Afterparty

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  He says, “Why is that boy in your bedroom?”

  I don’t say anything. Surprise, Dad, I’m a killer liar sex fiend and sitting in my bedroom is Exhibit One?

  Maybe not.

  I sit down on the couch, as far away from him as I can without perching on the armrest. Cradling a cushion in my lap, but I still feel unprotected, as if I’m being showered with embers and my uniform is melting off and here I am, uncovered, with no sign of being a student, or in high school, or the best of the best of the best.

  At his end of the couch, my dad says, “Emma, are you pregnant?”

  This from the man who wouldn’t sign the parental waiver to get me out of Issues in Modern Living, where I was forced to learn to roll a condom onto produce.

  “No! Why is it always about girls getting pregnant? Is that why you tried to keep me locked up here, so I wouldn’t get pregnant?”

  “I take it I didn’t do a very good job of keeping you locked up, eh?” It’s that Canadian “eh?” thing that gets to me, it still so gets to me. I feel so sorry for him, stuck with me, so sorry for what I am about to put him through.

  “Emma,” he says. “We’ve always been very honest with one another. You can talk to me about anything.”

  It is the moment of truth. Or of no truth. In the moral hierarchy, where does lying stack up next to shredding your father? With the corollary issue of my insides and the shredder, when he knows, and he gives me that look, only gone exponential, and there’s nothing left of me but bad genes and poor impulse control.

  I say, “No, I can’t. We’re not honest with each other at all. And everything we don’t talk about just exploded.”

  My dad just looks at me.

  I say, “Say something.”

  I am thinking that this will be the last sentence before I completely expunge any notion he might have of my Emma the Good–ness, and how wonderful I am, and his belief that if he’s a good enough father, he can somehow prevent me from turning into her.

  So I just say it: “I’m her. You might as well have stayed in Montreal and let everyone throw things at me, because I deserve it.”

  From his end of the couch, my dad says, “You know that we left Montreal because of me. Not you, Ems. And no one wants to throw anything at you.”

  “Have you been to Lac des Sables? Where I never have to go again.”

  My dad is leaning toward me now, but not actually touching me, as if I might be a stick of some volatile explosive. Which I might be.

  He says, “Ems, this is a difficult moment. I understand that. Siobhan is in the hospital. You have something going on with this boy. I’m not sure where Canada comes into this, but I’m going to sit with you until we sort it out.”

  “Do. Not. Go. Psychiatric. On. Me.”

  “Ems! Look at me. Look up. This is what parental looks like.”

  By now I’m shouting at him and I can’t stop. “Don’t you get it? I’m her! No matter what you did and how far from home you stashed me, I’m a total fuckup. Look at me! I look exactly like her! I just go around doing whatever I feel like doing and I don’t even feel guilty enough about it to stop.”

  My dad, who is by this point three inches away from me and white, pretending that he’s still calm, says, “Don’t you ever, for one moment, blame a single decision you’ve made on who your mother was.” He shakes his head. “And I think you might be exaggerating. Just a little.”

  “No I’m not! You know I’m not or you wouldn’t have kept me locked up here!”

  “Ems, if I’ve been inflexible, we can discuss it. But it’s because the world is a dangerous place. Here especially. No other reason. Not because I don’t think you’re wonderful.”

  “I’m not that wonderful.”

  Compass: You are a master of understatement.

  My dad says, “You’re wrong.” He sounds so sure and uncomprehending. “Teenagers have lapses in judgment. It’s expected. I don’t know what you possibly could have done that makes you feel this way about yourself, but I know you, and it’s not going to change what I think of you. I love you.”

  I scream, “Even if I killed Siobhan?”

  “Even if you did what?”

  This is when Dylan comes out of the bedroom, when my dad stands up and says, “You need to go home.”

  Dylan, who is backing toward the door, stops and says in extremely bad French, “Sir. Dr. Lazar. She didn’t. You need to hear this. She thinks that she did, but she didn’t.”

  My dad says, “Of course she didn’t.”

  On his way out the door, Dylan calls back, “And she’s not anything like her mother!”

