Afterparty (28 page)

I say to my dad, who is, by necessity, oblivious to everything that’s been going on, “I’m sleeping over at Sib’s, all right?”

My dad says, “Doesn’t Siobhan go wild Saturday nights?”

“Not this Saturday, she doesn’t.” Not really caring, because going wild is sounding slightly attractive and not entirely inconsistent with what I’ve turned myself into.

He says, “Okay.”

I pack my overnight bag while telling myself, This is what Kimmy does when she says she’s going to take pictures of Hoover Dam and stay with Declan Hart’s sister at UNLV, when, in fact, she’s going camping with Declan. I say to myself, I actually am sleeping over at Siobhan’s, so the actual sentence that came out of my mouth was true. See how improved I am now that I’ve
stopped skulking around with Dylan Kahane in the wonderful world of teen contraception so as not to accidentally turn up on a future season of
Teen Mom
?

The compass says,
Cool, a new form of lying. Unpack. Play a nice round of French Scrabble and call it a night. Repent. Repair. Make your dad tea.

Part of me wants to, but the part with legs is out the door.

Siobhan is completely antsy, chanting, “Party, party, party.” She turns up my car radio, and dances around in her seat.

I look over at her, bouncing around as if everything is swell, and I think, Why am I doing this? Pretending we can still have a Girls Just Want to Have Fun night after everything that’s happened? What am I even doing in the car with her?

We are driving through a tract of giant houses at the far end of Sunset. On the list of things my dad objects to in the U.S., these houses aren’t anywhere near the top, but I still can’t drive past them without hearing him go, “Ah, the marriage of bad taste, ostentation, and money.”

I do not, at this moment, want to be hearing my dad’s voice in my head.

Or the compass saying,
Turn around.

Siobhan says, “You’re awfully quiet, missy. Don’t you want to have a widdle fun?”

The party house is on a wooded knoll. I can’t tell if the electricity is overloaded and flickering out, or if this is weirdly intentional.

Siobhan is out the door before I’ve even parked, running toward
the house, up through the ivy on the steep bank because there’s no way to squeeze between the cars crammed in the sloping driveway.

She yells, “Come on!” above the blasts of music.

By the time I get there, she’s disappeared. The band is so loud, it hurts to be in the same room with them. The loudness vibrates into the part of the brain that produces headaches in bursts of pain behind the eyes. I head outside. The backyard smells like weed and vomit.

The first person I see that I know, and who looks to be enjoying things even less than me, is Arif. He’s in a gazebo with Kimmy, who doesn’t look as if she’s in much of a party mood either.

She’s sitting on a white bench, her hand on Arif’s arm. I can see her mouth move, but the music is so raucous, she might as well be in a silent movie, all the colors washed out in the blinking lights, her white top and Arif’s shirt glowing like phosphorescent fish dead on the beach at night.

She yells, “Emma!”

I climb through more ivy, up to the gazebo.

She says, “Did you come with Dylan?”

And I’m thinking, Maybe I should have told her something about that, back when she wanted to know.

“With Siobhan.”

“Can you drive?”

“What?”

She yells louder, “Can you drive? Are you sober? Your stupid boyfriend or whatever is trashed and someone has to get Arif out of here.”

I yell, “What’s going on?”

“The Winston assholes parked Arif’s car in, and he’s sick.”

In the green light, his skin looks ashy.

I yell, “Are you drunk?”

Kimmy says, “Hello. This is
Arif
. He doesn’t do alcohol. It’s against his religion. Literally.”

Arif moans something about nachos. Bad, nasty poisonous nachos.

Here it is if I want it, served up on a bad-nacho platter: a way out of here. Sib can taxi if she wants to stay, no big scene, sick friend. Arif could throw up in my car, but sitting on blocks for fourteen years makes a car smell like a sweat sock, so the risk is less hideous than in a normal vehicle that smells either new or like a cedar-scented car deodorizer.

Then I register Dylan, who is indeed trashed—you can see it in his walk as he lopes toward the gazebo. I register the extreme, imminent awkwardness of being in my car with trashed Dylan and sick Arif, in front of whom Dylan and I couldn’t actually talk about anything, not that I want to.

