Afterparty(88)

Oh God, oh God, oh God. I am so not what he thinks I am, and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

I say, “I’m not Emma the Good anymore, Dad, I’m sorry, I’m not.”

More soup.

He says, “Would you like to talk to Rabbi Pam? She’s worried about you.”

I have visions of my dad trotting out Rabbi Pam and a minister and a priest—like a slightly dirty joke with the same crew walking into a bar—and giving them all equal time.

This is who I am: A person who thinks of semi-dirty jokes in the middle of this. A person who keeps checking the computer, trolling for anything about what happened. For the nothing that means she’s still alive. For rumors and gossip and word on the street.

Which is that Siobhan fell off the roof unassisted.

Which is that she was drunk and stoned and crazy and belligerent all night, that she got into a hair-pulling catfight with an unsuspecting girl from Winston over nobody knows what, after which she tried to yank my hair out when I tried to put her blouse back on her.

That she careened up to the roof screaming something incoherent about impact.

That maybe her brain was so scrambled by a smorgasbord of Afterparty substances by then that she thought of her head as that seventh-grade welcome-to-science-class experiment where you toss a padded raw egg off a roof to see if it will crack on impact.

Or maybe she thought she could fly.

My dad says, “I see how difficult this is for you.” He is being so kind, he is trying so hard, I don’t deserve all of his soup and effort. “Would you like to come out of the closet and lie on the sofa? Give me your hand. Ems? Amélie?”

It’s been all French for days.

But I am screaming in English: “Don’t call me that!”

He sits out there for hours. It’s like a weird pajama party game. He hands me in a pillow and a quilt from Montreal.

I hand him back the quilt and he gives me my yellow comforter and some French Vogues and a flashlight.

He says, “Do you want to play with Mutt?”

I open the door and Mutt squeezes in and falls asleep on my shoes. He wheezes when he sleeps.

We’re in the fourth day.

Mutt is circling around my boots as if he’s looking for a special place to poop. I open the door and let him out in the backyard, where Jeff is sitting, nose to the back door, looking bereft, missing him.

There is banging on the front door. Not the knocker, a fist.

My dad gets off the floor. He says, “Come on. Maybe it’s Megan.”

I say, “Is it Megan?”

He shakes his head.





CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE


DYLAN IS STANDING IN THE doorway in jeans and one of those extremely cool jackets that isn’t quite a sports coat but hovers over his torso as if his tailor just finished perfecting it. He is dressed up. Not that I think my dad will register this fact, given that there’s no tie involved.

“I’m Dylan Kahane,” he says.

Even though I can only see my dad from the back, I know what his face is doing. I know this is not the genre of boy my dad sees as being in the same story as me.

“The orchestra geek,” Dylan says.

My dad says, “The hell you are.”

But he lets him come in, and Dylan walks through the front hallway and into the living room. He comes toward me where I’ve curled up on the couch. I start to get up and he holds me there, against his chest. I’ve been crying, off and on, for three days—why stop now? I press my face into the dark wool of the jacket, against the lapel, and I feel his chin on top of my head, vibrating, as if he were humming.

Here I am, leading my new, improved, and not imaginary secret life in front of my father, between the piano and the shelves of books on the technical aspects of being insane. I am kissing Dylan, walking past the record player with cabinets with all my dad’s historic vinyl, holding Dylan’s hand. I am walking into my bedroom and closing the door.

And the oddness of it strikes me, how I feel furtive, like a renegade bad girl, sitting chastely in my closed-door bedroom with Dylan across the room, yet I can sleep with him at his house without one single guilt-tinged scruple.

And from across the killer girl’s pale green-and-yellow bedroom, Dylan says, “Hey.”

I say, “Hey.” I say, “I’m sorry.” I say, “Nothing seems real.”

Dylan says, “I’m sorry. I know. I keep thinking, if I’d just done something differently—”

“I know.”

Because this wasn’t one of those quicksand landscapes with an inevitable outcome. The kind where you can tell yourself that there was nothing you could do to stop it, it was a runaway train, it was a stampede of crazed cattle, it was kismet, fate, and preordained.

I could have said no, said maybe, not said yes. All year.

Dylan says, “I know you don’t want me over here, but you won’t answer the phone. I never should have let you leave there by yourself. I should have gotten you home. I should have figured it out.”

“I think I told you to get lost.”

“So what. I just stood there. Jesus.”

And then I think, Siobhan is comatose, Siobhan is lying there at Cedars-Sinai and no one knows if she’s going to live or die, and I’m behind a closed door in my bedroom, engaged in teen romance.