Afterparty (29 page)

“I’m sorry!”

In a flatlined voice, Dylan says, “That fixes everything.”

I turn the key in the ignition.

“Nothing ever fixes anything, does it? Everything just gets hopelessly broken, and then we’re all permanently stuck with it.”

He says, “That’s your philosophy of life?”

“Like it’s not yours, too? Show me some evidence to the contrary. It seems remarkably accurate.”

This is when he brushes back the hair at my temple and he kisses the side of my forehead.

And when we get there, when my car has made its loud approach to his house, crunching toward the guesthouse on the part of the gravel that’s probably supposed to be a walkway, when he opens his eyes and his hand is covering my hand, when he walks around and opens my car door and takes my hand again, I rest my head against him for a minute.

Then I follow him inside.

• • •

A light from the bed of white roses outside the bedroom window is the only illumination in the room.

He has his arms around me, and he says, “Could we fast-forward to being okay? Skip the long emo conversation with crying and be okay?”

I sink into his desk chair, and he spins me around.

I say, “Probably not.”

“What would I have to do?”

“Two sappy sentences, maybe? One with a lot of clauses Massive reassurance?”

He sits behind me on the bed. “I don’t do sap. Last time I tried to do sap, I invited you to that party. How did that work out for you?”

Dylan swivels my chair until I’m facing him. “Shit. You don’t stop crying, do you?” He grabs the back of the desk chair and rolls me through the darkness into the guesthouse’s tiny kitchen. “I’ll give you sap. I have half your chocolate duck left over from Valentine’s Day.”

“You bought me a chocolate
duck
?”

“Okay, it was a swan and it came in a silver bag. Is that sappy enough for you? But it’s missing its head and neck.”

“You decapitated my swan?”

“I was hungry.”

Dylan opens the refrigerator, which is completely filled with international take-out. Pizza, and tacos, and Indian, and Chinese rice boxes.

“You
were
hungry. Have you been ordering snacks every night?”

Dylan says, “This is dinner. I don’t eat with them. When Aiden’s not here, family life grinds to a halt. Not that I mind.”

I touch his sleeve. “Your dad’s still . . . here?”

He says, “We’re not going to talk about my dad. Ever. Suffice to say, he’s still here; Aiden’s not here; neither is my mom, mostly; and I’m leaving. Nothing has changed.”

Dylan roots around in the refrigerator, behind what looks to be a quart of take-out Chinese soup, and pulls out an extremely wrinkled foil bag covered in silver mesh. He reaches in and breaks a wing off my swan and he sits on the kitchen table and
feeds it to me. Establishing for all eternity that the universe, or at least Beverly Hills north of Santa Monica Boulevard, is not completely fucked.

I say, “I got you the best valentine. It came from the fifties. It went with the dress.”

“We’re also never going to talk about that party.”

“Fine, just answer this one question: Did Siobhan flat-out tell you I went over there to get with Aiden?”

He groans, “Yes. And we’re not talking about how I fell for that, either.” He raps his forehead against the door of a kitchen cabinet.

Which is not—despite my complete sorry-ness and sopping up of all possible responsibility for everything I ever did—entirely inappropriate. Even though she’s the one I want to slam, Siobhan, the person formerly known as my best friend. As my any kind of friend.

I say, “Christ, Dylan. If I want a list of things that I can’t talk about, I’ll stay home.”

He says, “Shut up and eat.” He breaks off another piece and he outlines my lips with it. Withholds it a few inches from my mouth, very briefly, and then feeds me tiny, sweet splinters of dark chocolate.

“I’m afraid if I keep teasing you with this duck, you’ll bawl again,” he says.

“What if I gave you the valentine?”

“What if I teased you?”

At which point, he rolls the chair back into the bedroom.

I WAKE UP TO BIRDS
chirping, and a room filled with pale gray light. Which would be charming except it’s 9:40 in the morning and I’m still at Dylan’s house. My car is still parked in his driveway. My head is on his pillow, and my clothes are draped over his desk chair.

I’m wearing a T-shirt with Kurt Cobain on the front, no doubt the universe’s way of saying, Off yourself immediately and get it over with, because you are monumentally dead.

On the other hand, we are so back together.

