Hold On Tight (6 page)

“I wasn't …,” she began, stammering.

“I know, you goose,” the girl with the braids said. She sat down next to Ted, folded her legs up underneath her, and kissed him. The other girl, whose dark hair was arranged in one of those artfully messy ponytails, sat down, too, and gave me a crooked smile.

“I'm Lara,” she said. She was sharper looking than the other pink-cheeked girl who was currently rubbing noses with my brother. “I'm visiting for
the weekend—that's probably why you don't recognize me.”

“Oh yeah? I'm visiting too. Is your high school in the city?”

Lara laughed and put a hand over her mouth. “High school? No, no. I'm visiting from Sarah Lawrence, which isn't
quite
the city.”

“Lara, this is my brother, Jonathan,” Ted said, looking up from Lara's friend's neck. Lara smiled at me like I was a whole new person. “And J, this is my girlfriend, Margot.”

The girl with the long braids leaned forward and kissed me. For a moment I thought she was going to
kiss
kiss me, but then she just gave me the double kiss that seemed to be the clique norm. “It's
so
good to finally meet you,” she said. “Ted has just told me so many great things about you.”

All I could think of to say was, “Oh, yeah?” because I had never heard of Margot, or even imagined that Ted had a girlfriend. But then, it really
had
been a while since we'd talked. I hoped my mouth wasn't hanging open as I took in the sight of Ted as half of a couple—a really, really good-looking one. Luckily, Margot was still beaming despite my lack of words.

“So, are you going to apply to Vassar?” she asked.

“Maybe—it's really pretty here. And the people seem …” I broke off because Margot's face had gone from happy to horrified.

“Jonathan, what are you wearing?”

“Excuse me?”

Everyone in the little circle stared at my feet. I did, too—I couldn't help but think,
yeah, they're garish, but they're not
that
bad
. The silence, meanwhile, continued for an uncomfortably long time.

“Margot's a vegan and really committed PETA person,” Ted said gently.

“I mean, are those crocodile?” she said. “Do you know what kind of torture they put those animals through, just to get some flashy shoes?”

“Uh, no … I mean no they're not croc. Croc-o-dile.” Margot was looking at me in disbelief, but I couldn't help but continue. “They're vinyl, in fact. I only buy vinyl and other, um, non-hide clothing items.”

Lara, the girl sitting next to me, let out a long, snide, “Ha!”

Now people outside of their little group were staring, not in an exactly understanding way, and none of them were saying anything. You could've heard a chestnut fall, and I probably would have if I wasn't listening to the blood pumping to my
cheeks. Just when this whole silence/staring thing was getting a little ridiculous, Margot tossed her head back and laughed. It was a long, lovely, ringing laugh. I looked around for a reaction, but everyone waited until Margot leaned forward and took me in her arms. Like, actually hugged me, filling my nose with this very pleasant gardenia smell.

“Oh,
Jonathan,”
she said, “those are so
obviously
not vinyl.”

The group around us sighed and laughed, too. They had a good, long laugh at my expense.

“You can't tell Jonathan what to wear,” Ted said with a chuckle. “He takes all of that really seriously.”

My embarrassment must have been printed all over my face, because Margot continued, “It's okay, buddy. Even I wear—horror of horrors— fur sometimes. But you should be careful who you buy from,
especially
if you're buying new. There is a lot of cruelty in this world, and we should do our part not to support it, you know?”

Then everyone went back to talking and laughing and loudly enjoying the summer night, but I couldn't help but be flushed by a feeling of total, and very public, lameness.

“Hey man,” the guy with the angled bangs and the fitted red-and-white striped T-shirt was saying. Then he said it again, “Hey, uh, hey man.”

Patch came to terms with the fact that he wasn't going to be able to ignore this guy much longer. He shook his phone a few more times, as though that might somehow get him service in the bathroom of the basement bar, and then considered throwing it against the wall, before realizing that would mean that he would
never
get to talk to Greta again. Or for the rest of the weekend, at least.

