Afterparty(38)

“Strick?”

“Fake biker, yeah. And Dylan’s so kind of alternative.”

I snap my head back. I don’t even mean to.

She says, “Don’t say you don’t know what I mean. He doesn’t throw, kick, or catch balls except for pickup basketball, and he has Kurt Cobain T-shirts. More than one.”

“Tell me you’re not serious.”

Kimmy shakes her head, and her braid whips over her shoulder. “It’s just that he’s never interested in anyone our age. When he came to my party, it was kind of a shock. He never parties. He never hangs with us. He never likes anyone that Aiden didn’t check out first.”

Does everyone know more than I do?

Kimmy looks away. “It’s just nice that he’s all happy. He is all happy, right?”

“You don’t think he looks happy?”

“You know what I mean,” Kimmy says. “Hard to know what Dylan’s thinking, except that he doesn’t want to be here.”

“How would I possibly know what he’s thinking?” I am, perhaps, shouting at her. She takes a tiny step back, as if preparing to bolt.

I say, “Sorry. I’m just having a weird day. Sorry.”

“Every day’s a weird day at Latimer,” Kimmy says. “But at least it’s the best-of-the-best-of-the-best weird day. . . . Are you all right?”

“I am spectacularly and outstandingly all right,” I lie. “I’ve never been better.”

Kimmy says, “If you say so.”

After school, when Siobhan wants to go down to the Strip for iced coffee, I tell her I have to be at the food bank. Lie, lie, lie. Then I actually take the Latimer bus that goes into Hollywood to the food bank, and I help Mrs. Loman, who is too old to be lifting more than one can of tomato paste at a time, but is very gung ho. When my dad calls to find out where I am, since, obviously, I’m not at home dutifully studying, and I tell him I’m at the temple working and I lost track of time, he think’s I’m a wonderful, world-repairing person.

I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m not.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


NOW THAT I’M TRYING TO sublimate my little heart out at the food bank (without a whole lot of success), I’m filled with ideas for repairing the world through acts of subversion.

Megan says, “This isn’t going to work,” but you can tell she’s in love with the idea. I feel like the Sacajawea of girls who need to be led out of oppression.

I check Joe in at the student volunteer desk. When he rolls the r&?’s in “Gutierrez–Ortega” and says that he goes to Loyola, the place goes (very subtly) batshit crazy over the arrival of more interfaith cooperation.

I guide him back to Megan, where, according to plan, she says “Wait, don’t I know you? Haven’t I seen you at a mixer at Saint Bernadette?” Just in case she’s so knocked out she can’t completely pretend she’s never met him before.

“Why, yes indeed, I have been to a mixer at Saint Bernadette,” Joe says. You can see why he’s in Model UN and not drama club. Also, you can see he wants to grab Megan right there in the canned fruit aisle.

I whisper, “I am such an evil genius,” and they grin like crazy.

Only then, when I go back to get a box of crunchy peanut butter jars to distribute in the outgoing grocery bags and I see them standing there, very close together, and he’s stroking her hair, I start to cry and I can’t stop.

I’ve held out through weeks of shrinkish concern from my dad regarding my rapidly plummeting mood, which apparently even my clever methods for covering up the sound of crying (running water, online concerts by Stanford’s Japanese taiko drumming team, Beethoven’s Ninth) can’t disguise. I have faked cheer through a litany of shrink questions designed to see if I’m planning to off myself anytime soon:

Did you enjoy anything today?

Did you sleep though the whole night?

Are you by any chance harboring persistent thoughts about hanging yourself? (All right, slight exaggeration.)

But after he finds me trying to stop crying in the middle of the boxed pastas, I have to come up with a well-edited version of reality in parent-digestible form.

When I try, when I say in truncated sentences that Siobhan is with a guy I like and I don’t know why it bothers me so much but it does, my dad is flabbergasted. You might think a rigorously trained psychoanalyst would have figured out that his daughter might someday like a boy, but apparently this is shocking news.

We are huddled in the car, in the parking lot, and I keep dabbing my eyes and blowing my nose, creating a huge wad of Kleenex.

I moan, “Dad?”

He looks angry, which isn’t in the range of things I can even think about coping with.

He says, “Okay, boiling it down, Siobhan is keeping company with someone you like?”

And the way he says her name, you can tell that she’s the one drawing his wrath. He turns the key and guns the car out of the parking lot.

“Nobody says keeping company.” Sob, sob, sob.

My dad could just as well have a thought bubble over his head, with him throwing a party because he might have the rope he needs to drag Siobhan out of my life.

“I’ve noticed you’ve been a bit down lately,” he says.