Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “Siobhan, I’m fine! That pact was stupid! We’re both going to be fine.”

  “You need me! You know you do, you can’t cope without me, and I’m so out of here.” She is pulling on my arm, pulling toward the edge where the roof slopes down, across an expanse of tar paper and toward the tiles that are slick with mud and rain.

  “No! Siobhan! Stop!”

  “You can’t live without me,” she says, panting, pulling me along the roof, yanking on my wet hair. “Can’t live either way.” Her breath is labored as we struggle there, pulling and pulling away, pushing toward the edge as I maintain the wholly unrealistic hope that I can somehow talk her out of this.

  Because I see where this is going.

  This is going over the edge.

  I am not going over the edge.

  She is pulling me by my arm and by my hair, toward the edge of the roof. Each time I think I’m braced, that I’ve figured out how to balance myself, how to crouch down and push back with each new surface—tiles, and tar paper shingles that seem to tear like paper, and flat places covered with jagged little white stones, and then a slope that ends in puddled, muddy rainwater—we’re on another surface and I’m struggling again to keep my balance.

  I yell, “Siobhan, no!” and I keep trying to pull her back, but she’s stronger and we go down onto the flat of the roof, crawling over stones. I am pulling away and her nails are cutting into the skin on my forearms as I pull away from her grip. Almost free, not quite. I fall on top of her and she seems to be rolling away. But she’s taking me with her toward the edge, where the roof swoops downward and the rows of broken Spanish tile are treacherous, and the surface can’t be mastered.

  I yell, “Stop it! Siobhan, stop!” But I can’t pull away, she has my blouse and my hair and she’s on top of me now, rising to her knees and pulling me up with her.

  She says, “It’s a pact! You said! You can’t back out!”

  But I do. I back out. I end it.

  I grab onto a drainpipe just before we reach the sharp incline of the overhanging eaves, and I hang on.

  I’m crouched on the edge of the roof and I’m panting and soaked, and I’m not even cold.

  I have been running and running uphill. I have been rolling to the edge of the roof, sliding down a precipice of Spanish tiles and planes of gritty tar paper. Between my fingers, there is slime and a brown paste of decomposing leaves scooped from the rain gutter.

  From the rain gutter that saved me.

  The rain gutter I grabbed onto, onto the pipe that braced the rusty gutter to the roof, when she rolled over me, when she closed her eyes and grabbed me hard, when she tried to pull me with her, pull me down, down over the edge, and then I couldn’t hold her anymore. I couldn’t hold her back. Couldn’t hold back the dead weight of her, pulling and falling. All I could do not to go over, not to fly down with her, not to plummet through the branches to the awning, down, down to the hard sidewalk, all I could do was to push her off me.

  Was to push her over.

  Was to brace myself and push her as hard as I could, push her off me, push her headfirst off the roof, before she could pull me down with her.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  THE LAST TIME I SEE Dylan that night, I am alone on the edge of the roof, and he is standing by the stairwell. He is coming out of the stairwell. He is pulling himself erect. He is pushing back his hair, but it sticks to his face. Or maybe he has been there, crouching there, just outside the door all along. Maybe he saw.

  I’m pretty sure he saw.

  Drenched with rain, dark strands of hair dripping down his face.

  He peels off the wet black dinner jacket. And I think, Not here, what’s wrong with you, not here, not now, not again, not ever. He takes my arms and threads them through the wet sleeves, and he rolls the cuffs up just above my wrists.

  I am breathing fog and rain. I am shivering in the cold, wet jacket, and the sleeves hurt where my arms are scraped raw from the elbows to the wrists, my arms encased in gabardine and blood and rain.

  He says, “Go, you have to go.”

  I am nodding my head but there’s nothing to say. I am breathing hard, as if I had been running miles and miles, running hard through a ravine of dark inclines.

  He says, “Emma. Focus. We’re leaving.”

  I say, “Get off the roof.”

  There’s rain, and there’s breathing, and there’s the moment when he backs away.

  He says, “Do you know what to do?”

  “Just go away.”

