The Insiders (2 page)

“Oh wow,” Kelli said. I didn't look behind me. I knew she'd be staring with those hungry eyes and I didn't want to see that again.

“Well, if it isn't Jonathan. And who is this?” Arno asked.

“This is my cousin Kelli,” I said. “Arno, close your mouth—she's from St. Louis.”

“Your mom's sister's little girl,” Arno said.

“You've heard about me?” Kelli asked.

“Nah—wild guess,” Arno said. He started laughing as he pulled us both into the house. Arno's half Brazilian and half German. His mom and dad are art dealers and he lives in a town house in Chelsea that's filled with huge art. He really does model, too, for magazines like
Black Book
. He's six foot one and better looking than
anyone I've ever met. He was wearing a ripped purple polo shirt, Helmut Lang jeans, and Gucci loafers.

“Where you been?” he asked, and burped.

“Family dinner.”

“I hope you at least got to slam down some good wine,” he said.

We'd put all the expensive stuff in Patch's living room away earlier that day. Then we lit several dozen candles and put them in all the nooks where the sculptures and stuff had been. We'd pulled all the couches into a loose circle and thrown every pillow we could find on the floor, so the living room looked like one of those new super-sleek hotel bars in downtown L.A. Then we'd hauled a dozen cases of beer down to the ground-floor kitchen. Already at least twenty kids were drifting up and down the stairs, getting beer, and forming groups for drinking games.

“Wow,” Kelli said. She was staring at Arno, like she'd saved up all her allowance and now she wanted to buy him.

“Where's Patch?” I asked Arno.

“Stop it,” Arno said. “I don't know.” Some girl from Spence came up and started swinging on Arno's arm.

As usual, Patch Flood, who was our whole reason to be there, was nowhere to be seen. He's the kind of guy who wears the same khakis for six months until they harden up and have to be removed with gardening scissors because he's so forgetful and messy and just … just so
cool
about it. He's like a guy who floats by you on a happy cloud. You jump up and try to get him, but he's always out of reach.

Patch's parents are at their estate in Greenwich most of the time, so they've practically deeded the Perry Street house to their kids: Patch, Zed, who is up at Vassar with my brother, and Patch's big sister February, who is twenty and currently taking her second year off before college while supposedly doing an internship at Alvin Adler's design studio in Tribeca. Then there's little Flannery, known as Flan, a cute eighth grader who may or may not have been at the window when I came in with Kelli.

Arno pulled me into the dining room, stepping in some freshman girl's lap while he moved—and she seemed to cradle his foot for a second before he pulled away.

“Where'd you say you picked this
Kelli
up?” Arno asked. “The West Side Highway for twenty
bucks and a Happy Meal?”

“I said she was my cousin,” I said.

“Class runs thinner than water in your family,” Arno said.

“At least my parents aren't art dealers,” I said. It wasn't that I thought Arno's parents weren't cool. But Arno's easy to confuse—we have English class together at Gissing Academy and I'm always feeding him nonsense to say. Then he says whatever I come up with so charmingly to our teacher, Ms. Rodale, that she convinces herself that the junk I told him to say makes sense. It's a vicious circle and now my whole class agrees that P. Diddy is basing his whole existence on the world Fitzgerald built in
The Great Gatsby
.

“Mickey was looking for you. He broke into Philippa's house earlier and her dad called the cops,” Arno said.

“Was he upset?” I asked.

“Jackson Frady? No, he loves it when Mickey does that,” Arno said. “He asked him to set their house on fire next time.”

“Don't crack wise,” I said. “You can't keep it up.”

Arno didn't answer. Instead, he threw an arm over my shoulder and we started punching each
other's ribs.

“Where's the beer?” Kelli shouted over the music. She definitely wanted a do-over with Arno. He smiled at her, let go of me, and took her by the hand.

“You want to show her where she can get her drink on?” I asked.

“Would you put it that way?” Arno said to Kelli. But her grin for him was so big that she couldn't answer, and when Arno saw it, he started laughing, too. I eyed the staircase. Flan was up there. Probably in bed. She always got up early to ride horses in Central Park on Saturdays.