All right, I want to.

I say, “Okay, I just have to tell Siobhan.”

Kimmy says, “Try upstairs. It’s pretty insane up there.”

• • •

Siobhan is on the landing with her shirt mostly unbuttoned, barefoot on the deep pile of the Persian runner, deep blues and jewel greens and wet spots. I only find her because I hear her laughing, louder and louder and louder.

I call her, but she doesn’t turn around. I touch her and she’s shivering, but her skin feels hot.

I say, “Sib, we need to go.”

“But Mommy, we just got here.”

“Yeah, but I’m sober and Arif needs a ride. He’s sick.”

She looks over the banister at the party below, teetering over the railing. She says, “Who elected you nanny?”

I say, “Come on, he’s really sick. Kimmy can’t take him because she’s plowed.”

“Oh no!” Siobhan says. “Not Kimmy! Maybe you should go try to button up
her
shirt and take her home too. Or you could stay and get some check marks. Don’t you want some cocoa-puffs? Little bitty blow? You know you do.”

“Sib, we’re going. I can’t play with this stuff: bad genes.”

She gives me a little-kid-pout face. “You’re already
half
her. Don’t you even want to know what would happen?”

A completely trashed boy I don’t know comes out of a bedroom and says he’ll take Siobhan home.

“Fuck off,” she says. “Like
this
is taking me home? You go, I’ll taxi. It’s not like I never went to a party and got home fine without you before.”

She looks like the girl who gets into a taxi and is never seen again, not the girl who is going to get home just fine.

At this point, Charlene Perry, who appears never to drink but does a damn good impersonation of a totally drunk girl, comes down the hall. “I’ll take her home. I’m not, you know, incapacitated.”

Siobhan is already heading into another bedroom, leaning on the guy’s bigger, cuter friend.

Charlene says, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her. This is a Winston party. I have pepper spray.”

Someone is making noise about flamethrowers. I say, “What’s that?” And Charlene says, “Cigarettes with smack sprinkles. These people have
everything
,” as she heads downstairs. “And I won’t forget Siobhan, get out of here.”

• • •

The walk from the party house to my car is completely silent except for Arif groaning and thanking me. The drive to his house is silent except for the voice of my GPS lady taking us into the stratosphere of Bel Air. I am hyperaware of Dylan sitting next to me, of the proximity of his elbow, but he might as well be a crash dummy.

Arif’s house is a giant concrete fortress, built into a hillside, looking out at the city. We are at the gated end of a long driveway flanked by rows of conical trees.

I say, “It’s so modern.”

Dylan, slightly slurred, says, “You were expecting minarets?”

Arif moans for Dylan to shut up, and rests his head against the window.

Dylan says, “Reef, where’s your key?”

“Didn’t need it,” Arif says. “My car opens the gate.”

There is a very serious fence. “Great security,” I say.

“Just buzz,” Arif says.

Just buzzing doesn’ t seem like that great an alternative. I have a vision of my dad’s face if some unknown person in an ancient
Volvo unloaded me in that kind of shape, but I can’t think of any other way to get Arif into his house.

I punch the buzzer, the shortest buzz humanly possible, and drive in as the gate swings open.

Arif’s dad is at the front door in pajamas and a striped bathrobe. He looks upset, but not homicidal. This is good. I don’t want to be responsible for Arif being the object of parental rage.

Dylan does the drunk equivalent of helping Arif exit the backseat, and I sit there feeling useless and still worried I’m about to witness Arif getting creamed.

But his dad, fumbling around with his glasses, just kind of hugs him and looks concerned as Arif tells him about the bad nachos.

And then Arif’s dad says to Dylan, “Have you been drinking, D.K.?”

Dylan says, “Not Arif. He’s sick.”

“I can see that,” Arif’s dad says. “What about
you
?”

“I have a designated driver,” Dylan says. “I’ll be fine. She’s driving me home.”

Arif’s dad peers in at me. He says to Dylan, “There’s a young lady in that car.”

Mr. Saad leans down toward me. “I’d be happy to drive both of you, and you could come get your car in the morning.” He pushes his glasses along the bridge of his nose, as if he’s trying to get a better look at me. “Or Mrs. Saad could drive you.”

