Afterparty (32 page)

Already, someone is being carried out. I say, “Is he all right? Did somebody call 911?”

A guy in a tuxedo T-shirt says, “Ambulance number two. Not to worry.” He sounds sober and reasonably credible, so I don’t worry.

The bar is in an almost pitch-black room off the ballroom. I hand the bartender my money, and I get a screwdriver. I have developed a taste for screwdrivers.

Behind me, there is a tight circle of kids smoking. Strick, in fact.

He says, “Cocoa puff?”

I start to say I’ll pass, but I don’t pass. I take it and I take a hit, or a drag, or a puff, or whatever it is when it’s a cigarette with cocaine frosting, and I wait for something to happen. Nothing discernible does.

I keep trying. I try and try.

I say, “Are you sure?”

And he says, “Maybe. I’m too wasted to tell. I should lie down. I have a joint, though.”

He starts it and hands it to me, and I smoke it until my throat is burning and I’m pretty sure I’m feeling it. I turn to hand it back, but there’s nothing left of it.

Then he gestures to a curtain, a heavy brocade curtain, with a coffin jutting out underneath. With feet reaching almost to the end. There are coffins with their lids propped open, people inside, not all dressed, not fully, and some people are lying there, and some people are making out, and in the faint green light they look maggoty, although maybe the deadness motif just brings that to mind.

And when I look down, the coffins are resting in something soft, mounds of loamy-smelling dirt, five coffins resting in dirt, and there are two girls rubbing that dirt on a guy’s chest, slowly, as if in a party trance, as he lies there with his hands folded at his throat.

A voice that sounds so eerily like Siobhan’s, but isn’t, says, “Want to play?”

And I’m gone.

The band starts up with a strange, punkish cover of “Hooray for Hollywood.”

There is a blast of light so bright it hurts my eyes. I press my eyelids closed but the outline of shooting flames is visible behind my eyelids. When I open my eyes, Dylan is standing in front of me.

In jeans and a standard-issue white shirt, only one that skims his body, and a dinner jacket not unacquainted with a tailor. He is leaning against a pillar, smoking a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke.

He says, “Hey. Not bad for a girl who’s home asleep.”

I say, “Not bad yourself. For someone who’s—where are you?”

“We don’t live in the same fucking house,” he says. “I’m wherever I want to be. I’m where you wear jeans and a dinner jacket, and a zombie from Screen Actors’ Guild hands you a cigarette.”

I say, “What are you doing here? I thought you hated this.”

Dylan says, “You look beautiful. You always look beautiful.”

Straight to the heart. Which is not where I want him.

He smooths his lapels. “I might be overdressed. Paulina’s suite is clothing optional. And well stocked. As promised.”

Paulina has rented the semi-official junior class suite.

“Well stocked with what?”

“Wine, women, a shitload of pharmaceuticals. It’s raining white powder up there.”

I say, “Shit, is Siobhan there?” Almost reflexively, that’s where my concern goes.

“What do you think?”

I am struck by my remarkable inability to let go. Of her, of him, of Good Emma, of anything I decide to let go of, but don’t. Because here I am, right back in it, not dealing with the reality of a boyfriend I should have noticed wasn’t perfect and also was leaving town, and a best friend I should have noticed was high all the time.

Dylan groans. “No. Emma. Don’t go.” It is, despite everything, almost irresistible. “At least dance with me first.”

He reaches his hand around the small of my back, the Aiden move, and it feels so good, I let him lead me. He doesn’t even have
to open his mouth; just him standing there, swaying a little, almost imperceptibly, to the music is a compelling argument. And it isn’t that I want to do anything other than dance with him, to cuddle up to that black dinner jacket and those scruffy jeans, to succumb to the bursts of light in the dark room. But I’m backing away.

“Christ, Emma, you’re not her keeper,” Dylan says. “Are you planning to track her down wherever she’s passed out forever?”

“She’s
passed out
?”

“Not yet. She’s more in her flapping-around, making-out-with-anyone-that-looks-at-her stage,
before
she passes out.”

“That is so mean.”

“Yet so accurate.”

I turn toward the doors, but I’m moving against the tide.

“You should dance with me,” he says from behind. “You shouldn’t get distant and cold in advance.”

