Take It Off (24 page)

“Oh, Greta had a layover,” Patch said, as if that explained it. Then he added, “And I, you know, asked her to stay.”

“Bitch,
you're
the one with explainin' to do,” Mickey said, although I had a feeling this wasn't entirely true.

We got one of those minivan cabs and put our stuff in and crowded into the seats. Just as I was about to close the door, I heard somebody calling out to us. I looked up and saw Sara-Beth Benny standing next to a limo, looking very fashionably wintry. She was blowing us kisses. We all waved, and she waved and got into her car and was gone. It was surreal, but pretty much everything seemed surreal right then.

Then I slammed the door, and somebody told
the driver how to get to Patch's. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. As we rode through Queens I started telling them all the things that had happened to us since that day in Mallorca. For the first time, it started to seem kind of funny.

By the time we drove across the Williamsburg Bridge, and on to Delancey, we all knew how we had spent our days apart. “Thank God we're back in Manhattan,” I said. “I feel like never leaving again. And none of you are allowed to, either.” Everyone murmured in agreement. And even though Greta and Suki were in the car, and even though that was pretty much cool with us, my guys knew who I was talking about.

“Sounds like we're approaching the Flood residence,” Arno said dryly.

As the cab turned the corner onto Perry Street, they heard music coming out of the Floods' town house. It sounded like The Detroit Cobras, or something else that February would play. It was definitely a February party.

Arno, who had been sitting in the front seat, said “I'll get it,” and began looking around for his wallet. He was feeling sort of low. Whatever was up with his relative non-attractiveness to girls, he didn't like it. The Greta thing, he had to admit, was mostly a continuation of his competition with Mickey. But Suki he was actually into, and seeing her holding hands with Jonathan stung. Maybe she was just the hand-holding type—it wasn't a type he was really familiar with. Paying for the car gave him an edge, though, and as he followed the rest of them up to the door, he started to feel back in his game.

They all stood there for a minute, and then Arno said, “Hey, Patch, wanna let us in?”

“I forgot my key.” Patch shrugged. He rang the doorbell, but nobody could hear it because the music was too loud. Patch threw his head back and yelled, “Flan! Feb! Let us in!”

For a while, it didn't look like anyone was coming. But then the door swung back and February Flood stood in the doorway. Her hair was wild and her mascara was smudged all around her eyes. She was wearing a black slip that was much too big for her and lace-up high-heeled ankle boots without the laces, and she was smoking a cigarette. It was hard to tell if she had just gotten laid, or if she was just dressed that way. “Oh goody,” she said flatly, looking at Patch, “you're home.”

Everyone trooped into the front room, where it was very dark and very loud. It sounded like there were a lot of people in the living room and in the rooms beyond.

“I got in a fight with Mom and Dad,” February was saying as the guys hung up their coats and shoved their luggage into one of the hallway closets. “I don't even remember what it was about, but they were being total assholes and they went to vacation, to this place called Mallorca. Heard of it?”

Jonathan looked like he was about to be hysterical,
and Suki actually did laugh. “You mean, in Spain?”

“Yeah, Spain. Who the hell are you?”

“That's just really funny because—” Suki started to say, but February interrupted with a terse, “Whatever. So I decided to have a party. Hope you don't, you know, mind.”

Patch introduced Greta and Suki to February, who looked like she was probably going to forget their names as soon as they were gone.

Just then David and Rob came down the stairs. February turned to them and said, “Where's Flan?”

Jonathan's face went pale and his jaw dropped as his friend and stepbrother descended from the direction of Flan's room. David's face was all twisted up, like he didn't know whether to be happy or sad that all his friends were back. But Rob looked euphoric. He was wearing a suit vest, a tie, Diesel jeans, and nothing else. As he came down the stairs he held up a bottle and cried, “Welcome,” as though it were his house.