  My father follows Dylan out the door.

  • • •

  When my dad comes back, he is teary and ever so slightly furious.

  I say, “Before you even say anything—”

  He says, “Tell me what happened Saturday night.”

  Deep breath.

  Then I tell him.

  I tell him everything in gory detail. The window, the taxi, Dylan leaving Latimer, Paulina’s suite, the all-girl limo that I wasn’t in, the rooftop and the rain. And every time I say another true sentence, I feel as if I’m punching him in the face.

  He is pacing in front of the couch. He says, “We can deal with this.” It sounds as if he’s brainstorming, not as if he actually believes it. “You were frightened and you took off. We’ll talk to the police. We’ll talk to Siobhan’s mother. We can deal with this.”

  I say, “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”

  “What happened on that roof is not your fault. Entendu?”

  “Yes it was! What was I even doing there?”

  “That we have to talk about. Parties, taxis, drinking, drugs.” He is ticking it off on his fingers. “What am I leaving out? But this we have to handle first.”

  “Boyfriend,” I say. “You left that out.”

  He frowns. Then he says, “I’m a sucker for anyone who says my baby girl didn’t commit capital murder.”

  This is so extremely not funny that I think he might have snapped.

  He says, “This is the one you’ve been studying with?”

  I nod.

  He says, “Ems, the boy was there. He saw what happened. You were drunk and in the middle of it.”

  “I wasn’t that drunk.”

  “You were drinking and in the middle of it. Either way, that poor girl was trying to push you off the roof. He was a few yards away. He saw. I’m staying with his version.”

  “You have no idea—”

  “I know you.”

  “You don’t even. Weren’t you listening? I’ve been doing things all year. Pacts with Siobhan and all kinds of things.”

  “You rode a horse down Mulholland,” he says. “It’s not the worst thing anybody ever did.”

  I don’t even want to know how he knows that. “All I’ve done since we landed in this state is lie to you. That first day, at that beach club, I kissed some guy I didn’t even know.”

  “In those terrible plastic sunglasses.”

  I don’t know what I have to do to get him to see. “Everybody thought I had a secret boyfriend, and I made that up too.”

  “Lots of girls have secrets from their parents,” he says. “It’s part of growing up.” You can just hear him saying this in a similarly clueless way to the clueless parents of his pathologically dishonest patients who kill cats.

  “Stop making excuses for me! Stop believing I’m this wonderful person who couldn’t possibly do anything wrong. Admit you’re disappointed.”

  He says, “I know you.” As if this were definitive. “I believe you’re a wonderful person who did a lot of things wrong. As did I. That doesn’t make you a killer, or Fabienne, or—I regret I ever used this word with you—a disappointment.”

  “Like you’re not disappointed? Please.”

  “Of course I’m disappointed! You’ve been sneaking out of my house for six months. I should have listened when you said to chain you to the piano.”<
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  “It’s not a joke! You should have listened when I said to let me go out. You should have trusted me.”

  “Not the moment to tell me to trust you.”

  “Sorry.”

  He looks at me and he isn’t scowling, which is good under the circumstances. He says, “I think the boyfriend you didn’t make up is still in the courtyard.”

  “No!”

  “Do you want to ask him if he’d like to come in?”

  “Seriously?”

  He nods.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  SIOBHAN WAKES UP.

  Nobody thought that she would, but she does.

  And when I see her, weeks later, battered and bandaged and hooked up to machines, when they let people in, I can’t help it, I love her again.

  I see the green eyes, part open and a little crusty, and the ashy blond hair with roots badly in need of some attention, and her unmanicured fingernails, and I know how much she must hate this.

  And then I think, I’m in complete denial. She wanted to kill me. This is bad.

  “Way to screw up a pact,” she says.

  I’m so thrown off, it’s difficult to form a sentence.

  “Yeah, well, if I’d kept the pact, we’d both be dead.”

  “That,” Siobhan says, looking around the hospital room, “was the point. The point was not to still be here and damn straight the point was not for me to go to Austen-fucking-Riggs while you’re screwing some college geek. This is not how it was supposed to turn out.”

