Afterparty (20 page)

I stumble toward him and he catches me in flight.

Dylan says, “Jesus, Seed, what’s wrong with
her
?”

I look down, trying to figure out how to summarize the parts of this that don’t include Jean-Luc. Or how much I liked Dylan from way before I knew him well enough to like him that much, and how it killed me that he was with Siobhan. And how Siobhan is massively ticked off that I’m in girlfriend mode and not emotion-free checkmark collection mode.

There’s not a lot left over to tell him.

But when I look up again, he’s smiling at me. And without comment, I watch Siobhan and all that drama slouch away until she’s out of sight.

He says, “You going to History?”

“Can you live without my brilliant notes?”

“Your OCD notes? Maybe this once.” We are walking toward the path leading onto the hill. It is sunny, cold and clear, and you can smell the pine and eucalyptus from the edge of the quad. “Do you have gym shoes?”

Which seems like an odd question, as I kind of thought we were headed onto the hill to make out, as opposed to shooting hoops. But the fact is, I do. In the trunk of my car, with my earthquake preparedness kit full of packets of water-purifying chemicals, nutrition bars, and waterproof matches.

I say, “I’m prepared for everything.”

Everything involves driving west on Sunset and into a neighborhood where houses are far apart and hidden in foliage. At the end of a cul-de-sac, a hiking trail leads back into the hills, a dirt path that widens and narrows through canyons of wild grass and the occasional jolt of wildflowers.

Fifteen minutes up, there’s a clearing with some metal picnic tables and a view straight across to the ocean, turning slate blue as the afternoon darkens.

He says, “Hike much?”

“Franklin Canyon. Hollywood sign. Nothing major.”

We’re sitting on the picnic table closest to the edge, alone except for the occasional hiker with dog, and a woman with a cat on a leash that pauses, snarls at us, and continues up the hill.

“You’ve never been here?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Major make-out spot.”

“If you don’t mind attack cats.”

He says, “After dark, very few attack cats.”

“I take it you’ve been here after dark. Is this an invitation to ask questions, or are you just planning to torture me with curiosity?”

“It was a different kind of invitation. But ask. Unlike some people, I’m an open book.”

“You are so not an open book!”

He says, “Ask.”

“All right, rumor has it that you were running around town with some elderly college girl.”

Dylan looks surprised, and then impenetrable.

“You didn’t just say that to Lia Graham to look cool, right?” This is supposed to come out jokey, but it doesn’t. I regret it as soon as it’s out of my mouth.

“I never tell anybody anything so I’ll look cool. Again, that would be my brother. Face next to the word ‘liar’ in Wikipedia.” He stretches himself out on the picnic table. “Not me, I don’t fuck with people.”

“Sorry.”

“Your lack of gossip is shocking.”

More like no one ever tells me anything.

“I’m shockingly virtuous that way. You know,
lashon hara
. This Jewish thing with not gossiping. My dad is way into it; precludes most forms of interesting conversation.”

Dylan says, “I know what
lashon hara
is.”

Complete brain freeze. Of course he knows what it is, he reps Judaism at Religious Convo. Probably his idea in coming to a major make-out spot wasn’t to have a discussion of my dad’s completely cherry-picked precepts of religion.

Dylan says, “So. I could be making up a torrid affair with an older woman and you wouldn’t know the difference?”

Yikes.

“Were you having a torrid affair? If only I gossiped continually.”

Dylan blinks, which would appear to be his version of an eye-roll. “I hate to disillusion you, but guys in high school rarely get to have torrid affairs with older women.”

“Have you met Nancy?”

He closes his eyes. “Special case.”

“So what
have
you been doing while failing to meet your obligation to socialize at Latimer?”

“Aren’t you the girl who’s been with some bi-Continental guy that sends her French perfume and who probably doesn’t know where to find junior assembly?”

What French perfume?

“Have you ever noticed I was wearing French perfume?”

Dylan says. “Okay. When Aiden was a senior, he went out with this girl, Montana Gibson. She wrote a poem about him in
Latimer Rambles
that compared him to God. Roughly. Lasted all year. Then he left without saying good-bye.”

