Afterparty (21 page)

He says, “We have radically different family lives. I can go for days without seeing my parents, let alone being told what I can’t do.”

“Literally for days?”

“No. But I probably could if I tried.”

“That’s sad.”

He says, “You wouldn’t think so if you knew them. Emma, did I do something to scare you before?”

We are leaning against palm trees along the curb while Lulu eats grass that’s growing through cracks in the sidewalk. All this time of wanting to hold him, wanting to grab him when I couldn’t, and now here we are, on this quiet street with the occasional decorous dog jogging by with a power-walking human, and I actually could, but I can’t.

I hear Siobhan’s voice going, You know you want to. Your turn: Make a move.

I know I want to.

I walk from my palm tree to his palm tree; he is discernibly pleased. I reach for him, and he pulls me in, and we disgrace the Latimer uniform some more by engaging in more public kissing until, when my hands are in the small of his back, under the untucked tail of his shirt, Lulu’s howling gets so loud we have to take her home.

He leans back against the blue French doors, the doorknob in his hand.

He says, “Coming in?” Very carefully. There’s a chance that he’s figured it out.

I say, “I have to be home for dinner. On time.”

He says, “Saved by the bell.”

• • •

I spend the weekend in a state of crazed longing.

I don’t go out the window to Malibu on Saturday with Siobhan. In a flat voice, she says, “You wouldn’t. Have fun taking sample SATs and reverting to type.”

I don’t say “What’s that supposed to mean?” because I already know.

Restocking the shelves at the food bank on Sunday, Megan says, “Are you sure being with this guy is good for you? You’re acting kind of bizarre.”

“Like you didn’t act bizarre when Joe first showed up here?”

“That’s not a fair comparison. You have lunch with a table full of football players dripping testosterone on their burgers. I have lunch with Sister Mary Eunice. It isn’t the same.”

At the food bank, I am actually dropping things, even though, apart from being consigned to PE (as opposed to actual) ballet, I’m not generally known for klutziness. After I land a twelve-pound bag of rice on his foot, Joe tactfully suggests that I go log things in, or put food into grocery bags, or get a drink of water.

Megan leads me out into the parking lot. She says, “Well?”

“Well, nothing. We’re walking around Latimer staring at each other and nothing. We kiss all the time.”

“That counts.”

Except I want to jump him all the time.

Megan leans against the hood of Rabbi Pam’s car. She says, “You don’t have to do anything you’re not ready to do.”

Oh God, I’m getting romantic advice from Megan. “Is this where you tell me where babies come from?”

She says, “You’re tripping over things.”

“Tell me something new. Now I have to start working on getting to his house so I can trip over things there. Like at night. I thought Siobhan would cover, but she’s acting weird.”

“Siobhan acting weird is something new? You are way too forgiving.” Megan sighs. “Have you considered telling your dad that you
like
like this guy and seeing where it goes?”

“Really?”

“All right, I realize that I’m living in a similarly tangled web, but what a tangled web we weave—”

“It’s getting so I can’t keep it all straight.”

“At least you’re done with Jean-Luc.”

“I wish! Dylan is obsessed with him, and half the people at
school are pissed off that I broke his heart. People are looking at me funny.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re dropping things.”

Or maybe it’s because they’ve never seen me acting like such a love slob, faux French boyfriend notwithstanding.

IN A SHAMELESS ATTEMPT TO
make up for all my weirdness and confusion, I bring Dylan a slab of Sunday night’s dense flourless chocolate cake on Monday morning. He says, “You might not be that bad a seed.”

There’s nothing like the combination of extreme lust and constant guilt to make a girl unusually nice to her boyfriend.

I say, “You have no idea.”

Chelsea, who naturally pops up at the exact moment I’m feeding him cake, says, “Interesting. Disgusting, but
interesting
.”

Dylan looks her up and down. He says, “Disgusting and uninteresting.”

She flounces away.

In English, he doodles me in the notebook he doesn’t take notes in. Large enough to be visible to Ms. Erskine, standing, beady-eyed, in front of the room, making William Shakespeare less intriguing than an ad for auto parts. Who says, “Mr. Kahane,
we all know Ms. Lazar has a lovely profile, but we’re focused on
Henry the Fifth
if you’d care to join us.”

