Afterparty(83)

Then he gestures to a curtain, a heavy brocade curtain, with a coffin jutting out underneath. With feet reaching almost to the end. There are coffins with their lids propped open, people inside, not all dressed, not fully, and some people are lying there, and some people are making out, and in the faint green light they look maggoty, although maybe the deadness motif just brings that to mind.

And when I look down, the coffins are resting in something soft, mounds of loamy-smelling dirt, five coffins resting in dirt, and there are two girls rubbing that dirt on a guy’s chest, slowly, as if in a party trance, as he lies there with his hands folded at his throat.

A voice that sounds so eerily like Siobhan’s, but isn’t, says, “Want to play?”

And I’m gone.

The band starts up with a strange, punkish cover of “Hooray for Hollywood.”

There is a blast of light so bright it hurts my eyes. I press my eyelids closed but the outline of shooting flames is visible behind my eyelids. When I open my eyes, Dylan is standing in front of me.

In jeans and a standard-issue white shirt, only one that skims his body, and a dinner jacket not unacquainted with a tailor. He is leaning against a pillar, smoking a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke.

He says, “Hey. Not bad for a girl who’s home asleep.”

I say, “Not bad yourself. For someone who’s—where are you?”

“We don’t live in the same f*cking house,” he says. “I’m wherever I want to be. I’m where you wear jeans and a dinner jacket, and a zombie from Screen Actors’ Guild hands you a cigarette.”

I say, “What are you doing here? I thought you hated this.”

Dylan says, “You look beautiful. You always look beautiful.”

Straight to the heart. Which is not where I want him.

He smooths his lapels. “I might be overdressed. Paulina’s suite is clothing optional. And well stocked. As promised.”

Paulina has rented the semi-official junior class suite.

“Well stocked with what?”

“Wine, women, a shitload of pharmaceuticals. It’s raining white powder up there.”

I say, “Shit, is Siobhan there?” Almost reflexively, that’s where my concern goes.

“What do you think?”

I am struck by my remarkable inability to let go. Of her, of him, of Good Emma, of anything I decide to let go of, but don’t. Because here I am, right back in it, not dealing with the reality of a boyfriend I should have noticed wasn’t perfect and also was leaving town, and a best friend I should have noticed was high all the time.

Dylan groans. “No. Emma. Don’t go.” It is, despite everything, almost irresistible. “At least dance with me first.”

He reaches his hand around the small of my back, the Aiden move, and it feels so good, I let him lead me. He doesn’t even have to open his mouth; just him standing there, swaying a little, almost imperceptibly, to the music is a compelling argument. And it isn’t that I want to do anything other than dance with him, to cuddle up to that black dinner jacket and those scruffy jeans, to succumb to the bursts of light in the dark room. But I’m backing away.

“Christ, Emma, you’re not her keeper,” Dylan says. “Are you planning to track her down wherever she’s passed out forever?”

“She’s passed out?”

“Not yet. She’s more in her flapping-around, making-out-with-anyone-that-looks-at-her stage, before she passes out.”

“That is so mean.”

“Yet so accurate.”

I turn toward the doors, but I’m moving against the tide.

“You should dance with me,” he says from behind. “You shouldn’t get distant and cold in advance.”

We’re standing in the middle of the ballroom. Kids are waving their own bottles—the Camden isn’t particular—and smoking all manner of things; there are little plumes of smoke all around us. In the dim recesses of the room, people are hanging off the stage and off stairways to balconies, the acrid sensation of mold in my nostrils superseded by perfume and body odor and rum. Up on the stage, the drummer isn’t drumming because there’s a girl in his lap and they’re sharing a bottle and she’s whipping his belt around over their heads. It’s picking up the light, like a lone streamer.

We are being pushed toward the stage by bodies, elbows and shoulders knocking into us, and I keep moving to the side, trying for the exit door, if I could get to it through the crowd.

“You should stay here and dance with me,” Dylan says again. He starts off plaintive, but by the end of the sentence, it’s a demand. “Why don’t you face it? She’s too broken for you to fix.” I can’t tell if his arms are around me in anger or affection.

“Say what?”

“I said—”

“I know what you said! And if she’s so broken, what were you doing with her?”

“I told you why I was with her,” Dylan says. “Drunk and an idiot. Both times. Now tell me why you were with me.”

“You know why I was with you! I saw you my first day at Latimer. Like you didn’t notice.”

Dylan says, “That’s not what she says. And it’s starting to make sense.”

I say, “Excuse me?”

“She said I was a check mark. That’s what I was to you.” Even in the darkness of the ballroom with the flashes of disorienting light, even with the poker face, even with everything, it’s hard to miss the sadness. Or the anger. “You might have told me.”