We’re standing in the middle of the ballroom. Kids are waving their own bottles—the Camden isn’t particular—and smoking all manner of things; there are little plumes of smoke all around us. In the dim recesses of the room, people are hanging off the stage and off stairways to balconies, the acrid sensation of mold in my nostrils superseded by perfume and body odor and rum. Up on the stage, the drummer isn’t drumming because there’s a girl in his lap and they’re sharing a bottle and she’s whipping his belt around over their heads. It’s picking up the light, like a lone streamer.

We are being pushed toward the stage by bodies, elbows and shoulders knocking into us, and I keep moving to the side, trying for the exit door, if I could get to it through the crowd.

“You should stay here and dance with me,” Dylan says again. He starts off plaintive, but by the end of the sentence, it’s a demand. “Why don’t you face it? She’s too broken for you to fix.” I can’t tell if his arms are around me in anger or affection.

“Say what?”

“I said—”

“I know what you said! And if she’s so broken, what were you doing with her?”

“I told you why I was with her,” Dylan says. “Drunk and an idiot. Both times. Now tell me why you were with me.”

“You know why I was with you! I saw you my first day at Latimer. Like you didn’t notice.”

Dylan says, “That’s not what she says. And it’s starting to make sense.”

I say, “Excuse me?”

“She said I was a check mark. That’s what I was to you.” Even in the darkness of the ballroom with the flashes of disorienting light, even with the poker face, even with everything, it’s hard to miss the sadness. Or the anger. “You might have told me.”

His hand on my back feels more like a fist and less like the hand of a guy who has one single good feeling toward me.

“And you believed her, obviously.”

He says, “She said I was your learner’s permit supervised hours. Care to comment?”

But there’s no anger left in me for her; I already know who she is.

I say, “I can explain.”

The hand is off my back entirely.

I say, “It wasn’t like that.” Just a beat too late.

A burst of white light captures the contours of his face, a flash of rage.

He says, “Listen, Emma, high school is about to be over. You might have to hang up your learner’s permit and get a license. This is what people do. They fuck and then they leave for college.”

“You suck, you know that?” I am pushing him away.

He shakes his head and touches my cheek. It might as well be the cold fingers of the living dead.

I am weaving between people, and he is following, toward the exit door, which is heavy and warped and damp. I brace myself against it, pressing it with my right shoulder and all my weight, but it is slow to give until the moment it bursts open and I fall through it, into a cold, dark hallway, and run back toward the lobby.

THE ELEVATORS IN THE LOBBY
have hammered copper doors, decorated with intricately wrought tree branches and vines. The doors open slowly, the elevator having creaked to a stop six inches below the level of the lobby’s tile floor. Death trap, anyone? I head up the wide, curved stairway, which is draped with people sprawled from step to step.

I keep climbing to the penthouse floor, because apparently that is where we all are, nothing but the best of the best of the best of trashy. Hotel-room doors are hanging open on both sides of the hall, with odd assortments of people I know and don’t know all over each other. It’s hard to imagine that anyone is spending the night cooking up a storm, but there are sour boiled-cabbage smells. And apparently the hookah has made a comeback with smoke that smells fruity, burnt and aromatic, that curls up like a floating shadow of gray paisley.

Kimmy—who is finally making out with Max Lauder, barely
inching down the hall, hugging the wall, with Max working the thin straps of her dress off her shoulders—looks out at me.

I say, “Do you know where Paulina is?”

She pries her head out of the embrace and says, “Charlene has champagne,” nodding toward the door over her left shoulder. Where a bunch of kids are sitting on the bed, popping bottle after bottle in rapid succession. Where Charlene’s senior boyfriend is pouring champagne into her no-longer-abstinent mouth.

Charlene yelps, “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me how good this is?”

Senior boyfriend appears to be deeply perplexed as to why he didn’t think to tell her sooner.

Charlene cups her hands under her chin so the champagne won’t pour down over her chest. She is a serious good girl, yet someone is trying to lick champagne out of the dimple on her chin. She is now wearing a strapless bra and a tulle skirt that might be a slip.

