Afterparty(59)

I’m thinking, I’m five kinds of doomed.

I’m thinking, Who are you, and how is it I didn’t notice until now?

I say, “Sib, put down the iPhone. No evil texting. You sound like you’ve been smoking crack and watching Mean Girls.”

“You think I’m mean and evil?” She sounds worked up and insulted.

I’m thinking, All right, un-insult her fast, because her finger’s on the texting icon and she could wreck your life before you make it out of the ladies’ room.

“Sib,” I say. “You’re saying you could undo my life in under three minutes. What am I supposed to think?”

I’m thinking, fix this. Apologize. Turn cartwheels in the ladies’ room. Do anything you have to do to fix this. You can kill her later.

This is possibly the world’s worst ladies’ room situation that doesn’t have a mugger in it.

I say, “Remember me? Best friend and big-time sidekick?” Lie lie, flatter flatter. Except that until now, it was mostly, at least intermittently, intensely and undeniably, somewhat true. “Unless we have some kind of a pact to be evil, and I don’t remember that one.”

I’m watching her face to see if she looks like a person who’s about to push “send” on an evil tweet.

She looks like a girl who is brushing her hair.

She says, “Fuck this. I have to go to Econ.”

My lungs start to fill. I should immediately join the UN and broker peace in Sudan, the Middle East, and Chechnya.

I have an extreme need for candy.

I want chocolate so much, I am willing to enter the small space where the vending machines are, off the student lounge, with Chelsea, whom I plan to ignore while scarfing down a Kit Kat bar.

“Aren’t you unexpectedly interesting,” she says, blocking the swinging door. “Running around school screaming. Classy.”

I say, “Excuse me.”

Chelsea extends her leg so the toe of her shoe is pressed against the wall opposite, like a railroad crossing gate by Tory Burch.

Ambush.

“Are you seriously trying to trap me here? Because I’m leaving.”

This is wishful thinking because Chelsea seems determined to establish that she can intimidate me.

“Nobody likes what you’re doing,” she says.

“So you decided to trap me here? That’s helpful.”

“How do you get off being this big, better-than-everyone holdout?” she barks. “First you won’t even go out because we’re too boring for you. Then you’ll go out but you’re too good to do anything because you’re so devoted to this French guy—”

I interrupt, “That’s over.”

Chelsea has escalated from barking to snarling. “You can’t just lose your old boyfriend and take your best friend’s boyfriend like that.”

“That isn’t what happened!”

The glass door of the candy machine is slick against my back; I imagine myself sliding to the floor and crawling out under Chelsea’s leg.

“Please,” Chelsea says. “She was all giggly and unslutty with him. For her. Didn’t you notice that?”

“Are you seriously calling her a slut? What century do you come from?”

Chelsea scuffs the wall, planting her foot on the floor. She swings her backpack over her shoulder, and for a second, I think she’s going to smack me with it.

“Maybe you spent so long being vintage vanilla, you finally cracked,” she says. “Maybe you were a bitch all along. Who cares? But you should look at her because she’s not fine, and you’re all over school sucking his face. Who do you think you are?”

Am I walking around school sucking his face?

Maybe this is the one time in her life when Chelsea Hay has a point.





CHAPTER FORTY


DYLAN SAYS, “ARE YOU OKAY?”

It’s only lunchtime and the day is stretching into a horror show, starring me.

He says, “You look like shit.”

“Oooookay . . .”

“Let me rephrase. You look extremely upset, not like shit.”

I say, “Semi-okay.” Then, in a semi-suicidal moment of confessional daring, I say, “I might need to talk to you before somebody else does.”

“Somebody else already did,” he says. “Sam said he heard I should watch out because you’re a backstabbing bitch. I am, once again, confused as f*ck.” He is pulling me into him, which is both perfect and clear confirmation of Chelsea’s Emma-is-a-big-bitch-and-girl-code-violator hypothesis. “I hate high school.”

“You hate high school? Is Chelsea Hay ambushing you? Is Sam Sherman running around telling everybody you kill puppies and pummel your best friend?”

Dylan says, “Want to walk out of here?”

“Physics. I’m barely getting a B in Physics. I can’t skip again.”

“After. Pancakes. I’ll buy.”

Only after school, the Griddle is closed, and nothing else will do. He says, “Or. We could go to my house.” Where, it turns out, I’m addicted to frequent, impulsive acts of extreme lust, and very good at imagining future acts involving more of the same.

When we’re about to get dressed, he says, “So we’re good, right? You’re okay with the crap at school.”