Afterparty(2)

My dad brushes sand off the cuffs of his pants and gestures toward the club, where, I can tell just by the way he’s frowning, there’s way too much perfectly tanned skin and visible fun. He rolls his eyes “Would you say this is more killer or more gnarly?”

I say, “Dad, I love you, please don’t get mad at me, but if you want these people to hire you, you can’t say those words out loud ever again.”

I don’t know when people actually said “killer” and “gnarly,” but I’m pretty sure my dad was in Quebec, speaking French, back when they did.

My dad says, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I have to decide if I want them to hire me.”

This would be the whole rest of high school in one place, and the place would be here. I have already decided.

Beyond the giant wooden deck of the main building, there are pools and shuffleboard and rows and rows of beach chairs, studded with giant striped umbrellas that skirt a lagoon on one side and go straight down to the surf on the other.

Kids my age seem to own the chairs and the fire pit and the snack shack by the lagoon. My father makes me promise that I will not, under any circumstances, even so much as dip my baby toe in that lagoon, which he is pretty sure is formed from toxic runoff from a storm drain.

“What if my hair catches fire from a rogue tiki torch?” I say.

“Ems, I’m sure there’s a highly trained staff of lifeguards with fire extinguishers if that happens.”

“Just so long as I can swim in the ocean when we move here.”

“If we move here.”

A hostess in white linen leads us to wicker club chairs on the deck next to Dr. Karp, the head of the Albert Whitbread Institute board of directors, and his wife, who are mounting a campaign to convince my dad that Los Angeles, far from being Sin City, is actually a lot like Heaven. Only with a beach.

It is hard to tell from here if all those kids are hanging on the outskirts of the beach club willingly and are having a wonderful time (in which case we should move here and join up immediately, despite the toxicity) or if they’ve been dragged here under protest to keep them penned up and away from the un-rich.

The piped-in music plays “I Wish They All Could Be California Girls,” followed by “California Dreaming,” a version of “Hotel California” with marimbas, and “I Love L.A.”

All I want at that moment is to be a California girl leading a normal California life, sitting by the lagoon, drinking, all right, a bottle of root beer, with my magically transformed California dad, who has become completely okay with me engaging in normal California teen activities.

For my whole life, I was that girl. The girl who wasn’t allowed to watch PG-13 movies until I turned thirteen—which made sleepovers tricky, since if I couldn’t, nobody else could. The one time I broke down and watched the forbidden movie, and my dad found out, I basically spent the next two weeks in my room, nodding my head during long, heartfelt talks about how disappointed he was, and didn’t I have a moral compass?

It wasn’t a ploy or a trick or a parental manipulation, either. The thought that I might not be Emma the Good filled him with woe. I cried so much that he made me crème br?lée with a burnt sugar crust, and I sobbed the whole time I was eating it.

By the time we hit Chicago, the only kind of coeducational activities that didn’t leave him in a state of overwrought parental panic were rehearsals of the Chicagoland Youth Orchestra.

Yet here we are.

Here I am, the girl who has been craving sugar all her life, in Candy Land. Here I am, standing on the exact sandy spot where I want my life as the girl previously known as Emma the Good Girl to begin. Here I am, sliding the sunglasses into my bag after I look at all the other beach club kids and see that cat’s-eyes aren’t an Audrey Hepburn kind of fashion statement at all; they’re just weird.

Mrs. Karp, who keeps putting her hand on my arm when she talks, says, “Your daughter is so lovely. I’ll bet you have to beat the boys off with a stick.”

Not that he wouldn’t, given a boy and a stick, but this is the completely wrong direction for the conversation to be going. In fact, two boys standing in line for the bar at the edge of the deck are at that moment checking me out. At least they are until my dad gives them a look suggesting that unless they avert their gaze, they won’t live long enough to put their shirts back on.

Mrs. Karp tells me how much I’ll like California, oblivious to my dad miserably trying to get the sand out of his shoes.

“But really, a new school that’s already started?” my dad says. “During junior year.”

“But school doesn’t start for days, and I’m a really fast packer!” (Also a highly experienced packer. I could be out of Illinois in forty-eight hours.)

Mrs. Karp pats my hand and says, “Isn’t she precious,” as if I weren’t actually there.

Then Dr. Karp tells my dad how he’s also on the board of Latimer Country Day, where half the kids at this very club (kids who appear to be drinking beer and hooking up in broad daylight halfway across this crowded strip of ritzy beach) go to school, and moments from now, I, too, could be attending.

I am quite certain my dad is appalled at the thought of me having anything to do with these kids. Every time Mrs. Karp offers to take me down to the lagoon to introduce me to some kids my age, he shoots me a don’t-you-dare look and I end up ordering more lemonade.