Afterparty (26 page)

He holds up the phone; on the screen, there is a text that says,
Look what I’ve got
, with a photo of Beach Club Boy, dressed up and wrapped around Siobhan with one arm, aiming his phone at the two of them with the other.

“That’s
Aiden
?”

“He’d be the perfect man for you. Liar, meet liar.”

How much that hurts, how deep that cuts, and how much I probably deserve it is mitigated by my urgent need to get us out of there. Because that’s freaking Aiden.
Because why didn’t I know that that was freaking Aiden?????
Because why didn’t I tell Dylan about last night, say, last night? Why didn’t I fix this before what Siobhan set up (only I went along with it, and what kind of excuse it that, anyway?) plays itself out in the form of a train wreck?

Aren’t brothers supposed to freaking resemble each other so an unsuspecting girl gets some slight hint of what she’s doing when she accidentally kisses more than one of them?

“Let’s leave. Dylan! Could we please go? I
really
need to talk to you.”

“First we find them,” he says. “Then we leave.”

“But they could be anywhere.” Such as Siobhan could be clubbing with Strick or Wade or anyone but Aiden on the Sunset Strip, and Aiden could be back in Scotland.

Dylan says, “They’re in the pool house. I’ve been there fifty times.”

I say, “Could we please talk somewhere? Like
now
!”

Dylan is racing forward, through crowds of tipsy dancing grown-ups. Waiters are trying to waylay us with offers of food and drink. This would be quite the glamorous party if it weren’t the end of the world.

I race after Dylan with a skewered jumbo shrimp kebab in one hand and his sleeve in the other. I am trying to slow him down without actually tearing his jacket, to stop him before we reach the pool house, before we reach the point of complete hopelessness and relationship doom.

But we are there.

They are not in the pool house. They are laughing their way down the stairs from the upper patio toward us, Aiden still wrapped around her, Siobhan with huge pupils, and barefoot, and wearing a tiny red dress, hanging off his side.

Even though anyone with half a brain would know in advance that this was going to be a disaster of immense proportion, the actual unfurling of the immense disaster is just as surprising as if I hadn’t imagined it so many times, with ever-changing details and a lot of imaginary screaming.

I say, “Dylan, before—”

Aiden says, “Hey, Amélie!”

Even when he’s lurching, he’s got swagger. Swagger that says, Hello, see this girl under my arm? I own her. I own this night,
and this party, and the Western Hemisphere, and you. Or, in the alternative, I’m a completely ridiculous macho drunk guy that you never should have touched, because now you’re toast.

My mouth. Dry, bitter burnt toast.

Dylan says, “Shit, Aiden. Do they all blend into each other? This is one” (by which he means me) “you haven’t wrecked yet.”

Siobhan shakes herself loose of Aiden and gapes at me. I scream at her, “What are you doing here? What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

She says, “You stupid bitch, you didn’t tell him, did you?”

Aiden says, “Amélie. Where’s your Bert-and-Ernie slippers?”

“Her name is Emma and you’ve never seen her slippers,” Dylan says. Then he gestures at Siobhan, and shakes his head. “Drop the girl and get on a plane. I had her and now you’ve got her. You’ve made your point with her, now fly away.”

Siobhan yells, “I’m not anybody’s point!”

I say, “Dylan, we need to leave.”

“A-
mé
-lie,” Aiden crooks his finger at me. “C’mere. Sibby doesn’t mind. She didn’t mind before.”

People coming down the staircase from the upper deck have to forge a path around us at the foot of the stairs. Make spectacle of self at big, glam party: check.

Dylan turns to me. “Please tell me you don’t know what he’s talking about.”

I don’t say anything.

Dylan turns and walks back toward the dark side yard.

Aiden shouts, “D.K.! Don’t go over there.”

Dylan raises his arm in a one-fingered salute, but doesn’t turn around.

I am on his heels, clamoring for attention, like Mutt chasing a macaroon.

“It’s my French name. I don’t use it. It wasn’t anything.”

He stops short. “Then what was it?”

God, it’s no wonder I haven’t been telling the truth all along—beyond my more obvious moral failings and complete tumble off the Emma the Good horse—because it’s hard, it’s just so hard, and also painful.

