Hold On Tight (2 page)

It wasn't that Mickey didn't care about giving a good lecture—he did. He'd never been into school much, and the idea that maybe he could be an artist like his dad was novel and cool. So he did want to say funny, smart things at the lecture tomorrow. He had just never really seen the point in preparing for stuff.

Mickey tucked the letter into the pocket of his cut-off seersucker suit pants, and half-climbed, half-dove down the loft's ladder. When he hit the floor he was happy to find himself face to face with his friend Jonathan.

“Hey man!” Jonathan shouted over the music. He was
wearing some very loud shoes and a suede bomber jacket that the weather definitely didn't call for. For once, Mickey was kind of psyched on something Jonathan was wearing.

“Thanks for coming over!” Mickey shouted back. He gave Jonathan his usual, tackle-style hug; Mickey was not a tall guy, and his grip was powerful. “And for the unstated offer to save my sorry ass.”

“So,” Jonathan said, locating the universal remote and turning down the music. “What's the deal? What time are you supposed to be there?”

“Well, it says in this letter…” Mickey handed over the typed offer on Vassar letterhead for Jonathan's perusal.

Jonathan skimmed it and then said, “Okay, looks like you're supposed to meet the chair of the Art Department at five. It's almost eleven now, and it takes about two hours to get to Vassar. You're with me?”

“Yup. Sounds like we've got lots o' time.”

“Right, but that's two hours by car, and last I checked neither one of us has a license,” Jonathan said, as though he were administering a quiz. “Now, who do we know who has a license?”

Mickey looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about? I drive all the time.”

“Yeah, I know. But don't you think, given your new stature, it would be nice to arrive
without
police intervention?”

“You're probably right,” Mickey said, because Jonathan usually was.

“Good. Have you seen Patch—'cause I know he has a license.”

“Great! Let's go find Patch.” Mickey slapped his hands together. “Oh, the slides. I need the slides.” He started kicking through the piles of stuff he had left all over his bedroom floor. “Shit, I knew I should have paid more attention to those.”

“These slides?” Jonathan asked, lifting a slide carousel off the ground.

Mickey was about to give Jonathan another tackle hug, but then reconsidered. “Let's go.”

Jonathan followed Mickey down the hall, which was twenty feet high and had an eerie, cathedral-like feel. The walls were decorated with early Pardo wall sculptures made out of half-demolished farm equipment. On their way out they passed the studio, where Ricardo's latest project was being constructed by a small army of tattooed assistants amid a blaze of sparks.

“Do you think I need to do something about my hair?” Mickey said as he swung the industrial metal door closed and reset the alarm.

Jonathan shrugged. “They saw the pictures. They can't say they didn't know what they were getting.”

“Sometimes teenagers can be very callous,” Dr. Guy Beller said, stroking his graying beard and looking at Arno Wildenburger as though he had just made the profoundest of observations.

No shit
, Arno thought, although he just nodded and pushed back into the couch in Dr. Beller's spare Tribeca office.

Everyone agreed that Arno, who was half-Brazilian, half-German and six feet tall, was handsome. But he liked to think—with his defined features and dark hair—that he was never quite so good-looking as when he brooded.

Of course, thus far, his brooding had only landed him in therapy.

This moping and soul-searching was new for Arno, and had been brought about mostly by a series of unusual rejections. One moment he was being named the Hottest Private School Boy in Manhattan by
New York
magazine, and being pursued by not one but three
lank, bleach-blond Upper East Side party girls; the next it was publicly revealed that he was actually the magazine's
second
choice, and those party girls had changed their cell phone numbers just to further humiliate and avoid him. The whole experience had had a really negative effect on his sense of self.

That was how he had ended up having twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Beller, a colleague of Arno's friend David's dad.

Dr. Beller gave Arno a nod. “Do you agree?”

“Oh yeah. I know this sounds weird, but it seems like girls can be even more cruel than guys sometimes,” Arno said. “It was pretty traumatic for me, being treated like, you know, just any other pretty face.”

