Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  She’s sitting on a white bench, her hand on Arif’s arm. I can see her mouth move, but the music is so raucous, she might as well be in a silent movie, all the colors washed out in the blinking lights, her white top and Arif’s shirt glowing like phosphorescent fish dead on the beach at night.

  She yells, “Emma!”

  I climb through more ivy, up to the gazebo.

  She says, “Did you come with Dylan?”

  And I’m thinking, Maybe I should have told her something about that, back when she wanted to know.

  “With Siobhan.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “What?”

  She yells louder, “Can you drive? Are you sober? Your stupid boyfriend or whatever is trashed and someone has to get Arif out of here.”

  I yell, “What’s going on?”

  “The Winston assholes parked Arif’s car in, and he’s sick.”

  In the green light, his skin looks ashy.

  I yell, “Are you drunk?”

  Kimmy says, “Hello. This is Arif. He doesn’t do alcohol. It’s against his religion. Literally.”

  Arif moans something about nachos. Bad, nasty poisonous nachos.

  Here it is if I want it, served up on a bad-nacho platter: a way out of here. Sib can taxi if she wants to stay, no big scene, sick friend. Arif could throw up in my car, but sitting on blocks for fourteen years makes a car smell like a sweat sock, so the risk is less hideous than in a normal vehicle that smells either new or like a cedar-scented car deodorizer.

  Then I register Dylan, who is indeed trashed—you can see it in his walk as he lopes toward the gazebo. I register the extreme, imminent awkwardness of being in my car with trashed Dylan and sick Arif, in front of whom Dylan and I couldn’t actually talk about anything, not that I want to.

  All right, I want to.

  I say, “Okay, I just have to tell Siobhan.”

  Kimmy says, “Try upstairs. It’s pretty insane up there.”

  • • •

  Siobhan is on the landing with her shirt mostly unbuttoned, barefoot on the deep pile of the Persian runner, deep blues and jewel greens and wet spots. I only find her because I hear her laughing, louder and louder and louder.

  I call her, but she doesn’t turn around. I touch her and she’s shivering, but her skin feels hot.

  I say, “Sib, we need to go.”

  “But Mommy, we just got here.”

  “Yeah, but I’m sober and Arif needs a ride. He’s sick.”

  She looks over the banister at the party below, teetering over the railing. She says, “Who elected you nanny?”

  I say, “Come on, he’s really sick. Kimmy can’t take him because she’s plowed.”

  “Oh no!” Siobhan says. “Not Kimmy! Maybe you should go try to button up her shirt and take her home too. Or you could stay and get some check marks. Don’t you want some cocoa-puffs? Little bitty blow? You know you do.”

  “Sib, we’re going. I can’t play with this stuff: bad genes.”

  She gives me a little-kid-pout face. “You’re already half her. Don’t you even want to know what would happen?”

  A completely trashed boy I don’t know comes out of a bedroom and says he’ll take Siobhan home.

  “Fuck off,” she says. “Like this is taking me home? You go, I’ll taxi. It’s not like I never went to a party and got home fine without you before.”

  She looks like the girl who gets into a taxi and is never seen again, not the girl who is going to get home just fine.

  At this point, Charlene Perry, who appears never to drink but does a damn good impersonation of a totally drunk girl, comes down the hall. “I’ll take her home. I’m not, you know, incapacitated.”

  Siobhan is already heading into another bedroom, leaning on the guy’s bigger, cuter friend.

  Charlene says, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her. This is a Winston party. I have pepper spray.”

  Someone is making noise about flamethrowers. I say, “What’s that?” And Charlene says, “Cigarettes with smack sprinkles. These people have everything,” as she heads downstairs. “And I won’t forget Siobhan, get out of here.”

  • • •

  The walk from the party house to my car is completely silent except for Arif groaning and thanking me. The drive to his house is silent except for the voice of my GPS lady taking us into the stratosphere of Bel Air. I am hyperaware of Dylan sitting next to me, of the proximity of his elbow, but he might as well be a crash dummy.

