Afterparty (34 page)

Which is that Siobhan fell off the roof unassisted.

Which is that she was drunk and stoned and crazy and belligerent all night, that she got into a hair-pulling catfight with an unsuspecting girl from Winston over nobody knows what, after which she tried to yank my hair out when I tried to put her blouse back on her.

That she careened up to the roof screaming something incoherent about impact.

That maybe her brain was so scrambled by a smorgasbord of Afterparty substances by then that she thought of her head as that seventh-grade welcome-to-science-class experiment where you toss a padded raw egg off a roof to see if it will crack on impact.

Or maybe she thought she could fly.

My dad says, “I see how difficult this is for you.” He is being so kind, he is trying so hard, I don’t deserve all of his soup and effort. “Would you like to come out of the closet and lie on the sofa? Give me your hand. Ems? Amélie?”

It’s been all French for days.

But I am screaming in English: “Don’t call me that!”

He sits out there for hours. It’s like a weird pajama party game. He hands me in a pillow and a quilt from Montreal.

I hand him back the quilt and he gives me my yellow comforter and some French
Vogue
s and a flashlight.

He says, “Do you want to play with Mutt?”

I open the door and Mutt squeezes in and falls asleep on my shoes. He wheezes when he sleeps.

We’re in the fourth day.

Mutt is circling around my boots as if he’s looking for a special place to poop. I open the door and let him out in the backyard, where Jeff is sitting, nose to the back door, looking bereft, missing him.

There is banging on the front door. Not the knocker, a fist.

My dad gets off the floor. He says, “Come on. Maybe it’s Megan.”

I say, “Is it Megan?”

He shakes his head.

DYLAN IS STANDING IN THE
doorway in jeans and one of those extremely cool jackets that isn’t quite a sports coat but hovers over his torso as if his tailor just finished perfecting it. He is dressed up. Not that I think my dad will register this fact, given that there’s no tie involved.

“I’m Dylan Kahane,” he says.

Even though I can only see my dad from the back, I know what his face is doing. I know this is not the genre of boy my dad sees as being in the same story as me.

“The orchestra geek,” Dylan says.

My dad says, “The hell you are.”

But he lets him come in, and Dylan walks through the front hallway and into the living room. He comes toward me where I’ve curled up on the couch. I start to get up and he holds me there, against his chest. I’ve been crying, off and on, for three days—why stop now? I press my face into the dark wool of the jacket, against
the lapel, and I feel his chin on top of my head, vibrating, as if he were humming.

Here I am, leading my new, improved, and not imaginary secret life in front of my father, between the piano and the shelves of books on the technical aspects of being insane. I am kissing Dylan, walking past the record player with cabinets with all my dad’s historic vinyl, holding Dylan’s hand. I am walking into my bedroom and closing the door.

And the oddness of it strikes me, how I feel furtive, like a renegade bad girl, sitting chastely in my closed-door bedroom with Dylan across the room, yet I can sleep with him at his house without one single guilt-tinged scruple.

And from across the killer girl’s pale green-and-yellow bedroom, Dylan says, “Hey.”

I say, “Hey.” I say, “I’m sorry.” I say, “Nothing seems real.”

Dylan says, “I’m sorry. I know. I keep thinking, if I’d just done something differently—”

“I know.”

Because this wasn’t one of those quicksand landscapes with an inevitable outcome. The kind where you can tell yourself that there was nothing you could do to stop it, it was a runaway train, it was a stampede of crazed cattle, it was kismet, fate, and preordained.

I could have said no, said maybe, not said yes. All year.

Dylan says, “I know you don’t want me over here, but you won’t answer the phone. I never should have let you leave there by yourself. I should have gotten you home. I should have figured it out.”

“I think I told you to get lost.”

“So what. I just stood there. Jesus.”

And then I think, Siobhan is comatose, Siobhan is lying there at Cedars-Sinai and no one knows if she’s going to live or die, and I’m behind a closed door in my bedroom, engaged in teen romance.

But it’s possible that our compatibility lies in him being a similarly bad person, because he says, “This isn’t why I came, and we don’t have to get into this, but are we still broken up?”