“Hey man,” the guy said again. “I know who you are.”

Patch resignedly put the phone back in his pocket and looked up. “Hi,” he said.

“You're that guy that
New York
magazine wanted to name Hottest Private School Boy,” the guy continued excitedly. “I just wanted to say I think that is just camptastic.”

“Huh?”

“Like, campy fantastic!” the guy continued. As he spoke, he nervously reformed his bangs so that they crossed his forehead and partially covered his right eye just so.
“And
fascinating. I'm writing my senior thesis on the phenomenon of celebrities who are famous for being famous, like Paris Hilton, you see what I mean? So I really know a lot about this. I actually think it was very savvy of you
not
to have accepted the initial offer to be HPSB. It's sort of like you're hiding your hand a little bit longer, it gives you a certain caché, and it only makes the eventual blowup
that
much more inevitable. I think you have a 95 percent chance of being internationally recognizable by early 2007.”

“Wow, could you excuse me?” Patch stepped to his side.

“I understand—laidback and hard to reach is your thing,” the guy said. Then he put a hand on Patch's shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Just keep doing what you do so well.”

Patch climbed the stairs and pushed his way back through the crowd. He was still sort of pissed that Arno had abandoned him here, especially when Patch-enthusiasm was running so high among the Vassar kids, and when Arno knew he had a girlfriend. Patch decided he was done with this place, and moved—as much as he could, with all the girls reaching out to touch his skin for
a brief moment—toward the door. As he slapped a particularly persistent hand away, he realized he felt pretty low—almost as low as those horrible two weeks before he hooked up with Greta again. All this attention was making him feel seriously claustrophobic.

Vassar seemed to offer every cool thing about college except the thing that Patch had been looking forward to most—the chance for him to be anonymous again.

When he reached the door, he was relieved to see Jonathan and Ted descending the stairs. Ted was saying something to the bouncer guy who had tried to kick Patch out earlier—there were handshakes and smiles— and then Jonathan and his brother and a whole bunch of other people entered the noisy, disco ball-lit bar.

“Man, where have you been?” Patch said.

“Sorry dude, it took us forever to get here because my brother knows like every person on campus,” Jonathan said. “Check it out, that's Ted's girlfriend.”

“No way.”

“Yup,” Jonathan said, surveying the glittering crowd on the dance floor. “What's going on here? Man, these people are
dressed”

“Yeah, I guess it's, like, disco night or something,” Patch said.

“Mug rats are usually pretty New Waved-out,” Jed Silbur said, pulling up next to Jonathan and Patch with a
can of beer for each of them. And with a wink, Jed was dancing across the floor.

“Really glad you finally showed up,” Patch said.

“Yeah, it's good to see you, too. Everything okay with Greta?”

Patch shrugged. “She just texted me that she ran into her ex-boyfriend at Stanford.”

“Whoa.”

“It's not a big deal. I mean, I don't think anything is going to happen. I just want to talk to her, know what I mean?”

“Totally.”

“Hey,” Patch said, swigging from his PBR. “Where do you think the rest of our friends are?”

“I don't know,” Jonathan said. He gave his can of beer a little grimace. “But I sure hope Mickey is preparing for his lecture tomorrow. If the students here can dress this well, they
must
be pretty smart.”

Mickey took a long dive, pushing with his arms and legs, froglike, through the water. The night sky was dark, but the underwater lights were illuminating his fellow swimmers. He was surrounded by some fiercely hot legs, treading water on all sides of him, and up above he could hear the muted shouting of some very competitive ladies. He had never played water polo before, much less women's water polo, but he was a quick convert. It was, he knew already, his kind of game.

He had also realized that college was going to be a lot like summer camp, except with more breasts.

He burst through the surface of the pool, lifted his arm, and gave the ball a powerful swat. It sailed into the net. The pool erupted with noise, half of it cheering Mickey's point, the other half enraged by his flagrant disregard for the rules. Mickey only had a few moments to catch his breath before he was tugged back underwater. By the time he emerged again, his boxers were gone.

