Afterparty(36)

“Have you considered dumping her?” Megan asks. “Everybody knows that girls can’t do this to their friends. It’s an axiom of high school.”

“This is my best friend.”

She looks at me.

“You know what I mean, my best friend at school. It’s different with someone you go to school with every day.”

“Different like you get to see her making out with your boyfriend every day.”

“He’s not my boyfriend! It’s not like you can call dibs on someone.”

“Yes you can. Isn’t there anybody else you could hang out with over there?”

I catalog the junior class, as if I could conjure up someone exactly like Siobhan (except not with Dylan) and make her manifest in homeroom. But I just end up thinking about how Siobhan is stuck to me like gum under a desk.

“At least he’s not nibbling her in public, which might actually make me have a heart attack and die. And get this, she keeps telling me all about how nice he is and how she’s still planning to marry William when she’s thirty.”

Megan says, “Yeah, and I’m planning to run away with Joe to Barbie’s dream house on the Magic School Bus.”

I say, “I don’t think she’s joking.”

“You just sit there and listen?”

I pretty much do. While pretending that I never wanted him.

“Do you still like him?”

I do my sick-lamb noise in the form of a “yes.”

Megan, who almost never swears, says, “Damn.”

“What am I going to do?”

“A whole lot of homework. Sort cans of tomato paste. You know, sublimate.”

Sublimating, for those who lack a psychiatric parent, is when instead of getting in touch with your debilitating longings, misery, and sexuality, you throw everything you’ve got into things such as overstudying for Precalc, competitive ice-skating, and sorting cans of tomato paste. It’s what our parents want us to be doing at all times, day and night.

I ask, “Will you come sort with me?”

“Sort canned goods in the basement of a temple?” She sounds quite enthusiastic. “I think I could get out of my house for that.”

? ? ?

Siobhan, of course, wants to talk about him. A lot. It is difficult to pretend I don’t care, to make myself nod attentively and eat salad at the same time.

“You could eat lunch with him,” I say as casually as possible, in the interest of extricating myself from a thicket of misery. “You don’t have to babysit me.”

“He’s at Religious Convo lunch.”

“He goes to Convo lunches?” Only people who are actually into Convo, aka Religious Convocation for Interfaith Dialogue (as opposed to people who just want Convo on their college applications in the brotherhood-of-man category) go to Convo lunches. How did I not know this about him?

I’ve been obsessing about him since the first day I got to Latimer, yet she knows more about him than I do after like five minutes.

My whole semester is turning into a series of awful little shocks.

I take a deep breath and try to look amused. “He can’t be that religious.”

I try to visualize Dylan, two buildings away, holding hands with Arif and Lissi in a circle with all the Religious Convocation kids, watching documentary shorts about the Dalai Lama and singing “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” Every time I get to the place in the circle where I visualize him sitting, the image evaporates.

“Why can’t I be with a religious guy?” Siobhan says, dipping her carrot stick into my ranch dressing. “He’s not half as Jewy as William.”

“Wait a minute! William is Jewish? I thought his grandpa was a Nazi count.”

Now that I’m letting pretty much everything slide, I’m letting “Jewy” slide. Even though I’m feeling madly and protectively Jewish myself in the presence of “Jewy.” Even though according to some people with the same last name as me, I’m not even.

Who the hell says “Jewy,” anyway? People from Aryan Nation compounds? My best friend?

“That’s his other grandpa,” she says, again as if it’s nothing, as if it’s just how people chat while eating carrots. “William is Gramps-spent-World-War-Two-hiding-out-in-the-attic-of-a-monastery-in-Pisa-type Jewy.”

All right. Can’t take it.

“You have to stop saying that word. You’re going to get us kicked out of school for being anti-Semitic. Also, a tad offensive.”

“How can I be anti-Semitic if I’m going to marry William?” she says, stirring the lumpy dressing with a celery stick. “Think about it.”

Reflexively, almost on autopilot, I say, “What if he’s already married?”

“Then he’ll have to dump the bitch. It’s a pact. He can’t walk away from a pact just because he hooks up with some Eurotrash.”

Perfect. She’s still planning to marry an insomniac Swiss boy, while she’s sleeping with Dylan. While I pretend to be cheerful and unconcerned and made of freaking construction-grade rebar.

“I can’t believe you’re seriously planning that.” Just to say something.

“Why wouldn’t I? I mean, he was my first. How romantic would that be?”

“Wait! You had sex with William? And I’m just now hearing about this, too?”