“Dylan, it was one random kiss before I even knew you. It was anonymous. It was nothing.”

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“I didn’t even know it was your brother. You don’t look that much alike. Your eyes aren’t even the same color, and he’s taller—” This is not going well. “And then when I saw him again—”

“When?”

“You have to believe me—”

“No. I don’t have to believe you. I don’t believe you.
When? 
” Followed by a second so long and so painful, it feels as if it’s being stretched out on a medieval instrument of torture.

“Yesterday, I’m so sorry!”

“Yesterday.”
He is shaking his head, as if marveling at how horrible and unexpected this is. “Is there anything I know about you that’s true? I don’t even know your
name
.”

I grope for a list of true things, hard facts with no spin or
shading, but as I’m trying to compile it, he is pulling me along by the arm as we traverse the dark lawn, weaving around plants and the occasional couple, in a shoe-wrecking shortcut to the valet parkers off the circular driveway.

He says, “Hot damn.”

We are facing a decades older, exact model of Dylan, presumably his dad, jumping to get his hand off Dylan’s mother’s ass. And I wonder, in the middle of all this, if his mom is the second wife, because she looks decades younger, as if either she’s had the best cosmetic surgery on earth or she had Dylan when she was twelve.

In his I’m-actually-not-here-and-would-rather-eat-dirt-than-speak voice, Dylan says, “And here we have my father.”

I stick out my hand, dutiful girlfriend, even though that’s going to last for maybe five more seconds. I go, “Hello, Mr. Kahane. Hello, Mrs. Kahane,” followed by stone silence.

Dylan’s deadpan, it turns out, did not fall from the sky; it was inbred. He and his dad stand there looking at each other without any discernible facial expression between them, essentially without blinking.

“This is
not
Mrs. Kahane,” Dylan says. “This would be . . . Who are you?”

And I realize, of course I realize, that as horrible as this evening has been up to now, this is the main event.

I say, “We should go.”

Dylan says, “I wish I’d never met you.”

I am pretty sure he’s talking to me.

“Are you all right?”

“You’re the third-to-last person on earth I want sympathy from.”

He hands the parking ticket to the valet, not looking at me, not responding.

All I want to do is make him feel better. But the only way to do that would be to turn into someone else, preferably a better person, because, as things stand, all I can do, beyond apologizing, is make him feel worse. Listening to me apologize probably makes him feel worse, too.

In the car, every time I start to form a word, or a syllable, such as the “I’m” of “I’m sorry,” Dylan says, “I can’t. Talk. About this. While I’m driving.”

We’re parked just beyond the driveway of his parents’ house, having more or less driven through the rock garden, stopping just short of a hedge of white roses.

We just sit there and I watch him fume in profile.

I am waiting for his eyes to narrow in the amused way and not the so-angry-he-can’t-even-speak way. I am waiting for some slight indication that he’s thinking, okay, well, that’s not so bad.

And then I think, Sure, like that’s going to happen. Emma the I Don’t Even Know What, who did this to him on Valentine’s Day, who just couldn’t stop kicking his feelings down the road endlessly. The one who every time she had a chance to tell him, didn’t. In what universe do you get to lie this much, and then the person you’re lying to thinks it’s somehow okay because who cares if his girlfriend has been lying to him forever?

I don’t mean to grab him, but I grab him, in what is likely the
most awkward and unreciprocated hug ever offered to a boy who wasn’t dead. He’s so stone still, inhaling, exhaling, not holding me back, that it seems even more likely that I’m clinging to the last hug, or, more accurately, half hug, and it’s over, and I wrecked it.

My forehead is resting on his shoulder, but he doesn’t move.

He says, “Get out of the car.”

He turns his head slightly to look at me, to look me over, and it’s the kind of look that Emma the Good would never, ever, in the furthest reaches of anyone’s imagination, ever have to look back at.

This is us breaking up.

I TEXT “SORRY” EVERY COUPLE
of hours all day Sunday. I entertain brief, tiny delusional moments when I think, Hey, it’ll blow over, so he’s had a grudge against his brother since third grade and plans to cut off his parents as soon as he hits the Eastern Seaboard, but hey, he’ll forgive
me
.

