Afterparty(21)

“She said hello in Physics. The first day.”

“I’m soooo impressed. Let’s kiss her feet.”

I’m thinking that if someone with Kimmy’s assets can land in Social Siberia, we are permanently consigned to the gulag. Kimmy has a Teen Vogue face; a horse that people carry on about like addled fan girls; and a pack of older brothers who like her well enough that after school, they yell, “Hey, Kimster, you and your friends want a lift to Westwood?” Or wherever they’re going to carbo-load.

Also, having grown up in a house full of boys, Kimmy has a bunch of male buddies and looks perfectly comfortable climbing all over them, socking them, and showing them up in Physics. You get the feeling that Kimmy could watch boys light farts on fire and maintain her composure.

“You know,” Kimmy says, “my parents are going to a wedding in Houston and my brother, Kenny, is having a party Saturday.”

“Is that the water polo one?” Siobhan says.

“The soccer one. The water polo one is in college.”

“Maaaaybe,” Siobhan says. “Actually, very likely.”

“And it won’t be like one of those god?awful back-to-school keggers, either,” Kimmy says loudly for her not-that-distant audience.

Then she looks at me. I am holding up a french fry that is dripping ketchup onto my tray. There is no possibility whatsoever that my dad will agree to a high school party in a house with no parents home. This is in the you-can-go-when-pigs-fly range of not happening.

“Oh, her,” Siobhan says, glancing over. For a minute, I’m afraid that she’s dumping me for Kimmy. “No offense, Kimmy, but Emma doesn’t do high school parties. Em can’t stand immature boys.”

Which makes me sound a lot more interesting than saying my dad won’t let me go unless her mom, her dad, and a large contingent of precision-trained chaperones imported from Victorian England are swarming the place, and by the way, I’m grounded forever, so even that won’t work. I give Siobhan a thank-you kick under the table.

“I really appreciate the invitation,” I say.

“You and Dylan Kahane,” Kimmy sighs. “Ever since his god?awful brother Aiden graduated, he hardly goes anywhere either.”

This is not, strictly speaking, true. I know this because now that I’m too embarrassed by the kiss that didn’t happen to talk to him directly, I’m stuck somewhere between straight-up Facebook-stalking Dylan and merely being very, very interested in everything he ever did, does, or will do.

He would appear to have spent the better part of the summer in resorts on the Mediterranean with Arif, who does a lot of waterskiing on an unidentified European lake, Dylan (literally) in tow, and eating dinner with twenty-seven other people somewhere that houses have extremely large dining rooms. Somewhere the women wear Chanel or hijabs. Or both.

There he is in London with an arm around Arif and his other arm around a woman wearing a dress so short the jacket she’s thrown over it falls below the hem. Dylan and Arif look quite pleased with themselves, and the girl looks to be ecstatic. There he is in Mexico with Sam Sherman, eating taquitos.

Lately, he is tagged all over Westwood with a recurring set of girls in UCLA sorority tees covered with interlocking triangles, one feeding him a Diddy Riese cookie. You can’t see who she is, only her arms, and hands, and manicure.

Kimmy smiles at me. “Well, I hope you come anyway.”





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


SIOBHAN SAYS, “I TOLD YOU it was going to get better.”

“For you!”

“Come on. You have to find a way to come to this stuff.”

“It’s never getting better. My life completely sucks. You can’t even call my life a life.”

Siobhan says, “We just have to get you out of here. Big-time. That’s all it would take. For starters.”

“Not happening.”

She says, “It’s completely happening. You want a pact? Okay, here goes: If things aren’t looking a whole lot better for both of us by the end of the year, we should jump off a tall building.”

“Sign me up.”

“You’re in,” she says. “Pact.”

I say, “Sure, whatever, pact. If it doesn’t get any better than this, we should light each other on fire.”

“That’s not the pact. It’s acrobatic, not incendiary. If things still suck.”

Things do suck all weekend.

While Siobhan is at Kimmy’s party and at a club on the Strip with Wade, the tennis guy from Burton’s club, my only recreational activitiy is playing with Mutt and Jeff, the dogs from next door. Then it turns out that I wasn’t supposed to venture into the backyard, as “grounded” means locked inside the house. My dad says if I keep testing the limits, this really will last until I’m forty.

I say, “I was trying to cooperate. It’s not like I was sitting in the house thinking, ‘Hey, when he goes to the grocery store, I’m going to test the limits by petting some bulldogs.’?”

My dad says, “Very funny. I believe you. Now get in the house.”

Megan: He said until you’re 40???

Me: Yes maam. I might have screwed this up.

Megan: Asking for a car while drunk? You might have. Why were you drinking anyway? You shouldn’t drink.