Pass It On (6 page)

“Thanks, man.”

Jonathan and David got drinks and quickly went into the living room. Arno watched them go.

“I've been thinking about you,” Liesel said, pressing into Arno's back. He leaned against her and thought she smelled of alcohol and a different perfume than he'd had on earlier, perhaps Chanel No. 9, which Arno realized he recognized because his mother wore it.
Gross
. He tried to forget the connection.

“Let's get you into a bedroom,” Liesel said.

“Um, good idea.”

They took their drinks and disappeared down a hallway. Arno watched her small, twitchy butt as she walked. He slowed down, but only because he wasn't smiling and smirking the way he usually did before
hooking up, and he couldn't understand why.

“
Hurry up
!” Liesel yelled. Several other guys jumped to attention when she yelled, but she was only looking at Arno. So he got his face in order, tried to close his nose, and hurried.

“And awaaa-y they go,” I said.

“
I feel like if we said hello to her again, she wouldn't know our names
,” David whispered.

“Yeah. We're just the awesome friends. She's not into details.”

We watched Arno and Liesel disappear down a dimly lit hall and close a door behind them.

“If anyone's going to take over this kid's parents' bedroom, it should be them,” I said.

“She could break Arno in half,” David said as we wandered into the living room. His phone buzzed, and he looked at the screen.

“Mickey?” I asked.

He shook his head, glanced out the window. Alan Ebershoff came in and put on some Jimi Hendrix, really loud. Some guys stood in a circle, and then out came the Hacky Sack.

“Patch?” I asked. Still no. David typed something back.

“Risa Subkoff,” David said.

“Who?”

“I don't feel terrific about this.” David was IMing his location to Risa Subkoff. I looked over his shoulder.

“Don't tell me you have a thing with this Risa Subkoff.”

“Maybe I do.”

“What's your name again? Do you mind if I call you Arno?”

“Come on,” David said. “Don't pigeonhole me. I know I'm not Arno, but maybe I need to kick it with two different girls for a while.”

“Nah. You shouldn't even
say
kick it.”
David was juggling two girls
? He might as well have told me he was getting paid to have sex with them, which was about as believable.

But then David's screen said
be right there
and David smiled. He said, “She plays basketball for Trinity. We saw each other play this afternoon and then we talked and then …” He smiled. “I'm going to the bathroom and clean myself up before she gets here.”

“At least give me an explanation,” I said, and I downed a lot of my drink. A sweet girl called Madison, whom I knew from my days at Camp
Meadowlark, filled my glass with more cold vodka.

“Well, I was at Amanda's yesterday and she told me she wants to be engaged, which of course is insane, but she says we need to do it so we won't cheat on each other again.”

“So when she said that, you knew she must be cheating on you, so you figured you'd cheat on her again too?”

“Precisely.” David smiled and raised his glass in a toast to me. “I talked about it with my dad for a minute, without naming names. He said even if she hasn't already, she's going to.”

“But you love her.”

“Yeah, but we have problems, and this girl Risa, she's really nice to me and we actually have stuff in common, which obviously Amanda and I don't.”

“Because you're basically interested in basketball and psychology. And you don't like to deal with that second part of you, so a basketball-playing girl is like a dream come true.”

“Right again.” David raised his thick eyebrows and padded off. He turned around for a second when he got to the hallway, though, and said, “Hey, let's talk more about your dad later, okay?”

I nodded a nod that said
yeah, thanks
, but then I figured it was now or never. I had to tell him.

“Hey, David?” I walked across the room to get closer to him.

“Yeah?”

“The thing is … I'm not exactly sure how to say this, but I can only take one friend on this trip. So, you know …” I trailed off.

But David smiled. “Damn. I'm sure Arno's gonna be bummed, but that's really cool of you to want me to be there, man. We're going to have such a great time!”

He turned back toward the bathroom, and I felt my whole body sag. That certainly hadn't gone as planned.

Some kids watched him walk off and whispered to each other. Even though to me—to us—he was David the Mope, to other people he was one of the best basketball players in the private school leagues, and certainly the star of Potterton's team. But that didn't fool me into thinking he was cool, even though he was a great friend. I thought all his parents' psychobabble had worn off on him in a good way.

So now I'd managed to invite Arno, Mickey, and David all on a trip where I could only take
one of them, and worse, David thought he was The One. It occurred to me then that maybe this whole guilt over my dad being a criminal thing was subconsciously making me bribe my friends, kind of like when my parents got divorced and my Christmas presents suddenly got a whole lot better. I thought about this as I took a sip of my drink, which was no longer cold and simply tasted like extremely potent alcohol.

Suddenly, a whole group of girls came into the living room. I could tell instantly that they were it—the enviable group that all these uptown kids talked about. Conversations quieted while they settled in. It was easy to see that they knew everyone was watching them.

I finished my drink while I, too, watched them, and the dregs of that second glass of warm vodka hit my belly like an elbow-jam on the subway. I lurched and took a seat on one end of a black leather couch. The place was pretty modern looking, with a huge thing on the floor that was more of a mat than a rug and looked like an oil slick, and a lot of black and chrome furniture placed at odd angles throughout the living room.

That girl Madison walked through with one of the smoking icy bottles of Absolut Peppar, and I
held up my glass.

“Careful.” She smiled.

I sipped. It was like sipping water and then having someone snap a wet towel against your lips. I hit it again.
Ow
.

“If you're going to play old stuff, play The Band,” a voice said.

“Whatever you say, Ruth.” I watched Froggy hop away to a hidden place where the stereo must've been.

I looked up.

There was a girl attached to the voice. She had long honey-colored hair, and she was wearing a short purple skirt. In the black and silvery light of that living room, she had a golden yellow color all around her.

