Pass It On (22 page)

Mickey nodded at her. He'd only met her a couple of times, but Arno's problem was obvious. She was really, really good-looking, but she brayed like a donkey and she said the most annoying shit.

They were in the Shulmans' kitchen and a little line had formed in front of Mickey, who was showing everyone how to do tequila slammers. It turned out that the Shulmans had a whole cabinet full of high quality tequilas—Maduros, and Mezcals, and Marinahas—and Mickey was methodically finishing each bottle. He had plenty of ice and cold ginger ale by his side and he was getting really into pouring slammers down everyone's throats. He'd arrived early for no particular reason, except of course that he'd known Ginger since a round-the-world trip they'd taken together with their parents when they were ten. Ginger's parents owned a chain of bookstores, and her dad was really, really into buying
art. So he loved Mickey's dad. And of course, Mickey's dad loved him right back.

“Could somebody tell my friends I'm in here, when they get here?” Mickey asked. He brought a paper-towel-covered crystal shot glass up in the air and slammed it down on the black granite counter, then uncovered it and threw the shot down Liesel's throat. It was her fourth in a row, but nobody had the courage to push her out of line.

“Fuck me so hard!” Liesel yelled, after she caught her breath.

“I think David and Patch just got here,” Adam Rickenbacher said. He was next in line and getting really annoyed at Liesel.

“What about Arno?” Mickey asked.

“Don't speak of him!” Liesel screamed. She grabbed the shot glass and flung it at Mickey, who ducked, so it sailed through the kitchen entranceway, through the formal dining room, and into the reception room, where it banged against the head of a girl named Simone, who was talking with Philippa, who'd just arrived.

“Ow!” Simone said, and fell against a gigantic Matthew Barney photograph of a satyr.

“So we broke up because we're so in love but we're just really different,” Philippa said to Simone as she helped her stand up again.

“Do you really believe that?” Simone asked, while she rubbed her bruised head.

“I keep trying to. Does it sound sensible at all?”

“No. Could you get me some ice?” Simone stumbled to the couch.

Meanwhile, Mickey was backing away from Liesel, who was demanding more shots.

“Help!” Mickey ran out of the kitchen, swinging Ginger Shulman into Liesel's path. It was around eleven and the party was coming into its own. Mickey knew he was at the center of it. He could do whatever he wanted in Ginger's house. It was almost as good as Patch's house that way. And there was Patch! By the window, talking with Selina Trieff and some other stunning girls in short skirts and black tights and tall boots. David was with him, but he was off to one side with Amanda, their heads bowed in toward each other like a couple of nesting birds.

“Let's do a slammer,” Mickey said to Patch once he'd gotten Liesel off him.

“A popper.”

“Call it whatever you want, they're in the kitchen.” Mickey grabbed Patch and David, who only fought briefly before giving in. They paraded toward the kitchen and the music got big—it was old White Stripes,
White Blood Cells.

“Arno's on his way?” David asked.

“Yeah, and Jonathan?” Patch asked.

“Jonathan's right there,” Mickey said, because Jonathan was. He was on a couch with Ruth, who Patch and Mickey hadn't even met yet. Jonathan was in a black T-shirt, jeans, and black boots. He looked, Mickey thought, tougher than he was supposed to look.

“Hey guys,” Jonathan stared up at them, as they surrounded him. Neither he nor Ruth got off the couch.

“Popper?” Mickey nodded at the kitchen.

“Yeah, in a minute.”

And even to Mickey, it was apparent that things were not well between Jonathan and Ruth.

“You want us to bring you out something?” David asked.

“Just give us a few minutes.” Jonathan and Ruth were sitting close on the couch, but they weren't touching each other. The room was thick with people, and the music was keeping conversations loud, but it was pretty obvious that whatever they were talking about wasn't good.

The guys strode into the kitchen. Mickey pushed aside some younger guys who were doing slammers on their own, and he took over operations.

“What's the matter with Jonathan?” David asked Patch.

