Twelve (2 page)

Chapter Three

WHITE MIKE WALKS
into the gym and brushes past a strong dark kid he knows from uptown, hurrying down the stairs. White Mike watches after him and wonders where all the blood came from. Inside, he sees Hunter at the far end of the gym shooting free throws by himself. He has not seen Hunter since September, but the two go way back. They went all through grammar school together, wearing blue blazers and ties every day. Once they went on a field trip to Central Park with their class, and people kept yelling out “Dead Poets Society” as they passed by. White Mike liked the trip. It was like some experimental class; they sat on a bench somewhere and looked hard at everything for a couple of minutes. No talk, just watching. Tried to cool off a little, tried to see things a little more clearly. And White Mike looked at his classmates and thought,
Recognize this: we're only grammar school kids dressed like investment bankers
. Hunter had understood. White Mike sees the blood on Hunter from halfway across the gym.

“Hunter.”

“Hey, Mike, can you believe this shit?” Hunter says, turning and tossing White Mike the ball. “One-on-one?”

White Mike catches it. “I don't play anymore.”

“You're kidding.”

“Did you fight that kid?” White Mike throws the ball back.

“Nana. He's crazed.”

“How's school?”

“Same. Still dealing?”

White Mike shrugs.

“Rich yet?”

“I'll buy you dinner.”

As they walk out, Hunter says to White Mike, “I read somewhere that even if you're really broke, you'll survive, because there is so much food in New York just thrown away on the streets that it's nearly impossible to starve.”

“You have to want to eat.”

There is a McDonald's almost next door to the Rec. Hunter and White Mike sit by the window. Outside it is starting to snow again. The snow is wet and heavy, and it sticks to the plastic window and slides down, blurring the lights of the cars moving downtown. Hunter asks White Mike about college, if he's thinking about going.

“Maybe.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means maybe.”

“You've got till January first, man. You're fucked if you haven't applied yet.”

“I deferred last year. I've got until May to tell them.”

“My dad told me if I didn't get into Harvard, I had to go to Dartmouth.”

“He went there, right?”

“My grandfather gave them a science building.”

“Well, go to Harvard and you'd get to be with Warren.” Warren is their other best friend from high school. He is White Mike's year.

“See, exactly,” says Hunter.

“Exactly what?”

“Warren got into Harvard. You think you couldn't rip that place up? Come on, it could be the three of us together. Old times.” Hunter is laughing. “You'd be my year.”

“Yeah, just what I want. Old times.” White Mike feels his beeper going off in his pocket, probably that kid throwing the party in that town house off Fifth in the Nineties. “Got to go.”

Chapter Four

BY THE MIDDLE
of the fall, White Mike was dealing seriously, waiting for a customer on East End Avenue one day when he saw a kid throw a lit cigarette off a fire escape, and he watched it land in an open garbage can full of dry cardboard and newspaper. A fire started in the can, slowly at first, sending little whorls of thin smoke into the air but picking up force until the edges of the newspapers curled in the heat and the air in the cardboard popped. And then, as the flames started to lick at the metal, a mass of fire shot up and the tin can turned red around the rim, and the kids on the fire escape came down to the street. There, they pretended to be homeless around the garbage-can fire.

White Mike watched this and thought about
The Plague,
about how this town gets shut down by a plague and in the beginning all the rats start dying, before the disease hits the people. The rats come out into the street to die. They just die by the truck-load, and the people have to make big piles of rats and incinerate them
.

Chapter Five

HUNTER PUTS ON
his headphones, as he watches White Mike get into a cab. He wants to walk. He is thinking about Nana, and then he isn't thinking about anything. The city, in case you don't know, is better at night. It is cooler and gives you a second wind and is clearer, but it is snowing harder now and getting colder. Hunter keeps walking anyway. He is listening to James Taylor. At Park and Seventy-ninth, his CD is on the last track. He wants it to end as he walks through the door of his family's co-op, so he restarts to “Fire and Rain” and sets it on repeat. Hunter doesn't ever let anyone know that he listens to James Taylor, but the lie doesn't bother him because he suspects that everybody listens to softer music and hides it.

Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground
, as he walks past his doormen who nod at him. He hits the elevator button, leans against the wall. The doors open and he steps in, leans again, and stares at the ceiling. There is a hole in the middle of the glass light fixture, which Hunter knows conceals a camera.
He didn't realize this until after he had taken out his eleven-year-old prepubescent wanker and jiggled it about in the elevator, flapped it between his legs, humping air before he knew about humping. He didn't know why he did it while he was doing it, and he still doesn't know why he did it. The super showed him the tape when he turned fifteen.
I've seen fire
...

Hunter realizes the song is still going to be playing after he steps through the door of his apartment, but so what.

He's inside his apartment now and hears the television in the library—some show he can't name. He walks in, and his father is sitting there drinking, being sad. Hunter's father is a big man, bigger than his son, always drinking, always sad. His mother too. At least that's the way it seems to Hunter.

