Afterparty(13)

Back in the day, when naked ladies were found in magazines and not online, Sib’s mom, Nancy, was crowned the best Miss February ever. Posed across two full glossy pages, she was billed as a sharpshooting, baton-twirling Texas cowgirl, with sparkly red cowboy boots, a Winchester, and a small quantity of strategically arranged red gauze.

She was already pregnant.

When Nancy showed up, still gorgeous, at a Playboy Mansion charity event a few months later, with the highest, tightest baby bump ever, someone from a porn channel stuck a mike in her face and asked what she’d been doing. She snarled, “I’m writing a memoir. I’m writing how to be pregnant and sexy, see?”

Two ghostwriters later, Pregnant and Sexy was born. So was Siobhan. Followed by Sexy Mom, Sexy Mom at the Office, and a host of other bestsellers that make Siobhan cringe.

Nancy’s taste in clothes still involves the absolute minimum of cloth.

Siobhan says, “You can’t wear that. That’s what she wore to church on Christmas. I’ll pick.”

Nancy has thirty-one pairs of sandals, each one high-heeled, with delicate thin straps and ties and buckles. I’ve tried on all of them.

My dad thinks malls are playgrounds of sick, unfettered materialism, thus eliminating any possibility that he’ll stumble on me teetering around in these sandals and small dresses while Siobhan screams at men who leer at her (this is the rule: they have to leer first) in languages other than English. Eliminating any possibility that he’ll see her poking me and saying, “Your turn, babycakes.”

“In the first place, no one is leering at me,” I tell her. “And in the second place, no.”

We are sitting on a wicker couch near the bar, sipping wine a guy in a turtleneck sent over.

Siobhan says, “Look at that one in the Ultrasuede blazer. Gross. He is completely leering.”

“Not at me. You might have one or two Miss February genes I didn’t get.”

She uncrosses her legs and extends one foot in front of her, rotating it as if she’s checking out whether her ankle works. A middle-aged guy in a sports coat looks her over. She lifts her glass and shouts something angry at him in what sounds as if it might be a real language, but isn’t.

“There,” she says. “Isn’t this so much more entertaining than if we were at French Club listening to those brats massacre French?”

The chasm between who I’m supposed to be and who I actually am, between Emma the Good and this person my dad cannot find out about, is growing daily. Siobhan is getting impatient that I won’t play more games with her, but even here, in the land of the impending earthquake, the ground can only fissure so fast.

I say, “I want to play, I do. Theoretically I get it, but I lack the skills.”

“You lack yelling-at-pervs skills? How can you walk down the street without yelling-at-pervs skills?”

I try to explain how I’ve spent my life chained up and left to rot without sounding geeky.

Siobhan says, “So basically, you’re like this inherently cool person who got corked in a magic genie lamp for sixteen years?” She seems more intrigued than upset. “You can be my science project! We can sloooooowly raise your body temperature and ease you into the twenty-first century.”

“There aren’t a lot of outlets for coolness in a magic lamp. Just saying.”

She says, “People think you’re cool. And not just because you’re with me.”

Whenever Siobhan comes up with one of these completely untrue reassuring assertions, I want to invent an un-cheesy substitute for the matching friendship necklace and slip one underneath her pillow.





CHAPTER NINE


PEOPLE DON’T THINK I’M COOL. I actually check out French Club and Lia looks away, as if she’s searching for a rock-hard, day-old baguette among the fake-French snacks so she can chase me with it.

Mara, maroon-haired and infinitely cooler than Lia will ever be, says, “So what if sign-ups are over? Why can’t you let her in?”

Lia makes a disgusted noise, aimed more at Mara than me. She sits down on a table directly in front of Mara, her butt on Mara’s notebook, blocking her altogether.

But the next day, when I take a chair next to Mara in the student lounge, thinking to bond over vintage hair clips, admiring her orange Bakelite bracelets and her Felix the Cat ring, she won’t even talk to me beyond monosyllabic frost. She swings her head around, facing away from me so fast, my face is slapped with a hank of maroon hair.

Arif, getting Orangina from a vending machine, watches her slouch away.

I say, “Wow. Was it something I said?”

Arif shakes his head. “She’s a bit prickly. The Global Studio scandal? That was her father. Lost the spread in Bel Air. Had to move to the Valley.”

“That’s why Lia treats her like dirt?”

“Don’t worry about her,” he says. “She still has the Beemer. It was rough for her last year, though. The pony pals wouldn’t let her forget it. Latimer has an obsession with good families—no one will utter the word ‘class,’ but you know what ‘good family’ means—and when the mighty fall . . .”

And I feel bad for her, I do, but mostly what I feel is even more doomed. At least her father’s scandal was a good-family kind of one—a glam studio power grab he lost. (I looked it up.) The kind without a junkie in it.