  He says, “Go down the stairs and out behind the ballroom. Walk down to Hollywood Boulevard. Turn east. In a couple of blocks, it’s the Mayfield. There’ll be a bunch of taxis. Get in. Go to the Chateau. Or in front of a club. Are you up to walking?”

  I nod my head.

  I say, “I have to go get her.”

  Dylan says, “No. You don’t. Hear the sirens? Are you taking this in? I’ll walk you to the other staircase. At the bottom, there are people making out. Go out past the doorway, Hollywood Boulevard, east to the Mayfield, don’t hail a cab, just get one at the Mayfield. Do you have cash? Walk home.”

  I say, “Okay.” It is hard to climb down stairs, and when I step over the bodies at the bottom, nobody looks up.

  There are sirens and flashing lights and running.

  I go out the door, I go back out into the night, and I’m not the only person in a wet dress walking through the rain, down to Hollywood Boulevard. When the streetlights hit my dress, it glows. But I am not the only glowing girl walking away.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CONSIDER THE VIGIL: I’M NOT THERE.

  Three days after Afterparty. A hard rain is flattening magnolia leaves against my window, the sky is almost white between the branches. White and cold.

  Eighty-seven people have said yes to the vigil on Facebook. They are standing outside Cedars-Sinai Hospital, holding hands in hypocritical fellowship with everyone else who treated Siobhan like an expensive form of dirt. They’re posting pictures of rain-sodden votive candles, waterlogged teddy bears, and helium balloons with her name on them.

  Lia Graham recommends room deodorizer candles encased in pear-shaped glass to stay lit through the downpour, green for pine and yellow lemon zest. She is tagged on the event page in a knot of rain-drenched juniors singing inspirational songs. Waving their candles and praying for Siobhan to live. Waiting for her to die.

  I, on the other hand, am sitting on the floor of my closet. The screen of my phone glows through the darkness with all of Dylan’s texts that say some variant of Talk to me.

  And my one text message back that says No.

  I have watched “Tickle Penguin” on YouTube one hundred and sixteen times. I have watched a goose play with a cocker spaniel. I have prayed for her to live for three days straight, but unless you believe in the saving power of the ratty hotel awnings and the giant hydrangea bush that broke her fall, you are stuck with Occam’s Razor, which our physics teacher likes so much: The simplest solution is the likeliest; I pushed her off the roof, ergo, she dies.

  And no matter how many times emissaries of Religious Convo lead eighty-seven juniors waving room-deodorizer candles in chanting the Lord’s Prayer, it would take a huge number of screwdrivers to wipe out their ability to reason their way to the inevitable conclusion.

  If they knew.

  Even so, it seems highly unlikely that they’re going to start chanting, Our Emma, who art hiding in her closet, you are so not a walking exemplar of badness, the she-devil of Latimer Country Day, the harlot of the Hollywood Hills.

  Even I wouldn’t say that.

  Because every bad thing that a person can do, I just did.

  My dad, watching me sitting in the closet in the dark, but who knows nothing, is also trapped under the influence of Occam. I am sitting in the closet, ergo, I am sad because Siobhan has fallen.

  He offers to drive me down to Cedars to visit her, but how do you visit with a person in a medically induced coma? D
o you just stare at her unconscious face? Do you talk to her as if she could hear you, and pretend that she’s taking it in? Do you say, Hey, sorry I killed you, bye, but you don’t get to take me down no matter what asinine pact I accidentally said yes to?

  If things don’t get better, we’ll jump off a tall building? No.

  My dad is making soup: pea soup. Pea soup and French onion soup and chicken curry broth so far. This is as close to a mother as I’m going to get, a soup-making father who doesn’t understand a thing. And I think, Well, that’s pretty close.

  And I start to wish I could tell him, but of course, there’s no way.

  What happened that night and how hard it was raining and how it didn’t seem real and then it seemed like the only real thing in my life.

  My dad sits down outside the closet. The door is open a crack; I can see the window and the tree and the sky. I can see a slice of his plaid shirt, and an oven mitt.

