Afterparty(37)

“Is this the Spanish Inquisition? We were super-young and I wanted to see what it was like. Are you happy now? It’s not like it’s the first time I saw one. Remember Paolo?”

Paolo was the pervy stepfather two stepfathers ago, who only lasted a couple of weeks because he pranced around naked in front of eleven-year-old Siobhan.

“I thought that was just once when he did that thing with the bath towel and you barely noticed anything.”

“Until Nancy noticed anything. Then she checked us into the Grand Hotel Swankissimo and divorced his ass and took me out in gondolas and bought me charm bracelets and bread to rip up for the nasty pigeons in Piazza San Marco.”

“Yay, Nancy.”

“Yeah, she has completely bad taste in men, but she’s not a total failure as a mom.”

Which is the polar opposite of Siobhan, who is turning out to have perfect taste in men but to be a total failure as a best friend.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


EVERY TIME I WALK PAST Dylan, I imagine him with her.

Stop it, stop it, stop it is highly ineffective. There are still tiny little heart-stopping flashes: their fingertips, their lips, their hair against a white, starched pillowcase.

He keeps treating me as if everything is exactly the same.

Nothing is the same.

I can hardly bear to look at his face, even when he’s just one row over and completely absorbed in staring out the window. I want to jump into my locker to avoid having to deal, at the same time I can’t stop stealing glances.

I can hardly stand to watch his mouth move when he talks or how he shoves his hair behind his ear when it flops in front of his face when he’s drawing instead of taking notes due to the fact that I’m taking the notes. Except that whenever Mr. Auden calls on him, he sounds smart.

I can hardly stand it when Mr. Auden says, “That’s a very Hegelian take on it, Mr. Kahane.”

And Dylan, who is not very forgiving, says, “Yes, I’m almost as Hegelian as Aiden.”

When Dylan goes, “Hey, Emma, do you have something that could pass as review notes on the origins of Communism?” as if what happened in the cafeteria never happened, as if he weren’t completely stepping out of character and, say, sleeping with my best friend, I can hardly get the rings of my binder to open.

Siobhan still wants to hang out after school.

“Don’t you want to hang with, you know, the boyfriend?”

She says, “What’s wrong with you? You never told me to hang out with Wade or Ian Heath or Strick or anybody. I’m the girlfriend, not the lapdog.”

I don’t know why I agree to it, but I’m so into pretending everything is fine that we go back to her house. I almost can’t bear to step into her bedroom, to see the bed where I’m pretty sure he’s been. I turn around and lead us back downstairs to the screening room without a word.

Twenty minutes into the movie, during an endless interlude of seabirds flapping around a depressed French couple, she says, “You know, he’s not the funnest person ever born. It’s not like I’m going to sit there and do worksheets while he practices violin or whatever.”

Another hideous image of togetherness.

“If he wants to be the boyfriend, he’s going to have to step it up. Just because he hates L.A. so much and he hates Latimer so much and he hates his * brother so much, I don’t see why he can’t put on something nice and party.”

“Have you thought of asking him?” Said with only the slightest hint of edge.

She says, “Okay, we have to keep this Afterparty prep pact going or you’re going to stay single and clueless, and Afterparty is going to kill you. You don’t go, ‘Hey jerk, why are you so rumpled, have you ever noticed signs that say “dry cleaner,” and why are you such a freaking drag?’ and stay somebody’s girlfriend. Too bad we can’t double with Jean-Luc. You’d see what I mean.”

“I thought we were going to kill off Jean-Luc.”

“No! Why would you want to be the pathetic single girlfriend, when you could be the International Girl of Intrigue? It would be like going backwards.”

I almost can’t contain how much I want to slap her. Naturally, the film we’re mostly not watching has a tousled, brown-haired guy who pushes his hair behind his ear. Right then.

And it’s not as if I’m the only one who notices the novelty of them being together. Everyone who’s even marginally nice thinks it’s swell that Siobhan and Dylan have taken up with someone semi-normal, even though the two of them might not, at first glance, appear to be the same brand of semi-normal.

“You must be so happy!” Kimmy chirps. By this point, I can admit she’s a completely nice person whose horse I never should have touched, and if she finds out and hates me, I would, strictly speaking, deserve it. Kimmy is, as usual, all horse-sweaty and enthusiastic. “Who’d have thought her and Dylan? Pretty strange, huh?”

I say, “It’s not that strange.”

Kimmy looks at me sideways. “Come on, it’s strange.”

I say, “It’s not strange, Kimmy!” As if ordering it not to be strange and ordering her not to think it’s strange would work.

“All right!” she says. “Sorry! I’m not saying it to insult her. It’s just that she usually goes for these big, macho lacrosse guys and that guy from Crossroads with the really big Harley—”