The Insiders

j. minter

for MBB

a few words from me, jonathan, the social glue

friday night makes a fine beginning …

get ready to deal with my cousin … kelli

arno knows exactly where amanda is

david is depressed

mickey pardo knows how to wake up a room

i can't keep track of everybody!

david tries to get himself and his girlfriend back on track

liza and i do not discuss our past

arno turns on the charm

a breezy saturday in the city

mickey makes good use of his hospital bed

i should have known better

arno introduces kelli to oddy

david plays at the garden

even strangers love mickey

david gets the call

what happens when a girl likes you and you don't like her back enough

arno's night goes on forever and ever

the crash known as sunday

my quiet sunday morning

mickey and his dad sometimes disagree

the school week, which can't be helped

too late for david and amanda

is my cousin an evil person?

mickey gets to see his forbidden philippa

too little kelli, too many guys

david can't even make a layup

another oddy opening for arno

mickey blows it big time

david connects some of the dots

i take a walk with my little friend

mickey's troubles grow

arno can't connect his emotions and his actions

welcome back to friday night

i never asked to be the referee

mickey's dinner in hell

the search party skids onto arno's thin ice

mickey makes it out alive

arno takes hits from all directions

I get arno out of there

david gets a nice surprise

i go head-to-head with february

arno had it coming

mickey rounds up the rest of the gang

david and arno don't deal with each other

the search party rests for the night

saturday morning, sunny, sixty degrees

mickey pardo, p.i.

what do you wear to a search party?

arno goes back to what he's good at

mickey shouldn't be driving

david gets back to where he was before

a perfectly normal dinner with my family

arno apologizes for real

the object of our affection

a little more from the social glue

sunday brings us near to our end

the flood family actually sits down together

arno's dreamgirl goes home

fernanda, or flan?

We met Patch in fifth grade and let him into our gang right away. Before that we were four—Arno Wildenburger, Mickey Pardo, David Grobart, and me. My name is Jonathan.

Back then we had to dress for school in blue polo shirts and khakis, so we looked weirdly alike. And our parents were either friends or were doing business with each other. Those things, plus the fact that we'd all been in school together since kindergarten, were more than reason enough for us to be best friends. We picked each other for dodgeball, shared our science homework, and said laser when we meant penis.

Then Patch showed up. He was a skater whose family had lived on a sailboat since he was six. That experience left him with heavy freckles, streaky blond hair, and a weird kind of laid-back quality, where even though we had bells between classes, he'd get up and sit down when he felt
like it, because even indoors he was telling time by the sun.

We were eleven, and Patch was the
man
. The girls were all obsessed with him. Why? He barely noticed them, that's why. He didn't play too rough with them like Mickey or tease them like Arno. And he didn't sulk when they didn't talk to him like David. Since we were the cool group, we grabbed him, because we were as confused and amazed by him as anyone. And that made us five.

Patch was so cool that sometimes he forgot to wear shoes to school. He had heavy-lidded eyes and he'd stand and mutter apologies at teachers until they would give him anything. As for the rest of us: Arno was better looking than everybody else, and sharper. His polo shirts came from some special store on Madison Avenue and his black hair stayed in place even when we were beating on each other. He always had this level glare and he wasn't afraid to use it. Mickey was crazy back then, too. He'd talk back to anybody, anytime. David was always good at sports and considered the normal one, though he was kind of neurotic, if I can use that word about a fifth grader.

We were all fooling around with girls. We
thought it was funny to call it “Seven Minutes in Heaven.” Now we're sixteen and we don't call it anything in particular, but we sure do a lot of it.

Then, at the end of fifth grade, Arno kissed this girl Molly who David liked. And David moped about it and we couldn't stop them from doing some serious fighting at a sleepover at Patch's country house in Greenwich. After that we made a pact about not kissing girls that one of us had clearly said we liked, even if the girls asked. It was Patch who begged us not to bother making any other rules. He knew he'd never remember to follow them. So that was our only promise to each other.

I was always trying to get us to stick together. They called me “the glue.” This was before my parents got divorced and my dad went to live in London, so I don't have a clue why I was like that, like some shepherd, but I was always gathering us up. It was like I felt better when I could have us all in the room. I thought if we were together, we were better than safe. We were the Insiders. But we never, never called ourselves that.

There were the five of us, and up to about the time this story starts, that seemed like enough.

“Thanks for letting me come out with you,” Kelli said. There was a bit of midwestern twang in her voice that was both sweet and a little grating.

“We'll definitely have fun,” I said, and left it at that because of course her coming out with me wasn't my idea. It was my mom's. We were in the backseat of my mom's town car, which we'd been told to
send right back
to Nobu, after we got dropped off at Patch's house on Perry Street.

“Do you want to tell me about them?” Kelli asked.

