Infatuate (11 page)

“You’re right,” she said, sighing. “But later . . . ?”

“Definitely,” I promised her. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

We nodded at each other, signaling silently that we would go back in that room and revert to these other versions of ourselves for the duration of the evening until we could safely speak again.

“I saved you a seat,” I said, pointing, as we stepped inside. “We’re over here in the middle.” My bag and napkin sat on the two chairs between Lance and Tom, who was almost always dressed like he was on his way to the gym but had managed to wear khakis tonight. Sabine took the seat beside Lance. I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed; she would have had no way of knowing that I had been sitting there, and I certainly didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. Salads had been set at each place, along with small cups of gumbo, while several platters of an oyster dish, some kind of almond-encrusted seafood, and a saucy chicken dish were scattered across the table.

The clinking of knife against glass quieted all the wild threads of conversation. Connor stood, his cola-filled stemware in hand. “Hey guys! Just wanted to say I hope everyone had a good first week despite a little bit of a rough start.” My mind set on an image of that dead man in the street on New Year’s Day. I had been trying to snuff it out all week long. “But we’re glad you’re here, and here’s to a great few months ahead! Cheers!” A chorus of
ping
s broke out as everyone knocked their glasses together. Sabine turned to Lance, toasting him and then saying something that made him smile. “And also,” Connor went on, “I hope y’all enjoy being treated like kings tonight because we’re going on a retreat this weekend—”

A chorus of curious
What?
s and
Huh?
s swept the table.

“And it’s a little rustic. More to come but—”

“Aren’t we kind of already on a retreat? Here in New Orleans?” Brody, laughing, looked around the table for agreement. He leaned back his chair so it was balanced on its two back legs.

“Oh, y’think this is a retreat?” Connor smiled at him, perfectly calm.

“I mean, yeah, kinda,” Brody said with another staccato laugh.

Still smiling, Connor kicked one of the legs of Brody’s chair in a sharp and quick movement. It slid to the floor, taking Brody with it. He looked up from the ground for a second, like he didn’t know what hit him. Sabine gasped. The whole table fell silent.

“Are you insane?” Brody snapped at Connor, clumsily getting back up on his feet.

“No, man,” he said, entirely affable. “I’m just bein’ me. Why don’t you take a lap around the block and come back, okay?”

“Are you serious?”

“Deadly,” he said. “Go on. Look, now you’ve gone and made all your friends nervous. Come back in a better mood.” I glanced over at Lance, who looked stricken. There was something so jarring, terrifying even, about seeing someone say and do harsh things with a smile. The disconnect rattled me. Without another word, Brody stormed away, letting his hand slap against the doorframe. Connor sat back down, still grinning. “More food for us, right?” he said. Then to Tom: “Can ya pass the oysters? You guys gotta try these. They’re famous here.”

“They look great,” Dante said, trying to break the silence. “I’m gonna steal one before they disappear.” He grabbed one with a spoon just before Tom swooped up the plate. Connor started talking sports with Jimmy and slowly, the conversations began again, all of us making a group effort to act as though nothing had happened.

Sabine and Lance were already locked in some sort of tête-à-tête, Dante and Max were equally engaged with each other, so that left me and Tom.

“Glad that wasn’t me,” he said. He shoveled some salad into his mouth.

“Yeah, me too,” I said quietly. “I didn’t take Connor for such a tough guy. I don’t know why; must be the accent.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, and he’s pretty cool all around. But he’s fierce on the court, which I also never woulda guessed. Usually I can tell just by lookin’.”

“The court?”

“Basketball?” He rolled his eyes like I was some kind of idiot. “I’ve played a pickup game or two with him in my time and that guy is fast and scrappy.”

“When have you had time to play basketball?” I stopped eating to look at him. “They’ve been keeping us pretty busy.”

“Yeah, but I mean, back home.”

“You know Connor from home?” Now he had my interest.

“Met him this summer. We worked out at the same place.”

“You’re from . . .” I tried to remember. “LA?”

“Seattle.”

“Oh, I was thinking, you had a Lakers top on the other day.”

Tom rolled his eyes again, frustrated with me. “First of all, it’s a
jersey,
not a top. Second, Seattle lost its basketball team a few years ago—it was ugly—so I changed my allegiance. Desperate times.”

