Hold On Tight (5 page)

Just to the left of the fireplace there was a collection of cut-glass decanters gleaming with golden liquid. David righted himself and sidled over to the bar, where he poured a healthy portion of something that smelled like burnt rubbing alcohol. He felt five years older just inhaling it, and when he examined himself in the mirror behind the bar, he discovered that it was true: In the red-hand-stained suit, with a tumbler of very old grain alcohol in his hand, he
did
look more sophisticated. Except, of course, for the fact that the hem of his pants was above his ankles, which reminded him that he wasn't, in truth, very sophisticated at all.

“Yo, Davey,” he heard Mickey yelling from somewhere inside the cottage.

David gave himself one last glance in the mirror and climbed the stairs. After peeking into a series of immaculately made up rooms, he found the one Mickey was in. There was a large canopy bed with drawn curtains made out of red and gold brocade. On the
wall next to the bed there was a plaque. He was stepping toward it when Mickey waved him away.

“It just says the bed was a gift from the Rockefellers—it's originally from Versailles,” Mickey, who was standing on the balcony, told him nonchalantly. “What do we have here?” he added, gesturing toward the tumbler.

David handed Mickey the scotch as he joined him on the balcony.

“Whoa,” Mickey said. Then he swigged from the scotch, coughing satisfactorily when it was gone. He looked toward David with glassy eyes, but David was looking at something else.

Below them, in the fifty-meter pool that was housed in this remote corner of campus, a group of women in matching black bathing suits and funny white bathing caps were splashing around and making a lot of noise.

“What are those things on their heads?” David said absentmindedly as he watched a pair of perfectly muscled calves break the surface of the pool.

“Well, I was reading in my welcome packet that Vassar was a women's college until 1969—it was one of the, um, six sisters colleges? Anyway, maybe they have some weird former girls' school tradition about wearing old-timey bathing caps.”

“Uh, that would be
seven
sisters to you…,” David said. He had been half-listening to what Mickey was saying.

“Really? How do
you
know that?” Mickey asked.

“Seven. Definitely seven. Smith, Barnard, Wellesley …” David paused and looked at Mickey who was smirking unabashedly. “Shut up.”

“David, I just had no idea you were such a proponent of women's higher education. That's awesome.”

“I said shut up. And they're playing water polo, you dumbass. Those aren't old-timey bathing caps. They're like special water polo helmets.”

“Oh.”

They were distracted by some loud screeching and name-calling below. One of the girls seemed to be dragging another girl around by her bathing suit. This went on for a few moments, during which David wasn't sure if he breathed or not. Finally someone blew a whistle and the girls all moved to the edge of the pool for a time-out.

David and Mickey were staring unabashedly when one of the girls noticed them on the balcony. “Hey,” she yelled, “are you a professor?”

“Me?” David called down. “Um, no.” The girls propping themselves up with their elbows on the side of the pool all started to laugh, but it didn't seem like mean laughing to David. They were all looking up at him, and they all had glowing athletic skin and bright eyes.

The tall brunette who had blown the whistle yelled: “Are you an FBI agent?” which caused the girls to erupt again.

“I was just kidding,” the first girl went on. “You don't really look like a professor. Or an FBI agent. Especially with that art project on your chest.”

David looked down at the red splotches on his shirt, and then at Mickey, who was nodding to himself with satisfaction. “Told you,” he said.

“Hey!” One of the other girls exclaimed. “It's that nude photo artist guy.”

“Oh yeah,” said another. “And that's the cute guy from the photos, too.”

“Are you
really
the cute guy from the photos?” said a girl who had pushed herself out of the water and pulled off the cap to release a cascade of bleach-blond hair.

“Um, I guess. One of the guys …,” David mumbled, feeling his ears growing hot.

“Oh, I didn't mean to embarrass you,” the girl with blond hair said. “I just think you look really good in a too-small suit, too.”

David touched his flaming ear and smiled boyishly. It suddenly looked like he didn't have to worry about leaving the attention from girls behind, after all.

