Afterparty(44)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE


AFTER SCHOOL, SIOBHAN IS WAITING for me, perfectly happy.

I feel nothing but dread.

She says, “What’s wrong with you?”

We were right out in the open. Everyone could see us, so it’s not like I was sneaking around. We were just eating fries and having a theoretical discussion about friendship. I was making things up about French philosophers in an effort to sound as if I knew what I was talking about. How bad could that be?

Bad.

Siobhan says, “Here’s something to cheer you up. Kahane was talking about you some more.”

A wave of nausea radiates out from my sick stomach through the rest of me.

I say, “Siobhan—”

She says, “I know. Pretty twisted. You think he’s interested in some three-way action?”

“No. Way.” I have no idea where this is going, but I’m completely sure I don’t want it to go there.

“Oh yeah,” she says, “he wanted to talk about if I thought we could all be friends. Now he wants to be friends with you.” And by the way she says “friends,” it’s clear she means friends with three-way benefits.

“No!”

She snorts. “Of course no. Like that’s going to happen?”

“I just don’t think that’s what he meant. At all.”

“How would you know? Were you there? No. You weren’t.”

I go home and sit in the closet. I sit there and all I want is for the image of Dylan and Siobhan, together, in her room, to go away.

I want her to stop texting me every ten minutes to tell me how annoying he’s getting and expecting me to commiserate.

Siobhan: Party Friday?

Me: Aren’t you going out with the boyfriend? Or is this the fun threesome in which case no thank you.

It almost kills me to type this, but I have to say something.

Siobhan: Dylan doesn’t wanna party. So tough.

Me: So do something else.

Siobhan: Like I really want to hang out downtown and listen to Bach on xylophones when we could go to this Marlborough girl’s blowout? Girl school girls gone wild.

Me: What about Dylan?

Siobhan: What about him? I don’t need a permission slip to have fun. Are u in? Your window must be so sad and neglected.

Me: My window is fine.

Siobhan: Are u in?

Me: Fine.

How hard would it have been to go, “Nope, nuh-uh, not me, won’t go help you party without your damned boyfriend? We both know what’s going to happen.” But it keeps getting harder and harder to be even slightly direct with her about anything. As if she’s gone from being my perfect other to being my unpredictable, high-strung Doberman—the kind you love and take on walks, but bottom line, you don’t want to be within lunging distance when it bares its teeth.

The moral compass quivers with indignation: Does the lunging-dog image not tell you something? Walk away!!!

Me: I’m not walking out on my best friend. You can’t just walk out on people. She wants me with her, and I’m going with.

The pissed-off, unleashed moral compass croaks, Feel guilty. Feel very, very guilty. Feel guilty as hell.

Me: Okay.





CHAPTER THIRTY


ABOUT THE MARLBOROUGH GIRL’S BLOWOUT.

I shoot out the window as if it were just another door to our house. I taxi from the Chateau Marmont, no longer worried that everyone my dad knows in L.A. has chosen this moment to cruise Sunset and is speed-dialing him.

I can hear her party from a block away.

Apparently, her parents are on their annual trip to Hong Kong and she thinks that they won’t notice she’s appropriated the entire contents of their liquor cabinet, and that the neighbors won’t tell them how they called the cops at 2 a.m. because it was the most noise they’d heard in Hancock Park since last year’s blowout.

It gets very bad very fast.

It starts with this guy, home from Penn for the weekend, who kisses the back of my neck when I’m standing by the keg, and I don’t actually hate it. He’s very drunk and he thinks my name is Merilee, so clearly he thinks he’s kissing the neck of an entirely different girl.

This is so not my idea of what’s supposed to feel nice.

I go, “Dude, I’m not Merilee. You’re really drunk.”

He stumbles toward the tennis court where people are setting off firecrackers because, hey, that doesn’t draw any unwanted attention in the middle of the night in Hancock Park. I think, I’ve come a long way since the hair-nuzzling, repulsive guy at Roy’s. Now I have a neck-kissing cute guy from Penn who thinks he’s kissing someone else, and I’m not all that unhappy about it. Check mark for me.

I fill a red cup with thin, sour beer.

Sib is trotting around the yard. She is flapping her arms like a kid wearing a cape for Halloween, only there’s no cape.

She says, “I am so high!”

I say, “High on life, right?”

“Shut up, Em.” She is looking around in the darkness. “Where the hell is Strick?”

“Why are we looking for Strick?”

“Strick is cool,” Siobhan says. “Strick doesn’t have a stick up his ass.”

Someone staggers by, sloshing beer out of his cup.