“Literally?”

“She went to Jackson Hole with her family in July. When she got back,
Rambles
was in the trash and Aiden was in Scotland. She went nuts. Came over and screamed at my mom. But this is Aiden we’re talking about. If Montana took his name in vain, no wonder he blocked her number.”

“He just left for college? He didn’t actually break up?”

“Moot point. Even when he’s with someone, he’s not with them. They can be at the same party, the girl is waiting for him to get back with her drink, and he’s locked in the bathroom with some whore who likes muscles.”

He peers at me. “Oh. Sorry.” He slaps his face. It’s not much of a slap. “I know. Don’t call women whores. Shit. Did I just finish us off?”

All right, so he’s not allowed to say the word “whore” ever
again. But we are so not finished off. Because if it were dark, and if the hikers going up the hill weren’t going to come down eventually, and if I didn’t have to get back to school, what would I do? There are dark waves of urgency. Are un-whorish girls even supposed to feel like this? God knows, I’m not supposed to feel this or anything in the same general classification as this. I’m supposed to be up for a lovely picnic on the banks of the Thames wearing a flowered sundress from 1956,
not
for naked grappling in the hot, lush jungle where the Amazon veers off into rain forest.

Or on hiking trails fifteen minutes off a cul-de-sac near the 405 Freeway.

Not
this
.

Dylan is saying, “Yeah. I hung out with Montana a lot after that. Last year and this fall.”

I am trying to sound civilized, cool, and moderately under control. “Were you, like, her boyfriend? How old is she?”

“I was the Aiden substitute. Aiden was not happy. He comes home from Scotland for summer, he’s all over her. Then he breaks up with her for the second time in case the first time wasn’t bad enough. Montana starts hooking up with this other guy. And me.”

“Wow.”

“Aiden’s not a very nice guy. I was the revenge fuck. Not that I’m complaining. But it would have been considerate of her to tell me.”

“I’m no doubt going to be struck by lightning for gossiping like this, but your brother is a jerk.”

Dylan says, “Girls seem to like it.”

“Explains where your aversion to bullshit comes from.”

“Explains why I like being with someone
honest
, with no interest in running off with my brother. You have no interest in running off with my brother, I assume?”

I put my arm around him. “Let’s see. He lives in Scotland, so I could never actually see him, and he’s not a very nice guy. Bring it on. I’m hot for one of those.”

“I thought you
had
one of those,” Dylan says.

Holy shit.

I have officially lied to my dad about everything; to my best friend about how much I didn’t want her boyfriend; to everyone at Latimer about my nonexistent boyfriend; and now to this guy—who apart from calling women whores is kind of perfect, and who (hint) likes honest girls—about practically everything.

I say, “As long as you brought it up—”

He sits up. He raises his hand. He says, “I’m done hearing about bad absentee boyfriends.”

“But that’s not what it’s about!”

He says, “That’s never what it’s about.”

He pulls me back down with him to the surface of the picnic table. My cheek seems to be resting on the remnants of potato chips or some other crunchy thing I can’t identify. He moves his hand so it’s under my face, and he tilts my face toward his. I don’t care if the snarling cat sees me.

I kiss him for a very long time.

He says, “Friday.”

Oh yeah.

Siobhan:
Did u fall off the planet?

Siobhan:
I texted like five hours ago. Are you MIA?

Siobhan:
Don’t be like that

Me:
Like what? Like the person you shoved?

Siobhan:
Boo hoo. Tough love. U need to speed it up.

Siobhan:
Where were you?

Siobhan:
Oh. Do Emma and the boy toy have a widdle secret?

Me:
Shut up. We were hiking.

Siobhan:
Well don’t. You’re not in this to hike. Quick in and out. Check. Just hurry up and get there.

Siobhan:
Before he finds some trivial thing he doesn’t like about you and you’re toast.

Me:
I’m trying to tell him about Jean-Luc first. Takes time.

Siobhan:
I TOLD U NOT TO! You’ll be fucked and I’LL be fucked.

Siobhan:
U can screw up your life all u want but u can’t mess me up! I’m not going down w yr boat! Like I want the horse bitches to know I made you up? I don’t think so.