I say, “I don’t know, but if I said we are, I take it back.”

Dylan gets out of the vanity chair that he’s too big for and sits down next to me on the bedspread. “Your dad’s not going to shoot me, is he?”

I lean my head against his shoulder.

He says, “Did you tell him what happened yet?”

What they say about soldiers in trenches with their mouths tasting like metal, that’s exactly how my mouth tastes. Like metallic terror.

He says, “You’re going to have to go public pretty soon. You’re going to have to tell him. I’ve got your back, but we can’t just not tell anyone what happened.”

Closet, closet, closet. Where it is silent and dark.

“It’s already started,” he says. “Facebook. YouTube. Pictures of people going up the stairs. The bed collapsing under Paulina is going viral.”

“Emma kills Siobhan. How many hits do you think that would get?”

He says, “What are you talking about?”

I just look at him.

“I was up there,” he says. “I saw what happened. I thought, God, I’m sorry Emma, I should have figured it out, but you were under her and she was squirming around and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I’m sorry. And then, it was so fast but it was pretty clear she wasn’t kissing you. When she was trying to kill you.”

I am trying to stay on point. I am trying not to think about the fact that my boyfriend thought I was getting it on with my former BFF when, in fact, something quite different was transpiring.

“She wanted us to jump together.”

Dylan straightens up and shakes his head. He looks very grave, completely serious, no irony, no movement at the corners of his mouth, only a thin, tight line where his lips are pressed together.

“She was trying to push you off the roof. If you hadn’t grabbed that drainpipe and thrown her off-balance, you’d be dead.”

I am dizzy with the possibilities. If this is what he saw, or if this is what he thought he saw, or if this is what he’s making up to save me. If he just saw what he wanted to see, which was not me killing Siobhan.

I look into his face.

He is telling the truth. He thinks he is telling the truth.

Maybe it is the truth.

Maybe Siobhan was trying to kill me and I was so down
for being friends for life, I didn’t notice just how short a life she wanted me to have.

Maybe my best friend wanted me dead. Maybe she wanted us both dead, or maybe just me.

Maybe my best friend was trying to kill me on the roof of the Camden Hotel.

Maybe I killed her instead.

MY DAD IS OUTSIDE MY
door, and as he opens it, Dylan literally jumps off the bed, which makes it appear that we were doing something my dad wouldn’t approve of. Beyond sitting on my bed with the door closed.

My dad says, “Emma.” He nods toward the living room. “Now.”

I get up, smoothing my hair, smoothing my uniform (because I got dressed for school but didn’t go), looking incredibly guilty, although probably not of homicide.

My dad nods toward the living room couch and it’s pretty clear that now that I’m out of the closet, we’re back to the fairy tale with the princess who is expected to do as she’s told. My dad looks shell-shocked. I would no doubt feel guilty as hell about this if I wasn’t already feeling guilty for so many other, worse things.

He says, “Why is that boy in your bedroom?”

I don’t say anything. Surprise, Dad, I’m a killer liar sex fiend and sitting in my bedroom is Exhibit One?

Maybe not.

I sit down on the couch, as far away from him as I can without perching on the armrest. Cradling a cushion in my lap, but I still feel unprotected, as if I’m being showered with embers and my uniform is melting off and here I am, uncovered, with no sign of being a student, or in high school, or the best of the best of the best.

At his end of the couch, my dad says, “Emma, are you pregnant?”

This from the man who wouldn’t sign the parental waiver to get me out of Issues in Modern Living, where I was forced to learn to roll a condom onto produce.

“No! Why is it always about girls getting pregnant? Is that why you tried to keep me locked up here, so I wouldn’t get pregnant?”

“I take it I didn’t do a very good job of keeping you locked up, eh?” It’s that Canadian “eh?” thing that gets to me, it still so gets to me. I feel so sorry for him, stuck with me, so sorry for what I am about to put him through.

“Emma,” he says. “We’ve always been very honest with one another. You can talk to me about anything.”