Kicking his way over to the side of the pool, he looked around for David. He hadn't seen him since roughly the time the girls pulled him into the pool in the first place and assigned him to a team. Mickey pushed himself onto the pool's edge, and there was some giggling over Mickey's lack of a bathing suit. Then Mickey really did start to worry. “Where's my friend?” he shouted loudly.

It took a few moments for the girls to take his questions seriously, and then they all pointed to the house. There was David, sitting on a lounge chair, sipping from an apparently refilled tumbler. He was still wearing the suit, although he had unbuttoned the jacket and loosened the tie. He appeared to be smirking.

“Hey!” Mickey yelled. “Hey Grobart! What, you think you're too good for swimming?”

“Man, I'm just wondering what happened to your panties,” David replied, taking a sip of his whiskey.

“C'mon, the water's fine!” Mickey yelled back. When David just shook his head and laughed, Mickey switched tactics. He inhaled a good whiff of chlorine, and shot a conspiratorial look at the girls to his left and right. Their hair was all loose now, and their chests were heaving, catching their breath after the game. The girls treaded water and waited until Mickey gave them the nod. “Get ‘im!” Mickey cried.

The girls hurled themselves out of the water, and
made a long, wet dash toward David. That was how Mickey got to see his friend hauled into a swimming pool by fifteen water polo-sculpted college girls. Too-small suit and all.

Arno must have worn himself out walking the campus and looking for his guys, because when he half woke up, in the darkened lounge down the hall from Ted's dorm room, he had that dreamy awareness of being asleep. He knew that there was no one else in the room, and he heard a voice in his head—definitely Jonathan's—saying something about the smell. And he knew, even with his brain on autopilot, that the smell wasn't great, and that the carpet that it clung to was possibly as old as he was.

He drifted off again, although it wasn't a particularly restful sleep. Thoughts of superficial college girls who judged guys by the number of times they'd appeared in cheesy magazines danced through his head. He flopped from one side to the other, shifting under the scratchy blanket, which was made of the kind of wool he imagined soldiers slept under if they were stationed in Germany. His dreams were shifting to a battlefield, circa 1942, where the world was very cruel and senseless.
But then bubbling, giggling voices came erupting up the stairs, and a light switched on somewhere near him, and he knew he was going to be awake again.

Now that people were actually near him, he remembered that he'd spent his whole night alone. Wandering. Like a real outsider. He decided to hang onto that feeling a little longer, and continue to be asleep. Or at least pretend to be.

“No, it's really fine,” a male voice was saying.

“Are you sure?” That was Jonathan.

“No, little brother, I want you to have my bed,” the first voice said in a really sweet tone. Arno realized it was Ted. “And I can sleep at Margot's anyway. You and Patch should stay in my room. It's more comfortable than the lounge.”

Arno realized they hadn't even noticed him. He really
was
being left out. They continued talking about what a fun night it had been and what their plans were for the next day, but Arno was too busy concentrating on what an outsider felt like to really listen. That's when he heard the click of high-heeled boots walking past him, and the sigh of the couch across from his. He cracked an eye.

And there was the most beautiful-in-a-meaningful-sort-of-way-looking girl that he had ever seen. She had precise, dark little features, and she was wearing a long skirt and a threadbare tank top that fit her perfectly and
was thin enough to show the outline of her light-pink bra. The light from the hall seemed to be glowing on her slender limbs like moonlight. She had all these silver bangles on her wrists, but she was managing not to move them much as she carefully rolled a cigarette.

Arno was acutely aware that his hair, which he had artfully greased earlier in the evening, was now sticking up like crabgrass, and not all of it in the same direction. But he couldn't stop watching as the girl put the hand-rolled cigarette in her perfect little mouth and lit it.

“Lara,” another girl called, from somewhere over near Jonathan and his brother.

“Shhh …,” said the girl sitting across from Arno. She had a husky voice, even when she was whispering. “There's someone sleeping here.”