Afterparty(35)

I say, “I already know about your weekend. You went to awesome parties while I was prisoner of goodness.”

The woman turns in her seat to glare at us.

“Madame,” Siobhan says, “if you continue to make a racket with that newspaper, I will be forced to ask Security to escort you from the premises.”

She waves as the woman scurries back into the library proper.

“People suck,” she says. “Have you noticed that? I can’t even get William to call back, which, unless his phone got run over by a car, means he’d better be dead.”

“Maybe he’s in a Swiss canyon. No reception.”

“No, he just sucks.” She takes a long drag on the straw in her iced coffee. “And this coffee sucks.”

I say, “You suck.”

She says, “No, you. And about my weekend, don’t freak out on me, but I test drove Dylan Kahane for you, and he sucks.”

She goes back to sipping her iced coffee as if this were just a fun, ordinary, ho-hum conversational gambit. As if it were nothing.

“You what?”

“I know. It was Kimmy’s party, and this one didn’t have Kent and his Stanford boys, and Strick didn’t show. If you’d have come, it never would have happened.”

“This happened two nights ago?”

I look at her and it’s as if I’m seeing someone else, as if my actual friend has disappeared and I’m sitting in the snack bar, shaking and completely friendless. As if I’m standing on the bottom of the ocean and there’s no one else here.

“Say something,” she says.

While I’m figuring out what I can possibly say, she says, “It’s not like I was sober at the time. I doubt he even remembers because I don’t think his mommy ever told him beer has alcohol in it. Or that the boy brings the condom.”

It’s as if Siobhan is gone and Dylan has turned into someone else, because the Dylan I’ve wanted since the first day at Latimer doesn’t fall down drunk on top of Siobhan in Mandeville Canyon.

How could this even happen?

But what comes out of my mouth is “Whatever. It’s not like I’m hooking up with him.”

And then I’m looking at her through a landscape of dark water. I’m pushing away long strands of kelp, pushing through beds of rubbery green seaweed. I am remote and cold and flailing and alone down here.

She says, “I know. I’m just saying.”

Just saying the hell what?

I say, “Get real. It’s not like I’m on his speed dial.”

Completely true, although it leads to the completely wrong conclusion. But there’s no way I can say out loud, can formulate the sentences, can send out into the universe, how much I want him, and I kind of told her, I more than somewhat kind of told her, that he was the one. And yet she took him.

She says, “Are you sure?”

I shake off the salt water that is stinging my eyes, and the cold, and the ropes of kelp, and the sensation of drowning, and I outright lie to whoever she is.

I say, “He’s yours, for all I care.”

And Siobhan says, “Quel relief. Because it wasn’t anything, but turns out, he’s nice. I wouldn’t mind some nice. You have excellent taste in childhood crushes.”

I am close to losing it completely.

It wasn’t childhood, it was yesterday, and also this morning. “That’s all it was,” I lie. I will myself not to feel or think.

I keep trying to convince myself that it wasn’t anything, and that I’m fine, and that it doesn’t matter, and I’m happy for her. I tell myself I never totally told her, I actively hid it from her, and that time he almost kissed me, there was no kiss, proving he never liked me that way. I tell myself it would be stupid to be gutted, and no self-respecting girl would be gutted, it’s drama-queenish to feel gutted, and I Am Not Gutted.

It doesn’t work.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


MEGAN SAYS, “NO WAY.”

I am sitting in her room, eating an entire tin of chocolate chip cookies.

I say, “Oh yeah. They’re at a classic film festival she thinks is crap. Tuesday, they went to Stravinsky. He takes her to hear a band and dance in Silver Lake, and she totally doesn’t get how cool it is. She wants to be on the roof at Skybar.”

“No way,” Megan repeats. “And how can she even pretend she likes Stravinsky? I don’t even like Stravinsky, and I like classical music.”

There’s nothing to say. Siobhan is telling him she longs to sit with lavender-haired ladies who beam at them while they listen to Firebird because they look like such an adorable young couple. One of whom likes Firebird. (Hint: not Siobhan.) She is going on my weird dream date and pretending to like it. I don’t even get it.

Siobhan: Why do people like this shit again?

Me: Read the program notes.

Siobhan: And y is there a line around the block for the ladies room?

Me: Why don’t you just tell him you’re not up for this?

Siobhan: I might hv told him I like it. So stupid.

Me: Why did you tell him that?

Siobhan: Stop interrogating me. Duh. Bc I like him.

When you consider the fact that she couldn’t even stand him right up until she started dancing her way across L.A. in his not unwilling arms, it’s completely breathtaking. In the hardball-hits-you-in-the-chest-and-knocks-the-breath-out-of-you kind of way.