“Hunter, come talk to me.”

Hunter wonders what's on his father's mind this time. He's leaving for Europe tomorrow. His mother is already there. They ought to be happy. Isn't that the way it's supposed to be. Hunter listens to his father talk about how hard he studied when he was at boarding school, and then how hard he worked at Dartmouth, and how hard he still has to work. He looks like he might cry. After as much as he can take, Hunter says he's tired and wants to go to bed, and he goes down the hall to his room. His father didn't even notice the blood.

Hunter lies down on his bed with his clothes on. He knows he won't be able to sleep and just waits it out
until he hears his father go to bed, then gets up and slips out. He wants to walk.
And I've seen rain . . . James Taylor sucks
, thinks Hunter.

Chapter Six

NANA LIVES ON
117th Street and Third Avenue. There is this hill that descends from Ninety-sixth Street on the east side and ends in Harlem. One minute Park Avenue is doormen and Audis, and the next it is Harlem. One of the first things you see as you pass Ninety-sixth Street on Third Avenue is a bad fried-chicken joint. Nana hates the place. For him, it is always a lot better going down to the Rec than it is coming back uptown, coming home.

Home is his mother's apartment on the eighth floor of the project, 2123 Third Avenue, past the big sign that says
WELCOME TO JEFFERSON HOUSES
. Nana walks along the curved path to the entrance and around the corner of the front building, the one that hides the monkey bars from the street. His building's door faces the playground. Nana turns the corner thinking about how he's gonna have to explain all the blood on his clothing to his mother.

On the far side of the doorway, he sees two men. He can't really make them out as he walks toward the door.
They're both tall, one slim and one heavy, both puffy in their huge North Face parkas. And the slim one is white.
Strange
, Nana thinks. Must be some kind of deal happening. Nana steps back around the corner where they can't see him and peers around.

“You fuckin' guy, you're doing it, aren't you,” says the heavy one. Pissed, but calm pissed.
Scary pissed
, thinks Nana. “I told you not to do any of this shit.”

“No, man.” The white guy is edgy, muttering.

“Fine. Gimme the money.”

“Okay, let me get it.” The white guy reaches into his pocket and Nana can see him go all tense, and the big man sees it too, because as the white guy is bringing up a gun, a small silver thing with a flash of pearl handle, the big man punches him. The white guy staggers back.

Then, in a fluid movement the heavy man reaches in his pocket and suddenly there is a gun with a hand towel wrapped around it pointing at the white kid. The big man pulls the trigger, and Nana flinches as the muffled explosion blasts and echoes around the block. The towel catches fire, and the big man throws it on the ground as the white guy is sliding down the wall, leaving a track of blood and down feathers from his parka.

Nana bolts for the stairs, thinking the shooter is taking off the other way, but the heavy man changes his mind and turns around. Nana looks him straight in his brown and yellow bloodshot eyes for a split second before he
gets kneed in the testicles and falls to the ground. He squirms in anguish and, out of the corner of his eye, sees the heavy man back up. Nana tries to crawl up and away. He gets a good look at the corpse. The guy isn't much more than a kid. Pale with blond, almost white hair, and eyes frozen open. As Nana tries to rise, the heavy guys boot misses his temple and hits him in the side of the mouth. He goes back down and doesn't see any more as the heavy man scrambles for the towel, wraps it around the gun, and shoots him in the head. The heavy man turns back to the white corpse and picks up the little silver gun.

Chapter Seven

IT'S BEEN A
great vacation so far. Lots of parties. Sara Ludlow and one of her girlfriends are walking to another one. They step carefully to avoid wetting their Jimmy Choo knee-high stiletto boots in the puddles of slush. Sara is rooting through the Prada bag she got for Christmas, looking for her compact. She wants to see how she looks. Everyone pays attention to how Sara looks.

Sara Ludlow is the hottest girl at her school by, like, a lot. When that kid Chris, whose house she is going to, made up the chart about where the girls stood, like the stock-market quotes, Sara always came up on top. Her line on the chart kept rising while other girls tumbled according to the whims of the market or whether they put out. When the chart was finally discovered taped behind the Bob Marley poster in the senior lounge, the girls were fascinated. Egos were crushed and inflated, but no one was really surprised by Sara's dominance. Long legs, large breasts, blond hair, blue eyes, high cheek-bones.
Even people who didn't like her said that she was great-looking—if you were looking for that conventional sort of beauty. Such statements rarely assuaged any jealousy.

Sara looks in her mirror as she talks to her girlfriend. “Who's gonna be there?”

“Mostly seniors, I hope. It's that kid Chris's house, and his brother is supposed to be back from boarding school or rehab or whatever he goes to now.”

“Claude?”

“Yeah. Supposedly he's clean now.”

“Whatever. Did you notice Jessica got a nose job?”

