Break Every Rule (4 page)

When they got to the bathroom, David looked around awkwardly. Was he supposed to wait for her? He hoped not.

“See ya,” the girl said. Had she interpreted David's awkwardness as a lack of interest? Now, that would make him feel bad. David decided that he really was going to have to learn how to handle girls liking him better, now that he was hanging with Rob and Arno all the time. He just didn't know how to disentangle himself the way they did.

“Um, I kind of forgot your…”

“Sadie,” she said. There was a little irritation in her voice. She pointed at herself, and spoke in a Neanderthal voice: “Me, Sadie. I'll see you later, David.” And then she strode into the bathroom with her purse thrown over her shoulder. David looked at her legs and wondered if they really made skirts that short, or if you had to have them altered.

David waited a minute and then, not knowing what else to do, wandered into a nearby room. He saw that it was a coat check room converted into a bar, and it was spare and dark and lit mostly by candles. Mickey was leaning up against the bar. He was holding a beer and talking to some girl who was not Philippa. As David came up behind them, he heard Mickey saying: “Yeah, that's what the dude said.”

“But in a
restaurant
?” the girl replied, wrinkling her nose and dropping her bottom lip. “Isn't that sort of, um, nasty?”

“Hey, Mickey,” David said.

“Oh, hey, dude. What up,” Mickey said. They gave each other an awkward, back-slapping hello hug.

“What's up with you?” David asked. He was feeling a little light-headed from the champagne, so he ordered a Red Stripe.

“Nothing…,” Mickey said, swigging from his own beer. He looked like it wasn't his first drink, either. In fact, he looked a little crazed.

The girl he'd been talking to made an
ahem
noise. “So, tell me what Luc Vogel's like, though…,” she said.

“Who cares about that?” Mickey said, dropping the empty beer on the ground, and kicking it, soccerlike, across the floor. Luckily, his beer had come in a can. Mickey turned back to the girl and said, “Do you want to get drunk with me?”

David inched backward away from Mickey, who was obviously on a tear of some kind tonight. David had gotten caught up in a Mickey tear before, and he wasn't looking to do that again right now. As he inched along the wall, he saw the blonde (Sadie? That's what she'd said, right?) coming out of the bathroom. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and pointed her ski jump nose in
the air. David tried to disappear as much as a guy of his size can, and crouched down very low. The blonde walked straight back to the dance floor.

David was still instinctively hunched, and looking warily out at the crowd at about waist level, when he noticed something strange. There was a girl about ten feet in front of him wearing one of those dramatic, open-back dresses that go so low they almost reveal an unladylike crack, but don't. And just to the left of the small of her back, there was something large and black. Was it a giant fly? David moved closer.

The black thing was definitely big, and frightening. What was it doing in such a delicate area? David had a brochure of the Luc Vogel show in his hand; he rolled it, lifted it, and brought it down with a loud smack on the black spot. That lovely back twisted around in his direction, but the black spot stayed put.

“Excuse me,” the girl in the low-back dress said. She had a slightly husky, sardonic kind of voice.

Why, David asked himself, was he always doing the most moronic shit?

“Uh, I'm sorry. You had a bug on your back, I think,” David said, sounding stupider than even he could have imagined. “Maybe it was a fly?”

She opened her mouth and laughed. “That's a mole, jerk,” she said. She said it kind of nicely, David thought.

She was weird looking, with big almond eyes, a twisted nose with a bump halfway down, a tiny, puckered mouth, and an unbelievably long neck.

“Oh,” David said. He realized she looked like the Modigliani painting he'd just seen hanging in one of the upstairs galleries; she had the blocky, exotic features that the great moderns all had been obsessed with. (He had just read that off a gallery wall.) David couldn't stop staring at her.

“You're sorry?” the girl said. He thought her eyes kind of glittered when she said that.

“Yeah,” he said. “Really, really sorry.”

