Hold On Tight (14 page)

Gabby stopped leaping around and singing “I win, I win.” She looked up at him, seeming a little stunned. “What a fluke that was,” she said.

“Maybe I was just psyching you out my first two
turns. I should warn you, one of my many secrets is that I'm a shark.”

“Oh, whatever.”

“C'mon,” Arno said, collecting his tickets. “I'll buy you a teddy bear.”

“I don't want your teddy bear,” Gabby said, narrowing her eyes. “You cheated. I don't know how, but you must have.” She crossed her arms over her chest and stomped over to the railing of the boardwalk.

Arno couldn't believe this. Fighting over skeeball was possibly the lowest he'd ever sunk. But if he left now, he wasn't sure if he could technically still say he had already been in love, so he went over to the booth at the end of the row of skeeball machines and handed over his tickets.

“Does this get me the pink panther?”

“No,” said the heavy-set stuffed animal vendor, “and I saw what you did.”

“Oh, come on,” Arno said. “Everyone cheats at skeeball. And the other animals suck. Can I please have the pink panther?”

“Maybe I would if… but you're a cheater, so I don't see why I should help you out.”

Arno looked down at his chest and remembered the rush he'd felt with Lara. Now, looking down in the general vicinity of his heart, he didn't know what he saw there.

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” Arno said, a little more gruffly then he had meant to. He put a twenty down on the counter and stared at the guy until he lifted one of the big pink panthers down from the display and handed it over. “Thanks man,” Arno said crisply, and walked back over to where Gabby was standing, staring out at sea.

“Hey gorgeous, I got you something,” he said, handing her the pink panther.

“I love the pink panther,” she said, gasping and hugging it to her body. “Thank you. I'm sorry I acted like a baby, but I'm just a really competitive person.” She sighed. “And I'm an only child.”

“Me too,” Arno said.

“Well, I guess it's meant to be, then. Come on!” Gabby said, dragging him by the hand down the boardwalk. “Let's go ride the cyclone. Can we ride the cyclone,
please
?”

Arno said yes, but his heart wasn't in it. It was tough going, but if this—and by this, he meant Gabby—was what he had to get through to get a girl like Lara, he was just going to have to take a deep breath and ride the roller coaster. As they walked across the boardwalk toward the rickety-looking structure rising into the blue Coney Island sky, Arno realized that he had missed his therapy session entirely.

It took David a good half hour to convince his Potterton friends that he really wasn't down for an after-school game of pickup basketball. He never managed a very good reason why, but eventually they gave up on him and headed over to the courts at West Fourth Street. As soon as they were gone, David used his long, lean, basketball-playing legs to carry him back to his apartment as fast as humanly possible.

It was a bright day with an epically blue sky, and all the mothers in the Village were out with their strollers. David weaved between them, almost coming to a jog by the time he reached the lobby of his building.

He opened the door and as noiselessly as possible slipped inside and began tip-toeing down the hall. His parents were talking in the living room, so he was concentrating very hard on being quiet when his foot slid on the recently-shined hardwood floor and he went flying backward. He managed to keep from totally wiping out by slamming one hand against the wall
and swinging the rest of his body into the wall, too. It was not a quiet move.

David froze, and waited for his parents to appear. He knew this meant another half hour of talking about college and scholarships and community service before he got to rescue Sara-Beth from her loneliness. Weirdly, though, no one seemed to have noticed David's blunder. His parents voices were still chatting away on the other side of the wall.

“The celebrity industrial complex,” his dad was saying, “as I call it, can be very harmful to the self. It is, unique among psychiatric complexes, swayed by the opinion of the whole world. Or at least, a big portion of it.”

David's dad rarely talked about celebrity, much less the concept of celebrity. This couldn't be good. David cautiously moved along the wall and peered through the open French doors into the living room. And there was a very weird sight. His parents were both pacing the floor, and there was Sara-Beth Benny, wearing her gigantic black sunglasses and the same slip she had been wearing for two days. She was lying on the couch, with her head resting against a cushion and her bare feet sticking up at the end. David could see, even from the doorway, that tears were running down her face.

