Afterparty(43)

Then there he is. Coming up from behind the gym, where he plays pickup only when there’s no class, team, uniform, or coach involved.

(Siobhan says, “Really? He’s standing on principle by not joining a team? I’m on a team. Do I seem ‘overregimented, overcompetitive, and stupid,’ to quote him? I mean, he’s completely into me, so how is that even logical?”)

He says, “Where’s your friend?”

“Her name is Siobhan.” I so don’t want to sound this irritable. But I don’t want to sound too chummy. I want to sound friendly yet distant. Charming yet unattainable. Irresistible yet . . . all right, just irresistible.

He says, “She says you don’t think men and women can be friends.”

“What?”

“Yeah, because Jean-Paul Sartre said so.”

We’re walking through the patio by the cafeteria, and he sits down at a table. He just sits and I’m standing there, clutching my books.

“Excuse me?”

“That men and women can’t be friends. According to her, you’re a big fan of Jean-Paul Sartre, and he says they can’t.”

I say, “I’m pretty sure that’s from an old movie and not a French philosopher. Maybe she got confused.”

No way she got confused. He wants to be friends with me and she used a fake quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to talk him out of it. Then I think, Stop jumping to conclusions. Who was completely there for me over vacation?

This has gone so far beyond too far, all I want is to grab him, for the buttons to pop off his white, untucked shirt. I want to stop imagining her grabbing his shirt, and I especially want to stop imagining him grabbing her.

Dylan is paying a great deal of attention to the french fries on the next table. He says, “Do you want some?”

I say, “Sure.”

I think, This is Siobhan’s boyfriend. You do not want to be having a slightly suggestive conversation about whether men and women can be friends with Siobhan’s boyfriend, no matter what starkly stupid thing she told him you said.

But he wants to be friends. There’s no biblical injunction that says you have to turn down friendship.

I think, Give it up, you don’t want to be his friend—you know what you want from him, and it isn’t just friendship.

I think, You are a crappy friend and a horrible best friend.

Dylan slides a box of fries across the table, with a fistful of ketchup packets.

I think, Say something.

“If Jean-Paul Sartre did say that, he was wrong,” I manage. “Look around.”

All over the patio, people who’ve been together since kindergarten, and are too brother-sister close to hook up, are crawling all over each other. Kimmy is in Max Lauder’s lap, trying to steal his milkshake. “Unless that’s Kimmy’s way of seducing Max, Sartre was clueless. Anyway, I don’t think it was him. Wasn’t he friends with Simone de Beauvoir and any other intellectual girl he could get? We got the censored version of this in French, which, not amazingly, you missed.”

He says, “Isn’t she the one who thought men and women shouldn’t inhabit the same apartment? She was hooking up with Sartre for decades across town.”

Perfect, he knows everything there is to know about Sartre’s private life, and I don’t.

“So are you planning to marry a woman who lives across town?”

“I’m not the one who believes this crap. My parents have been together having the same fight for twenty-five years. You’re the one into statutory rape with a boyfriend five thousand miles away.”

“Did you just say that?”

He smacks himself on the head. “I’m an idiot. Sorry.” He does, admittedly, look sorry, and kind of freaked-out. For him.

“You think that covers it, Kahane?” I’m trying to stay as light and casual as possible under the circumstances. Which is not all that light or casual.

“Douchy, inappropriate, none of my business?”

I don’t have the slightest clue of what to say that wouldn’t make this worse.

He says, “You want a fry?” He holds one out. To eat it, I’d have to take the death grip off my books. It hits me that I am not only conversing but—as my dad would say—outright carrying on with my best friend’s boyfriend, who has now moved into the realm of the explicitly suggestive and possibly insulting.

Then I notice that Dylan is looking at me, expectant and kind of emotional for Dylan, and I think, What the hell?

I take a fry.

Then I take another fry.

Then I eat all his fries while he smiles at me, presumably because he’s so relieved he hasn’t unhinged my mental balance by commenting on my (nonexistent) sex life to the point that I can’t eat fries. By the time I’ve finished off the container, it’s clear that I’ve shed the last vestiges of Emma the Good the way a molting newt sheds skin, and if I don’t stop myself, I’m going to do something seriously bad.

I sit there sipping his root beer in a state of complete moral collapse. It’s hard to comprehend how a person could experience such extensive ethical decay, could ditch all scruples and the girl code, in the time it takes to polish off a box of fries.

I grab my books and run into the girls’ bathroom. I sit in a locked stall through the rest of the period. When the bell rings at the end of the period, I am still in a bleak state of huh??? So I sit there through half of French, where M. Durand is so overjoyed to see me, a person who reads the books in French, that he doesn’t even care if I’m twenty minutes late.