Afterparty(54)

There’s nothing like the combination of extreme lust and constant guilt to make a girl unusually nice to her boyfriend.

I say, “You have no idea.”

Chelsea, who naturally pops up at the exact moment I’m feeding him cake, says, “Interesting. Disgusting, but interesting.”

Dylan looks her up and down. He says, “Disgusting and uninteresting.”

She flounces away.

In English, he doodles me in the notebook he doesn’t take notes in. Large enough to be visible to Ms. Erskine, standing, beady-eyed, in front of the room, making William Shakespeare less intriguing than an ad for auto parts. Who says, “Mr. Kahane, we all know Ms. Lazar has a lovely profile, but we’re focused on Henry the Fifth if you’d care to join us.”

Dylan looks up, recites the “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” speech, and looks back down to my penciled profile.

It is one of the weirdest, most humiliating, most satisfying moments of junior year.

Siobhan sticks two fingers down her throat and makes a face, and it’s not because Ms. Erskine’s take on Shakespeare is making her ill.

Then, when I’m sitting outside the music room during Dylan’s orchestra practice, Arif slides onto the bench next to me.

He says, “So, you’re with Dylan now.”

I try for a she-didn’t-miss-a-beat kind of a grin, but my face feels more or less frozen. I say, “Yeah, guess so.” I’m going for cheerful here, but my tone of voice is also moderately frozen, because this is so clearly the opening line of an interrogation.

“You guess so?” Sitting this close to him, it’s hard for even a nervous, frozen person who’s obsessed with someone else to miss what his allure is all about. “That won’t do. I don’t know that I can let him wander around walking into walls over a girl who guesses so.”

I’m being checked out by the best friend, who wants to be certain I’m besotted.

“Just want to make sure you ladies aren’t passing him from hand to hand like lip gloss.”

“Arif, nobody shares lip gloss.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be engaged to some guy twice your age in France?” he says. “Are you still seeing him?”

I find myself wondering if Siobhan has actually told people that Jean-Luc got down on one knee and proposed by Skype from Jalalabad. Or Kampala. Or someplace I don’t even know she’s put him.

And I think, All right, diversion. Right now.

“What are you, the breakup police? Is your boy still seeing Montana?”

“He told you about that?”

Dylan sticks his head out of the music room and does the Dylan equivalent of a double take, which involves blinking.

“Arif,” he says. “What are you doing?”

“I told you I was going to look her over.”

“From afar,” Dylan says. “Like in class, you can look over the back of her head.”

I say, “Give him a break. He just wants to make sure I’m not two-timing you.”

Arif grimaces.

I say, “Well, I’m not. Maybe you’d like to share that with the world at large. I’m not cheating on anybody, I’m not engaged, I’m not a bad friend, and I’m not” (ripped from my dad’s vocabulary) “a tart. Anything else?”

Arif looks as if he deeply wishes he were somewhere else, and Dylan is snickering.

Arif says, “No, I think that covers it.”

Dylan, in front of everyone, says, “Do you want to come to my house again after?”

I, in front of everyone, say, “Yes.”

? ? ?

So after Orchestra, when I’m supposed to be at the library again, I’m lounging in Dylan’s garden in Beverly Hills. This time he doesn’t even lead me toward the door, he gestures to the wooden lawn chairs, and we sit there, side by side, looking back through his mother’s fruit trees to the wall of pine trees at the far end of the property. Drinking lemonade from a glass pitcher. Lulu stretched out in the grass, chewing her neckerchief.

The whole scene, the early sunset, the darkening afternoon, the long shadows and unseasonable heat, Dylan pouring lemonade into a heavy, cut glass tumbler (as apparently these are the only kind of glasses they own) is so sweet that the sweetness of it actually aches.

Dylan says, “Sorry about Arif.”

“Demerits at Convo. I think that constituted interfaith interrogation.”

“Don’t laugh at Convo. Arif and I are riding Convo into Georgetown, and it can’t happen soon enough. We’re pillars of interfaith dialogue. Ask Miss Palmer. Arif wants to quit, but his dad will kill him.”

“His dad should meet my dad.”

“I like his dad. I spent elementary school at his house. My Superman sheets are on the top bunk of his bunk bed.”

“I knew you guys were close, but your sheets on his bunk bed?”

“I lived there. I speak conversational Arabic.”

“What was wrong with your house?”

“My brother lived at my house. Funny thing about that.”

“He was that bad?”

“My parents thought we should work things out between us. Not the best approach when one kid outweighs the other kid by fifty pounds and thinks strangling people is fun.”