Afterparty(6)

She says, “You can thank me later.”

Miss Palmer, the guidance counselor, doesn’t seem at all perturbed that we’re an hour late and don’t have the ID cards she sent us to get. She delivers an unsettling pep talk about how wearing the Latimer uniform means we’re the best of the best of the best (as stated, in Latin, on the school crest), marches us across the quad to a building modeled after a Greek temple, only with air-conditioning, and ditches us inside the carved door of our French class.

Siobhan whispers, “I already speak French. You’d think they’d ask.”

“Bonjour, Siobhan Lynch et Emma Lazar.” The teacher, M. Durand, is an authentic Frenchman, slightly graying, slightly put out to be here. He looks us over with an unabashed stare and asks for two volunteer hostesses to show us (“How you say?”) the ropes.

The girls in the front row are busy examining their fingernails, the wood-grain surfaces of their desks, and the floor. Equestrian Girl from the bookstore rolls her eyes so far back in her head, it seems that our mere presence in her lair has precipitated a seizure. Nobody raises her hand to volunteer.

Siobhan twirls a lock of hair around her index finger and glares at la classe.

“No worries,” she tells M. Durand. “Je m’en fous de hostesses.” Roughly translated: I say screw you to the hostesses.

She really can speak French.

M. Durand raises one thin black eyebrow.

“Emma and I will show ourselves around,” Siobhan says in French spoken so slowly that even first-years could follow. “We could, no doubt, show you one or two things.” (There is no perfect translation, but it is so suggestive that M. Durand turns crimson all down his neck.)

“Oh, and Monsieur,” Siobhan continues, “s’il vous pla?t, assure these girls that even though Emma and I are un peu intimidating, we hardly look down on them at all.”

The entire front row looks up. It’s like the Wave people do at baseball games, only with bobbing headbands sparkling with a dizzying array of tacky rhinestones.

A boy leaning against the window turns slowly and looks at me, nodding in almost imperceptible approval.

Dylan, but I don’t know that yet.

And I full-on smile back.

Welcome to California, land of boys. I have just dissed an entire class that no doubt thinks I’m smiling about how much I look down on them by beaming at one.

He is worth beaming at.

I distract myself by cataloguing concrete details: hazel eyes, that wide mouth, slightly long brown hair, unbuttoned cuffs, his right arm hanging over the back of his chair. The wicked laugh he swallows just before the point he’d have to have a coughing fit or leave the room.

He looks as if the uber-prep clothes blew onto his body by mistake when he fell into a wind tunnel on his way someplace a lot more interesting. Which could explain why his hair is mussed and his shirttail has escaped from his pants and why he isn’t wearing socks.

He is the most attractive person I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Siobhan and the guy at the beach club, who was more of a fleeting mirage in the sad, overchaperoned desert of my life than an actual person.

At Latimer, on the other hand, I am surrounded by all manner of boys. And it’s clear that even in a lush forest of boys—their minute differences, the rich variety of their faces and shoulders and hands, emphasized by the fact that they’re all wearing the same thing—this is the boy.

It occurs to me that if I don’t stop staring at him, if I don’t suppress my desire to follow him out of the room and basically anywhere, he will probably notice.

“That was beyond good,” I say to Siobhan when we are sitting in the empty cafeteria after French, when I’m supposed to be in Math and she’s supposed to be in Econ.

“And it’s going to get better. I hold on to grudges for an unusually long time.”

“Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

“How could you be on my bad side?” she says, wide-eyed. “You’re my best friend in America. Aren’t I your best friend in America?”

I have several semi-friends scattered across North America, in cities where we lived when I was little and you make friends fast. They post sneezing panda videos on my Facebook wall and send chain letters threatening doom.

I say, “Yes.”

Eventually Miss Palmer finds us, draws us a map of where we’re supposed to be for all of our classes (just in case we’d planned to spend the whole rest of the day eating frozen yogurt), and shepherds us to PE.

Siobhan and I have checked our schedules, and we have four classes together, but PE isn’t one of them. I say, “Miss Palmer. I don’t think I’m supposed to be in PE. My schedule says ‘PE Alternative Dance.’?”

But apparently I’m trapped playing field hockey until I’m assigned to a ballet class.

“No worries,” Siobhan says when we are rifling through the leftover gym clothes they lend people who need them. “I’ll get us out of this.”

First, she tries to convince the teacher we can’t run around because of our periods.

“We’re synchronized,” she says. “It’s a scientific fact that best friends synchronize. You can look it up.”

“Suit up,” he says.

“This would never happen in Italy,” Siobhan says, ostensibly to me. “I lived in Milan before New York. There are old ladies who think you shouldn’t take a bath during your period in Italy.”