Take It Off (6 page)

Mickey twisted the trash bag shut and kicked it under the bed. The cans made a gigantic rattling noise, and that shut Arno up. Mickey crossed his arms across his chest and said, “Challenge.”

“Guys,” Jonathan said, “can't you remember one simple rule?”

Arno shrugged and looked back at Mickey. “Fuck the old rules. May the best man win.”

“I'm all for that,” Mickey said. He threw his head back and let out a loud war whoop.

“Two Jäger shots!” Rob yelled over the whooping and howling of the Bulgarian Bar's Saturday night crowd. The bartender, a petite brunette with a vague whiff of the international about her, nodded impassively and put two shot glasses in front of him. He leaned in against the bar and ran his fingers through his hair. “Make it three. One for me, one for
mi amigo Daveed, y uno también para ti, mi amor
.”

Earlier that evening, as they consumed a dinner of french fries with mayo and grappa at Le Père Pinard, Rob had described the Bulgarian Bar to David. “It is super-cool, it is like pure chaos. One of the few places you can experience pure Bacchic chaos in our technocratic society of today,” he explained, gesticulating and lighting a new cigarette with his old one. His English vocabulary increased suddenly, as though he were quoting something. David nodded, although this sounded suspiciously like the form of extreme therapy that his father, Sam Grobart, had helped pioneer in the seventies.

It was a cold night, and they had to walk through a slushy pile of snow left over from the storm to get to the entrance. The place was on the second floor of a building on East Canal Street, and the klezmer/punk/dance music was already deafening as they came up the stairs. David was secretly relieved to see how dense and manic the crowd was. He'd been feeling self-conscious about his usual Nikes/jeans/white T-shirt uniform all night. But the atmosphere inside the Bulgarian was riotous enough that David could be pretty sure nobody cared what he was wearing.

David stood fidgeting behind Rob, who was laying it on thick with the bartender.

“Salud!”
Rob yelled, elbowing David to pick up his shot. They threw them back. David shook himself back into focus and saw that the bartender was smiling at him mischievously. Before he could think what to do, she leaned across the bar and kissed him full on the mouth. He thought guiltily about Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, his still-sort-of-girlfriend. But then all he could think about was how good kissing somebody new felt. The bartender pulled away and winked at him, and before he knew what he was doing, David leaned over the bar and was kissing her heavily.

When he stepped back, the crowd around him erupted in cheers at the public make-out session. Rob
patted him on the back appreciatively. “Next girl's mine, okay?” he whispered to David, sounding like he was half kidding. Then he turned back to the bartender. “Another round,
bella
,” he said, waving a twenty in the air. “And two Heinekens.”

“Those are on me, boys,” she said in a hard-to-place European accent.

They took their drinks, the bartender still smiling coyly at David, and headed to one of the booths in the shadows.

The center of the room was like a high-fashion mosh pit. Skinny Polish girls were being swung around by the jumping, yelling dudes. The music was just about the loudest David had ever heard. They watched for a minute, and then Rob yelled, “C'mon!” and tried to pull him up and onto the dance floor. Before David could say “I don't dance,” he was swept up into a very fast, very drunk crowd of people.

Girls started to come up to them from the dance floor. David looked over and saw that Rob was dancing pretty suggestively with some girl he thought he recognized from Potterton. Another girl, slightly round with a shock of bleached blond hair and wearing a much-safety-pinned wife-beater, approached David and put her arms around his waist. She looked up at him and smiled a wide, careless, dark-red-lipstick smile. She
didn't move very much, just sort of twitched her hips and kept her eyes down. David tried to follow her rhythm and let go a little bit.

Finally the music stopped while a new deejay set up. The dancing mob dispersed, and David looked around at the room. The walls were paneled with fake wood, and the ceiling was strung with Christmas lights. There were plastic cups and beer bottles all over the floor, and the tracked-in snow was melting into the spilled drinks to make a dirty lake at their feet.

“I'm Caroline,” the girl said, looking up, but not taking her arms away from his waist.

“David.”