  Arif’s house is a giant concrete fortress, built into a hillside, looking out at the city. We are at the gated end of a long driveway flanked by rows of conical trees.

  I say, “It’s so modern.”

  Dylan, slightly slurred, says, “You were expecting minarets?”

  Arif moans for Dylan to shut up, and rests his head against the window.

  Dylan says, “Reef, where’s your key?”

  “Didn’t need it,” Arif says. “My car opens the gate.”

  There is a very serious fence. “Great security,” I say.

  “Just buzz,” Arif says.

  Just buzzing doesn’ t seem like that great an alternative. I have a vision of my dad’s face if some unknown person in an ancient Volvo unloaded me in that kind of shape, but I can’t think of any other way to get Arif into his house.

  I punch the buzzer, the shortest buzz humanly possible, and drive in as the gate swings open.

  Arif’s dad is at the front door in pajamas and a striped bathrobe. He looks upset, but not homicidal. This is good. I don’t want to be responsible for Arif being the object of parental rage.

  Dylan does the drunk equivalent of helping Arif exit the backseat, and I sit there feeling useless and still worried I’m about to witness Arif getting creamed.

  But his dad, fumbling around with his glasses, just kind of hugs him and looks concerned as Arif tells him about the bad nachos.

  And then Arif’s dad says to Dylan, “Have you been drinking, D.K.?”

  Dylan says, “Not Arif. He’s sick.”

  “I can see that,” Arif’s dad says. “What about you?”

  “I have a designated driver,” Dylan says. “I’ll be fine. She’s driving me home.”

  Arif’s dad peers in at me. He says to Dylan, “There’s a young lady in that car.”

  Mr. Saad leans down toward me. “I’d be happy to drive both of you, and you could come get your car in the morning.” He pushes his glasses along the bridge of his nose, as if he’s trying to get a better look at me. “Or Mrs. Saad could drive you.”

  Mr. Saad looks approximately as happy as my dad would be with the idea of me driving a drunk guy around in the middle of the night. The Saads and my dad and the Donnellys are no doubt all in a secret support group for the militantly overprotective. But the last thing in the world I want to have happen—just before being struck by giant bolts of lightning—is to lose the opportunity to be alone with Dylan.

  I say, “Thank you so much, but I told my dad I needed to drop two friends off”—lie, lie, lie, even Arif seems to be jolted out of his nauseated, half-dead state by my creativity—“so I’ll be fine. But thank you. That’s very nice of you.”

  Mr. Saad does not look convinced, but before he can throw himself in front of the Volvo, Dylan jumps back in and I’m rolling down the driveway toward the open gate.

  And I’m pretty sure, I’m almost certain, that Dylan wants to be here with me, too. Which, except for the fact that he makes me pull over before we get back down to Sunset so he can throw up in the gutter, could be somewhat romantic.

  Maybe.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  DYLAN GETS BACK IN THE car, smelling disgusting, and we roll down Sunset, not talking to each other. Dylan hangs on to the door handle and stares into the street, as if fascinated by oncoming headlights. Then he closes his eyes.

  A stunning reconciliation with a guy who first throws up and then falls asleep, or worse, simulates sleep, seems less than imminent.


  In a maybe slightly louder-than-normal voice, I say, “Are you asleep?”

  Dylan makes a show of stretching, which is difficult for a tall person in my car. He pushes against the roof. He says, “I’m up now.” He does not sound very happy about this.

  I say, “Could we please talk?”

  “Isn’t that what you said the last time you were trying to bullshit me? No.”

  He closes his eyes again.

  I slightly poke him.

  “Emma,” he says. “Please. I feel like shit.”

  “Can’t you cut me five minutes of slack?”

  “No.”

  All I had wanted in life was to be alone in the car with him and for him to go, Hey, that was pretty bad but now I’m past it, hug, hug, hug, and basically acknowledge my existence. But whatever there was before is clearly gone. All that longing followed by what felt like the opening chapter of endless bliss and then, welcome to this.

  The car might be jerking a little, or possibly a lot, and Dylan puts his hand on the steering wheel and he barks, “Let me out!”

