Today Kid Lit Frenzy is welcoming author, Ann Stampler to the blog. She has a special deleted scene from her young adult novel Afterparty for us. Thanks Ann for stopping by.
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At first, Afterparty took place over the course of five years–as opposed to one. I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, this is from a very early version when Emma lives in Portland, Oregon (and not Chicago), calls her father “Marty” (no way would he go for this), is in 8th grade (and not a junior), and doesn’t want to move to L.A. (as opposed to dying to move to L.A.). The primary thing this old Emma and the Emma in Afterparty have in common is that fact that they’re both feeling terribly burdened by the level of goodness their father demands, and a sense that they’re about to crack.
P.S. I’m so sad the stuff about Hearst Castle didn’t make it into the final book.
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“You might be catastrophizing,” Marty says. “Just a little.”
But I am not catastrophizing; I am thinking about all the beginning of the school year: orchestra try-outs and concert choir and ballet auditions that I’m going to miss. I’m thinking about how normal it is to say hi to complete strangers on the first day of school and how pathetic it is two weeks later.
I’m thinking about the friends in Portland it was so hard to make and how depressing it is to keep having to make new ones because we keep moving before I get used to being anywhere. And before my so-called, perpetually changing friends get used to me being there either.
I’m thinking about how eighth grade is the highest grade at Portland Country Day and what that means for moving up to second chair violin and getting out of the chorus and into a solo for the Christmas ballet and placing into concert choir and everything Marty so wanted me to do and be good at before, but that apparently he doesn’t care if we throw out the window of a moving car speeding down the coast toward another new city.
Our moving car.
So we don’t pack up and leave Oregon until the middle of September, barreling straight down the coast without stopping. Not even at Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Hearst Castle is Marty’s favorite bizarro U.S. landmark, which he thinks represents the pinnacle of unfettered American materialism run amok, and he takes every chance he gets to show it to me.
This is us: Marty and I standing on the sidelines, standing away from the hoards of admiring tourists, and while they are gazing at all that gilded and decadent splendor and hanging on the tour guide’s every word, Marty is frowning in principled disapproval and I am trying to suppress my sense of awe and longing. Everyone but Marty is admiring the lavish glory of the Castle, and I am secretly imagining what it would have been like to go to parties there, to be a flapper and jitterbug around the marble ballroom in a silk sheath dress covered with long strands of crystal bugle beads.When I think about it, in retrospect, even before we got here, even before we made it through the pass from the San Fernando Valley and back up into the Hollywood Hills, into the little Spanish house that the heirs of Albert Whitbread bequeathed for the use of their esteemed director, before I set eyes on our tile roof and the little stone fountain and the purple vines and tiny-leaved green ivy clinging to the white walls of the courtyard, and the giant, swaying pine trees that block our view of the nightlife we hear echoing up the canyon from the Sunset Strip, back when Marty was figuring out where to put the piano and his collection of folkloric string instruments, and I was putting all my books in alphabetical order on the built in bookshelves in my new room, when we looked to be the perfect father with the perfect daughter moving into their perfect white house, I was already cracking.