Mr. Saad looks approximately as happy as my dad would be with the idea of me driving a drunk guy around in the middle of
the night. The Saads and my dad and the Donnellys are no doubt all in a secret support group for the militantly overprotective. But the last thing in the world I want to have happen—just before being struck by giant bolts of lightning—is to lose the opportunity to be alone with Dylan.

I say, “Thank you so much, but I told my dad I needed to drop two friends off”—lie, lie, lie, even Arif seems to be jolted out of his nauseated, half-dead state by my creativity—“so I’ll be fine. But thank you. That’s very nice of you.”

Mr. Saad does not look convinced, but before he can throw himself in front of the Volvo, Dylan jumps back in and I’m rolling down the driveway toward the open gate.

And I’m pretty sure, I’m almost certain, that Dylan wants to be here with me, too. Which, except for the fact that he makes me pull over before we get back down to Sunset so he can throw up in the gutter, could be somewhat romantic.

Maybe.

DYLAN GETS BACK IN THE
car, smelling disgusting, and we roll down Sunset, not talking to each other. Dylan hangs on to the door handle and stares into the street, as if fascinated by oncoming headlights. Then he closes his eyes.

A stunning reconciliation with a guy who first throws up and then falls asleep, or worse, simulates sleep, seems less than imminent.

In a maybe slightly louder-than-normal voice, I say, “Are you asleep?”

Dylan makes a show of stretching, which is difficult for a tall person in my car. He pushes against the roof. He says, “I’m up now.” He does not sound very happy about this.

I say, “Could we please talk?”

“Isn’t that what you said the last time you were trying to bullshit me? No.”

He closes his eyes again.

I slightly poke him.

“Emma,” he says. “Please. I feel like shit.”

“Can’t you cut me five minutes of slack?”

“No.”

All I had wanted in life was to be alone in the car with him and for him to go,
Hey, that was pretty bad but now I’m past it,
hug, hug, hug, and basically acknowledge my existence. But whatever there was before is clearly gone. All that longing followed by what felt like the opening chapter of endless bliss and then, welcome to this.

The car might be jerking a little, or possibly a lot, and Dylan puts his hand on the steering wheel and he barks, “Let me out!”

We are sitting in front of a lit-up house on Alpine.

“I get that you’re just in my car to get home. Go ahead.”

Quietly, Dylan says, “Why are you being like this?”

“
Maybe
because you dumped me on Valentine’s Day, which was totally justified, I get it, but now you won’t even speak to me and you look right through me and I hate going to school.” This is punctuated by me splattering tears all over like a showerhead that somebody went after with a hammer.

“Aren’t you leaving out the part where you
lied
to me and made a
fool
of me?”

“Is it impossible for you to believe I might be sorry?”

“
And
made it very clear you’d rather be with Aiden?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you went over to Sib’s to hook up with him, okay?”

What?

“Who told you that?”
I am pretty much screaming.
“That’s not what happened!”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Dylan says. “I don’t want to listen to you trying to get out of it.”

“How do you get from
I’m sorry
to I’m trying to get out of it? Do you just stay mad at people permanently?”

“At least I don’t lie about myself& !” he shouts back. “Unlike you. I stayed away from you for how long out of respect for a nonexistent French guy? What an idiot! And then, February
thirteenth
, you decide it’s a good day to cheat with my brother? Hey, be my Valentine.”

“I did not cheat with him!”

“Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Dylan! I kissed some random guy at the beach club, and then six months later Siobhan all but orders me to come over or she might jump out the window, and there’s the guy in the Jacuzzi with her. And all right, I got in out of cowardice. The things she was threatening to tell you if I didn’t: all true. You can call me nine kinds of bad person for that. But I didn’t want Aiden, hook up with Aiden, cheat with Aiden, or
anything
with Aiden other than push him away when he came at me, all right?”

Dylan pauses. “Oh Jesus, Seed.”

I dig around in my bag for a box of Tic Tacs and I give him a whole handful.

I say, “Well, are you ever going to stop it?”

He shakes his head. I can’t decipher if this is Dylan saying no or Dylan being rueful. “Maybe I’ll send you a one-word text message fifty-two times,” he says.