“Let's talk about dreams,” David's mother said.

“Yes, let's,” his father said.

“Well, I dreamed last night that I had a sister. And all the kids in school made fun of her, because she was fat and she didn't know how to dress right. But I was too busy being this, like, famous party girl and so I didn't even notice until it was too late, and then she killed herself, and I didn't do anything to protect her!” Sara-Beth wailed.

“That's a very powerful dream,” David's mother said. Tears were now flowing, full force, down Sara-Beth's face.

“I agree,” his father said.

“What are you
doing?”
David said, stepping into the room.

“David,” his mother said.

“Stop it!” he yelled.

“David,” his father said.

“You're hurting her,” David went on. Sara-Beth lifted her glasses onto her forehead and gave him a look. Her eyes were red and her face was pale with emotion.

Sam Grobart took a step toward his son. “David, I thought you would have had more respect for the process of therapy, growing up the way you did.”

“Your new friend is a very wounded girl,” Hilary added.

“They're not hurting me,” Sara-Beth said. “They
just … they just … they just know how I like my eggs.”

“Scrambled?” David said in a very small voice.

“Yes,” his mother said. “Scrambled.”

“David?”

David blinked at his father. “Yes, Dad?”

“There's a lot of work to be done. Emotional work.” He sucked in his breath. “Now, I think we're going to all have to sit down and talk. A lot of talking. About what this girl has gone through, and how she can start living her best life.”

“Are you okay?” David asked Sara-Beth. She sat up on the couch and nodded.

“We've been talking about the first time she realized that she was famous,” Hilary said softly.

“Yes, like I said, there's going to be a lot of talking. So what I suggest is we order in Empire Szechuan and eat Grobart-family style. We put an old sheet on the ground and sit cross-legged and we can continue this very productive, this very
necessary
, conversation.” Sam Grobart lifted a finger to illustrate his point and then dashed from the room. “I'll get the menu,” he called. They could hear him rummaging in the kitchen.

The light of early evening was coming through the window and playing on Sara-Beth's pale skin. She gave David a long, deep stare, like she was helpless and she
trusted him to care for her. David almost forgot that his mother was in the same room as them, but then he looked up and saw that she was staring at Sara-Beth in this weird but definitely loving way, too. Then David's dad came back in the room.

“Can we please, please get duck?” Sara-Beth said.

Nobody said anything for a moment, and then Sam barked, “Of course. Of course you can. Honey-glazed Chinese duck? You got it. David, your usual broccoli beef?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Hil, I'm assuming sesame chicken for you? And I'll have the prawns Szechuan. And we can share dishes in whatever way makes us all most comfortable. Mmm, delicious.” He dashed from the room again. Then they heard him call, “Hil, where's the bleeping phone?!”

Hilary rolled her eyes. “How should I know?”

“Found it!”

David watched his mom sit down on the couch and begin stroking Sara-Beth's hair. David realized that it would probably be a good time to take his backpack off, so he did. “So you're not mad, Mom?”

“Of course not, honey bunch,” she said.

“So, can we keep her? I mean, can she stay?”

Sara-Beth and his mom both looked up at him with deeply sincere expressions on their faces. “I really think that's for the best,” his mother said. “Don't you?”

After school on Wednesday Patch skateboarded over to the East Side. It was an intensely bright day, and the park had been overtaken by sunbathers and people on rollerblades. The smell of grass and horse manure mingled in the air. When he got to the corner of Sixty-eighth and Park he skidded to a stop, took a navy blazer out of his backpack, and put it on.

He hadn't even known he had a blazer, and had been surprised to find it hidden away in the corner of his closet. It felt entirely wrong on him. But his college advisor had told him the Brown prospective student event he'd been invited to was jackets required, so he put the thing on, waved at the doorman, and rode the gilded elevator to the eighth floor.