She looked over her shoulder at the group of friends she had been standing with. “Those are my friends. Sorry,” she said. Then she bit her lip, like she was waiting for something to happen.

“Hey… do you wanna get out of here, maybe?” David couldn't believe he'd just said that. He sounded like Arno. But somehow he knew he liked this girl.

She smiled big. Was that the beginning of a nod? David could feel the
yes
coming like the best sneeze ever. And then he saw, over the Modigliani girl's shoulder, something that made his heart sink. It was Rob and Arno and the three very blond girls, charging in his direction. There was somebody else with them, too. A girl with a notepad.

David knew they were coming for him.

Arno spotted David and threw his hand in the air. “Yo, Davey,” he yelled.

David was standing next to a girl with a kind of weird face—her features were all big and wrong somehow. When Arno got over to them, he tried to ignore the fact that David had been talking to her.

“Hey, dude,” Arno said. “You ready to blow?”

David shrugged and looked at the girl next to him.

“Great,” Arno said. “We're going to that party at Lotus, the one that Jonathan got us all on the list for? But first I want you to meet Justine.” Arno gestured at the
New York
writer he'd just met, and then at David. “David plays ball for Potterton,” he went on.

“Nice to meet you,” Justine said, shaking David's hand. David nodded and looked over his shoulder. The girl with the funny face had taken Arno's hint and disappeared back into the crowd.

“Um, yeah. I'm not quite ready to go yet,” David said.

They were pretty far from the dance floor now, but Rob had started dancing with both Mimi and Lizzie again. Sadie was texting someone. Arno could feel himself getting annoyed: He had had enough of the MoMA and wanted to go somewhere else now, and he didn't understand why David was making things hard for him. “David,” he said, putting his arm around David's shoulder. “Let's talk.”

They moved away from Rob, the blondes, and Justine.

“You okay?”

“Um, yeah,” David said, still kind of looking around expectantly.

“That girl Justine wants to talk to you,” Arno said.

“I think she's a little old for me,” David said. He clearly was not paying attention.

“No shit. She's a writer for a magazine. She wants to talk to you for this story she's working on.”

“Oh.”

“So… could you talk to her?” Arno asked. “And then we'll go? I think this party at Lotus is going to give her some really great material.”

“Why does she want to talk to me?” David asked.

“'Cause she's writing about cool New York kids,
which I
thought
you were.” Arno sighed. It was tough sometimes, how people didn't think the same way he did. “She needs some quotes, dude.”

David gave him a pained expression. “I'm not going to have anything to say,” he said. In fact, he sort of whined it.

“David, come on, freaking help me out here,” Arno said. “Look, can you keep a secret? You know the Hottest Private School Boy issue
New York
does every year?”

David nodded.

“Well, that's what she's working on. And this year, you know who it's gonna be?”

David shook his head. Arno was smiling big.

“Me.”

Patch could be sad. He knew he could, because he was sad right now.

He had walked all the way from his house on Perry Street to the MoMA, off Fifth Avenue in Midtown, which was actually a pretty far walk. He had taken a little detour through Union Square, because it was a nice night: The air was moist and warm, and there were people everywhere, yelling and laughing and traveling in packs. He liked Union Square, too, because people sat around eating ice cream there, or went skateboarding, or picnicked late at night with people they really cared about. But when he crossed 18th Street and got back onto Fifth, his phone rang again and then made an annoying buzzing noise telling him that he had a message. He figured he'd better listen to it. Or, actually, he figured he'd better listen to at least a few of the many messages he'd ignored already today.

The first one went like this:

“Hey, Patch, this is Justine Gray at
New York
magazine. I'm writing a story about cool kids in New York, and I was hoping you'd be one of my sources. Could you call me back so that we can set up an interview? I'd appreciate it. Thanks.”

The next five said more or less the same thing, except the girl's voice got increasingly urgent, like she'd had a little too much coffee, or maybe something stronger and synthetic. Patch erased them all, as well as a message from his little sister, Flan, reminding him about the party and telling him that she really wanted him there. Then he listened to yet another message from Justine Gray.

