Afterparty(24)

I try to think about it. Because, okay, how hard would it have been to ignore Siobhan banging on the front door? But I couldn’t even do that one small thing. I am completely incapable of being the girl I’m supposed to be.

This is when I reach the opposite of spiritual epiphany, a moment of wrung-out clarity: I don’t want to be the girl I’m supposed to be.

Duh.

Not being her was the point of California. All right, it was perhaps incompatible with keeping my dad happy. But given that a roasted chicken breast, green beans, and heirloom tomato slices were just slipped through my door, as if I were a prisoner whose crimes are so appalling that her gourmet jailer can’t stand to see her face, how realistic an option is Good Girl?

Afterparty, on the other hand, sheathed in glamour and Hollywood noir and decadent sophistication, glittering slightly in the darkness, sparkling as I turn it over in my mind’s eye, is beckoning and dreamy and alluring.

That is who I want to be, a not-afraid, cool, glamorous person, who yields to temptation on purpose and is happy about it.

The list of all the strange and scary things I have to do in order to become that person is crunched into a ball in the gilded Florentine wastebasket, tucked under my desk. If the choice is feeling like this versus being Afterparty girl, crushing the compass under my four-inch heels, it’s Afterparty all the way.

Because I just can’t do this anymore.

At breakfast, my dad says, “Can I trust you to stay at school?”

“Obviously not. I’m the worst person in the world. Why don’t you chain me to the piano?”

In a cold, increasingly familiar voice, he says, “Fine, stay here.”

“Dad! I’m sorry! It’s school! I have to go to school.”

“And where were you again last Wednesday?” He walks over and unplugs the TV, purely a symbolic gesture, but I get it, and he leaves for work. I’m stranded here, not sure if it’s okay to turn on the den computer to do homework, or what I have to do to make this end, and no doubt talking back was yet another poor choice.

I say, “Screw it,” and I go outside to lie in the grass with Mutt and Jeff. I look at the sky, which is brilliant, blue and cloudless. But I feel too guilty to enjoy it.

When he gets home from work, I say, “Seriously. Please. Is this how you tell people to treat their kids?”

He says, “You’re my kid. It’s a different situation.”

“What about: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you’?”

He says, “Nice try.”

I feel terrible, but not terrible enough to want to deal with much more of this.

By Monday, at school, I say, “I’m no doubt going to regret this forever, but I fished that list out of the wastebasket and it might be the new story of my life.”

Siobhan intones, “You have used your dungeon wisely, grasshopper. Reject the path of Emma the Good and hop out the window.” Then she hands me a prepaid cell phone.

I say, “It’s not just that. It’s everything.”

Because enough disappointment, restriction, confiscation, punishment, confinement, and paternal rage can wear a person down. Tucked away in the hills, shielded from Sunset only by the treetops in the canyon, and the path from point A to point B can get a whole lot easier to navigate.

Also, it’s the only slim shot I’ve got for even one single unsupervised evening of something resembling normal teen life.

I say, “Pact.”





PART TWO





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


SO THIS IS IT.

A clear, cloudless night with big, fat stars and hazy light rising in glaring whiteness from West Hollywood. The cries of coyotes in the canyon and horns honking down on Sunset.

My dad whispers, “Night, Ems,” to the pillows arranged under the covers of my uninhabited bed. The moral compass rotates toward the pillow where the longitude and latitude of where my head should be converge.

I’m in the closet.

The compass mocks, Night, Ems, watching me slide into the dark unknown. I’ve heard my dad say no a hundred times to the specific geography I plan to explore, the land of unchained kids doing their thing under the watchful eye of no one.

But it always comes back to the unasked question: Dad, do you think if you let me out of your sight, I’m going to score some heroin, develop an incurable addiction, find myself a mini-mall, and curl up and die between two Dumpsters with a needle in my arm?

If he were honest, he would say yes to that one.

That stepping across the threshold of a party-lit tennis court can make a girl succumb to fatal carelessness. That the minute my kitten heels slide out the window and touch down in the wet grass, I’m lost.

No. Just no.

The compass says, Yeah, you just tell yourself that.

But even in fairy tales, princesses climb out windows, shimmy down vines and dance all night in diamond shoes. Hot princes vault their castle walls and climb their hair, all to spring them from their parents’ lockdown hell.

Seriously, if a fairy-tale princess had lived in a one-story Spanish house with a screenless bay window in the Hollywood Hills, would she have sat there pondering whether she should have a guilty conscience?

I unlatch my window. It’s so fast. First I’m inside, and then I’m ankle-deep in a bed of impatiens, and my kitten heels have sunk into the planting soil.