“Who?”

“Whoever we're going to see,” Kelli said, and laughed. She didn't seem uncomfortable or anything. If I were her I would've been, because we were on our way to a party in the West Village, with my best friends, and Kelli was my cousin from St. Louis, and there's no way she could've guessed what she was about to see.

Kelli was good-looking, in a bleach-haired, Brittany Murphy sort of way. She'd gotten done up in a short white skirt and pink sweater for the big welcome-to-the-city dinner with her mom and my mom and about a half dozen other people, including my mom's yoga instructor and her business partner.

And then, when our moms were sipping their Amarettos and waiting for the bento boxes of chocolate soufflé and vanilla ice cream they wouldn't eat, I decided to get out of there. I got on my Blackberry to Arno, and looked around for the yellow Ralph corduroy blazer I was into that week. Then my mom said “
bring her with you
” in a stage whisper. Like that was funny.

Kelli said, “Yeah, bring me!” in a very throaty voice. How was I going to say no? My mom doesn't tell me what to do very often, but obviously she wanted to keep drinking and reminiscing with her recently divorced sister and I knew that if I didn't get out of there, with Kelli, I was going to hear about it later.

Kelli had come from St. Louis with her mom to visit NYU and Sarah Lawrence and Barnard. She was a senior in high school, and I was a junior, and in the three years since I'd last seen her, it looked
like she'd gotten a little less risk-averse, to put it lightly. Or, she'd been
around
. But then again,
around
had been the St. Louis suburbs, which is fine, I'm sure, but it's not like New York City.

“It's hard to explain,” I said. We were at Canal Street. My knee was jerking uncontrollably. I crossed my legs and rubbed at my brown suede JP Tod's loafers.

“What is?” she asked. She had a good voice. Her eyes were green and sort of angled in toward her nose. Cat eyes. She was tall, too. So yes, she was sexy, but in a cheerleader-gone-bad kind of way. And nobody I know has cheerleaders at their school, which is a good way of beginning to explain why I was not that excited about introducing her to everybody.

“About my friends—it's really hard to get us all in one place at one time.”

“Is that like, your job?”

“No. Not exactly. It's just—they're really good guys but we go to different schools now and I'm the underlying thing that keeps us together.”

“The underlying thing?”

“More like the master of ceremonies,” I said. “But of course nothing like that.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I'm just psyched to get
away from my mom.” She pulled out a mirror and began painting on some pink lipstick. Worst case was I'd have to put her in a cab and send her back to my house, where her mom had one of the guest bedrooms and she had my brother Ted's room, since he was now a freshman up at Vassar. No. Worst case was Kelli would get wrecked and end up sleeping on the floor in Patch's kitchen with her arms curled around a chair leg and a quart bottle of crème de menthe. My aunt Jane would bitch me out to no end. I watched Kelli stare out the window as we got deep into the West Village. She seemed really excited by it all—it was like her whole body was hungry for Manhattan.

“I came to the city at the beginning of last year,” she said. “It was right after my mom kicked my dad out so my parents weren't keeping very good track of things and me and a bunch of other girls drove here and we had a total blast. We barely had time to get out of the car—but just driving around for two hours in Times Square, that was wild.”

“Yeah,” I sniffed. “Wild.”

Andy, my mom's driver, pulled over on Greenwich and Perry.

“Thanks, man,” I said. As usual, Andy said nothing.

It was early October and cool out. It had rained earlier and fat drops fell on our heads from the trees on Perry. Maybe the street glistened a little. I was trying to not be so analytic and nervous, to just give in to the fact that the night was beautiful and full of promises, even with Kelli along. I straightened my jacket, flipped out the collar on my white Prada button-down, and shrugged the hair out of my eyes.

“You didn't explain anything,” Kelli said as I helped her out of the car. “What about a girlfriend? Do you have one? Are we going to meet her?”

“No,” I said. I didn't want to mention Liza. Or that other thing I was involved with, which I didn't even want to go into.

“Don't worry,” I said. “You'll meet everybody. Arno's the hot guy who looks like you've seen him in magazines 'cause you probably have, Mickey's basically crazy, and David's completely introverted and overly sensitive. Patch is never around—but this is his house. That's all you need to know.”

And then we were up close to Patch's house and I could already hear a bootleg Neptunes track rattling the Floods' town house windows.

We ran up the steps to Patch's door and hit the
buzzer. The door was big, white, and vibrating. So were the windows. Everything else was bright red brick. The music switched to the new Yeah Yeah Yeah's and I checked my shoes once more as the door opened. I also heard the noise of a window above us going up so I knew that somebody was looking down, but I didn't look, 'cause that would have gotten me into this whole other thing with Flan Flood, Patch's little sister, and it absolutely was not the right time for that.