Dylan looks up, recites the “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” speech, and looks back down to my penciled profile.

It is one of the weirdest, most humiliating, most satisfying moments of junior year.

Siobhan sticks two fingers down her throat and makes a face, and it’s not because Ms. Erskine’s take on Shakespeare is making her ill.

Then, when I’m sitting outside the music room during Dylan’s orchestra practice, Arif slides onto the bench next to me.

He says, “So, you’re with Dylan now.”

I try for a she-didn’t-miss-a-beat kind of a grin, but my face feels more or less frozen. I say, “Yeah, guess so.” I’m going for cheerful here, but my tone of voice is also moderately frozen, because this is so clearly the opening line of an interrogation.

“You
guess
so?” Sitting this close to him, it’s hard for even a nervous, frozen person who’s obsessed with someone else to miss what his allure is all about. “That won’t do. I don’t know that I can let him wander around walking into walls over a girl who
guesses
so.”

I’m being checked out by the best friend, who wants to be certain I’m besotted.

“Just want to make sure you ladies aren’t passing him from hand to hand like lip gloss.”

“Arif, nobody shares lip gloss.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be engaged to some guy twice your age in France?” he says. “Are you still seeing him?”

I find myself wondering if Siobhan has actually told people that Jean-Luc got down on one knee and proposed by Skype from Jalalabad. Or Kampala. Or someplace I don’t even know she’s put him.

And I think, All right, diversion. Right now.

“What are you, the breakup police? Is your boy still seeing Montana?”

“He told you about that?”

Dylan sticks his head out of the music room and does the Dylan equivalent of a double take, which involves blinking.

“Arif,” he says. “What are you doing?”

“I told you I was going to look her over.”

“From afar,” Dylan says. “Like in class, you can look over the back of her head.”

I say, “Give him a break. He just wants to make sure I’m not two-timing you.”

Arif grimaces.

I say, “Well, I’m not. Maybe you’d like to share that with the world at large. I’m not cheating on anybody, I’m not engaged, I’m not a bad friend, and I’m not” (ripped from my dad’s vocabulary) “a tart. Anything else?”

Arif looks as if he deeply wishes he were somewhere else, and Dylan is snickering.

Arif says, “No, I think that covers it.”

Dylan, in front of everyone, says, “Do you want to come to my house again after?”

I, in front of everyone, say, “Yes.”

• • •

So after Orchestra, when I’m supposed to be at the library again, I’m lounging in Dylan’s garden in Beverly Hills. This time he doesn’t even lead me toward the door, he gestures to the wooden lawn chairs, and we sit there, side by side, looking back through his mother’s fruit trees to the wall of pine trees at the far end of the property. Drinking lemonade from a glass pitcher. Lulu stretched out in the grass, chewing her neckerchief.

The whole scene, the early sunset, the darkening afternoon, the long shadows and unseasonable heat, Dylan pouring lemonade into a heavy, cut glass tumbler (as apparently these are the only kind of glasses they own) is so sweet that the sweetness of it actually aches.

Dylan says, “Sorry about Arif.”

“Demerits at Convo. I think that constituted interfaith interrogation.”

“Don’t laugh at Convo. Arif and I are riding Convo into Georgetown, and it can’t happen soon enough. We’re pillars of interfaith dialogue. Ask Miss Palmer. Arif wants to quit, but his dad will kill him.”

“His dad should meet my dad.”

“I like his dad. I spent elementary school at his house. My Superman sheets are on the top bunk of his bunk bed.”

“I knew you guys were close, but your sheets on his bunk bed?”

“I lived there. I speak conversational Arabic.”

“What was wrong with your house?”

“My brother lived at my house. Funny thing about that.”

“He was
that
bad?”

“My parents thought we should work things out between us. Not the best approach when one kid outweighs the other kid by fifty pounds and thinks strangling people is fun.”

“You couldn’t tell them?”

“The last time I told them, Aiden told the whole third grade at Latimer I peed in the school pool. And . . . other things. Didn’t go over well.”

“All the same people, age eight?”

“It was brutal. You don’t want these people getting dirt on you. Pretty soon, I was barely there.” He shrugs. “I’m still barely there.”