“Hi, Patch, this is Justine again from
New York.
Wow, I feel like I
know
you from hearing your voice on the outgoing message so many times. But I don't really, and Patch, I'd like to.
New York
would like to. So: I'm going to put all my cards on the table. We want you to be the Hottest Private School Boy in New York for our HPSB 2005 issue. We've talked to a lot of people, and the consensus is,
you
are probably the coolest person ever to attend a private school in Manhattan. What makes you so cool? You don't
need
anything, and you don't
want
anything. That's what the people say. You're an island, Patch Flood, a very cool island unto yourself.”

Patch hung up without listening to any more. His phone made a buzzing noise, and flashed him a note that
he still had twenty unopened messages. What did that mean,
an island?
He figured there was no way he was listening to twenty more bullshit messages like that one, so he tossed the phone over his shoulder and kept walking.

But when he got to MoMA, he was still thinking about that message and what it said. If that was true, that thing about him not wanting anything, then that was really, really sad. He knew she was wrong. He
knew
there were things he wanted and needed… he just wasn't sure what they were.

When he came into the grand lobby of the new MoMA, the party was still going strong, but he couldn't see anybody he really wanted to talk to. He walked through the crowd of kids—all the grown-up art world people had split long ago—and looked around. There had to be
someone
he wanted to talk to.

“Patch!” yelled a voice from behind him.

Patch turned and saw Jonathan. They slapped each other five, and nodded hello.

“What's up, J? You having a good time?”

“I was, but…” Jonathan paused, like he was trying to think of the best way to say something he really didn't want to say. He was wearing a suit, and he looked more dressed up than anybody else in the room. “Um, listen, I think your sister's mad at me.”

“Why would she be mad at you?”

“I don't know. She's been in the bathroom for, like, an hour.”

“Why would she be in there?” Patch gave his friend a long, stormy-green-eyed stare. That usually got him talking.

“See, I got this call from this woman who's a reporter for
New York,
and she's working on the Hottest Private School Boy issue, which is… never mind, anyway, she wanted to interview me, for a story that I'm
pretty sure
is about me, so… I guess I kind of left Flan alone a little too long while I was talking to her. The magazine lady, I mean.”

“Oh.” Patch sunk his hands into the pair of worn khakis, rolled to the knees, that he'd been wearing all day. He was pretty sure Jonathan was not going to be the HPSB, and he was equally sure that he didn't want to be the one to tell him.

“Yeah,” Jonathan sighed, “I know. I'm a lame boyfriend. But could you maybe talk to her?”

Patch nodded. He wanted to get away from Jonathan as quickly as he could right then. Patch did not like lying to his friends, and not telling Jonathan about the messages he'd gotten felt a lot like lying. “Yeah, man. I'll talk to her.”

“Hey,” Jonathan said, “there's a party at Lotus later
that this ex-girlfriend of my brother is throwing. She put us all on the list, if you want to go.”

Patch shrugged. “We'll see,” he said, and walked through the crowds of slightly buzzed kids to the women's bathroom.

He knocked on the door and listened. When no one answered, he knocked again and went in. There was nobody at the mirror, and he walked along the stalls, looking underneath the stall doors for feet. He didn't see any until he got to the last one, where he saw a familiar pair of white Marc Jacobs boots.

“Hey, Flan, it's me,” he said.

“Patch?”

“Yup.”

He heard the lock pulling back, and then Flan peeked around the stall door looking very forlorn indeed. Her eye makeup was all smudged down her cheeks. She went back and sat on the top of the toilet.

“What's the matter, kiddo?” Patch asked. He came in and closed the stall door behind him. He slid down it and sat cross-legged on the floor. “C'mon,” he said. “Talk to me.”

“Oh, it's nothing, really…” Flan mumbled.

Patch tilted his head and gave her a look.