Afterparty(16)

I say, “But you don’t take anything for it.” Big mistake.

“Don’t like the pills. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, bags under the eyes.”

My dad is switching rapidly into doctor mode, getting his game face on.

“But not everyone feels that way,” Siobhan says cheerfully, “so I sold them.”

“You’re selling Adderall?!” my dad says.

I am one hundred percent certain I would know if Siobhan sold pills, if her Econ project involved marketing pharmaceuticals. My dad, on the other hand, looks completely unnerved at the possibility I’m hanging with a drug dealer and future obstacle to World Peace.

“No worries,” she says. “Long time ago.”

I kick Siobhan under the table. Hard.

“Whoa!” She kicks me back. “Just kidding. I have a very dry sense of humor.”

We play out the rest of the game very, very fast in almost absolute stone silence.

When we finally decamp into my bedroom, behind a closed door, Siobhan starts giggling, rolling around on my bed hugging a pillow.

“That went well,” she says. “But he still loved me, right?”

I don’t even know what to say.

“Stop looking at me like I run a cartel!”

I say, “Sib, you don’t do drugs, right?”

Siobhan throws the pillow. “Right, because vodka in a Big Gulp is the gateway drug to more vodka in bigger gulps. And you’re asking me because . . .”

I shrug.

“Because I was a screwed-up twelve-year-old?” she says. “Have you ever seen me take drugs? Do I have sacks of drugs lying around my bedroom? Oh no, is it the Oxy I put in your orange juice? Because sixth grade, it was the third stepfather, the pervy one she ditched in two weeks, and we moved back to New York and Nancy started dating freaking Burton and she tried sending me to freaking boarding school. So I had some extra pills. Get over it!”

She is picking up and putting down everything in my room. The silver brush and comb from Montreal. The small framed photo of my mother with me as an infant in a pom-pom hat. Snow globes from every city where we’ve ever lived.

I want to scream, “Don’t touch that!” every time she picks up something else, I want to scream until I don’t feel anything but the vibration of screaming. So it’s not like she’s the only screwed-up person in the room.

My dad keeps knocking on my bedroom door, offering us snacks, I’m pretty sure so he can make sure Siobhan isn’t shooting heroin into my veins. When he leaves for a night meeting at Albert Whitbread, he kisses me on both cheeks at the front door, looking toward my bedroom where Siobhan is sprawled on my bed, leafing through my collection of Vogue Paris.

He squeezes my hands, and even with my eyes closed, I would know these squeezes were a warning.

He says, “She’s out by ten. And don’t leave the house.”





CHAPTER ELEVEN


YOU KNOW HOW IN THE morning, everything is supposed to look all shiny and better? It doesn’t.

My dad makes waffles with blueberry smiley faces, like he did when I was seven. I’m pretty sure this is because (1) he wishes I were seven and (2) he wants me in the best possible mood so he can tell me that following our (trashed) Family Game Night, courtesy of my (trashed) best friend, he wants me to stay home more. I am not supposed to mistake this for being grounded; it is intended more as extreme family bonding. Or of me bonding with the inside of our house. Or of me bonding with anybody other than Siobhan.

And I understand his concern, I do. He’s not being mean, he’s being worried. I get that. But people change, right? She was a wrecked twelve-year-old, but it’s not like she’s still in that same wrecked place. Not everyone who screws up is doomed to be, well, doomed forever, right?

I wish I could explain this to him, but he’s so shaken up, I’m afraid if I add even one tiny sliver of unpleasant information, it will be the straw that got the camel sentenced to fifty years to life in solitary.

So I eat breakfast and I don’t say a word. Which, just to be clear, is not the same thing as lying. It’s more like not being argumentative. Not being confrontational. Not being completely stupid. Not being completely honest.

By the time he drops me at school, I feel so wrung out from the past two days, I just want to sit under a tree. Alone.

Dylan, walking up from the parking lot, says, “You look wiped. You liberate more quadrupeds last night?”

All right, possibly not alone.

I say, “You torment any bipeds? Other than me.”

Dylan tsks. “Somebody tormenting you, Seed?”

I pull a tiny pumpkin bread out of my backpack and break it in two. It’s difficult to think of my dad, who baked this still-warm pumpkin bread and tucked it into my pack, as the tormentor.

Dylan says, “You bake? If you baked this, forget school and open a bakery.”

“My dad.”

“The man’s a baking genius.”

I am in such a state of pathetic reverie, I am actually marveling at how the crumbs of pumpkin bread that fall onto his white shirt before he flicks them off match the rusty brown flecks in his eyes. I am watching him push his hair behind his ear and actively holding myself back from touching that hair. I am speaking to myself in command sentences: Do not touch hair. Keep breathing. Say something conversational.