“
The girl in the long gray coat
,” I whispered.

Froggy put on “Up on Cripple Creek” and she started to dance. Her other friends danced too. They didn't seem to be drinking. I pushed my glass aside, but I didn't feel like I could hop up and dance. How could I get to her?

That's when she threw herself down next to me and smiled.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“Yeah, I've seen you before, too.”

“You're best friends with Arno Wildenburger. Have you seen him tonight?”

I shook my head.
Not Arno
. Once girls got Arno on the brain, it was like a disease in a horror movie. They turned into screaming monsters and could not be changed back until he hooked up with them and blew them off.

She laughed. A tinkly tender noise that made me think that in order to hear it again, I'd do a lot. I'd do anything. And it was funny, because her laugh was a good contrast to her voice, which was sort of low and nasal—if a voice can be both those things at the same time.

“I don't
want
him. I just want to check in with Liesel.”

“You're her friend?”

“We go to Nightingale together. We have one of those friendships where we're close, but—whatever, I've known her forever.”

“That's how I am with Arno!” Some of her friends looked over and smiled. I'd been loud. I was drunk.

“Where are you from?” I asked. “Tell me everything about you. But first—do you have a cold?”

That's when David walked up with someone
almost as tall as him.

“This is Risa,” David said. I looked up and David had a female twin: a big dark-haired girl who was clearly destined for the UConn Huskies and the WNBA.

“Hey.” She held out her hand. I took it and it was like shaking with David.

“I'm Ruth,” the girl sitting next to me said. I realized that, even though we'd been basically saying nothing, she and I had managed to sort of snuggle up to each other. She was warm. I had my hand slipped around her waist, and slowly we extracted ourselves from each other. How had that happened?

“This is a good party,” I said. Ruth giggled.

We heard a whoop from the kitchen. All of us wandered in there, since everyone in the living room was swaying to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and laughing.

In the kitchen, the lights were off and Froggy was attacking the dry ice with a two-foot-long cleaver that his parents probably used to hack Thanksgiving turkeys to pieces. Bits of dry ice were skittering around on the tile floor and everyone was egging Froggy on while protecting their eyes. It was only a matter of time before the
cleaver connected with the Grey Goose bottles in the middle of the ice, and then there'd be a real mess.

“Why is he doing that?” Ruth asked. Her eyes were a little watery around the edges, and every time I looked at her, she was smiling. That made me smile too, that and her crazy voice.

“Because it's his house and no one can make him stop.”

I realized I was holding Ruth's hand. We edged into a pantry.

“Can we spend some time together sometime?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes, let's find each other.”

“Let's definitely do that.”

I reached to kiss her and there was an unbelievably loud crash that shook the whole pantry. Cans of overpriced vegetables from France rained from the shelves.

“The dry ice didn't do that,” I said, covering our heads.

There was another crash, and then several smaller ones. Then quiet. We peeked out and saw Froggy drop the cleaver. Then he flipped the overhead lights on. The ice was still intact.

“Hmm,” Ruth said. We crept through the
kitchen into the living room. Someone had turned off the music.

It was as quiet as it would've been if Froggy's parents had walked in. Then we heard muffled laughter and some whooping noises coming from another part of the apartment. Froggy took off running down the hall.

“Uh oh.” David turned to me. I nodded. We waited and then there was the sound of Froggy screaming.

“My parents' bed!” The Frog screamed as he came running back to us. “They crashed it through the floor!”

He stood in the middle of the living room, swinging what appeared to be a large piece of his parents' bed that looked like an unfinished section of an aluminum baseball bat.

Behind him, Arno came out of the hallway. He was pulling up his pants. Liesel was wearing Arno's jacket, a bra, panties, and no skirt. Her high heels were still on, though.

“Cool it, Alan,” Liesel said. “We were only playing.”

“Everybody out!”

Arno zipped up his pants. He grabbed a glass that was sitting on an end table and took a sip.

“Dude, that thing was so rickety—”

“Out!”

“Ruth,” Liesel screamed over Froggy's voice. “You made it!”

Liesel came over and the two of them hugged hello and everyone watched since Leisel was pretty much naked.

“Out!” Froggy screamed again.

“Froggy's got a temper and he did ride,” some kid sang out. We scrambled around and figured out where the stairs were, since The Frog clearly didn't want us waiting for the elevator, and then we streamed out of there like mice escaping a sinking ship.

“We've got to get across town.” Liesel sounded like she could only hang out on the Upper West Side for so many hours before she started to melt. “We'll see you boys very soon.”

Ruth hugged me and kissed me on the cheek.

It took about one second for a cab to stop for the two girls, probably because Liesel was still wearing next to nothing.

“Call me,” Ruth said. “Get Arno to get my number from Liesel. Call me tomorrow.”

“I will.”

And they were gone.

“Hey,” Arno said. “That girl liked you.”

I looked up at the sky. Sure enough, I could see one star. That's how you know it's a good night in New York City, when you can see just one big star.

“I want you,” David said simply, to Risa. He'd grabbed a cab from the party, rather than hanging around to see what happened. They slipped into the lobby of his building. The night doorman, Jordy, was fast asleep. They got into the old elevator.

“You're sure about this?” Risa said.

“Why wouldn't I be?” David asked. He'd turned his phone off so he wouldn't get calls from Amanda and Jonathan. He knew he was still getting the hang of behaving badly, but he was determined to get there, to the bad place where he thought Arno lived. He told himself that ever since Amanda had cheated on him with Arno, he'd been waiting for what he hoped was about to happen.

“It's your parents' house. Do they mind you bringing girls home in the middle of the night?”

“What? Oh yeah. No. They live like half a block down from me if you think about distance inside apartments that way, and they always go to sleep early. And
I've been—I want you to come upstairs with me.”