A guy on the bed waves a bottle of uncorked champagne at me, bubbles frothing from the mouth of the bottle onto the patterned carpeting. Grey Burgess, very cute, and with a crooked smile. I think, Shit yes, Grey Burgess. Drink champagne. Get a buzz. Save Siobhan. This year did not exactly work out as planned, everything kind of sucks, but here I am.

I walk in, Grey Burgess nodding to me, and I sit next to him on the edge of the heavily populated bed. The mattress tilts in our direction. He hands me the bottle and I take a swig. Then he kisses my ear. It isn’t the same as with Dylan, nothing is the same
as with Dylan, not his chest or the smell of him or his hands under my hair.

I hoist my legs onto the bed, thinking, This is nothing, we fucked and then he leaves for college. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I am so not the lamb at the wolves’ orgy, I have so passed the point of no return for lamblike girls with no out-of-control proclivities.

Which is working great until we roll off the bed and Grey is on top of me, kind of crushing me, and it’s somewhere between meh and unpleasant. I roll him off, he’s not insistent, and I go, “Sorry, Grey, I have to find Siobhan.”

Grey props himself up on his side and looks at me.

He says, “You’d have a better time with me.”

“I’m sure. Gotta go.”

Standing up is hard. I feel light-headed and a little bit elated. I wonder if maybe the cocoa puffs were, in fact, cocoa puffs, and the joint was more than weed, and I’ve made it over the line to hard drugs. As innocuous and nothing-like as Siobhan claims they are. Or if this is the champagne. Or if this is just how people feel in check-mark city.

I find Paulina’s suite. I stand in the hall with the sounds of someone bumping into the door from the inside, muffled music, and the smell of weed and cat pee.

There is the wet-trash smell of Siobhan’s French cigarettes.

I bang on the door and people I can’t see in rooms I can’t see into shout for me to be quiet. They are hoarse and loud and insistent.

Lia Graham, stumbling down the hall barefoot, a champagne bottle in each hand, wants to know if I can zip her up.

I can.

Paulina’s door opens inward, whoever opened it no longer in evidence. The girls’ lacrosse team, that I usually think of as scary upright creatures who live for sports, are huddled with Siobhan and some guys on the floor, and no one looks all that upright.

Siobhan is half undressed and halfway to oblivion.

I don’t even get what they’re doing at first; it’s like a live reenactment of a semi-abstract painting with limbs protruding at angles that don’t make anatomical sense. Missy Rogers and Kyra, who is in so-called ballet with me, are at the center of it, Missy having finally found someone glad to kiss her back. Everyone seems happy to kiss everyone back, sharing what looks to be a monster joint—hash, maybe? Maybe something I don’t recognize and probably ought to avoid.

Siobhan extricates herself, a disembodied arm rises from behind her to push her up, and she hands me the joint and watches as I take a hit. It’s harsh, and the roof of my mouth feels charred.

I say, “What is this?”

She says, “You don’t want to know. I thought you weren’t coming.”

“I said I was coming. We were supposed to be dancing downstairs. Don’t you remember?”

“Just saying.”

I say, “I’m here, aren’t I? Where’s your shirt?”

There are people and coats and bottles everywhere. There’s a cat eating something off the carpet by the bed.

“Why do you always care about my shirt?” she says. “You’re not my mother. Hell, my mother’s barely my mother.”

“Why is everybody walking around with half their clothes off?”

Siobhan looks puzzled. “Games. Strip poker in Ian’s suite. Truth or dare. Fun.”

Just then, Paulina, standing on the bed, pops a bottle and jumps up and down until one side of the mattress hits the floor and the pile of coats slides onto the rug. Siobhan says, “Why don’t you just—wait! Where are you going with that?”

Assorted pills are the
that
. That thing local news stations say misguided teens do with a jumble of random, unidentified pills in festive candy bowls passed hand-to-hand at parties—that thing that we don’t do? Apparently, at Afterparty, we do.

“Do you even know what kind of pill that is?” I bat it out of her hand. Then I go scrambling after it, so I won’t be responsible for the death or the out of body experience of the cat.

I’m thinking that I’ll get a shirt on her, something over the lavender bra and the black skirt, and I’ll get her out of the suite. I’ll get a shirt on her and we’ll freaking dance. We’ll be Afterparty girls dancing that long-planned dance and it’ll be freaking fun.