My head feels spongy and I don’t even remember how I ended up falling asleep here. Which is, I guess, how falling asleep works. Wham, you’re down. Other than the imminent deadness part of it, sleeping over here was nice. Waking up to rain on the shingles and Dylan spread over three-quarters of his bed.

Nine forty. Brunch with the Karps. Oh God.

“I was supposed to be home from Siobhan’s at nine!”

Dylan hands me my phone. Four missed calls. Which I slept through.

And then there’s the exciting prospect of Dylan being reminded of my improvisational skills when I tell my dad some fairy tale all about how his (slightly debauched) princess is over at Siobhan’s house. Not how I’ve been cuddled up all night with the world’s most restless sleeper. Who seems remarkably calm under the circumstances, given that unless I fix this, he’s going to be executed by my dad.

My only slim ray of hope is that if my dad tried to reach me on Burton’s landline, nobody over there is up before noon on weekends.

My dad opens with: “Why aren’t you here?”

I am feeling a confusing combination of dread, guilt, and extreme happiness. “I slept through your calls!” (True.) “I didn’t set the alarm on my phone.” (True.) “I’ve never been this late in my whole life!” (True.)

He tells me how rude and inconsiderate I am in French, which is somehow more appalling than in English, although it no doubt beats being nailed with whatever term applies to girls who spend the night in boys’ beds.

I apologize in French, as Dylan looks on, making faces at me. I politely motion that I’m going to cut his throat and he disappears into the kitchen.

My dad says, “I’ll meet you there. Two cars.”

“But all I have with me is jeans.”

Jeans would be completely all right with the Karps and everybody else we know, including the Donnellys, but count as wardrobe disrespect with him when visiting anyone other than bears at the zoo.

He says, “Can’t you borrow something from Siobhan?”

Oh God.

I say, very quietly, because it’s not true yet, but it will be if I ever talk to her again, “We just had a fight.”

My dad is too overjoyed about this to stay that annoyed. Or maybe I’m reading too much into the fact that he stops yelling at me.

Dylan is rummaging around in the kitchen. “You want something before you go?”

“Could I borrow a shirt?” The overnight bag is at Siobhan’s. All I have is the spaghetti-strap tight thing from last night and, in my car, a Latimer tee that’s cut off (actually cut, with scissors, not my best fashion experiment ever) three inches above waist level, and is not debuting at the Karps’.

Dylan’s closet smells like him. Not in a bad way. I take a white linen shirt, and I roll up the sleeves and look in the mirror to see if this could in any way pass as something a girl would wear when not desperate. I take the little metal belt from last night and try to get it to sit in the right place. The result isn’t strikingly horrible.

I hear Dylan rummaging around in the cupboards. “You want a jelly doughnut? It’s the only breakfast food I’ve got.”

“No time! I’ll just snort the powdered sugar off the top.”

“Bad joke, considering who I used to go out with.”

I say, “There’s another thing we’re never going to talk about.”

Mrs. Karp admires Dylan’s shirt and wonders if I got it at Fred Segal.

BY THE TIME I’VE (BARELY)
survived brunch—the first hour of which my dad spends glowering at me while Mrs. Karp flutters around saying how happy she is to have me, no matter
what
time I arrived, in possibly the world’s least helpful effort to be helpful—things are back to (mostly) normal.

My return to my dad’s good graces is greatly assisted by the youngest Karp child, who quietly spreads peanut butter on the Karp dachshund. Reminding my dad of his own amazing success in raising a daughter so repressed that she never, ever so much as considered coating a dog with peanut butter
or
jelly.

And when he walks me to my car afterward, if I weren’t wearing my boyfriend’s shirt, I would be the picture of goodness. Which is when I tell him how I left my overnight bag at Siobhan’s (true) because I was racing so fast to get out of there (not).

Now I’m tooling down Sunset in my own gumdrop-yellow car,
windows open, radio blasting; this was the Candy Land dream, for a second at the beach club that first day when I first saw Siobhan. When Montana Gibson was no doubt down on the beach toasting a marshmallow while I was in the clubhouse kissing Aiden, and Siobhan was bagging him, and I had no idea who they were, or what I was actually seeing, or how all that confectionary sugar was going to melt and get sticky and rank.

