Girls We Love (2 page)

Also, girls really love hanging out with Patch, even girls like Liv who wear turtlenecks and other lumpy clothing items, so I figured it would be kind of a treat for her if we ended up hanging out with him. He's my brother, so I try really hard not to think about this, but lots of other people think he's dreamy, too, so I've had to become immune to that kind of talk. It's the same with my sister, February. People are always saying how totally bats she is and I'm immune to hearing that, too. But I do understand that she's bats—the family doesn't try to hide anything from me anymore.

It was one of those lazy, almost summer vacation days, when nothing really happens until the sun goes down. Liv called at four-thirty, when she was in the cab on the way from LaGuardia, to make sure I was planning something. “Flan?” she yelled from her cell phone. “I forgot how freakishly ugly and untamed this city is. I'm so excited! We're going out, right?”

“Definitely,” I said, even though I still didn't know where. I wasn't worried, though. I figured just leaving the house and getting Mary's Dairy frozen yogurt would be a trip, especially after two
years in Montana. But I wasn't going to settle for that just yet.

I went down to the living room, where Patch was drinking beers with his friend Arno, who might be cute if he weren't so full of himself. They were watching
Kung Fu Hustle
for like the zillionth time. They were both wearing T-shirts and jeans, although Patch's looked like, you know, a T-shirt and jeans, whereas Arno's outfit looked like something a team of stylists spent two days choosing for somebody's first gig at the Bowery Ballroom.

“Hey, Flan,” Arno said, cocking his eyebrow in my direction in this way that totally made me feel my age. Even though I know Arno is kind of a jerk, he's still really pretty, and he makes me nervous even when I'm trying to force myself not to be. “You want a beer?”

My older brother and his friends always let me have beers, but Arno has to do this whole show of teasing me about it first. I tried to give him a sarcastic little smile as I reached over and grabbed a PBR, but I'm not very experienced with that sort of thing yet, so it might not have worked.

Patch gave Arno a don't-be-a-dick face, and then he said, “What's up, Flannie?”

“Nothing much,” I said, sitting down on the floor with my knees tucked underneath me. As soon as I was sitting, I realized that this meant I was looking up at my brother and Arno, who were sprawled across the couch all guy-like. Mental note: When attempting to transform into a party girl, try
not
making yourself look so small all the time.

“I heard you just broke up with some junior high kid,” Arno said.

“What?” I said, really hoping that he didn't notice my ears getting all hot and red. My dumping by Remy was absolutely the last thing I wanted to talk about with an older guy, even if I have known him forever.

“Arno, shut up,” Patch said.

“Sorry, Flan,” Arno said, and he actually kind of looked like he was. “I didn't mean that to sound mean.” He sighed. “And I like your dress.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking down at the yellow cotton sleeveless sundress that I've been wearing like every day since the weather got warm. I waited a minute, and then asked, “So … what are you guys doing tonight?”

Patch thought about it, and then said, “Something, I guess, I don't know.”

“Yes you do,” Arno shot back.

My brother gave his friend a blank look, and then Arno kept talking like he was telling Patch something painfully obvious. “Tonight is Liesel Reid's sweet sixteen party, don't you remember?”

“Oh … that uptown girl you were fooling around with last winter?” Patch asked. Then he went quiet and we waited for him to say whatever he was going to say next. He does this thing when he says people's names—I don't think he even knows he does it, but it always makes people feel special. He took a deep breath and said, “Huh. Liesel Reid. Why do we have to go to her sweet sixteen party?”

“Because for some reason she invited me, and I said I would go, and then all of you promised you would come with me.” Arno slumped on the couch, letting his very expensively cut mop of dark hair fall in his eyes. “But if that's too much to ask, whatever. I mean, I was trying to be a bigger person, but I guess nobody cares.”

“Fine,” Patch said. “We'll go to Liesel Reid's sweet sixteen tonight.” He turned to me, and smiled like he was letting me in on the joke. “I guess we're going to Liesel Reid's sweet sixteen party tonight. It's probably at the Boat House in Central Park.”

