Afterparty(52)

I say, “As long as you brought it up—”

He sits up. He raises his hand. He says, “I’m done hearing about bad absentee boyfriends.”

“But that’s not what it’s about!”

He says, “That’s never what it’s about.”

He pulls me back down with him to the surface of the picnic table. My cheek seems to be resting on the remnants of potato chips or some other crunchy thing I can’t identify. He moves his hand so it’s under my face, and he tilts my face toward his. I don’t care if the snarling cat sees me.

I kiss him for a very long time.

He says, “Friday.”

Oh yeah.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


Siobhan: Did u fall off the planet?

Siobhan: I texted like five hours ago. Are you MIA?

Siobhan: Don’t be like that

Me: Like what? Like the person you shoved?

Siobhan: Boo hoo. Tough love. U need to speed it up.

Siobhan: Where were you?

Siobhan: Oh. Do Emma and the boy toy have a widdle secret?

Me: Shut up. We were hiking.

Siobhan: Well don’t. You’re not in this to hike. Quick in and out. Check. Just hurry up and get there.

Siobhan: Before he finds some trivial thing he doesn’t like about you and you’re toast.

Me: I’m trying to tell him about Jean-Luc first. Takes time.

Siobhan: I TOLD U NOT TO! You’ll be f*cked and I’LL be f*cked.

Siobhan: U can screw up your life all u want but u can’t mess me up! I’m not going down w yr boat! Like I want the horse bitches to know I made you up? I don’t think so.

Me: This is between me and him. It’s not even about you.

Siobhan: It’s about me and you. And if you’re thinking about f*cking me over don’t.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


FRIDAY, EVERY TIME I’M NEAR Siobhan, she walks away.

Friday, Dylan attends an unusually high number of classes and keeps looking over at me (which I know because I keep turning around to look at him, and there he is with this laser gaze trained on me).

In English, he says, “So. Have you thought of something? Do you have a sudden need to pretend you’re at the library?”

So after school, when I am supposedly lost in the stacks at the BHPL, I follow his car to his house, a giant pseudo–country mansion with ivy growing all over it. He is waiting in the driveway, and he takes my arm and nods toward a small shingled building behind an oleander hedge.

“Guesthouse,” he says. “I live in there.”

I’m good with this for about thirty seconds. The coolness of the cottage is immediately apparent. Then, as I walk toward it, every terrifying thing I’ve ever been warned boys do to girls blows through my mind in a gale-force hurricane of paranoia. Until the guesthouse, which is sweet and has blue-painted French doors and shingles and a welcome mat, starts looking like a human-trafficking dungeon for careless girls.

Dylan says, “What’s wrong?”

Panic is what’s wrong. Well-indoctrinated, no-basis-in-reality fear of the known. Because I know him. And it’s the middle of the afternoon. And it’s the flats of Beverly Hills.

Dylan says, “Emma? Hey. Seed. You want to walk the dog?”

The dog is a large, unclipped Airedale named Lulu, rolling around on the lawn beyond the guesthouse, chewing a high-top sneaker. She has to be chased because she thinks that Dylan wants the shoe. He looks so goofy loping around the backyard, grabbing for her collar, that I come fairly close to calming down.

Then, once he has the leash on her, she lies down and barks at him, and has to be dragged toward the driveway.

He says, “So. What was that?”

“It was really nothing. Please.”

He says, “Did I do something?”

“No, totally not.”

“Then what?”

“Let’s just walk, okay, please? Take a walk. Walk.”

But Lulu doesn’t get the concept of a walk. She doesn’t get that she’s supposed to travel in a straight line, that it isn’t good to sit while crossing the street, and that walking up to a car with people getting out of it and peeing against the tire is frowned upon. Dylan pauses for her to sniff grass and other dogs. Lulu is very popular with other dogs.

I say, “How long does it take you to go around the block?”

“Hours.” I really wish he’d grin or something, because I can’t read how much I freaked him out. “If it gets too bad, I carry her home.”

We are standing on the corner while Lulu digs a hole on what would be the front lawn of a house that is being torn down and has gone to weeds and dirt.

I say, “Have you always lived here? It’s beautiful.”

He says, “My dad grew up in this house. Then he stuck my grandma in a nursing home and took it over.”

He is absolutely blank. No emotion at all.

I wait for him to say something else, to enlighten me about what’s going on between him and his dad, but nothing happens.

“And you moved here from Montreal?” he says. “You don’t seem like an L.A. type.”

“I don’t seem cool enough to walk around your block?”

“You don’t seem nasty enough to go to the same school as Chelsea, okay?”