Afterparty(40)

He goes to basketball games?

She says, “It’s not like I want to break his heart. I just don’t want to eat someplace three steps below Koo Koo Roo and dance someplace that smells funky. He’s got ID. He could go anywhere, but nooooo.”

“Don’t break his heart!” I say, in a brief, stunning appearance of Emma the Good, popping up through the muck, sincere but with mud in her hair.

I am deathly afraid that somewhere down there, in the least admirable corner of myself, I want my best friend to break the heart of the boy of my dreams, whom I don’t even know, apparently.

“What about my bored heart?” Siobhan says. “You should come out with us, Em! You’ll see what I mean. I could tell him you’re pining away for Jean-Luc and you need male attention or something. I’ll tell him you won’t eat at dives, so at least you won’t have to pretend you like pita at some crap falafel place.”

I like pita.

The moral compass intones, Screw pita! Do you seriously want to drown in muck? Say no and walk away. Running would work, too.

I spend so much time trying to formulate an answer that will satisfy both the (completely rational) compass and my (hot mess) desire to sit next to Dylan at a dinner on a date, even if it isn’t, strictly speaking, my date, that soon it’s too late to answer.

To make things even more excruciating, Dylan starts cornering me at school in his quest for inside info I don’t have. He arches forward, his hand above my head, pressing against the locker above mine.

“Do you know what your friend has against Mara’s band?”

“Not ever having heard them play, how would I know?” This conversation is at once innocuous and surreal. “Are they bad?”

“They’re an acquired taste.”

“Like olives?”

“Like tone-deaf Dixie Chicks risen from the grave.”

“That could explain it.”

And I’m thinking, Dylan Kahane, do you have no idea I like you? Is this some form of torture being meted out by the Universe?

And it goes on. There’s no end to how useful I could be in deciphering the mysterious and ever-fascinating ways of Siobhan. He wants to know if she ever tried to give up smoking and why, given her professed love of Gershwin, she can’t recognize Rhapsody in Blue.

I say, “Was it a culture quiz?” I feel so loyal, yet so sick to my stomach.

He says, “Oh. That’s not how I meant it. Do I strike you as someone who gives culture quizzes?”

He stalks off without waiting for the answer, and I think, Yeah, Kahane, you do.

Then he finds me taking a book up on the hill. He’s with Arif, but he peels off, and Arif keeps going.

“Here’s a quiz,” he says, following me up the path into the trees. All right, Dylan Kahane is following me into the trees. He probably wants to know Siobhan’s favorite restaurant now that he’s discerned she hates falafel. All I have to do is stay calm and not trip on a pinecone.

Before I can more fully develop the fantasy of me twisting my ankle on a pinecone and Dylan carrying me away (a scenario in which twisted ankles require a tourniquet, so Dylan has to tear off his white shirt and rip it into strips), he brushes against my arm. I am riveted to the absolute present, preoccupied with the issue of getting a grip.

I say, “Okay, are we moving on to Aaron Copland? I can do quizzes on anybody who ever composed a ballet. Hit me with Tchaikovsky.”

Dylan says,“What does your Canadian boyfriend think of your dynamic duo?”

I say, “What?” Then I say, “Why?” Then I say, “He’s French.”

Dylan says, “That’s not on the quiz.”

I want to reach up and touch his face, he’s standing so close to me, and I’m thinking, What are you doing? This is your so-called best friend’s boyfriend and you should probably take a pass on this quiz and stop considering creative uses for his shirt involving shirt removal.

I am so not the moral-high-ground, compass-compliant person of this situation.

I say, “He’s never met her.”

There are very few true things to say about Jean-Luc, whose impending death is becoming more urgent by the second, but I’ve managed to find one.

Dylan nods. “Probably a wise move.”

Then he pats me on the shoulder. He. Pats. Me. On. The. Shoulder. Perhaps I could audition to be mascot of his True Romance with Siobhan, whom I’m pretty sure he hasn’t been patting on the shoulder all that much.

What is this, anyway?

Is he just shooting the breeze, only after years of total indifference to people at school, he’s really bad at it? Is he, even slightly conceivably, looking out for me, and if so, is this some weird paternalistic thing where he and Jean-Luc protect me from his bad, bad girlfriend, who happens to be my best friend, and if so, am I just a magnet for paternalistic weirdness?

My thoughts are in chaotic disarray.

I check my heart.

Still broken.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN


BY THE MIDDLE OF DECEMBER, I am actually looking forward to break. Which is saying a lot, in light of the dystopian bloodbath otherwise known as vacation in the Lazar family cabin at Lac des Sables, in a foresty part of Quebec, north of Montreal.

Usually, by Thanksgiving, I’m imagining scenarios in which Canada seals its borders, possibly as a result of a twenty-first-century plague. Which is what it would take to get me out of spending two weeks being reminded that I’m daughter of the messed-up, out-of-control, wrong-religion, wrong-French-accent woman who catapulted my father out of Quebec and into the wilds of the States. No wonder I can’t do anything right—including speak French. Not that they speak French anymore; my aunt married a guy from Toronto. By the time I (not politely) tell my aunt Geneviève to put a sock in it, precipitating the annual name-calling jamboree, the damage is already done. My dad gets us out of there, roaring off to a dingy lodge on the other side of the lake. We always come home early. I always feel entirely beaten up. And we never talk about it.