“You must be Patch Flood,” said the woman who met him at the elevator. She was in her early thirties and even though she was dressed very casually in khaki slacks and a fitted black t-shirt, her hair was done up in a chignon to reveal the two giant, shining diamond studs
she wore. “I'm Gillian, Brown alumnus, and I am so glad you could make it. I just wanted to say that I really feel I've come to know you, from all the press, and, well, it's wonderful to meet you in the flesh.”

Patch tried to smile at her, but smiling when he didn't mean it was virtually impossible for him. “Thanks,” he managed.

“Won't you come into the living room? You have a guest waiting, I believe.”

That didn't bode well.

She led him into a huge room with expansive windows and a view down onto the treetops of Central Park. Patch never really got why people liked living uptown, but he always did enjoy seeing the park that way—it looked like a blanket had been thrown over the center of Manhattan, and it made him understand why one might put up with all the lapdogs and jerks in suits. A little bit.

“Would you like some tea?” Gillian asked him.

“Sure,” Patch responded, looking around at the other high school students standing around drinking from little porcelain cups. The guys were all in jackets, and the girls were all in neat skirts. More than one of the guys was wearing a Brown T-shirt underneath a blazer. Among them was an older, tall, sun-tanned guy in a frayed corduroy blazer, sticking out like a grandpa at an Ashlee Simpson concert.

“Dude, what are you doing here?” Patch asked, embracing his uncle.

“Came to check out what high school girls look like these days,” Heyday said with a chuckle. Then he gave Patch a serious look. “Just kidding, youngin'. Your college advisor called to remind you about the event, and I took the message. Thought you could use some backup with all the stiffs.”

Patch surveyed the scene and acknowledged that this was probably true. “Hey man, I hope you're not disappointed that I'm still looking at schools out here,” he said. “I mean, Deep Springs sounds great, but I do really want to go to the same school as Greta. And with my friends. That school strikes out in both categories.”

Heyday gestured to him that it wasn't a big deal. “Don't trip, kiddo,” he said. Then Brock, this guy Patch knew from Turner, and some other guys they went to school with approached the Flood men. There were hand-slapping hellos and a few pats on the back.

“So, I didn't know you were thinking about Brown,” Brock said resentfully, as though this news somehow lessened his ability to get in.

“I was,” Patch said, still almost wishing he didn't have to say so in front of his uncle. “But my girlfriend is from the West Coast, and Brown is the only school that appeals to her for some reason.”

“That girl from Pardo's photos?” one of Brock's friends asked. He was wearing a navy blazer and he had pale skin and greasy hair. Patch was pretty sure that he went to Turner, although there were a bunch of guys who looked like that. It irritated him that this guy could picture Greta naked.

“Yeah, she lives in California,” Patch said pointedly.

“Which is where I went to college,” Heyday interrupted with a crooked smile.

The guys all looked up at him. Before they could say anything, Gillian reappeared with tea. Patch and Heyday both took their porcelain teacups and saucers, and then the older man leaned toward her and said, “Sweetheart, any chance I could get a little bit of the good stuff in this?” He winked and patted her on the butt. Patch was worried for a second that his uncle had forgotten the rules of society, but Gillian didn't seem to mind. She whispered, “Sure,” breathily, and hurried off.

“So where'd you go to school, man?” Brock asked.

“A very small, labor-intensive school called Deep Springs,” Heyday said, accepting a shot of scotch in his tea from Gillian, who then lingered behind them listening in. “Chances are you've never heard of it. But it is one of the few institutions that produces
men
, as opposed to, say, employable young people.”

“I've heard of that place,” the kid who had wanted to know about Greta said.

“Oh?” said Heyday. “We Deep Springers don't want it to get too well known. But it is a remarkable experience.”

“Yeah,” the kid went on, sneering, “that's the one where it's just guys and you always have to have some farm job to do. After four years of New York private school, I'd like to sleep in a little, you know what I mean?”