“You want to come over to our table?” she asked. He nodded, and looked around for Rob.
Where'd that dick go off to?
he wondered.

Caroline dragged him to a booth crowded with glam-punk types who managed to look very bored despite the raucous crowd all around them. They squeezed in, and she began introductions: “David, this is Leo, Moira, Rex, Bill, Sandra, and February.”

“February?” David's mouth hung open.

“David Grobart,” Patch's older sister, February Flood, said, tossing back her spiky hair. “What in the hell are
you
doing here?”

“I don't get it,” Patch said. He and Arno were lying on their bellies on deck, watching Suki and a bunch of other girls do sunrise yoga. Suki was executing a perfect dhanurasana. Although Arno hated anything remotely New Age—especially any stay-young-forever fad that his mother fell for—he was thinking that Suki's contortionist pose was kind of pervy-hot. Patch sighed. “I mean, I sort of get it. But she's totally not your type. Why are you and Mickey ripping each other over this girl?”

Arno had really wanted someone to talk to, and he'd thought Patch would be perfect. After leaving Mickey's room in a huff, and spending a lonely night trying to read
The Odyssey
, he was feeling a little alienated from his crew. Suki had mentioned the yoga class as an excuse not to spend the night in his cabin, so around five a.m. a sleepless Arno went to look for Patch. After he realized that Patch wasn't in his cabin, he'd gone to Barker's study and politely interrupted. Barker looked
up from his desk, where he had been enjoying a twenty-year-old scotch as Patch sipped orange juice. Patch twisted in his chair and gave Arno a save-me-now face. Arno smiled at Barker, revealing a mouth of dazzling white teeth, and reminded Patch about their dawn jog-around-deck date. The older man nodded approvingly and excused them. Arno had been psyched about his craftiness, and glad to have his friend back from the grown-ups. But he hadn't expected Patch to get all Jonathan on him.

“Dude, she's hot,” Arno said.

“Dude, how many hot girls do we know?”

“Dude, she's
different
.”

“Do you know what you sound like right now?”

Arno paused, and pushed his hair, which he was wearing in a sort of mod mop these days, out of his eyes. “Look, I know I'm not sounding like myself, but I think all that bullshit between Mickey's dad and my mom might have changed me. I'm really starting to think about how being with a lot of girls is just my way of wasting time. And about, you know, commitment.”

Patch was silent.

“I mean, Suki's not like anyone we know in New York. I could have a totally alternative, bohemian thing with her that would be so polar opposite of all those art world lies.” Arno was almost convincing himself. He
couldn't help adding: “Besides, she would irritate the shit out of my mom.”

Then an image of Suki and his mom doing yoga together sprung into his mind, and he shuddered in horror.

The sun was coming up over the water now, and they could see that they were in the port of a new city. Out on the Paseo Maritimo that ran along the bay, shopkeepers were setting up fruit stands. Cathedrals and fortresses of another era rose up behind them. Patch seemed to have drifted off for a moment. When he looked back at Arno, he said, “Listen, all I'm saying is we're on this boat for another week. You'll have a whole lot more fun if you aren't trying to go up against a mad Pardo the whole time. Naw mean?”

Arno nodded. There was nothing he hated more than being told what to do. So he turned to Patch and said, “So what's up with you and that RA chick?”

But as usual Patch wasn't listening. He had a thinking look on his face, and after a few beats, he turned to Arno, as though Arno hadn't just said something, and said, “You know what I like? When I come home after skating around or whatever, and you guys are all just in my house. It makes me feel like that place might actually be home.”

Arno's first instinct was to say
You know what you
sound like?
in a sort of mimicking tone. But what came out of his mouth was totally different: “Yeah, sometimes I just feel like we're always going out. It's nice to feel like there's somewhere that is our, you know, home base.”

“How about tonight the crew just shows up at my cabin, like we would in New York, and we see what happens?”

They heard a footstep overhead.