“Are you sure this is where we're supposed to meet them?” Arno yelled over “Under Pressure,” which was reverberating against the walls of the Mug, Vassar's basement, on-campus bar. That was when he noticed all the glitter-encrusted signs on the walls proclaiming Friday night “Space Disco Night.”

“Yeah,” Patch said, “hold on a sec.” He was texting something, and since he'd only learned to text a week ago, it was taking all his concentration. Patch had insisted on taking an actual tour of the campus, so that he could report back to Greta, and Arno had tagged along.

He still hadn't figured out how he was going to get depth, although he could feel that it must be somewhere nearby. There were
quads
filled with girls out there. Surely some of them had to have depth.

Arno surveyed the scene. Many small cafeterialike tables were set up around the dance floor, which was reflected in the mirrored ceiling. The guy with Buddy
Holly glasses who had served them their beer was currently dancing across the floor—or at least sort of dancing, although the word “hopping” also occurred to Arno. Girls with sparkly eye makeup, frizzed hair, big jewelry, and short-shorts were swaying with guys who had apparently used the sparkly eye makeup, too. It occurred to Arno that a lot of work had gone into Space Disco Night.

He surveyed the girls and tried to imagine taking one of them out for a walk across the quad and a talk about life. He was having a hard time imagining which one of these girls would actually be down for that, though. There were two leggy creatures wearing identical little gold dresses and dancing cheek to cheek, pretty close to them, and though Arno didn't think they looked like the greatest conversationalists, he had to admit they were pretty hot.

“Don't you think Bowie is a genius?” Arno called out to them.

The girls looked back and appraised him. After a long, weird moment passed, Arno realized that he was being ignored.

“Sorry, dude,” Patch said, finally putting the phone down and taking a swig of his PBR. “Damn, these things go down quick, huh?”

The two gold-covered girls were paying attention
again. One of them looked at Patch and whispered to the other. Then they both looked at him, and kept dancing, except in a slower, more touching, attention-hungry kind of way.

“I know. Sometimes college kids have no taste,” Arno said, crushing his empty can under his foot. He should have known girls like that would care about superficial things, like who
New York
magazine wanted on its cover. “You want another one?”

Patch nodded, and they moved through the crowd of dancers to the bar at the end of the room. A line had formed, and as they joined the end of it, Arno noticed that a girl had replaced the Buddy Holly guy. She had long dark hair that twisted around near her waist, and she was wearing jeans and a wife beater.

“This is pretty cool that they have a campus bar,” Patch said.

Arno looked back at the dance floor. Everyone looked like they were having a great time, but Arno tried to concentrate and tell himself that it was all frivolity.
Depth
, he silently reminded himself. That's what he needed.

When they reached the head of the line he smiled at the girl bartender—she was even prettier than he had thought before. She pointed at him and jutted her chin like a person too busy for niceties.

“Two beers,” Patch said, laying another bill on the bar.

She reached into a bucket of ice, put two beers on the counter, and took Patch's twenty. As she was counting change out for them, Arno said, “I bet you'd rather be hidden in the library somewhere, reading a French novel.”

“Huh?” she said, looking nervously down the line.

“Or studying whatever you study,” Arno said. “What do you study? Maybe we could hang out later and talk about it.”

She squinted at him. “I don't,” she said. “I graduated three years ago. But if you want to get together and talk about how hard it is to get a job with a bachelor's degree from a liberal arts college, I guess I'd be up for that.”

“Oh,” Arno said, taking his beer and moving slowly away from the bar, “Yeah, maybe I'll come back some night when it's not so busy.”

“I'll be here,” she barked at him, turning to the next customer.

Arno caught up with Patch, who was walking around the perimeter of the dance floor and who hadn't seemed to notice his friend's botched pickup. “Hey, I wonder what happened to Jonathan and Ted …” He twisted his head around to make sure that they weren't somewhere in the crowd, and was met instead with the sight
of a very large, fratish-looking dude with a flashlight and a plastic badge. He was also yelling.

“Hey!” he shouted at them. “Let's see those armbands!”