After six “sorries,” he texts back, “Good for you.”

Over, over, over.

Megan, who is visiting her grandparents in Pebble Beach, bicycles down the road and calls me from behind a tree in a scenic overlook.

First I moan, and then Megan says, “Uh, Emma, you get that lying to him like that was really bad, right?”

“Of course I get it! I get that he’s not a shithead for dumping me and I get that I’m a terrible person. Justice is served. Balance is restored to the universe. It would probably feel better, though, if I hadn’t spent every waking minute fantasizing
about him since September and if he wasn’t
perfect
.”

“If he’s that perfect, eventually he’ll figure out you’re a good person and forgive you.”

“He’ll never forgive me.”

Megan says, “He’s probably flattened by the thing with his father. I would die.”

“I know. And I can’t even help him or talk to him or anything. I’m not even his friend anymore. I completely screwed that up.”

Siobhan:
Cheer up. He’s just some stupid high school boy who couldn’t deal.

Siobhan:
Where r u?

Siobhan:
It’s me. U know u want to talk to me.

Siobhan:
Yr nemesis is now in Scotland if u care.

Siobhan:
They’re both crap.

Siobhan:
So he ditched you. Big freaking deal.

Siobhan:
U got your check mark. Move on.

Siobhan:
Why would you even want to be with him?

Siobhan:
I told u he was crap.

Me:
U told me he was surprisingly nice.

Siobhan:
I told u to bail.

Me:
WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THAT WAS AIDEN???

Siobhan:
Are u BLAMING me??????? U think I screwed u on purpose?????

Me:
If it looks like a fish and it swims like a fish and it smells like a fish.

Siobhan:
Quaint. A Canadian proverb. Here’s an American fact. U said u were going to tell him. How wd I know u wussed out?

Me:
You were supposed to be with Strick on Sunset. And I couldn’t tell him about Aiden could I because my best friend didn’t bother to tell me who Aiden was!!!!!

Siobhan:
Strick sucks. Strick was supposed to b home coughing to death but he was at a party in Encino. Quel loser. Aiden said come I went.

Siobhan:
Big freaking deal.

But at the end of all this, at the end of the day, at the end of agonizing in the closet, which shouldn’t have taken more than two minutes because the truth is so obvious: my fault. Completely. Not just some joke of a Bad Emma taking a shortcut around an immovable wall to experience high school hijinks up close. An actual Bad Emma who hurt someone she proclaimed she loved.

How could I do that to him?

I text him:
Still sorry. Could we please talk?

Dylan:
Go away.

This is what I want to do at school: hide.

I want to find the Latimer equivalent of my closet and sit in there. I don’t want to face Dylan. When we accidentally catch each other’s eye, he looks at me and then, pointedly, looks away.

I like it down behind the stables, where it’s quiet, and there’s
no one there, possibly because even when there’s no sun, the air smells ripe and horsey.

I don’t want to see Siobhan, hear from Siobhan, or talk to Siobhan.

And nobody else at school seems all that interested in talking with me, except for Kimmy. Who is kind of friend-like, but who more than kind of can’t stand not having any and all late-breaking Latimer news.

“You and Dylan,” she says as I’m heading away from the candy machines and toward the path into the woods. “What’s up with that?”

I say, “Nothing.”

“You’re not back with Jean-Luc, are you?”

“No! Could we please not talk about this?”

Kimmy says, “But you’re MIA. Literally. Siobhan is slamming things, so that’s getting annoying. And Dylan is total Dylan, only more so.”

“Don’t.”

“Damn! Kahane didn’t dump you did he, because if he did, after you gave up Jean-Luc for him—”

“Kimmy, it’s nothing like that! Could we please talk once I figure it out?”

She says, “I guess. But nobody knows where you are and I, like, miss you.”

• • •

Siobhan, tromping down the hill, says, “You have to stop hiding out.”

I have a slice of pizza and I’m sitting on a rock with my physics book.

I say, “Go away. I don’t forgive you.”

Siobhan says, “Fine. Because I’m not sorry.”

“How can you not be sorry? That was a complete and total setup with your signature on it.”