Afterparty(72)

I gather up my pad, my pen, and my entirely synthetic cardigan, and walk out.

And I think, all right, I can tell that Siobhan set me up, I’m not a complete idiot. But it’s not as if I’m Snow White and I get to reject the morally deficient as potential companions because I’m just so ethically superior. Maybe she and I are even more perfect for each other than I’d ever imagined, because look at me.

Me: The Palisades. It’s on.

Siobhan: I knew it.

Then I text Dylan my fifty-first apology.





PART THREE





CHAPTER FIFTY


THE COMPASS SAYS, DON’T GO.

To which I reply: Go torture a nice, salvageable girl. Which (hint) would not be me.

I say to my dad, who is, by necessity, oblivious to everything that’s been going on, “I’m sleeping over at Sib’s, all right?”

My dad says, “Doesn’t Siobhan go wild Saturday nights?”

“Not this Saturday, she doesn’t.” Not really caring, because going wild is sounding slightly attractive and not entirely inconsistent with what I’ve turned myself into.

He says, “Okay.”

I pack my overnight bag while telling myself, This is what Kimmy does when she says she’s going to take pictures of Hoover Dam and stay with Declan Hart’s sister at UNLV, when, in fact, she’s going camping with Declan. I say to myself, I actually am sleeping over at Siobhan’s, so the actual sentence that came out of my mouth was true. See how improved I am now that I’ve stopped skulking around with Dylan Kahane in the wonderful world of teen contraception so as not to accidentally turn up on a future season of Teen Mom?

The compass says, Cool, a new form of lying. Unpack. Play a nice round of French Scrabble and call it a night. Repent. Repair. Make your dad tea.

Part of me wants to, but the part with legs is out the door.

Siobhan is completely antsy, chanting, “Party, party, party.” She turns up my car radio, and dances around in her seat.

I look over at her, bouncing around as if everything is swell, and I think, Why am I doing this? Pretending we can still have a Girls Just Want to Have Fun night after everything that’s happened? What am I even doing in the car with her?

We are driving through a tract of giant houses at the far end of Sunset. On the list of things my dad objects to in the U.S., these houses aren’t anywhere near the top, but I still can’t drive past them without hearing him go, “Ah, the marriage of bad taste, ostentation, and money.”

I do not, at this moment, want to be hearing my dad’s voice in my head.

Or the compass saying, Turn around.

Siobhan says, “You’re awfully quiet, missy. Don’t you want to have a widdle fun?”

The party house is on a wooded knoll. I can’t tell if the electricity is overloaded and flickering out, or if this is weirdly intentional.

Siobhan is out the door before I’ve even parked, running toward the house, up through the ivy on the steep bank because there’s no way to squeeze between the cars crammed in the sloping driveway.

She yells, “Come on!” above the blasts of music.

By the time I get there, she’s disappeared. The band is so loud, it hurts to be in the same room with them. The loudness vibrates into the part of the brain that produces headaches in bursts of pain behind the eyes. I head outside. The backyard smells like weed and vomit.

The first person I see that I know, and who looks to be enjoying things even less than me, is Arif. He’s in a gazebo with Kimmy, who doesn’t look as if she’s in much of a party mood either.

She’s sitting on a white bench, her hand on Arif’s arm. I can see her mouth move, but the music is so raucous, she might as well be in a silent movie, all the colors washed out in the blinking lights, her white top and Arif’s shirt glowing like phosphorescent fish dead on the beach at night.

She yells, “Emma!”

I climb through more ivy, up to the gazebo.

She says, “Did you come with Dylan?”

And I’m thinking, Maybe I should have told her something about that, back when she wanted to know.

“With Siobhan.”

“Can you drive?”

“What?”

She yells louder, “Can you drive? Are you sober? Your stupid boyfriend or whatever is trashed and someone has to get Arif out of here.”

I yell, “What’s going on?”

“The Winston *s parked Arif’s car in, and he’s sick.”

In the green light, his skin looks ashy.

I yell, “Are you drunk?”

Kimmy says, “Hello. This is Arif. He doesn’t do alcohol. It’s against his religion. Literally.”

Arif moans something about nachos. Bad, nasty poisonous nachos.

Here it is if I want it, served up on a bad-nacho platter: a way out of here. Sib can taxi if she wants to stay, no big scene, sick friend. Arif could throw up in my car, but sitting on blocks for fourteen years makes a car smell like a sweat sock, so the risk is less hideous than in a normal vehicle that smells either new or like a cedar-scented car deodorizer.

Then I register Dylan, who is indeed trashed—you can see it in his walk as he lopes toward the gazebo. I register the extreme, imminent awkwardness of being in my car with trashed Dylan and sick Arif, in front of whom Dylan and I couldn’t actually talk about anything, not that I want to.