  We are sitting in front of a lit-up house on Alpine.

  “I get that you’re just in my car to get home. Go ahead.”

  Quietly, Dylan says, “Why are you being like this?”

  “Maybe because you dumped me on Valentine’s Day, which was totally justified, I get it, but now you won’t even speak to me and you look right through me and I hate going to school.” This is punctuated by me splattering tears all over like a showerhead that somebody went after with a hammer.

  “Aren’t you leaving out the part where you lied to me and made a fool of me?”

  “Is it impossible for you to believe I might be sorry?”

  “And made it very clear you’d rather be with Aiden?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you went over to Sib’s to hook up with him, okay?”

  What?

  “Who told you that?” I am pretty much screaming. “That’s not what happened!”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Dylan says. “I don’t want to listen to you trying to get out of it.”

  “How do you get from I’m sorry to I’m trying to get out of it? Do you just stay mad at people permanently?”

  “At least I don’t lie about myself& !” he shouts back. “Unlike you. I stayed away from you for how long out of respect for a nonexistent French guy? What an idiot! And then, February thirteenth, you decide it’s a good day to cheat with my brother? Hey, be my Valentine.”

  “I did not cheat with him!”

  “Why should I believe anything you say?”

  “Dylan! I kissed some random guy at the beach club, and then six months later Siobhan all but orders me to come over or she might jump out the window, and there’s the guy in the Jacuzzi with her. And all right, I got in out of cowardice. The things she was threatening to tell you if I didn’t: all true. You can call me nine kinds of bad person for that. But I didn’t want Aiden, hook up with Aiden, cheat with Aiden, or anything with Aiden other than push him away when he came at me, all right?”

  Dylan pauses. “Oh Jesus, Seed.”

  I dig around in my bag for a box of Tic Tacs and I give him a whole handful.

  I say, “Well, are you ever going to stop it?”

  He shakes his head. I can’t decipher if this is Dylan saying no or Dylan being rueful. “Maybe I’ll send you a one-word text message fifty-two times,” he says.

  “I’m sorry!”

  In a flatlined voice, Dylan says, “That fixes everything.”

  I turn the key in the ignition.

  “Nothing ever fixes anything, does it? Everything just gets hopelessly broken, and then we’re all permanently stuck with it.”

  He says, “That’s your philosophy of life?”

  “Like it’s not yours, too? Show me some evidence to the contrary. It seems remarkably accurate.”

  This is when he brushes back the hair at my temple and he kisses the side of my forehead.

  And when we get there, when my car has made its loud approach to his house, crunching toward the guesthouse on the part of the gravel that’s probably supposed to be a walkway, when he opens his eyes and his hand is covering my hand, when he walks around and opens my car door and takes my hand again, I rest my head against him for a minute.

  Then I follow him inside.

  • • •

  A light from the bed of white roses outside the bedroom window is the only illumination in the room.

  He has his arms around me, and he says, “Could we fast-forward to being okay? Skip the long emo conversation with crying and be okay?”

  I sink into his desk chair, and he spins me around.

  I say, “Probably not.”

  “What would I have to do?”

  “Two sappy sentences, maybe? One with a lot of clauses Massive reassurance?”

  He sits behind me on the bed. “I don’t do sap. Last time I tried to do sap, I invited you to that party. How did that work out for you?”

  Dylan swivels my chair until I’m facing him. “Shit. You don’t stop crying, do you?” He grabs the back of the desk chair and rolls me through the darkness into the guesthouse’s tiny kitchen. “I’ll give you sap. I have half your chocolate duck left over from Valentine’s Day.”

  “You bought me a chocolate duck?”

  “Okay, it was a swan and it came in a silver bag. Is that sappy enough for you? But it’s missing its head and neck.”

  “You decapitated my swan?”

  “I was hungry.”

  Dylan opens the refrigerator, which is completely filled with international take-out. Pizza, and tacos, and Indian, and Chinese rice boxes.

  “You were hungry. Have you been ordering snacks every night?”