  He says, “Ems, I know you aren’t ready to process this yet, and I understand, but I want you to hear me. Whatever happens to Siobhan, whatever she did and whyever she did it, it’s not your fault. Do you hear me? You’re a good friend, you’ve been very kind to her, and sweet, and you’re probably the reason she could cope for as long as she did.”

  Oh God, oh God, oh God. I am so not what he thinks I am, and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

  I say, “I’m not Emma the Good anymore, Dad, I’m sorry, I’m not.”

  More soup.

  He says, “Would you like to talk to Rabbi Pam? She’s worried about you.”

  I have visions of my dad trotting out Rabbi Pam and a minister and a priest—like a slightly dirty joke with the same crew walking into a bar—and giving them all equal time.

  This is who I am: A person who thinks of semi-dirty jokes in the middle of this. A person who keeps checking the computer, trolling for anything about what happened. For the nothing that means she’s still alive. For rumors and gossip and word on the street.

  Which is that Siobhan fell off the roof unassisted.

  Which is that she was drunk and stoned and crazy and belligerent all night, that she got into a hair-pulling catfight with an unsuspecting girl from Winston over nobody knows what, after which she tried to yank my hair out when I tried to put her blouse back on her.

  That she careened up to the roof screaming something incoherent about impact.

  That maybe her brain was so scrambled by a smorgasbord of Afterparty substances by then that she thought of her head as that seventh-grade welcome-to-science-class experiment where you toss a padded raw egg off a roof to see if it will crack on impact.

  Or maybe she thought she could fly.

  My dad says, “I see how difficult this is for you.” He is being so kind, he is trying so hard, I don’t deserve all of his soup and effort. “Would you like to come out of the closet and lie on the sofa? Give me your hand. Ems? Amélie?”

  It’s been all French for days.

  But I am screaming in English: “Don’t call me that!”

  He sits out there for hours. It’s like a weird pajama party game. He hands me in a pillow and a quilt from Montreal.

  I hand him back the quilt and he gives me my yellow comforter and some French Vogues and a flashlight.

  He says, “Do you want to play with Mutt?”

  I open the door and Mutt squeezes in and falls asleep on my shoes. He wheezes when he sleeps.

  We’re in the fourth day.

  Mutt is circling around my boots as if he’s looking for a special place to poop. I open the door and let him out in the backyard, where Jeff is sitting, nose to the back door, looking bereft, missing him.

  There is banging on the front door. Not the knocker, a fist.

  My dad gets off the floor. He says, “Come on. Maybe it’s Megan.”

  I say, “Is it Megan?”

  He shakes his head.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  DYLAN IS STANDING IN THE doorway in jeans and one of those extremely cool jackets that isn’t quite a sports coat but hovers over his torso as if his tailor just finished perfecting it. He is dressed up. Not that I think my dad will register this fact, given that there’s no tie involved.

  “I’m Dylan Kahane,” he says.

  Even though I can only see my dad from the back, I know what his face is doing. I know this is not the genre of boy my dad sees as being in the same story as me.

  “The orchestra geek,” Dylan says.

  My dad says, “The hell you are.”

  But he lets him come in, and Dylan walks through the front hallway and into the living room. He comes toward me where I’ve curled up on the couch. I start to get up and he holds me there, against his chest. I’ve been crying, off and on, for three days—why stop now? I press my face into the dark wool of the jacket, against the lapel, and I feel his chin on top of my head, vibrating, as if he were humming.

  Here I am, leading my new, improved, and not imaginary secret life in front of my father, between the piano and the shelves of books on the technical aspects of being insane. I am kissing Dylan, walking past the record player with cabinets with all my dad’s historic vinyl, holding Dylan’s hand. I am walking into my bedroom and closing the door.

  And the oddness of it strikes me, how I feel furtive, like a renegade bad girl, sitting chastely in my closed-door bedroom with Dylan across the room, yet I can sleep with him at his house without one single guilt-tinged scruple.

  And from across the killer girl’s pale green-and-yellow bedroom, Dylan says, “Hey.”

