Afterparty (4 page)

IN MY DEFENSE, EMMA THE
good did not slide easily into the realm of the formerly good. I was not a complete scourge-of-God liar leading a fun life of deceit from the moment of the magic kiss.

Because, at first, my life of virtue remained stunningly intact. The extent of my evil was the sunglasses mini-lie I told my dad, and the completely false claim that the only makeup on my face was the slightest faint hint of mascara. And, all right, every word I said (and didn’t say) about Siobhan and pretty much everything we did, other than study.

In the Emma the Good column, I finish all homework and commune with my dad’s pick for my best friend in L.A., Megan Donnelly. It’s lucky that Megan and I like each other because we’re like the arranged marriage of kid friendship. It’s not her fault she’s the prisoner of her exponentially more clueless dad and overly attentive mom, goes to school in a convent even though
she isn’t, strictly speaking, Catholic anymore (although she has yet to share her lack of religious conviction with her parents), and spends all her time studying, going to church, and attending uplifting cultural events.

My dad achieves a state of parental bliss at the Donnellys’: While other parents worry that their kids are having lots and lots of unprotected sex, Megan’s mom worries she’ll drink beverages with artificial sweeteners.

Something about rotting your cerebral cortex.

“Just drink the apple juice and don’t ask,” Megan whispers. “You really do not want to know.”

If you line up Megan, whose idea of teen rebellion is talking to Joe, a boy she never ever gets to see in real life, on her cell phone, with Siobhan, whose idea of teen rebellion is teen rebellion, it’s hard to tell that they inhabit the same century.

Also in the good column, all the way on top, I cart sacks of brown rice around and teach eager eighty-year-olds (and kids who only know how to operate, say, late-model Macs) how to log in donations on the world’s oldest, slowest computer at the food bank where I volunteer—the place that my dad, in a giant breach of good-father decorum, slips up and calls Temple Beth Boob Job.

Obviously, this isn’t the name of the temple: It is Temple Beth Torah, and the core of its existence is repairing the world, one grocery bag at a time.

It is not a bad place.

Except the young, girly rabbi is too friendly. I’m pretty sure it’s because my needy-motherless-girl flag is flying and she wants to
share how to knit sweaters and the mysteries of tampons. (Hint: motherless, not needy.) But I think she catches me admiring her kippah, which is made of silver filigreed wire, as if a highly disorganized spider spun a skullcap that caught tiny pearls. Just as she’s telling me how welcome I’d be in levels of the temple higher than the basement where the food bank is, say in youth group, where I could be part of my own
little community
, my dad—who volunteers himself every couple of weeks, partly to help heal the world and partly to check up on me—bundles me into the car and starts making cracks about the place.

“Our community isn’t
little
and it extends far beyond the walls of this temple and all these reconfigured breasts,” he says.
“Entendu?”

Overlooking the fact that every Friday night, he makes Shabbat dinner. I light candles, he blesses me, and we eat an exact replica of the giant Moroccan Sabbath meal my grandma Bella—whom I barely remember—no doubt cooks each week in Côte Saint-Luc, just north of Montreal. During which he drills me with the tenets of Judaism he approves of, his favorite being
tikkun olam
, repairing the world, into which feeding the hungry falls. And somewhat
lashon hara
, which boils down to no mean gossip, his free pass to establish a vast list of important topics that he won’t discuss.

All of which we pretend never happened because, in another never-to-be-discussed fact of Lazar family life, my dad is off organized Judaism, religion in general, and all members of the Lazar family (religious or not) in Montreal. Which is so far from an approved topic for dinnertime chatter that you have to wonder if my dad ever thinks about it anymore.

When we are driving home from the food bank, I go, “Dad, so if Rabbi Pam asks what religion I am, what do I say?”

He says, “She asked you that?”

“No, but the thing is, we’re bagging groceries in a
temple
.”

“Would you prefer a church?” He sounds flustered, as if he’s beating himself up for committing a child-rearing blunder. “I could find you a church.”

Not find
us
a church, find
me
one. Raising the question of whether he thinks of me as the same religion as the rest of the Lazar clan, or, for example, as him.

I say, “No! Dad! This is fine. I like Beth Boob Job.”