“It is,” Arno, who was not yet totally out of pout mode, said.

“Oh, perfect—I mean cool.” I tried to take a dainty sip of my beer, which is, by the way, a really tricky thing to do. “Can I come? And maybe bring a friend?”

Both Patch and Arno turned in my direction, stared for a minute, and then said, “Okay.”

“Great!” I said, clapping my hands together because I love the Boat House, and all of this sounded much more fun than some house party with loud music and obnoxious people. “I'll go get dressed.” I put down the beer, glad that I had something to do, because I was sort of hating drinking it.

“It's not till, like, nine,” Arno said, sounding just like the pretty, not-very-bright guy who'd been teasing me about drinking beer a few minutes ago.

“Oh, okay. Sure,” I said, and then they went back to watching the movie and I went out front because I heard a cab pulling up in front of the house.

I stood on the stone steps and watched as the cabdriver took three really big suitcases out of the trunk and put them on the sidewalk. Then Liv
got out of the backseat and paid him and came running up and threw her arms around me.

“Oh my God, it's so good to see you!” she squealed.

“You too,” I said, and then I couldn't help but say, “You look amazing!”

And she did, too. She had gotten really tall and chesty and her skin was all golden from being out west. Liv used to be this girl with frizzy hair and a mouth that was freakishly large, but now it was like she had grown into her face, and the size of her mouth and the cat eyes—the whole thing just worked. Evidently somebody in Montana really knew how to do awesome-looking highlights, too. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. I've grown in all those ways, too, except for the skin tone part, since no matter what I do I'm really pale, but still, it's weird when you haven't seen somebody in a while and note how they've changed and gotten all … sexy looking.

Especially if that person used to wear maroon turtlenecks.

“You think so? Wow, thanks. I mean horseback riding is so different in the west and you know … ” Liv kept talking while we hauled her
huge bags up to my room. It didn't even occur to me how much stuff this was, because we had so much catching up to do.

We talked the whole time we were getting ready to go, and even though Liv had brought three suitcases of clothes, she ended up wearing this powder blue scoop neck C&C California shirt of mine with a jeans miniskirt I've had forever. I ended up sticking with my yellow sundress, but I put on a double strand of my mom's pearls and put my hair in a twist so it would be a little more beach-girl-goes-formal. I told her all about Remy, and what a dick he ended up being, and she told me all about her boyfriends at the Cattington School. Her many, many boyfriends.

Getting dressed really can be the best part of the night sometimes, and when it was time to go I was almost disappointed. But that's maybe just me being a little shy.

Anyway, at some point Arno knocked on my door and then poked his face in and told us the ship was leaving. Liv gave me this OMG-he's-cute look, and then we took big breaths and followed him outside.

We were in a cab, cruising uptown, when I said, “Hey Patch, where are the rest of your friends?”

Arno turned around in the front seat to look at
Patch, and then Patch said, “We're meeting all of them there.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, trying not to sound like I cared too much. Which I didn't, although I did want to be … prepared, I guess, in case Jonathan ended up there, too. He can be annoyingly, like, knowing about stuff sometimes, but in some ways I suspect he's my best friend, or maybe soul mate, which makes it all the more weird that I haven't hung out with him in so long.

I stared out the window for a lot of blocks and had a lot of thoughts about Jonathan and how difficult he was and how we argued all the time but also kind of enjoyed watching TV together in my parents' bed when they weren't around. And that's basically all the time, as I've mentioned.

At the corner of Fifth and Seventy-second there were a bunch of carriages in a row. This driver wearing a top hat over a kind of gross ponytail asked us if we were there for the Reid affair. I would
so
ride around Central Park in carriages all the time if the drivers weren't so weird and kind of dirty.

“Yes, unfortunately,” Arno said to the ponytail guy.

“What?” Patch said. “I thought you were all psyched on this.”

“Well, we've all been hired to drive you to the Boat House. So get on in,” the ponytail guy said, ignoring Patch and Arno. Liv and I climbed up first, and then my brother and his friend followed.

