’t perfect.”

  “If he’s that perfect, eventually he’ll figure out you’re a good person and forgive you.”

  “He’ll never forgive me.”

  Megan says, “He’s probably flattened by the thing with his father. I would die.”

  “I know. And I can’t even help him or talk to him or anything. I’m not even his friend anymore. I completely screwed that up.”

  Siobhan: Cheer up. He’s just some stupid high school boy who couldn’t deal.

  Siobhan: Where r u?

  Siobhan: It’s me. U know u want to talk to me.

  Siobhan: Yr nemesis is now in Scotland if u care.

  Siobhan: They’re both crap.

  Siobhan: So he ditched you. Big freaking deal.

  Siobhan: U got your check mark. Move on.

  Siobhan: Why would you even want to be with him?

  Siobhan: I told u he was crap.

 
Me: U told me he was surprisingly nice.

  Siobhan: I told u to bail.

  Me: WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THAT WAS AIDEN???

  Siobhan: Are u BLAMING me??????? U think I screwed u on purpose?????

  Me: If it looks like a fish and it swims like a fish and it smells like a fish.

  Siobhan: Quaint. A Canadian proverb. Here’s an American fact. U said u were going to tell him. How wd I know u wussed out?

  Me: You were supposed to be with Strick on Sunset. And I couldn’t tell him about Aiden could I because my best friend didn’t bother to tell me who Aiden was!!!!!

  Siobhan: Strick sucks. Strick was supposed to b home coughing to death but he was at a party in Encino. Quel loser. Aiden said come I went.

  Siobhan: Big freaking deal.

  But at the end of all this, at the end of the day, at the end of agonizing in the closet, which shouldn’t have taken more than two minutes because the truth is so obvious: my fault. Completely. Not just some joke of a Bad Emma taking a shortcut around an immovable wall to experience high school hijinks up close. An actual Bad Emma who hurt someone she proclaimed she loved.

  How could I do that to him?

  I text him: Still sorry. Could we please talk?

  Dylan: Go away.

  This is what I want to do at school: hide.

  I want to find the Latimer equivalent of my closet and sit in there. I don’t want to face Dylan. When we accidentally catch each other’s eye, he looks at me and then, pointedly, looks away.

  I like it down behind the stables, where it’s quiet, and there’s no one there, possibly because even when there’s no sun, the air smells ripe and horsey.

  I don’t want to see Siobhan, hear from Siobhan, or talk to Siobhan.

  And nobody else at school seems all that interested in talking with me, except for Kimmy. Who is kind of friend-like, but who more than kind of can’t stand not having any and all late-breaking Latimer news.

  “You and Dylan,” she says as I’m heading away from the candy machines and toward the path into the woods. “What’s up with that?”

  I say, “Nothing.”

  “You’re not back with Jean-Luc, are you?”

 

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