Me:
This is between me and him. It’s not even about you.

Siobhan:
It’s about me and you. And if you’re thinking about fucking me over don’t.

FRIDAY, EVERY TIME I’M NEAR
Siobhan, she walks away.

Friday, Dylan attends an unusually high number of classes and keeps looking over at me (which I know because I keep turning around to look at him, and there he is with this laser gaze trained on me).

In English, he says, “So. Have you thought of something? Do you have a sudden need to pretend you’re at the library?”

So after school, when I am supposedly lost in the stacks at the BHPL, I follow his car to his house, a giant pseudo–country mansion with ivy growing all over it. He is waiting in the driveway, and he takes my arm and nods toward a small shingled building behind an oleander hedge.

“Guesthouse,” he says. “I live in there.”

I’m good with this for about thirty seconds. The coolness of the cottage is immediately apparent. Then, as I walk toward it,
every terrifying thing I’ve ever been warned boys do to girls blows through my mind in a gale-force hurricane of paranoia. Until the guesthouse, which is sweet and has blue-painted French doors and shingles and a welcome mat, starts looking like a human-trafficking dungeon for careless girls.

Dylan says, “What’s wrong?”

Panic is what’s wrong. Well-indoctrinated, no-basis-in-reality fear of the known. Because I know him. And it’s the middle of the afternoon. And it’s the flats of Beverly Hills.

Dylan says, “Emma? Hey. Seed. You want to walk the dog?”

The dog is a large, unclipped Airedale named Lulu, rolling around on the lawn beyond the guesthouse, chewing a high-top sneaker. She has to be chased because she thinks that Dylan wants the shoe. He looks so goofy loping around the backyard, grabbing for her collar, that I come fairly close to calming down.

Then, once he has the leash on her, she lies down and barks at him, and has to be dragged toward the driveway.

He says, “So. What was that?”

“It was really nothing. Please.”

He says, “Did I do something?”

“No, totally not.”

“Then what?”

“Let’s just walk, okay, please? Take a walk. Walk.”

But Lulu doesn’t get the concept of a walk. She doesn’t get that she’s supposed to travel in a straight line, that it isn’t good to sit while crossing the street, and that walking up to a car with people getting out of it and peeing against the tire is frowned
upon. Dylan pauses for her to sniff grass and other dogs. Lulu is very popular with other dogs.

I say, “How long does it take you to go around the block?”

“Hours.” I really wish he’d grin or something, because I can’t read how much I freaked him out. “If it gets too bad, I carry her home.”

We are standing on the corner while Lulu digs a hole on what would be the front lawn of a house that is being torn down and has gone to weeds and dirt.

I say, “Have you always lived here? It’s beautiful.”

He says, “My dad grew up in this house. Then he stuck my grandma in a nursing home and took it over.”

He is absolutely blank. No emotion at all.

I wait for him to say something else, to enlighten me about what’s going on between him and his dad, but nothing happens.

“And you moved here from Montreal?” he says. “You don’t seem like an L.A. type.”

“I don’t seem cool enough to walk around your block?”

“You don’t seem nasty enough to go to the same school as Chelsea, okay?”

“Okay.” I give him the extremely expurgated version of my life, which covers moving a lot, but not much else.

He says, “Siobhan said something about your mom?”

“Jesus! Is there anything about me that she didn’t tell you?”

He says, “I asked. I wanted to know.”

He holds my hand. It would be a sweet, romantic moment if Lulu weren’t pooping over as wide an expanse of front yard as the leash will allow, and also howling, apparently for fun.

Lulu is now wriggling in the dirt on her back, squealing and barking. I say, “We have English bulls next door that play dead when you pretend to shoot them.”

“Cool. Do they have an agent?” He sounds pissed off and not as if he’s kidding. Then he slaps his cheek. “That was surly, right? Shit. I probably shouldn’t maul you if you criticize my dog.”

“Who says you’re surly?”

Dylan shakes his head. “My father and I have a limited set of repeating conversations.”

“That sucks.”

He has nothing more to say on this subject. I retreat.