  Austen Riggs is where kids who ventured over the line from out of control to mental cases went to get better. It’s where Courtney Garland went after she tried to gas herself with car exhaust in her father’s eight-car garage in October, and she got better. Second semester, she came back, transferred to Campbell Hall, and got onto the cheer squad.

  Although it’s hard to imagine Siobhan cheering, no matter how mentally shored up.

  She says, “It was a pact. You said you’d do it.”

  The fact that I thought it was a joke when she first proposed this pact, the fact that I was so busy overlooking serious craziness and joking when I said, sure, we should do that if things don’t improve, that’s just what we should do, has evidently evaded her.

  “Yeah, but on that roof, it had to be pretty obvious, even to you, that that wasn’t what I wanted.”

  She is breathing so heavily and loudly, I’m afraid that the little jagged lines, the peaks and valleys of her monitor, will spell out “SOS” and bring forth frantic nurses and a crash cart. “What do you mean, even to me?”

  I say, “You were kind of chemically impaired.”

  “I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” she says, grasping my hand. Her fingers are dry and wiry. “I said what I wanted to do, and you came with me. Like always. I said ‘pact’ and you came. We had a pact.”

  “Siobhan, did you not notice I was trying not to?”

  Trying not to what? Kill, be killed, die together at the age of sixteen because of a misunderstanding, what?

  I say, “People think you were trying to kill me.”

  “What!”

  “People think—”

  “I heard you,” she says. “And that’s not what people think, is it? That’s what you think. Isn’t it? It is! It’s what you think!”

  There it is. There is no answer that would work for both of us. But this is my answer. I say, “Yes. That’s what I think because that’s what happened. By the end, it was you pushing me.”

  She pulls away, gazing past my head and toward the door, to the hospital corridor, past wheely racks hung with pouches of clear liquids, past surfaces of fresh flowers and unopened gift bags from Stella McCartney and Fred Segal. “Never mind,” she says. “I thought I could trust you, but obviously not.” She is playing with the ends of her bangs, twirling her hair, but will not look at me. “Well, tant pis!” she says.

  “Siobhan, this is not a ‘tough shit’ kind of situation—”

  “No. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we should be friends at all. If I can’t trust you, what’s the point?”

  EPILOGUE

  IT ISN’T THE ENDING I EXPECTED.

  Standing on the roof in the rain, the colored lights of Hollywood Boulevard blurred in the sky, when I was absolutely certain that Siobhan was dead, and Dylan saw me do it, and that I was evil incarnate and not just some moderately bad good girl who screwed up.

  It’s the ending that comes after the last scrap of the drama, when life goes on, and even though my life has holes in it where people used to be, I’m still here at the food bank, shelving cans of tuna and boxes of mac and cheese with Megan and Joe.

  Also, I go upstairs.

  Rabbi Pam says, “Finally! Come in.”

  I slam the door to her office so hard, a book falls off her bookcase. Then I have a more generalized meltdown about the unfairness of certain key aspects of life. She doesn’t disagree or say that God will fix it or try to teach me how to crochet.

  For this, I’m grateful.

  I say, “So, am I part of this religion or not?”

  She shrugs. She says, “I choose it for myself every day. And I suspect that you do, too. I could lend you some books.”

  We are looking out her window toward downtown. Below, Mrs. Loman is patting an even older man on the shoulder as he sets off, shuffling, across the parking lot with his bag of food.

  I say, “Yeah, books would be good.”

  I am repairing the world, one grocery bag at a time.

  And I haven’t told a lie in three weeks. That’s kind of good, right?

  The compass says, Three weeks. World’s record. You are so not out of the woods.

  It’s a depressing thought, but does anyone ever get out of the woods? Was there supposed to be a moment of blinding clarity when the path through the thicket appeared, brightly illuminated, and Good, Bad, and Morally Neutral all sorted themselves out, slightly messy but completely unambiguous, like egg yolk and egg white and shell?

  If so, I missed it.

  So here I sit, deciding for myself. Emma the Tentative. Emma the Previously Unfamiliar with the Truth. Emma Who is Not Fabienne, Emma the Good Enough.

