Last Stop This Town (15 page)

“No answer,” Dylan reported.

“Let’s just head back to the car,” Noah shrugged.

They headed into the subway station, bought some tokens, and studied the subway map. Concluding that the E train was the best bet to get back to the Village, they headed down to the platform and waited.

A train approached, but it was the C train. The guys stepped back and let the passengers get in and out. Then, as the doors closed, Noah spotted someone inside the train.

It was Sarah.

And what’s more, she was with some Chace Crawford-looking dude.

“Sarah?” Noah blurted out, in disbelief.

Dylan turned and saw her as well, so he knew Noah wasn’t crazy. The car started to leave the station.

“Sarah!” Noah yelled.

Noah ran up to the car and pounded on the door, but it was no use. She didn’t notice him and the train sped away.

Noah looked panicked. “What’s Sarah doing here in the city?!” he asked frantically.

“And who’s that dude?” Dylan added, indelicately.

Noah dug out his phone and starting dialing, but Dylan tried to talk him off the proverbial ledge. “What are you doing?”

“Calling her.”

“Don’t do that. Come on.”

Dylan tried to take the phone away but Noah wouldn’t let him. Noah dialed, listened for a moment, then looked back at his phone, cursing himself.

“No signal.” Noah lashed out at Dylan: “Damn it! I shouldn’t have listened to you! We should have just gone to Marco’s!”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Sarah isn’t even at Marco’s.”

“Yeah, well, if I was at Marco’s I wouldn’t have seen her with that guy!”

“There you go. That’s the spirit. Complete denial.”

Noah looked helpless, and Dylan had run out of ideas to comfort him. So they just waited on the platform for their train.

At the laundromat, Walker was playing wingman while Pike chatted with Haley, the twenty-something girl in the tie-dye t-shirt.

Haley was pontificating about something, then paused dramatically. “I don’t know, I guess I’m just a very spiritual person,” she announced pretentiously.

Walker rolled his eyes. He hated girls who said they were “spiritual.” If they believed in God and went to church or temple or whatever, fine, just say you’re religious. But “spiritual” girls usually weren’t religious at all; they just believed in nonsensical crap like auras and Ouija boards.

But Pike was playing along and replied, “Me, too! You know, I sensed that about you. I’m very intuitive about these things.”

Walker wondered whether Pike would have been onboard with her babble if she’d said she was a pedophile. Or a Nazi.

The dryer buzzed and Haley started collecting her clothes. “Hey, do you guys want to head down to Soho to this amazing club where they do performance art?”

“Yes. Yes, we do,” Pike answered with a straight face.

“But what about Dylan and Noah?” Walker reminded him.

“We’ll catch up with them later.” Pike eyed Walker in the hopes that he might be a little more agreeable.

Walker didn’t want to be a cock-blocker, so he signed off with an albeit unconvincing, “Okay. Sounds good.”

Haley grabbed her basket of clothes and they headed out.

On the street, Haley gushed, “You guys are going to love this. Did you ever see ‘Interior Scroll’ by Carolee Schneemann?”

The guys shook their heads no.

“It’s amazing,” Haley continued. “She unrolls a scroll from her vagina onstage and reads a speech written on it about sexism and meat.”

“Sounds very powerful,” Pike commented thoughtfully.

Walker looked at Pike, like,
What the hell are we getting into?

After they dropped off Haley’s laundry at her apartment, the three of them took a taxi to “der Freiheitsgestalt” in the heart of Soho. It was little more than a dark, dirty bar with a dozen small tables and an elevated stage you might see at an elementary school holiday pageant. The name was taken from the German performance artist Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture movement in which he spent three days in 1974 in a room with a wild coyote. And Joseph Beuys would have been proud of the progress of history: Onstage, a naked man was giving a silent, seated Chinese woman a haircut. Literally.

As he cut five inches off the back, he melodramatically recited:

Potential life? Potential death.

Clone, hone, velodrome.

His dong flapped in the wind as he snipped off another large section of the woman’s hair, giving her a bald patch on one side.

Pike and Walker sat with Haley at a table near the front. Walker stared blankly at the “artist” while Pike did his best to appear into it, nodding his head approvingly. Next to Pike, Haley snapped her applause (only troglodytes applaud by clapping with their hands).

She whispered to Pike, “This is so visceral.”

The pot earlier in the evening must have made Pike really horny because even though Haley was a cute girl with curly brown hair, only a committed pussy-hound would sit through this crap. But Pike continued the grungy intellectual charade and played it for all it was worth, replying, “It’s very raw.”

“Exactly!” Haley gushed.

Walker spoke up, wondering aloud, “Does she get naked, too?”

Pike elbowed him.

Haley leaned over and whispered, “That’s not a woman.”

Confused, Walker strained to get a better look.

The naked guy cut another large section of hair, reciting:

Lenticular process? Follicular holocaust.

D.N.A., C.I.A., Chardonnay.

The audience snapped their approval.

