Take It Off (3 page)

With these thoughts charging through his brain, David became increasingly pissed off. He worked himself into a fury until, finally, exhausted, he fell into a turbulent sleep. After hours of tossing and turning, the
door opened, and Barker turned the lights on.

“Come with me, sailor,” he said with gravity.

David followed him up to the deck. His suitcases had been packed and were lined up by the exit ramp. It was early morning, and they were moored in Sicily. Barker handed him his coat.

“Your friend Patch packed your bags for you, because that's just the sort of excellent young man he is,” he said. “Now, a car is waiting. It will take you to the airport. Your parents have arranged for a flight to take you back to New York. I'm sorry it had to end this way. I understand you're quite a ballplayer. But I run a tight ship, and there will be no drinking on my watch.”

“Thank you,” David said, which immediately seemed absurd. He picked up his bags and walked down to the car. He took one last look at the
Ariadne
. Up on the deck, Patch, Arno, Mickey, and Jonathan were watching him sadly. They were waving, and they all looked, David thought—his anger rallying for a moment—a little bit hungover.

“I can't believe it,” I said.

“What,” said Arno without looking up at me. He was trying to finish his assignment as quickly as possible so that he could swim a few laps before dinnertime. We were sitting in the
Ariadne
's computer lab, and I had just gotten an e-mail from David.

“Grobart's back in the city and hanging out with that Rob kid—”

“You mean your stepbrother?” Arno interrupted.

“Yeah. And I think he likes it.”

“You already
knew
that. They were practically best-fucking-friends on your stepmom's yacht.”

“Yeah, but that's when they had limited options. This is
voluntary
. You're telling me, in the whole of New York City, the only person David wants to hang out with is Euro-Rob?”

Arno shrugged and kept typing. All the Ocean Term students had to read
The Odyssey
and write daily responses to it, and Arno had missed the first one and was really late on this one.

“He sounds okay with being back home, though,” I said. “I think.”

It had been two days since David got kicked off the boat, and we had all pretty much gotten over the oddness of how the most rule-abiding one of us had literally tripped over drunk in front of our fearless Captain Barker. But I'm the one who keeps us all copasetic as a group, so I felt really guilty that David was alone on the other side of the ocean. With Rob.

Arno paused and looked up at me.

“Remind me which one Calypso is …?”

I rolled my eyes.

For the second time, I quit my e-mail account and reopened it. There was still nothing from Flannery “Flan” Flood. We started going out about a month before I left for my dad's honeymoon. I couldn't really talk to Arno about it, but I was missing her a lot and was feeling pretty anxious about how we'd left things. And worse, I knew I deserved to be feeling the way I did.

I took a break from my e-mail obsession and
checked the trip schedule that we'd been given during orientation. And that's when I realized that we weren't just five days into the trip: We were ten days away from being back in New York. And today was Friday, which meant we were probably missing a lot of parties. Instead, we would have a sailing expedition in Menorca tomorrow, a “Free Day” on Mallorca on Sunday, we'd arrive in Barcelona two days after that, and leave port again the following day. Then there was still Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of little day trips in Spain and Portugal, before it was Sunday again and we could board a plane at Heathrow, bound for home.

Just then, a female voice called to Arno. Girls are always trying to get attention from Arno, and he doesn't give it up a lot—at least, statistically, when you consider how many girls are begging for his attention in the first place—which only makes them want it more. We both looked up. Two girls in flip-flops, boy-short bathing-suit bottoms, and worn tank tops were coming toward us. They looked very casual, like they had been sunning on the deck.

“Hey, Suki …,” Arno said, flashing his I-am-dangerously-handsome smile. Arno immediately
flipped off the computer, erasing what little work he'd done.

“And Greta,” I finished, elbowing him not to be a dick. Arno had met Suki in his orientation group, and Greta was her friend from California. Suki was taller and more outgoing, in a cold way. The first time we met, she looked at me and said, “Oh, that's why they call it a
faux
-hawk. Where I come from we have Mohawks for real,” as though she were the punkest ever or something. Greta was quieter, and she came from Santa Cruz, which is a place where Patch and his dad sometimes go to surf. Waves of hennaed hair spilled over Greta's shoulders, and there were knots of friendship bracelets around her pink wrists.