I turn up Doheny toward Burton’s house, with its fake-pond Jacuzzi, and I’m thinking, Quick in and out. No confrontation, no screaming, no drama. Just bye.

I’m thinking, One forty-five, she could still be asleep, this could be completely painless.

But Siobhan is not asleep. She doesn’t look as if she slept that much earlier, either. She just looks wasted.

This couldn’t be completely painless. We’ve already had the big-ass fight a dozen times; this is us breaking up.

“Look who finally showed,” she says, rolling over on her black and white quilt, setting down her book.

I feel weirdly defensive, as if what I think is the final betrayal hadn’t already happened. As if we were still the Dynamic Duo and this was just a rocky patch in Gotham City.

I say, “I fell asleep. It was kind of unplanned. Sorry if you were worried.”

“I thought you went off with some forty-year-old perv who asked you to help find his lost kitten.”

I say, “Yeah, well, I told him I was boss of my body.”

She is sitting on the edge of her bed now, in the same short
little skirt and unbuttoned shirt as when I left her at the party. “Didn’t get much sleep, did we?” she says.

“Could I just have my bag? I have to go.”

She says, “Where were you?”

“You know where.”

“He broke up with you for no good reason!” she half shouts. “He broke your heart and then you slept with him? Did you wake up stupid yesterday?”

At the center of me, there is something so hard and cold and icy, it’s as if my body temperature has plummeted to absolute zero and I don’t even have feelings left, because my heart is ice.

I say, “Forget it. I’m done. I can’t even listen to you.”

“What’s wrong with you?” She’s off the bed and in my face.

I’m dodging her, I’m behind the rocking chair, and I yell back. “What’s wrong with
you
? You pretend we’re friends and then you tell him I came over here to hook up with Aiden! Are you out of your mind?”

She’s grabbing at me and I’m holding up my arms and she has me.

I can’t twist out of her grasp. When I try to pull away, it just gets tighter. Her mouth is all blurred lipstick and her pupils are so dilated, her irises have almost disappeared.

I say, “Shit, Siobhan, did you do flamethrowers back there?”

“Who told you I do flamethrowers?” she screams, her face six inches from my face.

“How high are you right now?”

“Flames don’t last that long,” she says. “Because. If they did. I
wouldn’t feel like this. And
I’m
not the one obsessed with heroin, grasshopper,
you
are.”

Then she curls up in a ball, and she closes her eyes, and I can tell from her breathing that she’s asleep.

• • •

At school, on Monday, Dylan says, “Look what I brought you.”

Two slightly melted chunks of chocolate swan wing, which he procedes to feed me during break.

He says, “Does this satisfy your lust for sappiness, Seed?”

Arif says, “Do you two want privacy?” Only he says it with a soft
i
, and it sounds British and adorable.

“I’ll just drag her into the bushes for that,” Dylan says.

Arif slaps his hand to his forehead. “If you don’t stop trying to impress her with your feeble attempts at humor, she’s going to race back to her ex.”

“Thank you for not telling him about my so-called ex,” I say to Dylan when we’re walking to class, his hand at my waist, which Latimer has now banned as inappropriate intimate contact. We are no-public-displays-of-physical-affection-and-joy violators.

Dylan says, “Once again, reminding you that I’m not Aiden.”

“You are the model boyfriend.”

Dylan puts his hands to his throat and demonstrates strangling himself.

He does, however, spend the next two weeks demonstrating model boyfriend behavior.

I barely miss Siobhan.

Barely.

When I think about her, I am either so sad or so angry or such a confusing combination of sad and angry that I go into Stop It mode. I do a lot of counting.

She seems to get it. There are no texts and no IMs and no tripping me in the hall or hauling me into the bathroom for drama. Or maybe she’s too high to care.

I keep wondering why Nancy or even—half-blind as Siobhan says he is—Burton doesn’t notice. Because Siobhan arrives at Latimer high, and she leaves even higher. At least Marisol is chauffeuring her around.

The hair isn’t perfect, and then, in English, when Ms. Erskine says something typically, monumentally stupid (unless you actually think that Shakespeare was an early feminist and
King Lear
proves it, which it doesn’t), Siobhan laughs out loud. Very loud. Normally, she distracts herself during moments like this by chipping off her nail polish. I look over, and no nail polish.