Hold On Tight (3 page)

“Right, right. Thanks. Bye-bye,” his mother was saying. She was sitting on the black leather couch in the living room, underneath the collection of African masks that she and David's father had acquired while on their midlife crisis stint in the Peace Corps. She hung up
the phone and looked at David. “Well, you can't go in that.”

“Go where? In what?”

“To your interview. In a hoodie.”

“Um, interview?”

“Yes, sweetie. We're extremely lucky because they usually don't give interviews on the weekends, but I guess spring is a very busy time of year for prospective student visitors. Frightening, I know. But they do, occasionally, hold weekend interviews, and now you've got one. I just called. So I really don't think you should wear a sweatshirt. It would send the wrong signal, don't you think?”

“Uh, this was more of an informal, checking-out-the-school kind of thing,” David said. He sounded unconvincing even to himself.

“David, this is a very competitive time of year. If you're not going to make this trip a meaningful one, you should stay in the city. After all, there's the SAT to study for, you should keep in shape for basketball, there's volunteering, your schoolwork, and … well, just so many things.” His mom looked kind of exhausted just thinking about it. David, as usual, didn't have the heart to fight her when she was down.

“Okay, Mom. When's the interview?”

“Eleven-thirty, tomorrow morning. Here's the information,”
she said, handing him one of her business cards, which had the name and office location of his interviewer scrawled on the back. On the front side it said Hilary Grobart, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Intuitive. Lately his mother, who had made her name with a line of self-help books, was expanding her practice to include more “experimental” treatments. David took the card and watched as his mother stood up and walked to the closet in the hall where they kept all their winter coats. “Now, where's your suit?”

“Mom, that's the suit I wore to Great Aunt Edie's funeral. Two years ago.” David winced at the black wool suit his mother had pulled from the closet. It had been too small when she bought it for him, and he feared what it would look like on him now. “Don't you think it'll fit sort of funny?”

“David, I really think you're making a problem where there isn't one,” his mother said. “But put it on, let's see.”

David tried to make a face that would make his mother understand that she was treating him like a child, but the phone rang so she didn't notice. She answered, and then handed the phone to her son. “It's for you,” she said.

“Hello?” he said into the receiver.

“David, why haven't you left yet?” Jonathan asked.

“I'm coming, I'm coming!” David said.

“Well, hurry up, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and hung up. David turned to his mother; she was giving him a stern look, so he went resignedly into the hall bathroom and put on the suit. It was worse than he could have imagined. The pants were a good five inches above his ankles, and his wrists were entirely exposed. He stepped back into the hall. “Mom,” he whined, sounding a little bit like a five-year-old, “I look like a clown.”

“I think you look handsome,” she said. “And you
have
to wear a suit. Otherwise, what will they think? They'll think you were raised by wolves!”

The phone rang again. David picked it up. “What's up …,” he said.

“Why haven't you left yet?” Jonathan asked.

“I'm coming, I'm coming.” David shot back nervously. He hung up and looked at his mother. There was nothing about her that suggested she was going to budge. David weighed the embarrassment of going out looking like his mommy had dressed him in his junior high graduation suit versus the misery of being left behind.

“Thanks again, Mom,” he said. “I'll see you Monday!”

“But David, you can't
wear
your suit now!” His
mother called after him, as he hurried for the door and the safety of his nice, sane friends.

Of course, it wasn't until he saw Jonathan standing outside the Floods' house that David realized he'd left his duffel—and all his normal clothes—behind.

“But the thing is, you look adorable in surf shorts. And how often are you going to be wearing surf shorts at Yale or Swarthmore or some other stuffy East Coast school?”

Patch Flood, who was tall and lanky, had been called adorable before, but hearing it never got any easier. He twisted uncomfortably on the soft, light-gray leather seats of his parents' yellow Mercedes, stretching his legs out so that his ankles rested against the open window frame. Then he pulled his faded Yankees hat down over his overgrown sandy hair as though that might convey to his girlfriend, Greta O'Grady, who was currently sitting on her deck in Santa Cruz, California, looking at an ocean that was not the Atlantic, how weird that word made him feel.