“Hey,” Suki said when they reached us. Why did she irritate me so much? Greta waved shyly from behind her. “We were wondering if you guys wanted to be partners with us on that project tomorrow,” she said to Arno. The teachers had planned a day of sailing for us the next day, on little sailboats—Ideal 18s. We were supposed to choose our own groups of five to seven people. It would be our first sailing practical.

“Yeah, sure. We needed two more people
anyway,” he said with a shrug.

“I suspected,” Suki said at the same time as Greta said, “Right on.”

“Well, I guess we'll see you in the cafeteria for dinner,” I said, hoping to get rid of them.

“Sure,” Suki snorted, “if I can gather the strength,” and then, laughing, she put her arm around Greta's waist and they glided toward the door.

Arno watched them walk away. Then he picked up his copy of
The Odyssey
and threw it at me for no apparent reason. It bounced off my shoulder and hit the ground.

“Are you going to read that or what?” I asked.

“Nah, I got more important stuff to attend to.”

“Whatever.” I turned back to my screen and quit and reopened my e-mail so I could see if there was anything from Flan. The e-mail program has a Check for New Mail option, but I'm superstitious about that. I'd rather go for a clean slate.

“Oh, by the way …” It was Suki. She'd made it to the door, but she hadn't
quite
made it out. “I saw your friend—Mickey? On the deck? And he said he thought we'd all make a real sweet team.”

Arno knocked on my cabin door at 6:25. Weirdly, Arno and I have fallen into the same hanging-out habits we have at home. Back in New York we spend the most time together because we go to the same school, even though we aren't the closest in our crew, and now we were doing the same thing. After the computer lab, he'd gone for a swim, and now he was back at my place.

“Dinnertime, Grandma,” he called. I groaned and let him in. In Manhattan we would eat dinner at 10:00, or maybe 8:45. Or maybe we'd skip it entirely and build up an appetite for late-night breakfast at Florent when we're all wasted and absolutely starving. Arno flopped onto my bed and rolled his eyes at me.

“I know,” I said. “This sucks.”

“It would be fine if they didn't
force
us to go.”
He picked up one of the magazines I'd left lying around and began flipping through it.

I gave myself a hard look in the mirror and tried to determine whether my outfit was too much. I was wearing white Ben Sherman jeans and an argyle Paul Stuart sweater.

“Do you think this is, you know, too much?” I asked, catching Arno's eye in the mirror.

“Christ,” Arno said, throwing the magazine at my head.

“Fine, let's just go,” I said. I pushed my hair a few times, so that it re-formed into a crest down the center of my scalp, and kicked on some flipflops for casual balance.

All the other students were streaming toward the cafeteria. Girls we sort of knew waved at us, and we waved back. We checked our names on the attendance list that one of the faculty people kept at the door, and got in line.

“Great. This looks like cafeteria food,” Arno said. The cafeteria was dishing out your basic lunch-line fare—mashed potatoes, greasy chicken, corn, and greens. You get the idea. We both got grayish burgers, fries, and a Coke, and went to find a table. I looked around for Mickey or Patch, but I couldn't see either of them, so we
picked a random, empty table. The room was large, with vaulted ceilings. They'd gone for a sort of faux–prep school feel, with wood paneling and wood picnic benches for tables, in long rows as far as the eye could see. There were wall hangings made from sharks' jaws, that sort of thing.

Next to us was a table of jocklike guys shoveling food in their mouths and all yelling at once. Every one of them was wearing some shade of athletic gray or navy blue, with baseball caps turned at odd angles. There was one girl amongst them, a tall lanky blonde. She looked a little like Flan, and I stared at her for a minute until I realized she was way not as beautiful as Flan.

