Afterparty(11)

CHAPTER SEVEN


IT WOULD MAKE LIFE A lot easier if I were the kind of bad seed with a hard, protective shell and thorns that leave splinters if you try to crush them in your hand. The kind Chelsea wouldn’t mess with.

But in the absence of a shell, there’s Siobhan.

“We should burn her at the stake,” Siobhan says.

We’re reading Saint Joan in English class, and Ms. Erskine insists that what happened to Joan (hint: she pissed off all the important men in France and then they burned her at the stake) is the perfect metaphor for the fate of women in the cruel, cruel modern world. Discuss.

A large number of boys grab hall passes and don’t come back. Dylan is out of there in five.

And every time I speak, Chelsea mimes an imitation of me with the added touches of protruding tongue and hands clenched like two claws in rigor mortis.

Kimmy, the horsiest of horse girls, mouths, “Stop it, Chels,” but Chelsea doesn’t stop.

I try to gut it out, but I choke on my words. What I was trying to say about the Bishop of Beauvais is lodged in the back of my throat, like a mouthful of gristle.

“My horse has more interesting things to say,” Chelsea mutters after class, falling into her little brigade with Mel Burke and Lia Graham.

Siobhan keeps saying that it’s going to get better, but I don’t believe her.

For me, better is when Sib and I are alone together somewhere else. When we’re sitting in the screening room at her house, semi-watching a French film Paris Match said was stupendous, which I guess it is, if you like attractive naked people who can’t act.

Siobhan is trying to get her laptop to Skype-connect with William, her best friend on all continents except North America, where I am the reigning best friend. She can see him, but there is no sound.

Whenever I look away from Siobhan’s laptop to the movie screen that spans the front of the room, I get an eyeful of full frontal nudity.

Siobhan says, “You need a drink, right?”

I say, “Thanks. I’m fine.”

“Oh Jesus, don’t go all American on me. Montreal is practically France. Say you haven’t been guzzling wine with dinner since you were eight.”

All right, I have, liberally cut with water, but I am unprepared for high-octane vodka in orange juice.

“Better, right? Wait!” She lunges for her laptop, which has started to make dial tone noises. “William! Where the f*ck are you?”

Siobhan and William are bound by years of little-kid pacts. It is difficult to reconcile her stories of their childhood—jumping into fountains in Milan, riding scooters down staircases at his country house in Umbria—with chain-smoking, insomniac William, who is always up no matter what time it is in Switzerland. His boarding-school buddies, half passed-out, dispense crude comments in three languages in the background.

Siobhan and William have pacts from when they were twelve to get married at thirty and become gamekeepers in Africa, pacts filled with adventure and secrecy and a long-remembered rush that will keep them friends forever.

“A gamekeeper?” I say when she tells me about it.

Siobhan says, “It’s a pact. We’re stuck with it.”

Then, over the din of the grunting French actors, Siobhan screams, “Fuck this laptop!”

William’s face freezes. The connection turns to static and then silence. William’s image, heavy-lidded eyes staring straight out, fades to grey.

“You want a pact?” Siobhan says. “Let’s mess with Chelsea. Let’s mess with her creepy horse. I’m Chelsea and Sir Galahad only performs for meeeee.”

Of course I want a pact.

She says, “Can you ride English?”

It’s hard to tell, sitting in the half darkness of the screening room, if what we are planning is adorable teen hijinks on the order of pasting a mustache on the statue of Charles Emmett Latimer in front of the administration building, or more of a late-night felony by reckless rich kids with no morals, conscience, or sense.

I come down on the side of hijinks.

Which is how I find myself in a basic black breaking-and-entering outfit when my dad thinks I’m sleeping over at Siobhan’s house so we can practice our Joan of Arc oral report and get up early to wrap each other in tinfoil suits of armor. I have never done anything remotely like this, told my dad a lie of this magnitude to cover up something that is no doubt fourteen kinds of illegal, and also kind of wrong. But somewhere between trying to talk myself into the idea that this is hijinks and ordering myself to bail, I climb over the stone wall near the dark paddock.

“How long before Security shows up?” Even fortified by brandy that Siobhan claims is good for quelling fear but seems to have left me slightly uncoordinated, I’m pretty sure we’re doomed.

“Get a grip, grasshopper. They’re playing cards in the gym.”

“How do you even know that?”

“Midnight football,” she says. “Remember? If you’d give up the boo-hoo, Daddy-I’ll-be-sooooo-good shit, you could be tackling Ian Heath.”

“Wow, I could be hooking up with a functional illiterate.”

“Or Sam Sherman. You could be hooking up with him. Football and he’s the only guy in Mara’s so-called band. Man of your dreams.”

“Could we possibly concentrate on what we’re doing? I haven’t ridden since I was six.”