  I say, “Hey.” I say, “I’m sorry.” I say, “Nothing seems real.”

  Dylan says, “I’m sorry. I know. I keep thinking, if I’d just done something differently—”

  “I know.”

  Because this wasn’t one of those quicksand landscapes with an inevitable outcome. The kind where you can tell yourself that there was nothing you could do to stop it, it was a runaway train, it was a stampede of crazed cattle, it was kismet, fate, and preordained.

  I could have said no, said maybe, not said yes. All year.

  Dylan says, “I know you don’t want me over here, but you won’t answer the phone. I never should have let you leave there by yourself. I should have gotten you home. I should have figured it out.”

  “I think I told you to get lost.”

  “So what. I just stood there. Jesus.”

  And then I think, Siobhan is comatose, Siobhan is lying there at Cedars-Sinai and no one knows if she’s going to live or die, and I’m behind a closed door in my bedroom, engaged in teen romance.

  But it’s possible that our compatibility lies in him being a similarly bad person, because he says, “This isn’t why I came, and we don’t have to get into this, but are we still broken up?”

  I say, “I don’t know, but if I said we are, I take it back.”

  Dylan gets out of the vanity chair that he’s too big for and sits down next to me on the bedspread. “Your dad’s not going to shoot me, is he?”

  I lean my head against his shoulder.

  He says, “Did you tell him what happened yet?”

  What they say about soldiers in trenches with their mouths tasting like metal, that’s exactly how my mouth tastes. Like metallic terror.

  He says, “You’re going to have to go public pretty soon. You’re going to have to tell him. I’ve got your back, but we can’t just not tell anyone what happened.”

  Closet, closet, closet. Where it is silent and dark.

  “It’s already started,” he says. “Facebook. YouTube. Pictures of people going up the stairs. The bed collapsing under Paulina is going viral.”

  “Emma kills Siobhan. How many hits do you think that would get?”

  He says, “What are you talking about?”

  I just look at him.

  “I was up there,” he says. “I saw what happened. I thought, God, I’m sorry Emma, I should have figured it out, but you were under her and she was squirming around and I thoug
ht—I don’t know what I thought. I’m sorry. And then, it was so fast but it was pretty clear she wasn’t kissing you. When she was trying to kill you.”

  I am trying to stay on point. I am trying not to think about the fact that my boyfriend thought I was getting it on with my former BFF when, in fact, something quite different was transpiring.

  “She wanted us to jump together.”

  Dylan straightens up and shakes his head. He looks very grave, completely serious, no irony, no movement at the corners of his mouth, only a thin, tight line where his lips are pressed together.

  “She was trying to push you off the roof. If you hadn’t grabbed that drainpipe and thrown her off-balance, you’d be dead.”

  I am dizzy with the possibilities. If this is what he saw, or if this is what he thought he saw, or if this is what he’s making up to save me. If he just saw what he wanted to see, which was not me killing Siobhan.

  I look into his face.

  He is telling the truth. He thinks he is telling the truth.

  Maybe it is the truth.

  Maybe Siobhan was trying to kill me and I was so down for being friends for life, I didn’t notice just how short a life she wanted me to have.

  Maybe my best friend wanted me dead. Maybe she wanted us both dead, or maybe just me.

  Maybe my best friend was trying to kill me on the roof of the Camden Hotel.

  Maybe I killed her instead.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  MY DAD IS OUTSIDE MY door, and as he opens it, Dylan literally jumps off the bed, which makes it appear that we were doing something my dad wouldn’t approve of. Beyond sitting on my bed with the door closed.

  My dad says, “Emma.” He nods toward the living room. “Now.”

  I get up, smoothing my hair, smoothing my uniform (because I got dressed for school but didn’t go), looking incredibly guilty, although probably not of homicide.

  My dad nods toward the living room couch and it’s pretty clear that now that I’m out of the closet, we’re back to the fairy tale with the princess who is expected to do as she’s told. My dad looks shell-shocked. I would no doubt feel guilty as hell about this if I wasn’t already feeling guilty for so many other, worse things.