To everyone's surprise, Jonathan ran at him with his fist clenched. Rob didn't seem to register what was going on, as though he couldn't comprehend why anyone would be mad at him. Luckily for Rob, the swing went slightly to the right of his head, although Jonathan had gotten enough momentum going that when they collided, they went crashing to the floor.

“You asshole!” Jonathan was shouting as he Rob rolled on the floor pummeling each other. By this time, Rob seemed to have caught on and was hitting back. “How could you move in on my life like that? How could you corrupt my little Flan?”

Everyone gasped, although they basically all knew how Jonathan felt about her. It was more just hearing him call her “my Flan” loudly and front of everyone while he was tussling with his new stepbrother.

David, who had been inching along the wall, finally reached Arno. They said “what's up” and hugged awkwardly without taking their eyes off of Jonathan. “What the fuck's happening here?” Arno asked.

David shook his head, sort of unconvincingly. “I dunno.”

Finally February, who had been clapping her hands and enjoying the whole melee, had had enough. She reached in and grabbed Jonathan by the collar and pulled him up on his feet.

“Okay, cowboy,” she said, “get off my date.” Everyone gasped again. February hissed at them, hauling Jonathan over toward David and Arno. She grabbed David's collar with her other hand, which looked especially ridiculous, since David was so tall. “And you, loverboy,” she said to David, “time for you two good old buddies to have a nice little chat.”

David turned to Arno, with a plaintive help-me expression. Arno smirked. Whatever was going on here was too good to stop. As David was being pulled away, though, Arno reached into his pocket and pulled out Jonathan's watch. He put it in the hand that David was reaching out toward him, and said, “This might help you.” Then February pushed them down the stairs and into the kitchen and kicked all the random people there out. When she came back into the hallway, she helped Rob up, and they disappeared up the stairs.

“That is seriously weird,” Arno said to Mickey. They looked over to where Greta and Suki were whispering, and they knew that by then Suki knew everything about the survival test. Patch walked over to them and took Greta by the hand and led her up the stairs. “Why don't you guys come to the roof?” he called down to them.

Arno looked at Suki, then back at Mickey. “Hey dude, I don't want to fight with you. But I think I like her.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mickey said. “Go on. She picked you anyway.”

Once Mickey had gone up to the roof, Arno went over to where Suki was standing by herself. “Hey,” he said, “sorry all this craziness got in the way. But I think
something was going to finally happen between us that day on Mallorca …”

“Yeah, I thought so, too,” Suki said, smiling. “You keep on having a face like that, and it just might.”

February had cleared everybody out of the kitchen, and now it was just me and David sitting across from each other at the big, industrial-looking table. I rubbed my shoulder, which was hurting because I'd fallen on it, and stared at David. He was hanging his head.

“What's up with you, man? Your e-mails got really weird, and like, sort of mean. Are you mad at me?” I said, because even though I urgently wanted to know where Flan was, and what was going on, part of me just wanted all the bad feelings to go away and for Flan to be pure and safe. At least I knew she wasn't with Rob, who February was obviously, if very bizarrely, into. And that meant he definitely was not and had never seriously been interested in her little sister.

David raised his eyes to me. “Not really anymore. I mean, I was. Not at you, but at all of you
guys. It's probably not really fair, but I feel like you guys were really shitty after I got kicked off the boat.”

“But I was the only one who e-mailed you!”

“I know. My dad says I have shoot-the-messenger syndrome, or some shit.” We both laughed at that, even though it really wasn't funny. “Anyway, Rob's not interested in Flan—”

“I can see that—”

“—I am.”

“Oh,” I said. The room sort of went blurry, and if someone had asked me my name I'm not sure I could have told them. I said, “Oh,” again, although I'm not sure I got the whole word out.

“I just … After you asked me to ‘keep an eye on her for you,' I started hanging around her a lot. And since Rob was my only friend in New York, and he was hanging out with Feb, it made sense. Flan was, like, really comforting. She's sharp, and she said all these really smart things about our dynamic as a group and it … made me feel okay.”