Dr. Beller leaned his elbows on his knees and gave Arno a searching look. After a pause, he said, “Would you say things come easy to you?”

“Um, well, usually,” Arno said warily, “I guess.”

“Would you say that—because of the way you look, the way you dress—people ‘hand you' things?” Dr. Beller asked, making quotation marks with his long, slender fingers. Dr. Beller was even taller than Arno and he took up an awful lot of space in the room. He kept coming forward and crouching and staring, too, which wasn't making Arno more relaxed.

“Um, maybe,” Arno said darkly. “But it sure doesn't feel that way lately.”

“How did it feel to be the Hottest Private School Boy?” Dr. Beller went on, again using his too-long fingers to make lots of quotes.

For a moment, Arno couldn't help himself—his wide mouth broke into a smile, and the gorgeous creases in his cheeks emerged. “It's was awesome, just getting attention, everyone wants to know you, getting into all the hottest clubs. Not that I couldn't get in before, but everything was amplified, you know?”

Dr. Beller nodded thoughtfully. “Have you ever gone out with a woman who wasn't beautiful?” he asked.

Arno chuckled. “Nope, they're always hot chicks.”

Dr. Beller sighed, and leaned back in his chair. “What I'm trying to get at is that
maybe
it isn't entirely the world's fault that
you're
not feeling so hot. Maybe the fault is fifty percent the world's, fifty percent yours.”

Arno stared out the window at the skyline of expensive penthouses converted from industrial buildings and wondered how
that
could be.

“These young women you were hanging out with, for instance. They treated you poorly, no doubt about that. But I'm not sure what you were doing with these ‘ladies,' ” Dr. Beller again made the quotation marks, “in the first place.”

Arno shrugged. “It was just a good time …”

“Perhaps what you need, in your life right now, is more than a good time.” Dr. Beller stood up so that he was looking down on his patient. “Rather than fun—a very overrated pursuit, in my opinion—and rather than ‘hot chicks,' perhaps you should be seeking a meaningful relationship.”

Arno noticed for the first time how well-dressed Dr. Beller was, and how totally tall, and that made Arno respect him just a little bit more. “Meaningful relationship?” he repeated.

“Arno, what I'm trying to say is, I think you need some depth.”

“Depth?” Arno said. He was still trying to get a handle on the word when his cell went off in his pocket. “Wildenburger,” he said, flipping open his new phone. It was silver and tiny, and just as he had expected, it made him feel very cool and tech-savvy.

“Hey, man. It's Jonathan. Listen, have you seen Patch?”

“No. Where are you?” Arno asked, signaling to Dr. Beller that he would just be a moment. Dr. Beller gestured to him that it was all right.

“Mickey's house.”

Arno stood up and turned away from Dr. Beller, as though that might prevent him from hearing Arno's
conversation. “I'll come over,” he said. “What's brewing?”

“Mickey, believe this or not, was asked to lecture at Vassar.”

“On what? The hazards of substance abuse?”

“Maybe you forgot your friend is a big artist now? Anyway, you haven't heard from Patch? We need someone to drive us up there, and Patch is the only driver we know.”

“Can I come?”

“To Vassar? Why do you want to come to Vassar? You know you wilt like a daisy when you're taken outside urban areas.”

“Yeah, I know,” Arno said, glancing toward Dr. Beller. “But I've been thinking about getting a new girl, and that maybe it should be a … you know …
meaningful
relationship. That's what college girls are into, right?” In Arno's mind, he pictured an ivory skinned creature lounging on a settee with a book by one of those French guys, Camus or whoever. They could read it aloud to each other and hold hands and he could stare deep into her eyes. That sounded pretty meaningful.

“I guess,” Jonathan said doubtfully. “Anyway, you want in? Then get over here and help us find Patch.”

Arno hung up the phone, and turned back to his therapist. “Look Doc, I gotta run.”

“That's too bad,” Dr. Beller said evenly. “I thought we were really getting somewhere.”