Somebody grabbed my lapel and I grabbed his arm and tried to rip his hand off my clothes.

It was David. “Have you seen Amanda?” he asked. He had his Yale sweatshirt on and the hood was pulled over his head. I tugged it off. He pulled it back on. He was the tallest of all of us. David was the best basketball player at Potterton. He was a really good listener, and, save for some deep neuroses, an all-around normal guy. So somehow, between good listening and being one of us five, he'd gotten this hot girl, Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, who was absolutely the most conniving person I'd ever met. Partly because of her,
he was David the Mope.

“I haven't seen her tonight,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure. What would I do, lie to you?”

“I hope not,” he said. “Would you?”

“David. Why would I? She's your girlfriend. She's probably just not here yet.”

“She is. And I can't find her.”

“Don't be a mope.”

“I can't help it,” David said. He walked off, trailing the laces on the vintage '86 Jordans I had bought in Williamsburg from a guy called Shigeto for four hundred dollars. They were way too big for me, so I gave them to David, who had no idea how valuable they were and kept treating them like normal sneakers. I wished he would tie the laces.

More girls came in the door. I didn't recognize them, but I heard them whispering about Patch. Would they even get a chance to see him? If I knew Patch at all, the answer was no. I looked both ways before dashing up the staircase to check in on little Flan Flood.

Amanda Harrison Deutschmann and Arno Wildenburger were out in Patch's backyard. A very light rain, like a mist, was falling.

“What're you looking at?” Amanda asked. She was a short girl with very straight blond hair, gray-green eyes, and a killer body that she'd gotten from a lot of sailing and tennis.

“You, because you're hot,” Arno said.

“Oh yeah?” Amanda said.

“Your eyes are like soft gray clouds on a Saturday afternoon.”

“Oh yeah?”

She put her arms around Arno's neck and opened her eyes wider, at him. Arno took a pull from his beer and swayed Amanda back and forth.

Arno had come from a small dinner party his parents had thrown for Randall Oddy, a British painter who was having his opening the following night. He'd done several shots of Jaeger with Randall in the kitchen.
Randall was only twenty-three, after all, and he'd made Arno swear to hang with him the next night at his opening. And then Arno sailed right out of that party and landed here, with David's girlfriend, where he really was not supposed to be.

“Well,” Amanda said.

“Well what?” Arno asked. He sort of half-glared at Amanda. She licked her lips, so he glared some more.

“I want to talk to you,” Amanda said.

“About what?”

“About …” Amanda paused. “I'm upset about Meg.”

“Who?”

“You know, my friend from Brearley who passed out in a bathtub at the American Hotel at Sag Harbor last weekend. Her mom had to come all the way out from the city to get her and even now nobody knows how Meg got there. Meg can't remember a thing and we've had to have all these meetings where we try to recreate her night.”

“Oh yeah, Meg.” Arno slipped his arm around Amanda and she gave in to him. With his other hand he sipped from his bottle of Grolsch. He wasn't drunk. Physically, getting rocked took some work—he was almost as big as David, though he wasn't any good at basketball, and hadn't been since they'd been cocaptains
of the middle school team at Grace Church.

He took Amanda's hand in his for a second, and she moved it to his mouth. Did she want him to bite it? He did, and she moaned.

“When we were in sixth grade,” Arno said, “Mickey got kicked off the basketball team for biting the hand of some kid on the Saint Ann's team, so David had to be the captain even though Coach Bank said he didn't have leadership qualities. We ended up with a losing season.”

“Did you have to mention him?” Amanda asked. She'd slipped her hand underneath Arno's shirt and he was trying to keep his goose bumps under control.

“It feels like you lost something inside my shirt and you're desperate to find it.”

“Don't make fun of me,” Amanda said. “What we're doing is a big deal.”

“Sorry,” Arno said.

“I just want to talk to you about what's going on with me,” Amanda said.