If that qualified as a desperate time in Tom’s life, then clearly we had little in common.

“Right. But about Connor . . .” I started again, wondering how one guy covered so much ground in a summer. Maybe he was on one of those soul-searching cross-country road trips I heard people were always taking in college. I hoped that someday I would get around to learning how to drive.

I had already lost Tom’s attention, though. He swiveled his head and became instantly engrossed in some proper guy talk. I spent the rest of the evening flitting in and out of the innocuous getting-to-know-you conversations at the girls’ end of the table.

“I don’t like the sound of rustic,” Emma said. She was from Nashville, as was Jimmy.

Drew lit up. “Near where I’m from there’s this amazing resort where you stay in treehouses.”

“See, that sounds like a nightmare to me.” Emma laughed.

But for the most part, I found myself too distracted to really pay attention. I needed to talk to Sabine. I looked over, but her epic discussion with Lance wore on. I anxiously tapped my foot, ready for this party to end and for an opportunity to ask all my questions.

8. That’s Just the Krewe

It was nearly ten o’clock by the time they cleared away the last of the dishes. We ambled out of Antoine’s en masse, and I found my way to Lance’s side.

“So are you going to this thing?” he asked.

Before I could ask what he was talking about, Sabine materialized. “Brody says that Jimmy knows someone who can totally get us into that bar on St. Peter Street with the crazy courtyard, you know?” Her eyes were bright and shining at the prospect.

After Sabine approached Connor with a chirpy, childlike “Can we get ice cream?” she secured the green light we needed to break off from the group.

Connor looked the seven of us over and begrudgingly warned, “Curfew’s midnight,” while a scowling Emma shot daggers at us—or, at least, at Jimmy—and turned back in the direction of the house. And so we set off, following Jimmy through streets that were nearly as packed as they’d been New Year’s Eve. I was getting the idea that was just how it was in New Orleans: every night was a party even if there wasn’t anything in particular to celebrate. Everyone we passed had smiles on their faces and many had drinks in their hands. Here in the French Quarter a feeling of liberation swirled around you and swept you up, roughing off your frayed edges and leaving you aglow.

We could hear the music and the crowd even before we turned the corner onto St. Peter Street. Jimmy whispered a few words to the burly guy at the door and we were magically granted safe passage through a carriageway entrance into the sprawling courtyard. Lance had convinced me it made sense to go, deeming it a fact-finding mission, to get our bearings in this city and have a look around the nightlife scene. This place certainly had its charm. Lantern lights twinkled, wrought-iron tables were surrounded by spirited revelers who looked to be having the time of their lives. I thought I even recognized a few faces from the New Year’s Eve party in the Garden District. Were they counselors? Students? Either way, like us, they looked too young to be allowed in here. Perhaps everyone knew Jimmy’s connection. Jimmy . . . I looked around our group but he had wandered off somewhere. It seemed we were on our own to navigate through the drunken throng. Lance said something into my ear, but I couldn’t really hear it. I could barely make out my own thoughts. He pointed ahead of us. At the center of the patio, water cascaded from a lit fountain, shaped almost like a martini glass with angelic carved figures at the top. In an odd union of elements, a low-burning fire flamed up from the center of the fountain’s pool.

“Hey, you’ve got your camera, right?” he said, breaking me out of my reverie.

“Oh, yeah.” I pulled it out of my bag. I planned to snap everything and everyone in sight. It couldn’t hurt. I wished it were quieter here, though, so I could tell Lance about Sabine.

From several feet away, she called over to us. “Hey! Haven! Will you get us?” She put her arms around Brody and Max on either side of her. I never would have known that this was the same girl who had entrusted me with her deepest secret just hours before. It seemed as if she had simply told herself she wasn’t going to think about any of that right now and she shifted into the old, fun Sabine. I was always trying to lock things away at times when I couldn’t afford to be brought down by them, to compartmentalize my moods, but I never felt I succeeded.

I trained my camera on them and zoomed in. Dante leaned into Max in a way that almost made me laugh. I snapped, the flash blinding everyone in the general vicinity. Dante shot over to me.

“You have to e-mail that to me,” he whispered.