  Megan says I’m inspirational.

  Joe walked up to her front door and knocked and Megan announced she was going out to dinner and a movie, and drove off in Joe’s car to the Arclight, where they shared a giant Coca-Cola and a vat of highly salted popcorn. Her parents stood there in the front hall in Los Feliz with their mouths hanging open. No one died.

  It is difficult for me to extract even the smallest shred of inspiration from what I did.

  I celebrated the High Holy Days in September. I dragged my dad to Beth Torah, which was weird. I fasted on Yom Kippur, which, if you’ve never been there, is a total bloodbath of everybody confessing an extensive list of sins in alphabetical order, forgiving other people, and asking God for forgiveness for nine hours straight. And here we are, three weeks later, and I still feel about as morally fit as roadkill.

  The moral compass has been shrieking, Honesty is the best policy! Nothing good happens on the Strip after midnight! Do not unhook your bra in the presence of others! for years. And did I listen?

  I try a do-it-yourself making-amends thing.

  I tell Miss Roy I wasn’t sick a single time I told her I was sick and signed myself out, and she gives me a week of detention.

  I tell Dylan the gruesome details of the Afterparty list and watch him cringe for forty-five minutes.

  I tell Kimmy how I rode Loogs in the middle of the night, and he’s really a nice horse, and I’m sorry, and she says, “I know, but don’t tell Chelsea, or she’ll probably kill you.”

  I feel somehow a lot more secure about my ability to cope if people try to kill me. I am still not that good at coping when they leave.

  I miss Siobhan. This is no doubt sick, but I do.

  As for Dylan, he insists he hasn’t left me. Generally, he is sitting across from me at the Griddle when
he says this, wearing a Georgetown T-shirt. I am cutting twelfth-grade assembly and watching him eat a syrupy stack of red velvet pancakes, which apparently do not exist—at least not really good ones—in Washington, D.C., or the entire state of Maryland. He is reduced to IHOP back there.

  He says, “Seed. We’re here. I miss you. Nothing has changed.”

  I say, “Note the T-shirt.”

  But when we are leaning against each other, walking around the corner at Sunset and Fairfax, back to our two cars, me heading to Latimer and him heading home to catch a shuttle to the airport, he says, “You have to have a little faith in people.” He is pushing against me and I push back. “You have to have a little faith in yourself.”

  I put my arms around him and I rest my head against his chest. I hear his heart. And I think, Maybe I will.

  Maybe I do.

  Acknowledgments

  First, thank you to my agent, Brenda Bowen, whose judgment, savvy, and expertise continue to inspire absolute trust, and whose literary sensibility remains awe-inspiring. More than I could have hoped for, and what I hoped for was pretty far over the top.

  Huge thanks to Afterparty’s two editors—both brilliant, creative, and a joy to work with. Jen Klonsky, who first acquired my novels, is a whirlwind of enthusiasm and a master brainstormer, and I would probably never forgive her for leaving Simon Pulse if I didn’t love her so much. I was terrified at the concept of a new editor, but Patrick Price’s intellect, energy, and humor bowled me over. Patrick, I so value your ideas, your amazing eye for detail, and the way the manuscript has developed with your guidance. Plus it’s really fun to work with you.

  Actually, there isn’t one person at Simon Pulse who hasn’t been wonderful. Bethany Buck, many hugs and thank you. Carolyn Swerdloff in marketing has been holding my hand and doing fabulous things above and beyond for the past two years, now with the help of the dynamic and sweet Emma Sector. Mara Anastas has been kind and darling. Paul Crichton is a truly generous magician, and Lydia Finn the most amazingly effective, proactive, and genuinely nice person. Jacket designer Jessica Handelman is inspired (and also prescient). Michelle Fadlalla, Venessa Carson, and Anthony Parisi have done all kinds of beyond great things right from the start. And Mary Marotta and Teresa Brumm, just wow. Both Nicoles, Ellul and Russo, have been lovely, as has Courtney Sanks, and as for my local rep, Kelly Stidham—I am so lucky. (And, Dawn Ryan, I miss you.)