“What's the plan?” Suki asked. Before either of them could say anything she knelt down and kissed Arno. It was the sort of gray-area peck that could either be romantic or friendly. She stood up and threw her arms in the air. “
Wooo-hooo
, I feel
so good.
”

Arno watched as she reached into her bag—it was one of those sack things you can buy at health food stores—and took out a cigarette. She smoked those hippie clove cigarettes that smell like a Morrocan bazaar. She took two drags, and then slapped her forehead dramatically. “Silly me! I
completely
forgot that I quit smoking these things forever this morning,” she said, handing the lit clove to Arno. “I'm such a goose. You'll take care of that for me, won't you? Thanks. I'm going to go shower and stuff, but I'll see you guys at morning meeting at eight thirty, right?”

With that, she skipped off—literally skipped—across
the deck and was gone. The two guys remained on their bellies, watching the city slowly come to life. Arno took a long, meditative drag of the clove. Then he stubbed it out because it tasted absolutely disgusting.

“Good morning, sailors!” Stephanie was standing behind the lectern of the lower-level lecture hall. The rest of the faculty were sitting on the stage, to her left. They were mostly college-age kids like her, and as usual they were a wearing a lot of polar fleece and Gore-Tex. Patch walked down the middle aisle behind Arno, and Arno thought he saw Stephanie wink at Patch. They surveyed the room for a minute and then saw Mickey in the fifth row. He was sitting next to Suki and Greta. Arno cocked his chin in their direction, and Patch followed him over. As they took their seats, Stephanie continued to talk.

“Now, we're going to have a beautiful day trip to Mallorca in just a few hours. But before that, I want to tell you about the survival test. It's the biggest challenge you'll face here at Ocean Term, and it's going to begin tomorrow morning. The survival test will take place over twenty-four hours. You will divide yourself up into ‘survival teams,' and each team will earn points based
on their creative abilities in the wilderness and on their cohesiveness as a group.”

Mickey leaned over and hissed at Arno, “Think that pretty face is going to help you when you're out in the real world?”

Without turning his head, Arno whispered, “I'd hardly consider an Ocean Term survival night the
real world
.”

Patch tried to shush them. Usually he wouldn't have cared—if he'd even noticed, he would have assumed they could handle themselves—but right now he was sort of hoping not to catch any more of Stephanie's attention. He enjoyed her company, but he didn't want the entire student body of Ocean Term thinking that Barker
and
Stephanie were enamored with him.

“… when I was a student at Ocean Term,” Stephanie was saying, “not so long ago, the survival test was one of the most rewarding things I did, so I encourage each and every one of you to do it. But, for those of you who don't feel up to it, we have an alternative written exam. But I really,
really
encourage you to do it. I'm passing around this clipboard. Please sign up in teams of three to five on the first page, or, for those of you who
really can't handle it
, put your name on the second page to take the exam.”

Mickey wasn't listening anymore. He hissed, “What,
you scared, pretty boy?”

“Survival challenge? I can take you. Easy,” Arno shot back.

They both looked back at the stage. Stephanie had moved to a chalkboard and was drawing a big oval with little cresting waves all around it. “We're very lucky at Ocean Term because several years ago Dr. Barker inherited a small island between Mallorca, where we will be moored today, and Barcelona in mainland Spain. That's where the survival test will take place. So we're going to have a nice relaxing day on Mallorca today, and then tomorrow morning we'll approach Barker Island. You will break into your groups, and travel to the island by dinghy. Once there you will …”

Suki leaned over Mickey's armrest. “Are we a group?”

“Hell, yeah,” Arno and Mickey replied at once. She smiled and leaned over to whisper something to Greta.

“It's on,” Mickey said.

“It most definitely is,” Arno replied.

“… during the survival test, myself and a few other staffers will monitor your progress in several areas. The test will conclude with a group swimming race from the island to the ship. We don't want to tell you any more, but how you work as a group, and how you make use of the tools you're given, is a major part of the scoring. Any ques—”

Just then the door banged open and Jonathan came dashing down the middle aisle. He looked severely freaked. His faux-hawk had gotten much hawkier.