“Ems!”

“Don’t look at
me
.
I’m
not the one who made the inappropriate comment in front of
my
impressionable kid.”

My dad fake-slaps at my jeans. He says, “Enough. You’re a good kid, but enough.”

But before long, when you add up the number of hours I spend as a paragon of virtue in the basement of that temple, it turns out to be the exact number of hours I feel as if I can still claim the title of Emma the Good, figuring out how many cans of tuna I can give people, whether there are enough boxes of dried mac and cheese to go around.

• • •

Siobhan says, “You spend
every
Sunday sorting rice and beans? You can’t come with me
once
?”

Siobhan spends her non-lacrosse Sundays at her stepfather’s country club, flirting with Wade, the junior tennis pro, who goes
to UCLA. This drives her mom up a wall as apparently her one and only rule for Siobhan is No Older Guys. Her strategy when driven up a wall is to try to distract Siobhan by taking her shopping and burying her under the entire contents of Kitson.

“Win-win-win,” Siobhan says, cracking open her uniform blouse to reveal a new black camisole. The blouses are the thickness of plastic picnic tablecloths. The black doesn’t show through.

She says, “I still don’t get it. Why doesn’t your dad write your food place a check and just be done with it?”

• • •

Megan Donnelly says, “He offered to find you a
church
? Maybe he’s giving you a choice. Unlikely, but consider. If my parents gave
me
anything resembling a religious choice, I’d throw a party.”

We’re sitting on Megan’s bed, eating my dad’s fudge brownies that I had to sneak in because her mom thinks pastries are a public health menace.

I say, “Or maybe he just doesn’t want the spawn of Satan in his club.”

I’m talking about my mom, and Megan knows it.

Megan says, “She wasn’t Satan! My dad says your dad was so in love with her, he couldn’t even think.”

“Meaning he was thinking with . . . you know.”

Megan, who is the nicest, but not the most experienced, person you could ever meet (even compared to me), says, “No, thinking with what?”

I say, “Nothing.”

Seriously, would Emma the Good corrupt Megan Donnelly?
Every time we go over there, Megan’s parents, my dad’s friends since medical school, make him look like an irresponsible, anything goes–type parent. Before we escaped to Megan’s room with the contraband chocolate, the dinner table talk involved how her mom spends her nights in the ER, cleaning up the alcohol-poisoned, bloodied, car-wrecked, controlled-substance-ingesting teen wreckage of other parents’ failure to recognize the dangers of urban life. Then we listened to her dad complain about how minors can get condoms at twenty-four-hour drugstores.

On the drive home, my dad says, “There’s a revelation! Compared to Edgar Donnelly, I’m the groovy dad.”

I am practicing driving my dad’s car through the winding streets near the base of Griffith Park. Which is why all I’m thinking about is not hitting other cars. I say, “I hate to tell you, but you can’t say ‘groovy.’ Were you even born when people said that?”

If I’d been looking at him instead of the road, I would have stopped there.

I say, “Also. You’re the total despot dad. Edgar is just a whack job.”

“I’m a
what
?”

“Sorry! That was a completely bad joke. Sorry!” I accidentally slightly swerve the car across the dotted line that runs down the middle of the street.

He says, “Pull over.” Which I do.

He says, “A
despot
? Is that what you think?”

I have made my dad miserable again. I say, “Of course not! We’ve been at the Donnellys’ too long!
I’m
the one who’s
allowed
to joke around.
Megan
is the totally oppressed one who will no doubt run away and go to stripper school if you don’t make Edgar see reason.”

He says, “Good save.”

He pats my shoulder. He says, “I’m proud of you, Ems. Don’t disappoint me.”

I am determined not to. Emma the Good. Emma the, all right, considerably less than good. Every cell and eyelash of me is determined not to disappoint.

Meaning: He can’t find out. Anything. Ever.

ON MONDAY, GOING INTO HISTORY,
Dylan wants to know if I had a nice weekend.

“Hey, Bad Seedling,” he says, “what do Canadian ballerinas do in L.A.?”

I say, “It’s just
PE
ballet, not
actual
ballet.”

“Hard to picture you doing jumping jacks in toe shoes.”

