Afterparty(76)

I apologize in French, as Dylan looks on, making faces at me. I politely motion that I’m going to cut his throat and he disappears into the kitchen.

My dad says, “I’ll meet you there. Two cars.”

“But all I have with me is jeans.”

Jeans would be completely all right with the Karps and everybody else we know, including the Donnellys, but count as wardrobe disrespect with him when visiting anyone other than bears at the zoo.

He says, “Can’t you borrow something from Siobhan?”

Oh God.

I say, very quietly, because it’s not true yet, but it will be if I ever talk to her again, “We just had a fight.”

My dad is too overjoyed about this to stay that annoyed. Or maybe I’m reading too much into the fact that he stops yelling at me.

Dylan is rummaging around in the kitchen. “You want something before you go?”

“Could I borrow a shirt?” The overnight bag is at Siobhan’s. All I have is the spaghetti-strap tight thing from last night and, in my car, a Latimer tee that’s cut off (actually cut, with scissors, not my best fashion experiment ever) three inches above waist level, and is not debuting at the Karps’.

Dylan’s closet smells like him. Not in a bad way. I take a white linen shirt, and I roll up the sleeves and look in the mirror to see if this could in any way pass as something a girl would wear when not desperate. I take the little metal belt from last night and try to get it to sit in the right place. The result isn’t strikingly horrible.

I hear Dylan rummaging around in the cupboards. “You want a jelly doughnut? It’s the only breakfast food I’ve got.”

“No time! I’ll just snort the powdered sugar off the top.”

“Bad joke, considering who I used to go out with.”

I say, “There’s another thing we’re never going to talk about.”

Mrs. Karp admires Dylan’s shirt and wonders if I got it at Fred Segal.





CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE


BY THE TIME I’VE (BARELY) survived brunch—the first hour of which my dad spends glowering at me while Mrs. Karp flutters around saying how happy she is to have me, no matter what time I arrived, in possibly the world’s least helpful effort to be helpful—things are back to (mostly) normal.

My return to my dad’s good graces is greatly assisted by the youngest Karp child, who quietly spreads peanut butter on the Karp dachshund. Reminding my dad of his own amazing success in raising a daughter so repressed that she never, ever so much as considered coating a dog with peanut butter or jelly.

And when he walks me to my car afterward, if I weren’t wearing my boyfriend’s shirt, I would be the picture of goodness. Which is when I tell him how I left my overnight bag at Siobhan’s (true) because I was racing so fast to get out of there (not).

Now I’m tooling down Sunset in my own gumdrop-yellow car, windows open, radio blasting; this was the Candy Land dream, for a second at the beach club that first day when I first saw Siobhan. When Montana Gibson was no doubt down on the beach toasting a marshmallow while I was in the clubhouse kissing Aiden, and Siobhan was bagging him, and I had no idea who they were, or what I was actually seeing, or how all that confectionary sugar was going to melt and get sticky and rank.

I turn up Doheny toward Burton’s house, with its fake-pond Jacuzzi, and I’m thinking, Quick in and out. No confrontation, no screaming, no drama. Just bye.

I’m thinking, One forty-five, she could still be asleep, this could be completely painless.

But Siobhan is not asleep. She doesn’t look as if she slept that much earlier, either. She just looks wasted.

This couldn’t be completely painless. We’ve already had the big-ass fight a dozen times; this is us breaking up.

“Look who finally showed,” she says, rolling over on her black and white quilt, setting down her book.

I feel weirdly defensive, as if what I think is the final betrayal hadn’t already happened. As if we were still the Dynamic Duo and this was just a rocky patch in Gotham City.

I say, “I fell asleep. It was kind of unplanned. Sorry if you were worried.”

“I thought you went off with some forty-year-old perv who asked you to help find his lost kitten.”

I say, “Yeah, well, I told him I was boss of my body.”

She is sitting on the edge of her bed now, in the same short little skirt and unbuttoned shirt as when I left her at the party. “Didn’t get much sleep, did we?” she says.

“Could I just have my bag? I have to go.”

She says, “Where were you?”

“You know where.”

“He broke up with you for no good reason!” she half shouts. “He broke your heart and then you slept with him? Did you wake up stupid yesterday?”

At the center of me, there is something so hard and cold and icy, it’s as if my body temperature has plummeted to absolute zero and I don’t even have feelings left, because my heart is ice.

I say, “Forget it. I’m done. I can’t even listen to you.”

“What’s wrong with you?” She’s off the bed and in my face.

I’m dodging her, I’m behind the rocking chair, and I yell back. “What’s wrong with you? You pretend we’re friends and then you tell him I came over here to hook up with Aiden! Are you out of your mind?”