Afterparty(91)

“In those terrible plastic sunglasses.”

I don’t know what I have to do to get him to see. “Everybody thought I had a secret boyfriend, and I made that up too.”

“Lots of girls have secrets from their parents,” he says. “It’s part of growing up.” You can just hear him saying this in a similarly clueless way to the clueless parents of his pathologically dishonest patients who kill cats.

“Stop making excuses for me! Stop believing I’m this wonderful person who couldn’t possibly do anything wrong. Admit you’re disappointed.”

He says, “I know you.” As if this were definitive. “I believe you’re a wonderful person who did a lot of things wrong. As did I. That doesn’t make you a killer, or Fabienne, or—I regret I ever used this word with you—a disappointment.”

“Like you’re not disappointed? Please.”

“Of course I’m disappointed! You’ve been sneaking out of my house for six months. I should have listened when you said to chain you to the piano.”

“It’s not a joke! You should have listened when I said to let me go out. You should have trusted me.”

“Not the moment to tell me to trust you.”

“Sorry.”

He looks at me and he isn’t scowling, which is good under the circumstances. He says, “I think the boyfriend you didn’t make up is still in the courtyard.”

“No!”

“Do you want to ask him if he’d like to come in?”

“Seriously?”

He nods.





CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE


SIOBHAN WAKES UP.

Nobody thought that she would, but she does.

And when I see her, weeks later, battered and bandaged and hooked up to machines, when they let people in, I can’t help it, I love her again.

I see the green eyes, part open and a little crusty, and the ashy blond hair with roots badly in need of some attention, and her unmanicured fingernails, and I know how much she must hate this.

And then I think, I’m in complete denial. She wanted to kill me. This is bad.

“Way to screw up a pact,” she says.

I’m so thrown off, it’s difficult to form a sentence.

“Yeah, well, if I’d kept the pact, we’d both be dead.”

“That,” Siobhan says, looking around the hospital room, “was the point. The point was not to still be here and damn straight the point was not for me to go to Austen-f*cking-Riggs while you’re screwing some college geek. This is not how it was supposed to turn out.”

Austen Riggs is where kids who ventured over the line from out of control to mental cases went to get better. It’s where Courtney Garland went after she tried to gas herself with car exhaust in her father’s eight-car garage in October, and she got better. Second semester, she came back, transferred to Campbell Hall, and got onto the cheer squad.

Although it’s hard to imagine Siobhan cheering, no matter how mentally shored up.

She says, “It was a pact. You said you’d do it.”

The fact that I thought it was a joke when she first proposed this pact, the fact that I was so busy overlooking serious craziness and joking when I said, sure, we should do that if things don’t improve, that’s just what we should do, has evidently evaded her.

“Yeah, but on that roof, it had to be pretty obvious, even to you, that that wasn’t what I wanted.”

She is breathing so heavily and loudly, I’m afraid that the little jagged lines, the peaks and valleys of her monitor, will spell out “SOS” and bring forth frantic nurses and a crash cart. “What do you mean, even to me?”

I say, “You were kind of chemically impaired.”

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” she says, grasping my hand. Her fingers are dry and wiry. “I said what I wanted to do, and you came with me. Like always. I said ‘pact’ and you came. We had a pact.”

“Siobhan, did you not notice I was trying not to?”

Trying not to what? Kill, be killed, die together at the age of sixteen because of a misunderstanding, what?

I say, “People think you were trying to kill me.”

“What!”

“People think—”

“I heard you,” she says. “And that’s not what people think, is it? That’s what you think. Isn’t it? It is! It’s what you think!”

There it is. There is no answer that would work for both of us. But this is my answer. I say, “Yes. That’s what I think because that’s what happened. By the end, it was you pushing me.”

She pulls away, gazing past my head and toward the door, to the hospital corridor, past wheely racks hung with pouches of clear liquids, past surfaces of fresh flowers and unopened gift bags from Stella McCartney and Fred Segal. “Never mind,” she says. “I thought I could trust you, but obviously not.” She is playing with the ends of her bangs, twirling her hair, but will not look at me. “Well, tant pis!” she says.

“Siobhan, this is not a ‘tough shit’ kind of situation—”

“No. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we should be friends at all. If I can’t trust you, what’s the point?”