“Oh.” I felt like my insides had been pulled out. These were all things I knew about Flan already. My Flan. If I'd wanted to beat Rob to a
pulp, now all I wanted to do was not be. This was so infinitely worse.

“My dad told me this story about how he met my mom in college. He said the same thing happened. This buddy of his was going out with Mom, and he went abroad for his junior year, and when he came back my dad and mom were engaged. It made me feel like it might be kind of romantic if …”

“Oh,” I said, because whatever he was going to say, I didn't want to hear it.

“But then I realized that that's my parents, and that's fucking gross. Anyway, I didn't do anything with Flan. I just thought about it. And that's not so hard to believe, right? Flan's a really cool kid. In fact, she's not really a kid at all. She's fucking hot, and if you want to be with her you should tell her and stop saying one thing and doing another.”

I took a deep breath, and for a minute I thought I might cry. Whatever mangle of emotions I had experienced with Suki on the beach, this was much, much more intense.

“What are you, my therapist?” I said, smiling suddenly out of sheer relief.

“I'm sorry, man,” David said, giving me a very earnest look. “I'm glad you're back, but we can
talk all this shit out later. Right now, you better go find Flan.”

I stood up, still not entirely sure how to feel about anything. David reached out his hand and we shook in this really stilted way. I felt something cold and metallic in his hand, and when I pulled my hand away I saw that he had palmed me a watch. My watch, the Tiffany's one with my initials engraved in the back.

“How did you get this?” I asked.

“Don't ask,” he said. And even though the whole thing was improbable, I was so overcome by the miraculousness of it all, that I threw my arms around him and we hugged in a really sincere way.

“I missed you, dude,” I said, “and I'll see you really, really soon.”

“Go,” he said, and I went off to find Flan.

I took the stairs two at a time up to the roof. It was still kind of early, for New York, and all of February's friends, and all their friends and friends' friends, were still crowding the stairwells and most of the rooms on the first floor. It was strangely quiet up on the roof, and you could tell that everybody down below thought it was still winter, when in fact the air was kind of temperate and refreshing and clear. All of the plants were sill brown and leafless, of course, but they looked nice against that pale lavender color that you only get in a city as crazy and twisted and lit up as New York.

There were a few people up there I didn't know, and then some people I knew really well. Patch and Greta were standing over by the railing looking into the garden. Greta was wearing this white velvet blazer that I think I recognized from Flan's closet, and it complemented her hair really
nicely. She looked kind of sophisticated, which I realized was something that I never really thought of Flan as being. But now, looking at her coat on another girl, I realized that I actually, subconsciously, knew this all along. Arno and Suki were leaning up against another part of the railing. He had his coat spread over both their shoulders, and he was nibbling at her ear. As I looked at them I realized I didn't feel weird about Suki at all, and also that they looked great together. Farther down the railing, February and Rob were doing something disgusting with their tongues. They didn't exactly make as beautiful a couple, but it was something I guess I was going to have to get used to.

“What are you doing up here?” Greta had turned and was calling out to me. I walked over to her and Patch, and Suki and Arno came over, too.

“I don't know, I just wanted to say good night, I guess. In case you guys all disappeared. I mean, where's Mickey gone off to already?”

“He got lonely, I guess,” Patch said, and he pointed across the gardens to the Fradys' roof, where Mickey and Philippa were … talking.

“Yeah, you just can't keep those crazy kids apart.”

“Speaking of which, what are you doing up here?” Arno said, giving me that look he always gives me when he thinks he can teach me something about girls. I didn't mind, though; it was just in his nature to act like that. And he probably
had
taught me a lot about girls, so who could blame him?

Suki disentangled herself from Arno and walked over to me. She laced her arm in mine, and for a minute I thought she was going to do something really embarrassing, like confess her love to me or tell all my friends that we'd made out on a beach in the moonlight. (Which was seeming cheesier every time I thought about it.) But she didn't. She said, “Jonathan, say good night to your friends,” in this very mothering tone.