It is the moment of truth. Or of no truth. In the moral hierarchy, where does lying stack up next to shredding your father? With the corollary issue of my insides and the shredder, when he knows, and he gives me that look, only gone exponential, and there’s nothing left of me but bad genes and poor impulse control.

I say, “No, I can’t. We’re not honest with each other at all. And everything we don’t talk about just exploded.”

My dad just looks at me.

I say, “Say something.”

I am thinking that this will be the last sentence before I completely expunge any notion he might have of my Emma the Good–ness, and how wonderful I am, and his belief that if he’s a good enough father, he can somehow prevent me from turning into
her
.

So I just say it: “I’m
her
. You might as well have stayed in Montreal and let everyone throw things at me, because I deserve it.”

From his end of the couch, my dad says, “You know that we left Montreal because of me. Not you, Ems. And no one wants to throw anything at you.”

“Have you
been
to Lac des Sables? Where I never have to go again.”

My dad is leaning toward me now, but not actually touching me, as if I might be a stick of some volatile explosive. Which I might be.

He says, “Ems, this is a difficult moment. I understand that. Siobhan is in the hospital. You have something going on with this boy. I’m not sure where Canada comes into this, but I’m going to sit with you until we sort it out.”

“Do. Not. Go. Psychiatric. On. Me.”

“Ems! Look at me. Look up. This is what
parental
looks like.”

By now I’m shouting at him and I can’t stop. “Don’t you get it? I’m her! No matter what you did and how far from home you stashed me, I’m a total fuckup. Look at
me
! I look exactly like her!
I just go around doing whatever I feel like doing and I don’t even feel guilty enough about it to stop.”

My dad, who is by this point three inches away from me and white, pretending that he’s still calm, says, “Don’t you ever, for one moment, blame a single decision you’ve made on who your mother was.” He shakes his head. “And I think you might be exaggerating. Just a little.”

“No I’m not! You know I’m not or you wouldn’t have kept me locked up here!”

“Ems, if I’ve been inflexible, we can discuss it. But it’s because the world is a dangerous place. Here especially. No other reason. Not because I don’t think you’re wonderful.”

“I’m not that wonderful.”

Compass:
You are a master of understatement.

My dad says, “You’re wrong.” He sounds so sure and uncomprehending. “Teenagers have lapses in judgment. It’s expected. I don’t know what you possibly could have done that makes you feel this way about yourself, but I know you, and it’s not going to change what I think of you. I love you.”

I scream, “Even if I killed Siobhan?”

“Even if you did
what
?”

This is when Dylan comes out of the bedroom, when my dad stands up and says, “You need to go home.”

Dylan, who is backing toward the door, stops and says in extremely bad French, “Sir. Dr. Lazar. She didn’t. You need to hear this. She thinks that she did, but she didn’t.”

My dad says, “Of course she didn’t.”

On his way out the door, Dylan calls back, “And she’s not anything like her mother!”

My father follows Dylan out the door.

• • •

When my dad comes back, he is teary and ever so slightly furious.

I say, “Before you even say anything—”

He says, “Tell me what happened Saturday night.”

Deep breath.

Then I tell him.

I tell him everything in gory detail. The window, the taxi, Dylan leaving Latimer, Paulina’s suite, the all-girl limo that I wasn’t in, the rooftop and the rain. And every time I say another true sentence, I feel as if I’m punching him in the face.

He is pacing in front of the couch. He says, “We can deal with this.” It sounds as if he’s brainstorming, not as if he actually believes it. “You were frightened and you took off. We’ll talk to the police. We’ll talk to Siobhan’s mother. We can deal with this.”

I say, “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”

“What happened on that roof is not your fault.
Entendu?
”

“Yes it was! What was I even
doing
there?”

“
That
we have to talk about. Parties, taxis, drinking, drugs.” He is ticking it off on his fingers. “What am I leaving out? But this we have to handle first.”

“Boyfriend,” I say. “You left that out.”

He frowns. Then he says, “I’m a sucker for anyone who says my baby girl didn’t commit capital murder.”

This is so extremely not funny that I think he might have snapped.