I think about what my dad would have done if I’d zoned out for eight years, and it does not involve me moving into someone else’s house.

“My dad’s a director,” Dylan says. “Commercials. But he likes to direct everything, and I don’t take direction well. They had me evaluated for learning disabilities, deafness, blindness, a conduct disorder, and juvenile psychosis. But the Saads like me fine. Where would
you
live?”

“On my best friend’s top bunk.”

He reaches over and touches my hand. “So now are you going to tell me?”

“What?”

“Arif said you got all weird when he mentioned French Face. Has he been kidnapped by Al Qaeda or something?”

French Face? Oh God, Siobhan, what did you say?

“Would that be funny for you?”

“Hilarious.” He looks over. “Wait. Is something happening with you and him? You have to be honest with me. Once burned. All that.”

I’m thinking, Tell him.
Tell him, tell him, tell him.
But he looks so fond of me. And even though I know how wrong/weak/bad/stupid/morally backwards/shortsighted it is to want to keep that—to not want to jeopardize that by being, all right, honest—I don’t.

I say, “There’s nothing there.” How much I hate myself for this is almost totally eclipsed by how much I want him.

He touches my face and pulls me toward him. Oh God. The kiss.

I say, “I have to go. I have to be on time for dinner.”

“Phone your dad. You might be unavoidably detained.”

“Dylan, he’s old-school. Really, really old-school. I can’t.”

“How does this work? How do you go out at night? Do I need written authorization to pick you up or old-school dad comes after me or what?”

I say, “You have no idea. Later,” and kiss him some more.

I drive up the hill wondering how this actually is going to work. Wishing that I could morph into the kind of girl he thinks I am. That I were her for real. Wishing I’d stayed.

• • •

Siobhan says, “He’s taking up
all
your time, you don’t answer texts, and you’re not getting check marks. Kissing? Seriously? What are you even doing with him?”

She is slouching around my bedroom at her sulkiest. It’s 9:00
at night, I’m pretty sure my dad is lurking in the hall, and I’m not sure why she appeared at the front door.

I say, “Come on. This was your idea. You set it up. I still see you all the time. Such as now.”

This placates her, but not enough.

I say, “How is it you can’t comprehend that I might want to hang out with the person you told me to hang out with? And do you ever look back at the shit you text me? Come on.”

“You should come to this Malibu thing Friday,” she says. “Bring the boy toy. I don’t care. It’s in the Colony. Better than last time, no one will freeze up and die between the water and the house.”

It is unseasonably hot, it’s all over the news; the beach is not out of the question. But the three of us at the same party, somewhat together, somewhat not?

I say, “I don’t know.”

She bangs the palm of her hand against the wall. “Am I your ninth priority now?” She is pacing, picking things up, tossing them down. “After Dylan and homework and Megan and feeding the poor and conditioning your hair? Do
I
ditch
you
when I’m with a guy? Uh,
no
. When I was with Kahane, I went to parties with you.”

I don’t even know how to respond to this one. I say, “I’m not ditching you.”

“Here’s a news flash! This is what ditching people looks like!” And she storms out, slamming my bedroom door, the front door, the gate to the courtyard, and her car door.

Siobhan, when she’s annoyed, doesn’t keep it to herself.

In the morning, the slamming theme extends to her locker, books on desktops, and snack trays at break. When she talks to me, I (and everybody else within a hundred yards) can tell she’s seething.

Dylan says, “Should I avoid dark alleys and homeroom? Eat lunch with me. I’ll protect you if she creeps up and tries to hit you with a lunch tray. But you’ll have to brave the music room.”

I say, “I like music.”

Dylan is sprawled on the redwood bench on the far side of the library, framed by vines that no doubt got confused by sudden summer weather and are covered with small, waxy flowers. He looks all earnest, and also to die for.

“Prove it,” he says. “Come out with me at night. I’ll even demonstrate how chivalrous I am by meeting old-school dad. Maybe he’ll like me.”

No he won’t.

Dylan lives in a guesthouse without parental interference. Dylan smolders and looks through people. There is something about even his posture, the way he stretches his arms out in front of him with his fingers laced together, the way he scowls at the world, and the intensity of the way he looks at you, the way he looks at me, that says Scary Indie Guy You Can’t Take Home.