“The thing with Jonathan is he can get pretty emotional about things. That's why I like him, I guess.” Patch accepted a foaming slammer from Mickey.

“Yeah,” David said. “He's definitely emotional. We should talk with him later. Clear some stuff up about—” But before David could finish he had a slammer under his nose, and as he tried to get it down he sneezed and tequila and ginger ale went all over Selina Trieff's shirt, and she slugged him. Then David's eyes started to water and it looked like he was crying.

“This party's killer!” Mickey screamed. He leaped up on the counter and tried to slam one over his head on the ceiling. He was making a huge mess, but of course Ginger Shulman was nowhere to be found.

“I think I should go,” I said to Ruth. But I didn't stand up.

Before the party we'd tried to have dinner together at Brasserie in midtown because my mom was friends with the owner, but as it turned out he was also a former client of my dad's and he wouldn't give me a table, so we ended up walking up to Ginger's in the cold. We'd been on the couch for two hours. And Ruth had taken most of that time to slowly and carefully break up with me.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She still looked beautiful. She had on these stiletto highheeled boots, black pants, and a tight little Michael Stars T-shirt. She sipped at the glass of white wine she'd poured herself when we came in. She wasn't much of a drinker.

I kind of felt like I'd been listening to Ruth for too long. But her point, that I'd come on too
strong and now she felt pressure from me, was a good one. I couldn't deny that. And she wanted to think about Harvard and how pretty she was and the great life she had. Of course she didn't see it that way. But I did. And me? I was thinking that if we ended the night apart, I'd be really low—as low, and this dawned on me quickly, as the low of how it feels to have a bucket of cold water dumped on you when you're at camp and sleeping naked because it's so hot and they've dragged you and your bed into a field and gotten some icy water from the kitchen and thrown it on you so you'll pee all over the place and wake up screaming. I would be as low as I'd ever been since that happened.

“I used to go to camp with Ginger,” I said, because Ruth was being so quiet. “Boy did we ever play practical jokes on each other at that camp.”

I stood up. My new boots were a little slick on the soles and I shimmied for a second on the slick wooden floor.

“I may not be here when you get back,” Ruth said. I took her hand, suddenly, and kissed it.

I turned then, and walked toward Ginger's parents' bedroom, but then I caught a glimpse
someone who was so out of place here but somehow set me immediately at ease. Flan. She saw me, too, and she waved and smiled in a really quiet, warm way.

I sighed. I can't quite describe the feeling I was having as anything but relief. She was just who I needed to see. I started walking toward her, but then I saw that she was talking to that Adam kid, and she made a little sign with her hand that said
one minute
, and I realized it sort of looked like she was giving the same talk to Adam as Ruth had just given to me. I nodded at her and kept going toward Ginger's parents' bathroom. On the way I passed Arno, who'd just arrived. He was deep in conversation with one of Liesel's cute friends, and he barely noticed me.

It was still early enough in the night that no one was using Ginger's parents' bedroom to hook up. I strode through and went into the bathroom, where it was very quiet. Once inside, I flipped the lock and took a deep breath. The bathroom was big and new, with two sinks and a tile shower stall enclosed with thick slabs of glass. The floor was white marble, with pink and red veins running through it. Speakers embedded in the ceiling played the same music that everyone
at the party was hearing, but the temperature was different in here—it was warmer, and I could feel the hushed vents pulling out the bad air and pumping in good air.

There was a new steel tub on a platform, too, and a comfortable chair in one corner, under a window. I looked out the window as I undid my belt, and saw the moon. I felt like apologizing to it.
I'm sorry I screwed up my life, or let it get screwed up, or whatever
.

I checked the lock again and sat down on the toilet, which was as new as the rest of the room. The toilet faced some kind of African sculpture of a boy peeing. Great, we were going to watch each other. And we did.

My pants were down around my ankles, and I stared at my boots and took care of what I needed to take care of, and then I just sat there. I was the boy at the party who stays in the bathroom. And that's not cool. But Flan was here and even though I could say objectively that maybe she was too young to be at this type of party, I also sort of knew she was the coolest girl here. Maybe even cooler than Ruth, and that gave me a reason to stop being the boy in the bathroom. I reached around me, then, and tried to pull the handle. But
instead there were buttons. So I pushed them.