He had taken to making calls from the car, because he lived with two sisters who were very into eavesdropping.

Patch had met Greta on an educational cruise over the winter, and he was now having a bicoastal, cell-phone
enabled relationship with her. It certainly wasn't convenient, but then, he'd never met a girl remotely as cool as Greta. She was so cool that he was willing to have the millionth argument with her about whether they should go to college together on her coast or his.

“I think you might be forgetting that college only takes up like eight months of the year,” he said. “I mean, don't you think we should spend our collegiate years in a classroom instead of at the beach?”

“Patch Flood, attendance king of the eastern seaboard,” Greta hooted. “You can't tell me you're going to stop playing hooky now. Besides, hello, redwoods? I mean, you've been to California. I can't believe I have to convince you how nice it would be for us to live here. Together.”

“Hey, I know California is gorgeous. But realistically, you're about as much gorgeous as I can handle.” Patch rarely resorted to lines of this kind, but when he did, they were frighteningly effective. Except, perhaps, on Greta, who was a little bit shy and a little bit wild and didn't seem remotely interested in being romanced in any of the usual ways.

“Flattery is not going to make me want to go live in an overcrowded, bricked-in city that's freezing four months out of the year. Four months of the
academic
year.”

“Maybe you'd end up liking it. You know, learning about the seasons, watching fall turn to winter. That's when snow falls from the sky. Then you can roll around in it. It's very academic.”

There was a long silence, and then Patch could hear Greta standing up and walking somewhere. He could tell from the sound that she was wearing flip-flops. Greta had a body that was strong and freckled from crew practice, but she had small, perfectly pale feet with toenails like little red jewels. Patch was thinking about them distractedly, when she cut in with a hushed “Look, Patch, do you want to go to the same school as me and live together and be crazy and fun and in love or not? I mean, it seems to me like you can't let go
at all
. I mean, really, seriously, what is so great about New York? What are you so afraid of leaving behind?”

At the abrupt change in tone, Patch pulled his legs in and jerked himself upright. That was when he saw three sets of eyes peering down on him—Mickey, Arno and Jonathan. Patch immediately fumbled his cell phone.

“Patch,” Jonathan said, leaning in against the window frame, “you've been wearing that hat since 1999. Don't you think it's time to get a new one?”

“Hi guys,” Patch said as he tried to locate his phone. “Can you give me a couple?”

“A couple what?” Mickey said. “Cuz I think you're already in one.”

“Mickey, shut up,” Jonathan scolded.

“A couple minutes,” Patch said. “Can you give me a couple minutes?”

“Patch?” he heard Greta say, as he grabbed the phone from the floor. He reached for the window crank, and then he remembered that the windows were automated.

“Yeah, I'm still here. My friends just showed up. Look, all I want to do is go to the same school as you. I just never considered going West Coast. And that's weird for me.”

“I know,” Greta said. “I'm sorry. I know this is a decision we really have to make together and …”

“Um, excuse me, Patch?” Jonathan was sort of leaning in through the window now, and he had a very urgent look on his face.

“Greta, can you hold on?” Patch asked. “What's up, J?”

“We have to go to Vassar. Now. Can you drive us?”

Patch considered this for a moment, and then he said into his phone: “Hey apple blossom, if I check out Vassar for us this weekend, will you check out Stanford?”

“You mean, you'll consider going to Stanford?”

“Yes,” Patch answered.

“If we
do
go to Vassar, can we get a puppy?”

“Two,” Patch said.

“Okay, yes then.”

“Great. I've got to go now.”

“Yeah, me too. I miss you.”

“I miss you too,” Patch said, noticing as he did that Jonathan was rolling his eyes.

“Call me tonight?” Greta asked.