Pike leaned over and whispered to Haley, “You wanna get baked?” No soul-searching, hand-wringing, or elaborate plans with Pike, just a spur-of-the-moment suggestion, a whim really.

Haley smiled. “You’ve got some?”

Sure, the brick of marijuana was in the back seat of the Cube, but Pike had remembered to pilfer a small supply off the top. He raised an eyebrow.

“My hero,” she beamed.

She took his hand and they stood up.

Walker protested, “Wait, where are you going?” but they didn’t answer. Walker watched helplessly as they abandoned him.

Onstage, the Chinese “woman” was losing more hair.

“Great,” Walker muttered to himself.

D
YLAN AND
N
OAH
rode the E train downtown as Noah frantically surfed the web on his phone with an intermittent-at-best signal.

“There,” he finally announced. “Thank you, Twitter.”

He read Sarah’s tweet: “‘Heading down to Stark Raving Mad 2012.’” Noah was confused. “Wait. She’s going to our party?”

“How did she find out about it?” Dylan asked, a tad annoyed that the party wasn’t as exclusive as he thought.

“Probably from Gossip Girl back there.”

“Hey, check, maybe he’s one of her friends…”

Noah waited for his signal to come back, then started scanning through Sarah’s list of Facebook friends. During a signal outage, Noah told Dylan, “We need to get to that party.”

“What are you going to do? She’s with that guy.”

“I don’t know, but I have to do something.”

Dylan looked skeptical.

Noah found something. “There he is. Kim Striker.” Noah looked up at Dylan. “Seriously? What kind of dumb name is that? He has a girl’s name!” Noah was not taking the news of Sarah’s apparent moving-on well.

Dylan grabbed the phone and looked at Kim Striker’s profile. “He’s a freshman at U. of W.”

This was getting worse and worse for Noah. “She probably met him when she visited the school,” he sighed. “Come on! How long does this train take?”

The truth was that Sarah
had
met Kim Striker at the University of Wisconsin when she was visiting Madison during her February break. He was a freshman and led the campus tour. They had hit it off right away—he was an art history major and that was something Sarah was seriously considering. After the tour, they exchanged emails.

Sarah hadn’t thought much about it at the time. After all, she had a serious boyfriend and made that fact clear to anyone who perused her Facebook profile. So when Kim emailed her a couple of weeks later, she naturally assumed it was innocent, which it mostly was.

“Any other questions about the school, just give me a shout,” was all he wrote. Sarah did have a few more questions—
Did everyone pretty
much join a sorority or was it cool not to pledge? Can you change your major
after you declare? Did Kim ever feel lost in such a big school?
—and Kim and Sarah became friends. In April, when Sarah found out she got in, Kim was the first person she told, even before Noah.

To Sarah, Kim was just a friend. Kim, however, had obviously considered the possibility that knowing a hot freshman girl might pay dividends in the Fall. There was little effort in maintaining the Facebook friendship, and Kim had seen how things change between girls and their “serious” boyfriends. Especially when the boyfriend is suddenly a thousand miles away and the girl is plopped down in a campus with 30,000 undergraduates. It was just a fact of life and it cost Kim nothing to wait and see.

So when Sarah called him suddenly last week—an actual phone call, not a text or email—crying about how she broke up with her boyfriend, Kim was glad she couldn’t see his shit-eating grin. He consoled her for as long as he could stand it, then offered to cheer her up with a trip into the city. Kim was already out of school for the summer and had scored an awesome internship at the MOMA. Another intern that he was hooking up with had told him about Stark Raving Mad and after a few texts, he had two wristbands.

The ironic thing was that Sarah only agreed to go into New York to see Kim because she thought Noah was going to be at Marco’s house. She just didn’t think she could deal with seeing Noah all weekend long. So Sarah lied to her parents and took the train into Grand Central by herself.

Kim met her by the clock with a big hug. Sarah hadn’t really thought of Kim in that way before, but after talking to him the other night and seeing him now, she couldn’t help but wonder if something might happen between them on this visit.

Kim took her to the theater district to get Ethiopian food (which Sarah had never had before). Then they went back to Kim’s sublet on the Upper West Side that he shared with five other guys from Madison. After a million questions about the school, and some obscene
Are you
going to bone her?
gestures behind her back, Sarah stowed her stuff and changed to go out.

Sarah wasn’t sure she was ready to move on just yet. She felt a pang of guilt about even being on this trip. Even though she and Noah were over, they had been a couple for a long time and they were in love, for Christ’s sake. You don’t just move on to some other guy after one week. But all her friends told her she was crazy not to go off with a hot college guy like Kim Striker, so she did it.

They took the C train downtown together, listening on split headphones to Kim’s iPod. He was playing some band Sarah had never heard of before called “Vivian Girls.” But it was good and Sarah looked over at Kim and they shared a smile. It occurred to her that sitting with Kim on the subway just kicking back and listening to music like this was actually kind of romantic. She didn’t know where things were going to wind up tonight, but part of her decided then and there that it would be good for her to go off to college with a little more sexual experience.