“Um, armbands?” Patch looked at him coolly, like a person who has just been spit on and is trying not to be irritated about it.

“Yeah, kiddo, there's no drinking in here if you don't got an armband. And you can't get an armband if you're under twenty-one.”

“Well,” Patch frowned, “I'm over twenty-one, and I don't have an armband.”

This seemed to confuse the guy for a few beats, but then he returned to the idea that an armband equaled ability to drink. “My job is to kick out anyone out who has a beer but doesn't have an armband. And that's just what I'm gonna do,” he grunted. Then he grabbed Patch by the wrist and seemed about to pull him out of the bar when a blond girl in converse high-tops and a sleeveless dress that looked like it could also have been a tube-top came skidding up next to them.

“Lou,” she squealed excitedly, “you caught him!”

“Who?” asked Lou. He was confused again.

“The
real
Hottest Private School Boy. Can I have him, please?”

“He's underage,” Lou said, “At least, I think he is.”

“Of
course
he is. He's the HPSB. He's still in high school, duh!” She sighed in exasperation, and turned toward Patch. “I see that you're trying to hide underneath that old baseball hat, but I would have recognized you in a paper bag.” The blond grabbed Patch by the hand and pulled him into the crowd on the dance floor. Arno looked up at Lou disgustedly, and realized instantly that he wasn't going to get any sympathy there.

As he was being dragged toward the door, “Rebel Rebel” started up, so Patch couldn't even hear his friend calling for him. Arno felt his mood sink and rise at once. Getting kicked out—that made him an outsider, didn't it? And all outsiders had depth, didn't they?

“Ted's brother!?” squealed the pretty, neo-boho girl my brother had just introduced me to. She had a wide, genuine smile on her face, and she twisted her head left and right so I could give her the double-cheek-kiss treatment. “I can't believe there are
two
of you.”

“Naw,” Ted said, and to my embarrassment he seemed to be blushing. But then I realized that this was different blushing—not the full-on, please-shoot-me blushing of high school. It was more like his face had just gotten some flattering coloring. “I'm like a paler, very unexciting version of J.”

This was the kind of thing I'd been angling to hear by coming to visit my brother, but hearing it now, I was filled with a queasy suspicion that it just wasn't true anymore. I smiled weakly at the girl, trying to show her that I did have some humility. She patted the lush patch of grass next to her.

“I'm Zelda,” she said as I sat down in the spot
she had indicated. There were a bunch of other people sitting around on the field, too, smoking cigarettes and looking pretty relaxed for college students at the end of a semester. They were all dressed like Zelda, in loose-fitting peasant gear that looked kind of comfy and expensive at once.

We had been slowly making our way from Lathrop to this campus bar, where everyone supposedly hangs out, but we'd been stopped on the way by a lot of people who wanted to talk to Ted, a surprising number of them hoping he could tell them what was happening that weekend.

So we were running a little late.

Ted sank down on the lawn, and I sat down, too—hesitantly, because grass stains could be potentially disastrous for my jeans—and I smiled at Zelda, who was no longer looking at me. She was carefully pushing Ted's hair behind his ears.

“So how's New York?” one of Zelda's guy friends called out to me. He was wearing a cord vest over a white V-neck shirt and jean shorts. Weird.

“Busy, you know,” I said with a shrug.

The guy nodded. “Everyone is so formulaically unconventionally busy there.”

“Um, right.”

I turned to survey the lawn. Students were
everywhere, walking on the paths that led between the big, brick buildings. Night had fallen, and there was laughter everywhere. Two girls were walking toward me, wearing long, crinkly A-line skirts and silvery collections of bangles on their wrists. They had faces like little foxes, snuggled close to each other, telling secrets. When they had almost reached our group, the one in the belted cardigan, who was wearing her hair in two long braids, dropped her bottom lip in mock horror and yelled, “Get your hands off my boyfriend!”

For a moment I thought she might be referring to me, but then I saw Zelda jump away from my brother. She had been giving him a head massage—at least, that's what it looked like.