Then Patch came through the line with Barker, who seemed to be escorting him through the many tables of students. The suppertime din quieted to near silence as they passed, and everyone turned to look. Patch has this effect on people: He's golden and guileless, and sort of hard to pin down, too, and he has that very rare kind of cool that happens only when a person has no idea or intention of being cool in the first place. We watched as Barker cut in the food queue and
gestured for one of the caf people to make up their trays.

“We've got to save him,” I said.

“I don't want Barker anywhere
near
me,” Arno said. “He'd probably kick me out based on smell alone.”

“Get over it. Patch needs us.”

Arno stood up and started waving. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled: “Patch! Patch Flood! I just read this
amazing
passage in
The Odyssey
. Come over, I want to share it with you.”

The cafeteria hushed again, and everyone looked in our direction. Patch excused himself from Barker and came over to our table.

“Thanks, man,” he said. He and Arno did one of those man hugs where they shook hands and then leaned in to slap each other's backs. “That guy's really dragging on my scene. What's new?”

“I got an e-mail from David,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, he seems like he's taking it okay. Apparently his dad is writing a crazy letter to Barker about what a repressive program he's running and how bad it is for developing psyches blah-blah-blah …”

“Sweet.”

I took a sip of my Coke and looked at Patch. I tried to look nonchalant. “Oh, by the way … you haven't heard from Flan, have you?”

He opened his mouth to say something, but just then that girl Greta appeared over his shoulder, looking a little lost and confused.

“Hey, guys, you haven't seen Suki, have you?” We all shook our heads. She bit her lip and looked around at all the other tables of kids who were having very involved conversations, like they had all been in the same cliques forever, just like us. “Well … do you think I could sit with you guys, then?”

“Sure,” Patch said, apparently forgetting entirely about my question. I looked purposefully at Patch, hoping he would remember what we were just talking about. But he just gave me this little smile like “Isn't this fun?” and bit into a chicken leg.

“You, like, hang with Suki all the time at home?” Arno asked.

Greta took a bite of potatoes and shook her head. “Mostly on the weekends. But we go to different schools, in different towns, so during the week I spend time with my boyfriend.”

“Oh. Do you hang out with Suki and her boyfriend, then?”

“Suki and Kyle broke up
months
ago,” Greta said.

This was getting old, and Patch was obviously not going to talk about Flan anytime soon. I looked distractedly around the room and saw something weird.

“Hey, isn't that Sara-Beth Benny?” I asked. Coming toward us was a very petite-looking girl wearing a Missoni poncho over black knee-length shorts. They were cuffed and a little baggy, and accentuated her gorgeous, if slightly too skinny, calves. Her messy hair was a muddle of dye jobs, and her mascara was smudged a little bit. She had that deer-in-the-headlights quality about her.

“From
Mike's Princesses
?” Greta asked. Sara-Beth Benny had been the child star of this sitcom that was popular when we were kids in which Mike, a single dad and Los Angeles stand-up comic, struggles to raise three daughters. Sara-Beth had been the youngest. She was famously wild now; we saw her around New York at parties sometimes.

The jocks next to us all began to sing the
Mike's Princesses
theme song and laugh. Sara-Beth
looked like she was about to cry.

The blond girl who was not as pretty as Flan said, “Jesus,
eat
something,” really loud.

Patch shook his head at us. “Those dudes are assholes,” he said. He picked up a roll and lobbed it at them. “Hey, chill out. It's like you've never seen a famous person before or something.”

The guys all looked sort of pissed, but it's hard to argue with Patch. Especially when the trip's director so obviously adored him. Arno motioned for Sara-Beth to come over.

She set down her tray—which had three pieces of corn on the cob and a Diet Coke on it—and kissed Arno on both cheeks. I had forgotten until then that they had modeled together a few times.

“They know each other?” Greta whispered to me. I shrugged.

“God, doesn't this place
suck
?” Sara-Beth said as she began furiously blotting the butter off of her corn with napkins. “I'm so glad there are some other civilized people on this lame-ass trip.”