  Dylan says, “This is dinner. I don’t eat with them. When Aiden’s not here, family life grinds to a halt. Not that I mind.”

  I touch his sleeve. “Your dad’s still . . . here?”

  He says, “We’re not going to talk about my dad. Ever. Suffice to say, he’s still here; Aiden’s not here; neither is my mom, mostly; and I’m leaving. Nothing has changed.”

  Dylan roots around in the refrigerator, behind what looks to be a quart of take-out Chinese soup, and pulls out an extremely wrinkled foil bag covered in silver mesh. He reaches in and breaks a wing off my swan and he sits on the kitchen table and feeds it to me. Establishing for all eternity that the universe, or at least Beverly Hills north of Santa Monica Boulevard, is not completely fucked.

  I say, “I got you the best valentine. It came from the fifties. It went with the dress.”

  “We’re also never going to talk about that party.”

  “Fine, just answer this one question: Did Siobhan flat-out tell you I went over there to get with Aiden?”

  He groans, “Yes. And we’re not talking about how I fell for that, either.” He raps his forehead against the door of a kitchen cabinet.

  Which is not—despite my complete sorry-ness and sopping up of all possible responsibility for everything I ever did—entirely inappropriate. Even though she’s the one I want to slam, Siobhan, the person formerly known as my best friend. As my any kind of friend.

  I say, “Christ, Dylan. If I want a list of things that I can’t talk about, I’ll stay home.”

  He says, “Shut up and eat.” He breaks off another piece and he outlines my lips with it. Withholds it a few inches from my mouth, very briefly, and then feeds me tiny, sweet splinters of dark chocolate.

  “I’m afraid if I keep teasing you with this duck, you’ll bawl again,” he says.

  “What if I gave you the valentine?”

  “What if I teased you?”

  At which point, he rolls the chair back into the bedroom.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  I WAKE UP TO BIRDS chirping, and a room filled with pale gray light. Which would be charming except it’s 9:40 in the morning and I’m still at Dylan’s house. My car is still parked in his drive
way. My head is on his pillow, and my clothes are draped over his desk chair.

  I’m wearing a T-shirt with Kurt Cobain on the front, no doubt the universe’s way of saying, Off yourself immediately and get it over with, because you are monumentally dead.

  On the other hand, we are so back together.

  My head feels spongy and I don’t even remember how I ended up falling asleep here. Which is, I guess, how falling asleep works. Wham, you’re down. Other than the imminent deadness part of it, sleeping over here was nice. Waking up to rain on the shingles and Dylan spread over three-quarters of his bed.

  Nine forty. Brunch with the Karps. Oh God.

  “I was supposed to be home from Siobhan’s at nine!”

  Dylan hands me my phone. Four missed calls. Which I slept through.

  And then there’s the exciting prospect of Dylan being reminded of my improvisational skills when I tell my dad some fairy tale all about how his (slightly debauched) princess is over at Siobhan’s house. Not how I’ve been cuddled up all night with the world’s most restless sleeper. Who seems remarkably calm under the circumstances, given that unless I fix this, he’s going to be executed by my dad.

  My only slim ray of hope is that if my dad tried to reach me on Burton’s landline, nobody over there is up before noon on weekends.

  My dad opens with: “Why aren’t you here?”

  I am feeling a confusing combination of dread, guilt, and extreme happiness. “I slept through your calls!” (True.) “I didn’t set the alarm on my phone.” (True.) “I’ve never been this late in my whole life!” (True.)

  He tells me how rude and inconsiderate I am in French, which is somehow more appalling than in English, although it no doubt beats being nailed with whatever term applies to girls who spend the night in boys’ beds.

  I apologize in French, as Dylan looks on, making faces at me. I politely motion that I’m going to cut his throat and he disappears into the kitchen.

  My dad says, “I’ll meet you there. Two cars.”

  “But all I have with me is jeans.”

  Jeans would be completely all right with the Karps and everybody else we know, including the Donnellys, but count as wardrobe disrespect with him when visiting anyone other than bears at the zoo.