Afterparty(8)

Within a week, she is playing midnight touch football with them, climbing the fence and evading Latimer security. And I, Emma Lazar, Canadian good girl, am eating lunch with the Latimer Day football boys.

Dylan is never around at lunch.

Siobhan says, “Who are you looking for? Not that jerk from the beach club. I told you he’s not here. You should listen to me.”

I say, “No,” because I’m not. I don’t say who I am looking for, as this would involve pointing at Dylan and gnawing on my arm to keep from saying something truly embarrassing.

“Guy’s an arrogant dick,” she says. “Guy can’t go on a simple corkscrew run without sticking his tongue down some handy skank’s throat.”

“Making me the handy skank?”

She says, “How do you know how many other girls he kissed on his way to the ma?tre d’? How do you know if he even kept it in his pants between the beach and the clubhouse? Oh, that’s right. You don’t.”

“How do you know I didn’t captivate him with my charm?” I don’t actually think this is what happened, but the thought of him kissing his way up from the beach, his lips landing on mine just because they were there, is not my memory of choice.

“Your charm and that dress. I love that dress.”

The football boys, catching a snippet of a conversation with “not keep it in his pants” in it, are suddenly attentive.

The mean girls walking past our table take note, but what are they going to do, dump their Fiji water down our backs?

“Us against them,” Siobhan whispers. “We win.”

? ? ?

In Math, Dylan walks past my desk even though his desk is in the farthest back corner, by the door. The blazer hanging off one shoulder brushes my arm, smooth and alarmingly electric for navy blue gabardine. “So. Any needles in the eye yet?”

I say, “I’ll let you know. If.”

“Not if. When.” He writes his number on a slightly used Post-it and sticks it on my sleeve. He says, “Text. They don’t confiscate cell phones. They say they do, but they don’t.”

I type his number into my phone.

I do not pay attention in class.

I feel an astonishing absence of guilt.





CHAPTER FIVE


IN MY DEFENSE, EMMA THE good did not slide easily into the realm of the formerly good. I was not a complete scourge-of-God liar leading a fun life of deceit from the moment of the magic kiss.

Because, at first, my life of virtue remained stunningly intact. The extent of my evil was the sunglasses mini-lie I told my dad, and the completely false claim that the only makeup on my face was the slightest faint hint of mascara. And, all right, every word I said (and didn’t say) about Siobhan and pretty much everything we did, other than study.

In the Emma the Good column, I finish all homework and commune with my dad’s pick for my best friend in L.A., Megan Donnelly. It’s lucky that Megan and I like each other because we’re like the arranged marriage of kid friendship. It’s not her fault she’s the prisoner of her exponentially more clueless dad and overly attentive mom, goes to school in a convent even though she isn’t, strictly speaking, Catholic anymore (although she has yet to share her lack of religious conviction with her parents), and spends all her time studying, going to church, and attending uplifting cultural events.

My dad achieves a state of parental bliss at the Donnellys’: While other parents worry that their kids are having lots and lots of unprotected sex, Megan’s mom worries she’ll drink beverages with artificial sweeteners.

Something about rotting your cerebral cortex.

“Just drink the apple juice and don’t ask,” Megan whispers. “You really do not want to know.”

If you line up Megan, whose idea of teen rebellion is talking to Joe, a boy she never ever gets to see in real life, on her cell phone, with Siobhan, whose idea of teen rebellion is teen rebellion, it’s hard to tell that they inhabit the same century.

Also in the good column, all the way on top, I cart sacks of brown rice around and teach eager eighty-year-olds (and kids who only know how to operate, say, late-model Macs) how to log in donations on the world’s oldest, slowest computer at the food bank where I volunteer—the place that my dad, in a giant breach of good-father decorum, slips up and calls Temple Beth Boob Job.

Obviously, this isn’t the name of the temple: It is Temple Beth Torah, and the core of its existence is repairing the world, one grocery bag at a time.

It is not a bad place.

Except the young, girly rabbi is too friendly. I’m pretty sure it’s because my needy-motherless-girl flag is flying and she wants to share how to knit sweaters and the mysteries of tampons. (Hint: motherless, not needy.) But I think she catches me admiring her kippah, which is made of silver filigreed wire, as if a highly disorganized spider spun a skullcap that caught tiny pearls. Just as she’s telling me how welcome I’d be in levels of the temple higher than the basement where the food bank is, say in youth group, where I could be part of my own little community, my dad—who volunteers himself every couple of weeks, partly to help heal the world and partly to check up on me—bundles me into the car and starts making cracks about the place.

“Our community isn’t little and it extends far beyond the walls of this temple and all these reconfigured breasts,” he says. “Entendu?”