“Okayyy,” Arno said. “What is going on?”

“Right now, you are.”

“You're beautiful,” Arno said. “You know that? You're built like an eighties Playboy playmate—just like the ones my father has his bathroom wallpapered with. When I was a kid I looked at those all the time.”

“You looked at those and then what did you do?” Amanda whispered in his ear.

“Exactly,” Arno said.

Arno touched Amanda's round shoulder. He looked around and saw that if someone happened to glance through the windows in the parlor, or in the kitchen, or even on the third floor, they could see what was going on in the garden really easily.

“You know what?” Arno said. “I need to go to the bathroom. I need to go use a bathroom upstairs and you need to come with me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Okay, forget it,” Arno said.

“No … well, I'll follow you up there.”

Upstairs and tucked safely away in the bathroom, Arno and Amanda got to fooling around pretty seriously. And it was as if she'd been hungry to do something really wrong with him for a while already. They leaned against the white subway tile wall and they both eased their shirts up, like exotic snakes, and then they pulled off their pants, like strippers.

They were trying to be really quiet. Because even though the party was loud, they were on the top floor, and they were in the bathroom that had doors leading
to both Flan's and Patch's bedrooms.

During a lull, they heard a soft voice.

“That's a cute story,” the voice said. It wasn't Flan's. Arno raised an eyebrow at Amanda, who'd been chewing on his neck. He pried her off, and she listened, too.

“And then tomorrow I'll probably watch movies with my friends after we go riding,” a different voice said. That was Flan.

“That sounds nice,” said the other voice, which clearly belonged to a guy. “If I didn't have to hang out with my cousin I could probably go up to the park and see you ride.”

Then the voice stopped.

“
Jonathan
,” Amanda whispered to Arno.

“Nah,” Arno said. They both put their ears up to the closed door.

“Don't you go out with Liza Komansky?” Flan asked.

“No way—people said we were going out last year, but that was just because we spent a lot of our time together.”

“And fooled around constantly and didn't go out with anybody else,” Amanda whispered. “And now look, Jonathan's going after little Flan Flood.” Arno kissed her neck. She punched him in the chest. Then there was quiet from Flan's room.

“It sounds like they're fooling around, or maybe just
cuddling
,” Arno said.

“No way,” Amanda said.

Amanda and Arno started giggling then, and covering each other's mouths. Most of their clothes were off and they were awkwardly leaning against the wall.

So they had to twist around and help each other stand when Jonathan opened the door to the bathroom to see what was going on. And they clearly couldn't figure out what to say when Jonathan leaned in the doorway and stared at them, visibly shocked that Arno was in there with Amanda Harrison Deutschmann,
their best friend David's girlfriend
.

“Shit,” Arno whispered. “I really wish you hadn't been the one to see this.”

“Because I'm your conscience?” Jonathan hissed.

“That's way too nice a way of putting it,” Arno whispered back.

“Jonathan?” Flan called out.

Jonathan pointed to Arno and Amanda and put his finger over his mouth to say
shhh
. Then he pointed to the bedroom behind him, and to himself, and did the whole quiet gesture all over again.

“Nobody can say anything about anybody else,” Jonathan whispered. “Get it?”

“Shhh,” Arno said, and fixed his eyes on the floor.

“Little Flan Flood,” Amanda said, and shook her head. “Jonathan, you are crazy.”

“She's just a friend,” Jonathan said. “I'm not doing anything with her that could be construed as crazy.” But he smiled when he said it, and he went a little red.

“Bullshit,” Amanda said.

“We didn't fool around,” Jonathan said, glaring at Amanda. “And even if we did, which we didn't, I wouldn't be cheating on somebody who happens to
completely love me
.” The lights in the bathroom were on a dimmer, and Jonathan touched the switch and made everything a little brighter.

They were all glaring at each other.

“Why don't we all leave each other alone,” Amanda said, “and go back to what we were doing?”

“No,” Arno said. “I think Jonathan's right.” He'd found his jeans and he sat down on the lip of the tub to put them on.