“Really? I couldn't tell.”
Ha, ha, ha
.

“Yeah, me either. You know who's a bitch?”

“Who?”

“Layla.”

“Yeah, I know. She thinks she is so smart. She never shuts up.”

“She's in my English class.”

“Wenchler's?”

“Yeah, and she just says anything. Something about how everyone took the holocaust so seriously or something. She made Jane Grey run out of the room crying.”

“Jane cries all the time.”

“I know, but Layla was, like, heartless.”

“Is Jane Jewish?”

“No, I don't think so. She used to be anorexic.”

The girls are having a big laugh over that one when
they get to Ninetieth Street and Madison. They can see the town house where the party is happening. There is a tall kid in an overcoat standing in the doorway.

Chapter Eight

WHITE MIKE CAN
hear some pop rap playing inside. Nelly or something:

Oh why do I live this life
Hey, must be the money.

This is Chris's house and Chris's party. Chris hands White Mike a hundred dollars and asks if he wants to come in. White Mike doesn't. He glances over his shoulder at the two girls coming up the steps. He stares at the pretty one for a second, wonders how smart she is, then leaves.

White Mike walks west, crosses Fifth Avenue, and turns downtown along the east side of the park. The apartment buildings across the street are like fortresses. White Mike thinks about how rich everyone is.
So you are born in the capital of the world and you can never escape and that's how it is because that's how everyone wants it to be. It is all about want. No one needs anything here. It is about when you wake up in the morning and
the snow is already coming down and it is bright between the buildings where the sun falls but already dark where the shadows are, and it is all about want. What do you want? Because if you don't want something, you've got nothing. You are adrift, you are washed away, and then buried under the snow and the shadows. And when, in the spring, the snow melts, no one will remember where you were frozen and buried, and you will no longer be anywhere.

Chapter Nine

CHRIS WAITS AT
the door for the two girls.
Sara Ludlow
, Chris thinks,
Sara Ludlow. I wonder if she's still going out with that football-player guy
. That would be just his luck. Part of the bad luck of not ever getting laid, even though Chris is seventeen and a half years old and has dark blond hair and blue eyes and is good enough looking, except for the acne, which is part of the bad luck, the same bad luck that he has felt come back to him over and over since he was little. Bad luck like a couple of months ago when he was trying to hook up with some public school girl, and she was so turned on or surprised or whatever when he put his fingers between her belt and her belly to try to ease her pants down that she jerked around suddenly, and Chris's left pinky got snapped back, and the tendon in that finger tore in two, and the bottom half retracted down into his palm. He had no control over the digit; it hung limp as he moved the rest of his fingers. The girl thought it was funny. He told everyone he had gotten his hand stuck in a drawer, but he wound up with a big cast from the
complicated hand surgery and lost his confidence. So he waited. And now that the cast is gone and he is mobile and, to his mind, attractive again, he throws parties, looking for the right girl. And here suddenly is Sara Ludlow asking him to show her around.

“I hope it's a big party,” Sara says. “They're more fun.” Chris doesn't know what to say to that, but he is feeling lucky.

The stone town house rises, clutched in ivy, up from the sidewalk. If you were to take the stairs on a normal weekday, you would be in the perfect artisan sterility of the extremely wealthy. Nothing out of place; tapestries on the walls, real ones, from dead monks near Normandy. Tonight, though, there is a party going on. The tapestries are still there, but things (bodies, cans, parkas, portable DVD players) lie out of place.

On the sixth floor, a bunch of kids are standing around another kid who is banging on a drum set in an empty guest bedroom. One of them is playing the drums, but his rhythm is suffering for the eight beers he's had. Lots of beers—Corona Lights, Budweisers, all over the floor in various parts of the house. Across the hall from the drum room a stereo is playing Ben Harper's “Burn One Down” loud enough so the kids smoking weed on the terrace can hear it. They look out over the street and flick ashes into the ivy. On the fifth floor, there are only two kids, one blond and one dark and pimply, both short and passed out on big leather couches where some
other kids left them entwined and drooling. On the fourth floor, about ten kids sit in front of a big flat-screen TV watching Cinemax pornography. One kid, in a big leather chair, has a girl half sitting on his lap. They both stare at the screen happily, the boy's left hand resting lightly on the left half of the girl's left breast. On the third floor, more kids are sitting around a table, drinking and gossiping and flirting. Snoop plays on that stereo.

“You should have invited more people,” Sara Ludlow says to Chris. All he can think about is what it would be like to fuck Sara Ludlow and not just hook up with some drunk girl at one of his parties, like is happening in a different room on the third floor where a girl they both know named Jessica is making out with a guy from another school whose name nobody knows. Jessica and this guy, and they are reduced to really just the two of them, making out without any pretense or thought about it. And then he comes in his pants and they stop and the guy goes to get another beer and Jessica goes to the bathroom.