Afterparty(22)

Me: Don’t rub it in.

Siobhan: U won’t believe where I am.

Me: Where?

Siobhan: Skybar. Kid at Crossroads party knows someone having other party on the roof.

Me: What Crossroads party? What happened to Kimmy’s party? I otoh am spending my Sat night studying for SAT.

Siobhan: U cd be here. Studying for life of fun.

Me: Don’t rub it in.

? ? ?

On Monday, after school, Siobhan is sitting on my bed, bouncing. She’s not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be languishing in solitary. But I feel as if, having shown no attitude (seriously: none) all weekend, I deserve some minor bending of the rules. And I didn’t get to see her at school because Nancy took her to get hair extensions instead, which is evidently time-consuming.

“I finally get why this godforsaken place doesn’t just sink into the ocean,” she says. “Parties!”

I say, “It was that good?”

“Compared to what I was expecting: legendary. And this was Kimmy’s party. This is what their average parties look like. Because then Grey Burgess, this kid from Crossroads, took me to this other party in Santa Monica with these other Crossroads kids. OMG, as we say in L.A. It was like metrosexual youth on steroids. Not actual steroids.”

“Do not say OMG,” I say. “I mean it. Next you’ll start wearing headbands.”

Siobhan is bouncing on my bed and off the walls.

I say, “Sibby, are you all right? Did you, like, take something?”

“Don’t be such a baby! If I’m happy, I must be on coke? Is there a hole in my septum? Are my nostrils bleeding? Oh no, I’m having a heart attack!”

“I never said coke.”

“Listen to me. Latimer is famous for parties. Constant parties. Holiday parties. Beach house parties that defy description. And an afterparty in the spring that beyond defies description. Oh my God. This afterparty. Last year it was in a warehouse in the toy district. There was a bar at the center of a maze. It was smoking. Actual smoking, special effects.”

“There’s a toy district?”

“It’s industrial. It’s downtown. It was incredibly cool. Until the police closed it down, but by then it was four a.m., so no one cared anymore. Don’t you get it? I finally found something good for us to do!”

Siobhan holds up her phone and shows me a fuzzy YouTube video of flashing lights and smoke and dusky glamour, almost like a riff on the unspeakably romantic black-and-white nightclubs in old movies.

“This is from Grey, from last year,” she says. “You have to get out of this house. The entire Strip is down the street from you. We have to go to Afterparty. This will be so good for you! Your coming-out party of cool. We can go in an all-girl limo, and we can pregame, and then we can dance in a circle and guys can fall over dead crawling to get to us.”

“Dream on. I’m never getting out of here.” It’s pretty clear that the magnitude of crackdown following my foray into, all right, moderate badness, but still no boys or drugs or parties or orgies or arrests, precludes any fun whatsoever.

I’m not even allowed to go to the food bank, where by now the computer has probably shut itself down in protest against being abused by well-meaning volunteers. And no amount of going, “Dad, wait, what about ‘Enter the gate of the Lord, if you’ve fed the hungry’?” “What about ‘You shall leave the gleanings of your fields for the poor’?” gets any response beyond, “You shall keep your kid safe, even over her protests,” which I’m pretty sure he made up.

But still, that video, the pulsating bursts of light, the hints of music and the kids all in each other’s arms, the limo and dancing in a circle in a dress that refracts light like a prism . . .

Siobahn says, “Think of this as a math problem. How hard can it be to get you from point A to point B in a field of moving taxis?”

“How about impossible?”

Siobhan starts shaking my shoulders, bouncing higher and higher on the bed, which has more trampoline potential than I’d ever realized. She yells, “Wake up! Look at this window! It’s perfect. Opens out, no screen. We need a pact. We have to get you party-ready by Afterparty. We are so going—and you’re completely unprepared. Do you want to be the lamby at a wolf orgy? You like lists; we’ll make a list. Make out. Do shots. Get stoned. Climb out window. Go to many, many parties. Hook up. Hook up all the way. Finish and we go to Afterparty.”

“You are seriously losing it.”

“Get a pen. We’ll make this list right now. The Afterparty prep list. Let’s go in a limo and you have to stand up through the sunroof and scream.”

This sounds quite tame.

“But before then, check marks. Many, many check marks. We’ll start slow and work up. Do you have kissing on there?”

“Top of the list.”

“Okay. Beer pong. It’s disgusting, but you’re the last kid in this country who can’t play. And you have to win. And you have to flash someone, and you have to smoke some weed and you can go harder from there.”

“Siobhan, I might possibly want to avoid the pharmaceuticals.”

“Jesus. Not heroin, coke. One little line of coke and some itty-bitty pills. And sex, obviously. And you have to get totally shitfaced. At a party. And you have to dance and you have to take off some major clothes and sext.”