Hold On Tight (9 page)

Arno turned and looked into her exotically dark eyes. “Well, maybe I could be in love with you.”

She rolled her dark eyes and released an impatient sigh. “Maybe you can find me once you've tried it out on someone else.”

Arno realized that her statement had multiple interpretations, but he decided to go with the one that favored him the most. “I saw you in my dreams last night,” he said, meaningfully.

Lara turned and looked at him with a serious and unreadable expression. She stared at him longer than people usually stare in real life, as though she were searching for something inside him, and then she took a lollipop from behind her ear. She didn't take her eyes from him as she unwrapped it. Then, instead of licking it, she bit into it. Arno stared at the slight parting of her lips until it started to drive him crazy. So he went for it.

They shared warm, candy-flavored kisses for a long time, on the slope, oblivious to the chaos all around them.

Patch was back from his hike.

He had found the highest point on campus, which had finally made his cell phone work. It hadn't made him able to talk to Greta, however, as hers was either out of juice or turned off. He'd checked his messages—just one, in which Greta said many things that were drowned out by all the people in the background. He hadn't wanted to think about it until now, but Greta had told him once about her first serious boyfriend, who was a senior back when she was a freshman, and who, he was pretty sure, went to Stanford now. And now Greta—the only girl he's maybe even …
loved
… was 3,000 miles away with her ex-boyfriend. It was killing him.

Patch shoved the phone in his pocket and walked back to the center of campus, where bonfires were burning and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Really
enjoying themselves. Really loudly.

He walked up to a group of girls who were dancing to the MIA song playing on their boom box, and asked
them if they'd seen the kid who had just given the lecture. “He's my friend, but I was a jackass and I missed it,” he added.

The girls looked like pretty normal college girls, if a little sorority-esque with their straight blond hair and their tans, but apparently they weren't normal, because as soon as they saw Patch they started jumping up and down and whispering “Oh my god,” into their hands.

“It's the HPSB,” one of them said, her voice quavering.

“It totally is.”

“Can I just say, you look
so hot
without your clothes on?”

“Um.” Patch fiddled with the phone in his pocket.

“Do you just wear that old baseball cap so people won't recognize you?”

“You shouldn't—you're gorgeous.”

“So, like, who's the redhead? Because you don't seem like the marrying type.”

Patch was overwhelmed by the questions, and displeased with their direction. He was trying to think of a graceful exit when a big hand slammed into his shoulder and he went flying forward into the circle of girls.

“Sorry,” he said, righting himself. The girls hadn't seemed to mind.

“Katy, why the hell don't you have your shirt on?”
the big guy with the big hand said. Patch suddenly realized that the girls weren't wearing swimsuits. They weren't at the beach, after all, and what they had on was now looking a lot more like bras and panties.

“Excuse me,” Patch said, going back over to the Pusher. He was wearing his visor upside down and sideways, his shirt said TKE, and even though he was shorter than Patch, his arms looked like they knew their way around a weight room. “But that was weak.”

The Pusher thought this over. “I ain't weak.”

“As in lame. Uncool. Uncalled for.”

The Pusher's friends were gathering round, muttering. “What the hell is going on here?” one of them said. The girls had stopped dancing, and they were watching the frat dudes apprehensively.

“It's a freakin' skin show.”

“Hey, is that our keg?”

“Who's that little freak drinking right out of it?”

“Um,” Patch said again, because he knew without looking that the little freak was Mickey. “Listen, dudes …”

“Oh, yeah? Why should we listen to the Hottest Private Whatever when clearly all he wants to do is steal our women, get 'em drunk and make 'em take their clothes off?”

Patch scratched at his forehead. “Dude, I respect the
fact that you are the only guys who are allowed to do that.” He had always been lucky enough to sound sincere even when was going for sarcasm. “But it's just a party. Everyone's just having a good time.”

“Yeah, you're having a good time because my girlfriend doesn't have her shirt on,” the Pusher yelled in Patch's face. “I'm gonna go kick that freak's ass and shut this party down. And when I'm done with that, I'm gonna take care of you.”

Patch breathed deeply, and let the Pusher see the whites of his eyes.

“Dude. Would you listen to me? I get it. My girlfriend is, as we speak, unreachable and partying in California. Do you know how that makes me feel? Any idea?”

The Pusher thought about this. “A little bit.”

“You have a little bit of an idea? Because I really wouldn't care if your girlfriends were all topless right now. Buck naked. I'd trade it all just to get a
call
through to my girl.”

The Pusher and his backup frat guys seemed kind of touched by this.

“The best I can do,” Patch said, “the best that
I
can do right now, is party. Be a part of the party, and not ruin anybody else's party. You know what I mean?”

The frat guys all hung their heads for a minute, and
then collectively pumped their fists in the air. There was a long silence, and then the Pusher said, “That was beautiful, man. Let's party!”

The guys continued to whoop and cheer, and Patch, still fiddling with the cell phone in his pocket, went off to pry Mickey from the keg.

Before he could do that, though, he spotted Jonathan, and the scene was weird enough that he had to pause and make sure it was actually him. It was. He was sitting on the grass next to a petite blonde who was wearing a conservative, navy blue suit, pearl studs, and two large circular pins on her chest that proclaimed
Bush/Cheney 2004
and
Campus Republicans
. She was vigorously pounding her little fist into her other little palm.

“Marriage means one man one woman, end of story,” Patch heard her say.

“Wow,” Jonathan said, apparently without irony. “So that's what you care about.”

“Yes, and the thing about me—as opposed to the liberals who run this campus—is that I really
do
care. It's not just a smarmy front. I care
a lot.”

“Excuse me,” Patch said. The girl looked up with this don't-tick-me-off kind of expression, but as soon as she saw Patch her piercing gaze softened. “I think this guy needs to take a breather. Can I borrow him from you?”

