Afterparty Read Online Free PDF Page A

(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 toshare 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,