“Okay.” Patch hung up and tossed the phone onto the front passenger seat. He looked at his three friends, who were all trying in a sort of half-assed way not to giggle. Patch climbed into the front seat and put the key in the ignition.

“You all can laugh if you want to,” he said. “But I'm still the only one who can drive you weirdos to Vassar.”

Jonathan opened the back door and scooted into the middle seat with Mickey behind him. Arno walked around and took shotgun. Patch was about to pull out when he saw a tall guy walking toward them in the middle of the street. He was wearing a suit that made him look like the stranger in a black and white movie.

“Who's the bible salesman?” Jonathan said from the backseat.

“Who died?” Mickey shouted out the window.

David came trotting up to the car and bent over to peer in. “You guys weren't going to leave without me
were you? Because I left all my clothes at my house and—”

“Dude,” Anro interrupted. “That suit is not going to make girls think you are hot.”

“Except in the literal sense, of course,” Jonathan said. “Why are you wearing a dark-colored, wool-blend suit on one of the warmest days of the spring? Also, is that a mod outfit? Because unless you're trying out for a part in
Austin Powers 4
, I think that suit is a shade too small for you.”

“Ha, ha,” David deadpanned. “Now, can we just swing by my house and grab my stuff?”

“Not a chance,” Mickey said as he opened the canary yellow Mercedes door. “We've got places to be …”

“No way, you do
not
have to talk to your girl again …,” Mickey yelled. I was sitting in the middle of a back seat that was luxury, but not exactly luxurious, so I really heard that one. Arno, up in the front, added loudly: “Can't you see our boy is whipped?”

“I'll call you back in a second …,” Patch said before hanging up and putting his phone back on the dashboard. Then he made a sudden turn and brought us into our third rest area of the afternoon.

Secretly I was happy that we had stopped again, what with me somehow having been assigned the middle seat and all, although teasing Patch felt like the natural thing to do. Patch is kind of day-dreamy and the most elusive of my friends, which of course makes girls crush on him even more than they would in the first place. So now that he actually, no joke, cares about just one girl, it's hard not to want to talk a little bit of good-natured shit.

And his girlfriend, Greta, lives in California, so that only makes it more funny—Patch has never been one to abuse his cell phone minutes, you see, and now that's all he seems to be doing.

“Did you just want to check with her if it's okay to go over sixty-five?” I asked. Patch shot me an
Et tu, Brute?
look in the rearview mirror, pulled up the emergency break, and got out of the car. Then we all tumbled out, too.

The first time we'd stopped, at the very first gas station on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, nobody had said anything. We were out of the city, and that simple fact had tranquilized us all somewhat. Apparently Patch and Greta had had some sort of fight (although I couldn't figure out who was apologizing to who), and Patch talked on the cell phone for a good half hour while the rest of us got big Cokes and watched the traffic go by.

The second time, it was actually Mickey's fault because he'd forgotten to piss before we got back in the car at the gas station, and only after we'd all gotten out to stretch our legs did Patch's phone ring. Apparently, that time Greta was just calling back with her initial impressions of Stanford, where she'd just arrived.

Now we were standing around our third roadside convenience store, with a lot of greenery surrounding us and some birds chirping. Patch walked away, talking on his cell phone, and stopped just as soon as he knew we couldn't hear him anymore.

“This is too weird,” David said. Arno and Mickey and I had sat down on a log, but David was standing up in this kind of rigid position. He'd tried on the clothes we'd all packed at the last rest stop, but all our worn T-shirts had fit his lank basketball-player frame like belly shirts, and now he was back in his black suit. Poor guy.

“What?” Arno said. “You mean how Patch has gotten all Mr. Greta on us?” He looked wistfully over at Patch, who was talking and tugging on his Yankees cap like he was trying to psych out a batter. “It's going to bite us all, sooner or later,” he added cryptically.

“Hey man, are you getting hot or what?” I asked.