“Visualize my father taking me to concerts at UCLA. Visualize me listening to three hours of Brahms.”

Chelsea, who just won’t give it up, says, “So that’s where people who don’t get invited to parties go. What
do
they do for fun, I wonder?”

“How do you know if she goes to parties?” Siobhan says, dropping her notebook on her desk.

“Answer the question,” Chelsea snaps. “Did somebody invite you to a party somewhere in civilization, Emily?” She turns to Siobhan. “Maybe you can get yourself invited if you rub up
against everybody on the football team enough—I hear you’re very close to groping
all
of them—but Miss Thrift Shop here?” She looks me over, and recoils. “I doubt it.”

I say, “It’s
Emma
.”

Dylan holds up his hand, to no avail.

Chelsea says, “Even Dylan Kahane thinks she’s seedy. And he sleeps in his clothes.” As if he weren’t there to hear her dissing him.

“Seedling,”
says Arif. Arif Saad is the English-accented, creased and pressed, Saudi Arabian foil to Dylan’s casual insubordination. They are a matched pair of opposites. “He called her ‘seedling.’ Friends often call each other by terms of endearment. Something you’d know, Chelsea, if you were more endearing.”

Chelsea mutters something about a camel and starts to walk away. Arif puts his hand on her arm. He says, “Repeat that.”

Chelsea just looks at him.

“That thing about the camel. Repeat that.”

Apparently Chelsea
can
be stared down.

Apparently Arif, once provoked, won’t give it up either.

“A point of clarification,” he says. “Was I the camel or the camel
jockey
? Or was I having sex with the camel? Or was that
you
and your maggot of a horse?”

There is a sharp intake of breath from Chelsea and everyone else.

“You aren’t going to repeat it, are you?” he says. “Unfortunate. Because I’d so enjoy a written apology.”

Dylan says, “Don’t pout. Maybe next time.”

Chelsea storms off, but doesn’t open her mouth.

I turn to Arif, who sits behind me. I say, “Thanks. And sorry.”

“My pleasure. His seedling is my seedling.” He looks over at Dylan, who is turning toward his seat in the back, snickering. “Oh no. ‘Seedling’ wasn’t offensive or sexist or degrading, was it?”

Dylan swings around and smacks him on the back of the head. You can tell that they’ve been hanging out together since forever.

Arif says, “I’m going to sic my camel
and
my falcon on you.”

Dylan flips him off and Arif responds in kind, except Dylan is nowhere near his seat, whereas Arif is sitting down with his notebook open.

“Mr. Kahane,” Mr. Auden, the AP European History teacher says, coming into the room. “Again? And Mr. Saad, not what I’d expect from you.”

Dylan says, “Heading to my seat.”

“Or you could leave now and save us the suspense of wondering when you’re going to disappear.” Mr. Auden sighs. “What I wouldn’t give to have your brother back in my class. You have no idea.”

Dylan flinches. Then he says, “Okay,” and walks out the still-open door. Illustrating the idiocy of Latimer’s policy that skipping out on its magnificent educational offerings is its own punishment, a free pass for constant cutting.

Over my shoulder, I see Arif put his head down on his desk.

Lissi Kallestad, completely oblivious, waves her hand, flashing the bracelet on which her family motto, “Strive, strive, strive,”
is engraved in Norwegian. “Mr. Auden! Mr. Auden! Is there extra credit for chapter four?”

Chelsea says, “Extra credit for shutting your mouth.”

I say, “Leave her alone.” Reflexively and without thinking. Oh God.

I feel a buzz in my pocket and check my phone under my desk.

Dylan:
Seed. How are your history notes?

Me:
I noted your departure.

Dylan:
It’s my signature move. Notes?

Me:
I take OCD notes. With footnotes. You still want them?

Dylan:
Afraid so. Maybe for more than today. I don’t think I’ll be there much.

Me:
That was pretty rank.

Dylan:
O the horror. I’ve got better things to do.

Me:
Who doesn’t?

Dylan:
Remain seated. Resist impulse to flee. Take good notes.

When I’m anywhere near him, even by electronic proxy, even when my texting fingers are hovering three quarters of an inch over his words, I have to resist any number of impulses. Fleeing is not one of them.