Afterparty(4)

She says, “Right. Well, don’t get any ideas about sister-wives, jerkoff. Just give me the corkscrew.”

He is smiling, apparently capable of smiling intensely at two girls simultaneously.

I would jump back, but I’m already pressed against a closed door. I say, “Oh God, is this your boyfriend?” She looks as if he’d be her boyfriend. She is wearing a thin chain with a tiny diamond every few inches that is pooled between her breasts, and she has the same wet hair and the same potential for a lucrative career modeling tiny pieces of lingerie while glaring.

She says, “You can have him. He’s a shit kisser, anyway.” She hooks a finger through his belt loop and pulls him away, down the hall.

I go back to the dinner party, but it’s hard to pay attention.

Three weeks later, we live here.





CHAPTER TWO


I HAVE STARTED AT NEW schools on days that weren’t the first day often enough to know the drill.

This time I wake up in a Spanish Colonial house covered with night-blooming jasmine a half mile above the Sunset Strip. At night, we see its colors filtering skyward through the pine trees in the canyon at the edge of our backyard, spotlights sweeping the too-bright sky. If I open my bedroom window, I hear traffic and coyotes and wind.

In the morning, my room smells like fresh paint and the aroma of my dad baking me pumpkin bread in his belief that motherless girls need fathers who know their way around a mixing bowl.

He pulls my uniform out of its box and rubs the fabric of one more plaid pleated skirt between his fingers. The other Lazars—the ones who, unlike him, did not go to medical school and then scandalize Montreal by marrying the spectacularly wrong woman and producing me—are the kings of Canadian imported silk.

He says, “I’ve never felt so much synthetic. If someone flicks a live ash, your skirt will melt off.”

I imagine myself standing skirtless in a puddle of navy blue and burgundy. You can guess who I imagine flicks the ash. (Hint: He is wearing a worn-out Latimer football tee.)

My father, gazing at me slouched in the doorway in the stiff white blouse and dinky little tie, as I pin up my hair, says, “Ems, you look just like her.”

It is the first time he has mentioned her—She Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken, the unmentionable junkie otherwise known as my mother—since Baltimore, two cities ago.

And it’s not that I haven’t been waiting for an opening to have this conversation with him since Baltimore, because I have. It’s just that I’d like to make it to my first day of school without snot and mascara streaming down my face.

I pretend that I am suddenly fascinated by our neighbors’ English bulldogs, Mutt and Jeff, who have tunneled under the fence between our houses and are currently wagging their stubby tails and panting, noses to our French doors, watching us.

My dad grabs the backpack he has filled with brightly colored plastic school supplies, well suited to the carefree twelve-year-old I never was, and we wind down to Sunset, past the flower beds on the median strip at Sunset Plaza, past the Viper Room and the Roxy, back into the hills toward Latimer.

We can see the ocean dead-on from the parking lot despite the gray-blue haze.

The landscaping belongs at a luxe tropical resort (not that we go to luxe tropical resorts: we fight off bloodthirsty Canadian mosquitoes in a cabin in Quebec near Lac des Sables; we take nature walks in the hills, facing due north, away from Montreal).

The buildings are palatial, the pathways wide and curved and swept immaculate.

And in the middle of all this, there is a sign pointing to the stables. The stables?

I was prepared for swank, but not this level of swank. I panic, but now that we are (sort of) Southern Californians, my dad shows no inclination to protect me from all this K-12 ocean-view opulence. He half drags me down the perfect path toward the awe-inspiring administration building.

Our hands are shaken firmly and repeatedly by well-dressed Latimer administrators, juggling the words “welcome” and “elite” and “fit right in.”

I am sent off to get my student ID photo taken in the student store, which has Latimer-logo clothes, school supplies, and every kind of ball, oar, paddle, fencing jacket, and athletic headgear known to man.

A girl in riding clothes—boots no doubt sewn together by Italian shoemakers while her calves were encased in the cordovan leather, and jodhpurs so tight across the back, you have to wonder how she got her thong so lined up with the seam—is complaining about the brand of saddle soap and the fact there hasn’t been any mink oil for her bridle for a week.

The kid behind the counter keeps trying to end the tirade by offering abject apologies, but the tirade is endless. When there’s the slightest pause, I say, “Excuse me, is this the right place for the photo?”

The girl turns on her heel (literally); she pivots toward me. She says, “I was talking about my bridle. So unless you have something to add . . .”

I suddenly recall why girls without Miss Teen Universe potential should never be the new girl. Then she does a double take and looks me over in a horrified state of disbelief.

She says, “Didn’t you, like, babysit the Karp brats at the beach club?”

I am about to descend into my own state of horrified disbelief, but even though she is tall and blond, she is not the girl in the bikini top. I say, “I was having dinner with the Karps.”