“Oh, okay,” she said, blushing. Jonathan jumped up and shook hands with the girl.

“Thanks, Pam,” he said. “I don't think I agree with you, but seeing your passion … well, that really helped a lot.”

As they headed in the direction of Mickey, who was still attached to the keg, Jonathan turned to Patch and said, a little crazily, “I had no
idea
there were so many things to care about.”

Arno found himself standing on the bottom of the slope again. He was holding two fresh beers—one for Lara and one for him. The grassy expanses of the Vassar campus had been overwhelmed by the kind of partying that only happens with just the right combination of heat, hormones, and Mickey Pardo. It was loud and salty out there.

But Arno didn't really care about any of that. What he cared about—a lot, and suddenly—was that Lara girl. And where she had disappeared to.

He blinked his eyes. Surely something was amiss here. He had just been telling Lara about his parents' art gallery and how awesome it was to go there at night to look at art by himself. Or with a girl.

Arno was reasonably sure that conversation had gone deep.

He surveyed the masses of people, who were dancing and shouting and showing off their skin. Even with most
of the girls stripped down to their bras, caroming around on dudes' shoulders, the only thing he wanted to see was the girl with the dark eyes and sparkly top.

The beers in his hands now looked sad. What was he going to do with them without her?

Then he remembered what she'd said. Before he could have a meaningful relationship with a girl like Lara, he was going to have to have already been in love. Arno took a sip of one beer, and then the other, and wondered if he could wait.

There was a feeling growing in his chest. It was a rare kind of sadness, almost a little bit like pain. He looked down there, just to make sure everything was okay, and he realized that his heart was beating like crazy. He could actually feel it pumping this bizarre, unfamiliar pain/pleasure feeling all over his body.

And then he knew what the feeling was. It was love. Love was beating in his heart.

It was nearly dawn, and my friends and I were splayed out on luxurious leather couches in perhaps the largest room you could possibly describe as
cozy
. This was the “cottage” that Mickey had neglected to show me till like two hours ago—the one the Vassar Art Department had seen fit to put him up in. Apparently, it had been worth their while. Mickey Mania was currently sweeping the campus. For my part, I was just really enjoying the whole fireplace, scotch, country-chic thing.

“Hey, you guys want to do this again next weekend?” Mickey said, tossing his cell over his head and not catching it as it came falling down on the hearth. He picked it up and looked at it for a minute, but I guess it must have still been working okay, because he flipped it open and started playing cell phone Deer Hunter.

“Hell yes,” Arno said. He said it sort of dreamily, though. Apparently he had met and become smitten
with Margot's friend, Lara. Which figures—Arno usually only falls for girls who are as absurdly good-looking as he is and know it. So I guess that explains the starry eyes. “How are we going to do that?”

“Argh!” Mickey was keying into his cell furiously. “Hold on. Hah! Die! What? Oh, yeah. Let's do this again next weekend!”

“Right. How are we going to do that?” I said.

“This professor I met before my lecture? She was really impressed. She says the speaker she was going to have next Saturday at
her
college just cancelled and she said—get this—a Mickey Pardo lecture would be a
major coup.”

“Shut up,” Patch said. He shook his head in that very Patch unbelieving-but-heard-it-all-before way. “I can't believe I missed this lecture of yours.”

“It was wild,” Mickey said.

“You should have seen our boy,” Arno said. “He had this laser pen, and he was like pointing at different people's bodies and talking about the modulation of color on nipples and shit. It was hilarious!”

“So this professor said that Vassar is like sixty percent female, but her college—Sarah
Lawrence—is like
seventy-five
percent,” Mickey said. “Ya'll will go with me now, right?”

“Just so long as we get to stay in the President's Guest Cottage, or whatever the equivalent is,” I said.

“Professor Soto
did
say that the campus used to be a private estate with like mansions on it and stuff,” Mickey said. “I guess that's how it got its name—Sarah Lawrence was the founder's old lady.”

“Wait, did you say Sarah Lawrence?” Arno looked like he was the hero in a costume drama and he was about to run across a field of wild-flowers to embrace his mistress. His face was that lit up.

“Uh, yeah,” Mickey said, squinting his eyes at Arno like he was slow or something. “Sarah Lawrence. Private estate. Seventy-five percent female.”

“Lara
goes to Sarah Lawrence,” Arno said. “And I was actually thinking that might be a really good place for me next year. Like, maybe I could apply early action and …” We all watched him drift with the wildflowers for a moment. Eventually, mercifully, he snapped out of it. “Man, that was one wild party.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping the conversation would
not
return to Lara. There was something cruel about her that I couldn't quite pinpoint, and even though Arno has done wrong many more times than he's
been
done wrong, I still sometimes feel a little protective of him. Which is absurd, I know. “I always thought college social life was going to be sort of underwhelming, after New York and everything, but that was like, pretty bacchic. I mean, do you even realize what just happened to that campus?”

“It was pretty crazy.”

“That was the most fun I've had in weeks.”

“Totally.”

We all paused and thought about that, soaking in the high-end hunting lodge ambience, sipping our drinks.

“Wouldn't it be sweet if we all ended up going here?” Mickey said.

We all murmured our agreement, because we all realized at once how
cool
that would be—starting over, but having your best people with you.

“Hell yeah,” Arno said. “It seems like there's just so much to experience here. I mean, college is going to totally give us so much depth.”

I couldn't believe I'd just heard Arno use the D word, but I had to nod because I kind of felt the same way. Even if it sounded cheesy, wasn't that sort of what I wanted, too?

“College is going to be awesome,” Mickey went on, and we all just laughed and said hell yes, and didn't mention the irony that it was Mickey—the worst student among us—who was getting excited about college.