I snapped all around us, capturing as many faces as I could. Our group colonized a cozy, dimly lit area of the patio amid a backdrop of drooping broad-leaved trees. Dante, Max, and Brody were dispatched to round up drinks. Sabine had positioned herself beside Lance again. The music got even louder—a peppy, jaunty style like nothing I’d heard before.

“Hey!” Sabine and Lance both looked over at me. “Name that tune.” I leaned forward, around Sabine, to try to stump Lance in one of our favorite games. “Classic Cajun music. The entire genre.”

“Uhh . . .” He put his hands up, not playing along.

“Zydeco,” I said, shaking my head, feeling shot down.

“Oh! So that’s what zydeco is,” Sabine said. “You know your stuff, Haven.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to conceal my disappointment. She and Lance resumed whatever it was they were talking about while I allowed myself a sip of my fruity hurricane—which was so dangerously good, its alcohol so well camouflaged by sweetness, I knew too many sips could easily get me into plenty of trouble.

A man in a straw hat strolled out from inside the bar with a washboard strapped to his chest and a spoon in each hand. He strummed against the rippled surface, earning cheers for his scratchy percussion from those patrons, ready to live it up, streaming in.

A group wandered in amid the newcomers, but stood out from the T-shirts and beer bellies and even the low-cut tops and tight jeans. The girl leading them wore a spaghetti-strap floral minidress hitting at her midthigh, her tanned and taut legs in expertly beat-up brown leather cowboy boots. There was a small pink bloom perched behind her ear, softening the severity of her short-cropped blond hair and accentuating her perfect features. I recognized her in an instant: the girl with the sparklers on New Year’s Eve. With no warning, she grabbed the hand of the man with the washboard and pulled him into a dance, spinning herself under his arm, stepping and prancing to the music.

The entire outdoor crowd turned its attention to their dancing as though this had been part of the night’s planned entertainment. The sparkler girl’s group was made up of dressed-down jeans-clad guys and girls who seemed like they exerted zero effort to look the way they did—their faces had no makeup and yet appeared flawless; while their outfits generally were unremarkable, it didn’t matter—everyone still looked at them. They clapped and hooted and hollered as the group’s leader whirled around. Before long, the revelers in the courtyard were clapping, and other patrons who trickled out from the bar to see what the fuss was about quickly joined in. Two members of the band from inside—a trumpeter and fiddler—even came out playing, bopping to the music.

I was so transfixed that I didn’t realize I had actually given voice to my thoughts: “Who is she?”

A rosy-faced man in a stained T-shirt piped up beside me. “That’s just the Krewe,” he said, his eyes glued to the show playing out before us as he took a swig from his beer.

“The Krewe?”

I sorted through my mental files. “I thought krewes only came out during Mardi Gras time—there are a bunch of krewes, right? They put together the floats and march in the parade?” I remembered reading that there were a host of different groups; people paid dues to be part of them and they had all sorts of wild names.

“Yeah, yeah, those are the real krewes. Rex, Bacchus, whatever. But
this
Krewe,” he said, gesturing with his beer toward the group, “isn’t really a krewe at all. It’s just a name they’ve sorta been given unofficially since they have this way of riling people up—just look at ’em.” He yelped and whistled, tucking his beer bottle under his arm to clap along.

Watching the hubbub, I was so engrossed I almost forgot to take pictures. I dug my camera out again and clicked off a bunch of shots of the scene. As the blonde twirled, smiling so brightly, I noticed a mark on the inside of her wrist. I zoomed my camera and managed to snap a photo of the fleur-de-lis, that symbol we’d seen so much of since arriving, branded proudly on her skin. This one had been drawn to look like it was made of flames. I thought I could feel a tattoo needle burning at my back and in that marred space above my heart. My scars were suddenly flaring in a way I couldn’t ignore.

As the song ended, with a great sawing flourish from the fiddler and a flutter of notes from the trumpeter, the girl embraced the washboard player and gave a bow to the jubilant, applauding crowd. She transformed the whole feel of the party, like some sort of good infection. Everyone was dancing now.

“She’s amazing,” Sabine said gushing, and leaned over me as we both watched her return to her group and go back inside. “Gorgeous, too. Where do you think she got that dress?”