Afterparty(84)

His hand on my back feels more like a fist and less like the hand of a guy who has one single good feeling toward me.

“And you believed her, obviously.”

He says, “She said I was your learner’s permit supervised hours. Care to comment?”

But there’s no anger left in me for her; I already know who she is.

I say, “I can explain.”

The hand is off my back entirely.

I say, “It wasn’t like that.” Just a beat too late.

A burst of white light captures the contours of his face, a flash of rage.

He says, “Listen, Emma, high school is about to be over. You might have to hang up your learner’s permit and get a license. This is what people do. They f*ck and then they leave for college.”

“You suck, you know that?” I am pushing him away.

He shakes his head and touches my cheek. It might as well be the cold fingers of the living dead.

I am weaving between people, and he is following, toward the exit door, which is heavy and warped and damp. I brace myself against it, pressing it with my right shoulder and all my weight, but it is slow to give until the moment it bursts open and I fall through it, into a cold, dark hallway, and run back toward the lobby.





CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT


THE ELEVATORS IN THE LOBBY have hammered copper doors, decorated with intricately wrought tree branches and vines. The doors open slowly, the elevator having creaked to a stop six inches below the level of the lobby’s tile floor. Death trap, anyone? I head up the wide, curved stairway, which is draped with people sprawled from step to step.

I keep climbing to the penthouse floor, because apparently that is where we all are, nothing but the best of the best of the best of trashy. Hotel-room doors are hanging open on both sides of the hall, with odd assortments of people I know and don’t know all over each other. It’s hard to imagine that anyone is spending the night cooking up a storm, but there are sour boiled-cabbage smells. And apparently the hookah has made a comeback with smoke that smells fruity, burnt and aromatic, that curls up like a floating shadow of gray paisley.

Kimmy—who is finally making out with Max Lauder, barely inching down the hall, hugging the wall, with Max working the thin straps of her dress off her shoulders—looks out at me.

I say, “Do you know where Paulina is?”

She pries her head out of the embrace and says, “Charlene has champagne,” nodding toward the door over her left shoulder. Where a bunch of kids are sitting on the bed, popping bottle after bottle in rapid succession. Where Charlene’s senior boyfriend is pouring champagne into her no-longer-abstinent mouth.

Charlene yelps, “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me how good this is?”

Senior boyfriend appears to be deeply perplexed as to why he didn’t think to tell her sooner.

Charlene cups her hands under her chin so the champagne won’t pour down over her chest. She is a serious good girl, yet someone is trying to lick champagne out of the dimple on her chin. She is now wearing a strapless bra and a tulle skirt that might be a slip.

A guy on the bed waves a bottle of uncorked champagne at me, bubbles frothing from the mouth of the bottle onto the patterned carpeting. Grey Burgess, very cute, and with a crooked smile. I think, Shit yes, Grey Burgess. Drink champagne. Get a buzz. Save Siobhan. This year did not exactly work out as planned, everything kind of sucks, but here I am.

I walk in, Grey Burgess nodding to me, and I sit next to him on the edge of the heavily populated bed. The mattress tilts in our direction. He hands me the bottle and I take a swig. Then he kisses my ear. It isn’t the same as with Dylan, nothing is the same as with Dylan, not his chest or the smell of him or his hands under my hair.

I hoist my legs onto the bed, thinking, This is nothing, we f*cked and then he leaves for college. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I am so not the lamb at the wolves’ orgy, I have so passed the point of no return for lamblike girls with no out-of-control proclivities.

Which is working great until we roll off the bed and Grey is on top of me, kind of crushing me, and it’s somewhere between meh and unpleasant. I roll him off, he’s not insistent, and I go, “Sorry, Grey, I have to find Siobhan.”

Grey props himself up on his side and looks at me.

He says, “You’d have a better time with me.”

“I’m sure. Gotta go.”

Standing up is hard. I feel light-headed and a little bit elated. I wonder if maybe the cocoa puffs were, in fact, cocoa puffs, and the joint was more than weed, and I’ve made it over the line to hard drugs. As innocuous and nothing-like as Siobhan claims they are. Or if this is the champagne. Or if this is just how people feel in check-mark city.

I find Paulina’s suite. I stand in the hall with the sounds of someone bumping into the door from the inside, muffled music, and the smell of weed and cat pee.

There is the wet-trash smell of Siobhan’s French cigarettes.

I bang on the door and people I can’t see in rooms I can’t see into shout for me to be quiet. They are hoarse and loud and insistent.

Lia Graham, stumbling down the hall barefoot, a champagne bottle in each hand, wants to know if I can zip her up.

I can.

Paulina’s door opens inward, whoever opened it no longer in evidence. The girls’ lacrosse team, that I usually think of as scary upright creatures who live for sports, are huddled with Siobhan and some guys on the floor, and no one looks all that upright.