“This is so much fun,” Liv said. I nodded in agreement, but I guess she wasn't talking to me, because she added, “Patch, isn't this fun?”

“I guess so,” Patch said. “Actually, I don't know if I've ever been in one of these before.”

As we rode into the quiet leafiness of the park, we started to overtake another carriage with some other partygoers in it. I knew they were going to the same place, because their carriage was decorated with the same big pink bows as ours was.

“Hey,” Arno said, loud enough for them to hear, “don't we know those kids?”

There were two boys and a girl in the carriage, and they all turned to look.

“Wait a minute,” Liv said, in a voice that was maybe supposed to be quiet but definitely was not. “Flan, isn't that that guy Jonathan you used to be secretly in love with?”

Everyone was staring at me, and maybe I would have been embarrassed, except that I was really distracted by this strange thing Jonathan
was doing. Which was that he totally had his arm around some girl with shiny brown hair and a lot of freckles who was smiling idiotically at us like we were all about to be her new best friends.

I mean, what was that about? And when did Liv become so totally tactless?

“Hey, did I meet you at the Yale Early Action meeting last week?”

Liv Quayle tossed her long, wavy hair over her shoulder and took a look at the latest guy to approach her. He was tall, with slicked back hair, and he was wearing a blazer and smiling wolfishly. He looked pretty uptown. Most of the guys at the party were pretty uptown.

“I don't think so,” Liv said, smiling conspiratorially at her crew of new friends, Jonathan, Ava, Arno, and David. Her best friend from elementary school, Flan, was standing with them, too. But Flan was a bit off to one side, looking just slightly piqued. “Especially since I haven't even started high school,” Liv added, in order to bring home to this guy that he was absolutely no Patch Flood.

Because that was the guy she was holding out for
tonight. And she could wait—she had spent two long years in Montana keeping her love for him, which dated to third grade, a secret. It wasn't until her last e-mail from good ol' Flan hinted at how big and popular he'd gotten recently that she realized it was time to come back to New York and make her love for him real. It was perfect timing, because she had finally gotten all hot and popular, too.

“Oh,” the uptown guy said, looking a little confused, like he wasn't sure whether to keep hitting on her or scamper away. “Um, I guess it was nice to meet you then,” he said, and lifted his glass at her before turning around.

Liv wiggled her fingers in his direction, and mouthed
Buh-bye
at his back as he moved through the topiaries and white balloon sculptures set up throughout the Boat House restaurant. The beamed ceilings over their heads were decorated with strands of Christmas lights arranged in cursive L-shapes, and out the windows they could see a warm summer night descending on the park. Their little group had been enjoying rounds of pink champagne from the trays being circulated by waiters. And Liv was getting increasingly weak-kneed by the general madness infiltrating the usually staid restaurant.

“This really isn't my regular scene,” Liv said with a giggle, to no one in particular. What she meant of course was that it was filled with guys who were cute
but totally uninteresting compared with Patch, who was even more sparkly-eyed and delicious than when she got sent away to boarding school by her parents.

But she couldn't think about them now. If she thought about her parents she would have to admit to herself that they were probably wondering where she was right now, and then she would have to deal with that. For Liv, ignorance-is-bliss had always been a friendly motto.

She took a sip of her champagne and surveyed the crowd. There were a number of older women with big dramatic hats, though the place was jam-packed with kids, too, most of whom looked pretty preppy but also looked like they knew how to party. Whoever this Liesel girl was, she had really gone all out. Downtown-famous DJ Tahoe was spinning, which had inspired a small but enthusiastic dance floor in the corner. He was playing a Kanye West song, and a bunch of kids were getting down quite a bit farther than Liv would've thought they could.

“It's not my scene, either,” Jonathan said emphatically. He was wearing a light brown suede motorcycle jacket and his bangs were styled diagonally across his forehead as though he were an actor playing a private-school boy on TV. “This place was built in what, 1910?”