Afterparty(68)

I say, “We should go.”

Dylan says, “I wish I’d never met you.”

I am pretty sure he’s talking to me.

“Are you all right?”

“You’re the third-to-last person on earth I want sympathy from.”

He hands the parking ticket to the valet, not looking at me, not responding.

All I want to do is make him feel better. But the only way to do that would be to turn into someone else, preferably a better person, because, as things stand, all I can do, beyond apologizing, is make him feel worse. Listening to me apologize probably makes him feel worse, too.

In the car, every time I start to form a word, or a syllable, such as the “I’m” of “I’m sorry,” Dylan says, “I can’t. Talk. About this. While I’m driving.”

We’re parked just beyond the driveway of his parents’ house, having more or less driven through the rock garden, stopping just short of a hedge of white roses.

We just sit there and I watch him fume in profile.

I am waiting for his eyes to narrow in the amused way and not the so-angry-he-can’t-even-speak way. I am waiting for some slight indication that he’s thinking, okay, well, that’s not so bad.

And then I think, Sure, like that’s going to happen. Emma the I Don’t Even Know What, who did this to him on Valentine’s Day, who just couldn’t stop kicking his feelings down the road endlessly. The one who every time she had a chance to tell him, didn’t. In what universe do you get to lie this much, and then the person you’re lying to thinks it’s somehow okay because who cares if his girlfriend has been lying to him forever?

I don’t mean to grab him, but I grab him, in what is likely the most awkward and unreciprocated hug ever offered to a boy who wasn’t dead. He’s so stone still, inhaling, exhaling, not holding me back, that it seems even more likely that I’m clinging to the last hug, or, more accurately, half hug, and it’s over, and I wrecked it.

My forehead is resting on his shoulder, but he doesn’t move.

He says, “Get out of the car.”

He turns his head slightly to look at me, to look me over, and it’s the kind of look that Emma the Good would never, ever, in the furthest reaches of anyone’s imagination, ever have to look back at.

This is us breaking up.





CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT


I TEXT “SORRY” EVERY COUPLE of hours all day Sunday. I entertain brief, tiny delusional moments when I think, Hey, it’ll blow over, so he’s had a grudge against his brother since third grade and plans to cut off his parents as soon as he hits the Eastern Seaboard, but hey, he’ll forgive me.

After six “sorries,” he texts back, “Good for you.”

Over, over, over.

Megan, who is visiting her grandparents in Pebble Beach, bicycles down the road and calls me from behind a tree in a scenic overlook.

First I moan, and then Megan says, “Uh, Emma, you get that lying to him like that was really bad, right?”

“Of course I get it! I get that he’s not a shithead for dumping me and I get that I’m a terrible person. Justice is served. Balance is restored to the universe. It would probably feel better, though, if I hadn’t spent every waking minute fantasizing about him since September and if he wasn’t perfect.”

“If he’s that perfect, eventually he’ll figure out you’re a good person and forgive you.”

“He’ll never forgive me.”

Megan says, “He’s probably flattened by the thing with his father. I would die.”

“I know. And I can’t even help him or talk to him or anything. I’m not even his friend anymore. I completely screwed that up.”

Siobhan: Cheer up. He’s just some stupid high school boy who couldn’t deal.

Siobhan: Where r u?

Siobhan: It’s me. U know u want to talk to me.

Siobhan: Yr nemesis is now in Scotland if u care.

Siobhan: They’re both crap.

Siobhan: So he ditched you. Big freaking deal.

Siobhan: U got your check mark. Move on.

Siobhan: Why would you even want to be with him?

Siobhan: I told u he was crap.

Me: U told me he was surprisingly nice.

Siobhan: I told u to bail.

Me: WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THAT WAS AIDEN???

Siobhan: Are u BLAMING me??????? U think I screwed u on purpose?????

Me: If it looks like a fish and it swims like a fish and it smells like a fish.

Siobhan: Quaint. A Canadian proverb. Here’s an American fact. U said u were going to tell him. How wd I know u wussed out?

Me: You were supposed to be with Strick on Sunset. And I couldn’t tell him about Aiden could I because my best friend didn’t bother to tell me who Aiden was!!!!!

Siobhan: Strick sucks. Strick was supposed to b home coughing to death but he was at a party in Encino. Quel loser. Aiden said come I went.

Siobhan: Big freaking deal.

But at the end of all this, at the end of the day, at the end of agonizing in the closet, which shouldn’t have taken more than two minutes because the truth is so obvious: my fault. Completely. Not just some joke of a Bad Emma taking a shortcut around an immovable wall to experience high school hijinks up close. An actual Bad Emma who hurt someone she proclaimed she loved.