Afterparty(34)

“Stay!” she says. “You should check him out in case he’s awful and I missed it.”

But when he gets here, when he gets out of his car and comes up the walkway, I might as well not exist. Megan is one happy Rapunzel and Joe is quite well suited for his role as smitten prince. Smitten normal prince. Compared to Dylan, he has a Twitter feed of his every thought and feeling embedded in his forehead.

I have seen Joe on the tiny screen of Megan’s iPhone, but apparently gawking, mad love is easier to discern in person. Also, tall, dark, and handsome don’t come across in this much glory on a three-inch screen.

Megan jumps up to get him a glass of water and crashes into the coffee table.

I say, “I’ll help you carry,” and follow her into the kitchen.

Arranging the Rice Krispies Treats on a plate with some difficulty, she says, “He’s great, right?”

“Come on! You’ve got Prince Charming waiting on your sofa. Let him climb your hair, already.”

“That was a different prince,” she says over her shoulder because she’s charging through the louvered doors into the living room.

So I sit there in the kitchen trying to concentrate on math. All I can think is, Why can’t I sneak Dylan into my living room and make out on my living room couch?

Oh yeah, because Dylan doesn’t idolize me.

Even when he would appear to be about to kiss me and I’m sitting there in a fully cooperative state of complete longing and receptiveness, leaning forward so he could accomplish this feat by moving his lips maybe six inches, he doesn’t.

Does he check my Facebook every day? Is he even, in a rudimentary way, stalking me back? I think not.

Siobhan doesn’t even think that he’s a realistic check mark. If Siobhan is even thinking about me at all. She hasn’t texted back for two days.

I listen to Megan giggling on the other side of the louvered doors, and I’m thinking, This is truly pathetic. I’m jealous of Megan’s love life.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


ON MONDAY, IT’S CLEAR AND cold. For here. Driving in the hills toward school, we pass a misplaced maple tree with leaves that have turned colors and are falling to the ground, all yellow and red, among palm trees and birds of paradise.

“Autumn in California,” my dad says.

I say, “I like it. I like endless summer.”

My dad says, “I do too, I admit it.”

“Oh no! What’s next? A pair of shorts?”

My dad swats at my arm, but we’re both smiling.

“How did I raise such a fresh kid? It’s California. I’m getting you to Lac des Sables at winter break.”

“In the cabin?”

“Of course the cabin.” As if the nightmare aspects of the cabin are forgotten, the way dreams disappear from memory when you’re jolted awake, bolt upright in bed, with no recall of the wretched hunchbacked thing that was just chasing you.

“I thought we were building a shelter in Oaxaca. You know, ‘You shall take the poor into your house’? Repair the world? Emma gets a nail gun.”

“I was with you right up to the last sentence,” he says. “No nail gun.” Then he says how much he respects my commitment.

I’m not even sure if my commitment is to world repair or to staying the hell, yes, “hell,” I use the world advisedly, hell, hell, hell out of the unadulterated Hell that is the Lazar family cabin at Lac des Sables. Siobhan had better be talking to me, because no way will my dad have an honest conversation about this.

She’s sitting there in homeroom, looking great. Unusually great. Unusually calm and unusually pleased with the world.

I say, “Hey, Siobhan. Lost your phone?”

“It was one weekend,” she says. “To quote Miss Goodypants.”

“Because we have to do the carbon footprint assignment.”

“This is bullshit,” Siobhan says. “Why is homeroom even allowed to assign homework? My house has solar panels. Marisol drives a Prius. We don’t own a plane. How small is my carbon footprint supposed to get?”

“Wow. No plane. You might have been at Latimer too long.”

“One day was too long.”

I say, “I would seriously die here without you.”

“Slain by the evil Chelsea in the flower of her youth, when still a virgin. Pathetic.”

“Could you please yell ‘virgin’ louder?”

She opens the lid of the old-timey wooden desk, a historical artifact that helps give Latimer its movie-set, classic prep-school feel, and lets it fall with a bang. Everyone turns around.

She says, “There. That was loud.”

? ? ?

Loudness is the theme of the day.

Siobhan and I are sitting in the snack bar at the Beverly Hills Public Library, where we can’t find the references we need to prove our environmental sensitivity.

Siobhan looks disgusted with the entire operation.

A woman who is making a great deal of noise crinkling a giant newspaper, and anyway, this is a snack bar, says, “Shhhhhh!”

Siobhan says, “Don’t you want to know about my weekend?”

I am keeping myself awake with coffee. I can barely focus on anything other than not falling off the chair. The food bank took beyond forever on Sunday, and then I had to finish Monday’s homework. Which was voluminous. Latimer, in addition to its other charms, is hard.