The toilet flushed in near silence. I didn't move. Then there was a gushing noise and, well, something hit my ass. Something hot and wet. I shot forward the moment I felt that, because it was like nothing I'd ever felt before and it was totally freakish, and as I started to go forward, my new boots weren't able to get traction on that marble, and it was like I was getting shot into the air by a geyser at a hundred miles an hour toward that pissing African boy, thinking only one thought,
what the hell is happening to my ass?

And since my balance was long gone, my head hit the boy's midsection. The sculpture was made of something surprisingly hard, like bronze. And he didn't move. Then everything went black.

“It can never be,” Arno said to Liesel, for about the twentieth time. He was getting really bored of having to break up with her, but she just wasn't going away. They were in the living room on a couch, and Liesel was practically crouched over him, stroking his hair. He sat there, looking up at her.

Around them, the party was starting to fall apart. There was a couple fighting furiously in one corner and a bunch of seniors from Trinity in another, smoking pot and talking quietly about how they thought it was cool to be Republican. Some girls had passed out on the couch opposite Arno, and he looked vaguely under their skirts, but he felt so glum about the girl on top of him that he didn't even feel that sleazy about it.

“We are going to make this work,” Liesel slurred. She puckered her lips at him and he knew she was about as good-looking as people get, but all he saw were the lips of a camel, about to slobber all over the side of his face.

“I'm sorry Liesel—you're just—you're too good for me.”

“
Bullshit
,” Liesel whispered, “
I'm never letting you go
.” She licked his ear. And inside, a voice said to him
you should've let her break up with you
. And he knew the voice was right, that if he'd just done nothing, she would have gone away, but he'd played the power card of ending it first and she wasn't going to let him get away with that. And obviously, the inner voice belonged to Jonathan.
She needs to be the one to walk away. Don't you know that?
Now wait a second, where the hell was Jonathan?

“Could you excuse me for a second?” Arno had to slide down onto the floor and actually crawl away from Liesel. The Trinity people laughed, and Arno did nothing to stop them. He straightened his pants and went into the kitchen. Mickey was in there. The ginger ale had run out, and now he was making tequila shots with Tabasco sauce and smoked oysters. Music continued to blast: Now it was “Ramblin' Man,” by the Allman Brothers.

“You want one of these?” Mickey held up a shot glass filled with red liquid, the oyster bobbing in the middle of it.

“No, listen to me—” Arno said, watching Mickey slam back the shot as David wandered in. David had
found a fisherman's hat with lures stuck in the brim and he was wearing it pulled low over his eyes. Somehow, Arno thought, it worked perfectly on him.

“Bleah!” Mickey screamed. But he didn't puke the shot.

“What's up?” David asked. He poured himself a glass of orange juice. They stood together, and a couple of girls and some guys he didn't know who probably went to Dwight all seemed to look to see what they'd do. Then Patch wandered in.

“This is fun,” Patch said. He'd found a piece of chocolate mousse cake and he was eating it with some peppermint stick ice cream. He was always much more into dessert than drinking.

“Has anyone seen Jonathan?” Arno asked. The four of them looked at each other. It always, always felt weird when they were together and Jonathan wasn't there. And this was the third time in a week and a half that it had happened.

“I saw him go to the bathroom,” one of the girls said. Arno looked at her. She was probably a sophomore, not really sure of herself yet. Those kinds always went for Jonathan.

“Which one?” Arno asked.

“I don't know,” the girl was suddenly shy in front of all the guys looking at her. “Maybe I'm wrong.” And
she disappeared into the living room. The four of them watched her go.

“How weird of him to disappear.” Patch grinned. “I mean, isn't that
my
job?”

“He's been pretty depressed lately,” David said.

“I think I heard that that Ruth girl doesn't even like him anymore,” Arno said.