“But I'll see you next week, right?” Arno said. He actually wanted to, too.

“Of course. But Arno? Try and think about what we've discussed for next week.
Depth
, Arno. Think about depth.”

Arno promised he would think about depth, and then he headed for Mickey's house.

David Grobart was lounging in his bedroom in the West Village, making weekend plans with a girl he couldn't quite remember meeting but who definitely remembered him. She even knew about the long scar that ran from his hipbone to his lower rib, a souvenir from that time in sixth grade when he'd tried to be a skateboarder. David had always been the guy in his group who was the least smooth with girls, but ever since he'd been prominently featured in his friend Mickey's nude photo shoot, his relative lack of smoothness had become pretty much irrelevant.

He'd been told there were whole websites dedicated to his abs.

David was the best basketball player at Potterton, and he had long, powerful, basketball-player arms. He stretched them over his head in a big, yawny gesture and listened to this girl Mia, who knew all about his scar, tell him what she was going to wear to the party at Lisa Brenner's that weekend.

“So, you're coming with me?” she asked breathlessly. He had no idea who this girl was, but he loved the sound of her voice.

“Yeah, I don't
think
I have anything to do that night,” David said. “Oh wait, can you hold on a sec? I have someone on the other line.”

“Okay, but don't leave me sitting here forever,” she said, in a way that was jokily chastising and kind of made him think that was
exactly
what he should do, just to find out what the consequences were.

David hit the flash button. “What's up?”

“David? It's Jonathan. Have you seen Patch?”

“Um, no,” David said. It was a weird question, because if Jonathan hadn't seen Patch, it probably meant that David hadn't seen him, either.

“Damn, all right,” Jonathan said disappointedly. “You don't have basketball practice tonight, do you?”

“Nope, season's over.”

“Good. Because we're going to Vassar.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. Mickey's going to lecture to the Art Department, and Patch has to go because he's the only one who can drive, and Arno wants to go meet some un-shallow girls, and I'm going to try and hang out with Ted. Obviously, you should come, too.”

“I think I have a date,” David said. That thought,
which had made him so happy a minute ago, made him feel sort of sad when he said it now.

“You
think
you have a date? With who?”

“Um, this girl Mia. She says we met her at the Hudson Hotel bar a couple of weeks ago?”

“Oh. Huh. Do you remember who she is?”

“No.”

“Well, I think you should postpone the big date with the girl you can't remember and come to Vassar with us. There will be girls you don't remember there, too.”

David thought about this for a moment, and was about to say that canceling the date like that didn't really seem like a very nice way to treat a girl, when his mom, Hilary Grobart, came barging through the door. His mother, like his father, was a therapist, and she talked a lot about how she protected and valued and believed in David's privacy. Apparently, this was in contrast to a lot of her patients. It was also more in theory than in practice.

“David, have you seen the phone?” she asked.

“Yeah, I'm talking to Jonathan on it,” he said, and then added, unnecessarily, “He's going up to Vassar this weekend.”

“I didn't know Jonathan was considering Vassar,” his mother paused, twisting at her Live Strong bracelet. “Maybe you should go, as well?”

“Can I?”

“Don't you think that's a good idea?”

All the attention from mysterious girls with soft, girly voices, like Mia, was new, and David felt nervous giving that up for even a couple days, as though it might all evaporate. But he also hated being left behind by his friends. That was something he had already experienced plenty.

“Jonathan, I gotta go. I'll meet you at Patch's?”

“Great,” Jonathan said. “I'll see you soon, man.”

As soon as David hung up the phone, his mother took it out of his hand and began dialing. She walked out of his room, and as she headed down the hall, he could hear her saying, “Who? Mia? Could you maybe be trying to reach a different David Grobart?”

David decided that if he were Arno, he wouldn't feel bad about ditching this Mia girl, and that got him as far as stuffing a change of clothes, his iPod, and some English homework into his backpack. Then he pulled his oversized Potterton hoodie over his head and walked into the living room.