Pass It On (14 page)

“Why didn't you ask my brother?”

“Only ‘cause I haven't seen him.”

“Flan?” It was Adam, calling out. Neither one of us said anything. Then we heard him pad back down the stairs.

“Well, you all have made it this far. And I know you saved my brother. So I bet you can count on them.”

“But what if I can't?”

“You have to trust them,” she said.

“Why? They're going to hate me when they find out that not only did I overextend my invites, but I'm buying all this new shit with money my dad probably stole from their families.”

“Well, Patch once told me that they'd be
nothing without you. They need you. That's how groups work. You just need to be totally honest with them.”

“Totally honest? I'm not sure I can handle that.”

“Don't you know you have no choice?” Flan smiled and got up to leave the room. “If you lose your friends over this, well, you're an idiot and I'm going to forget I ever had a crush on you.”

I watched her, there in the doorway, with the globes between us, all lit up and rotating and valuable and geographically dated and wrong.

“So you're saying I'm acting like an idiot?”

“If you really believe you can't trust your friends,” Flan said, “then the answer is yes.”

“I think Mickey's going to meet us there,” Arno said.

It was Thursday night and he was with Liesel. They were headed to a party at Spice Market, on Thirteenth Street. There'd been an opening at Arno's parents' gallery for a new artist called Bolander Berkman, who Arno liked, but Liesel had nixed going. She'd said she wasn't into art, probably because her parents were.

“Mickey?”

“Yeah, my friend. You didn't meet him yet. He just broke up with his girlfriend again last night, and he's pretty upset.”

“Oh. Well I hope he doesn't make the whole night mopey.”

Arno had taken to wearing a long black cashmere trenchcoat and he had his hands stuffed down low in the pockets. They walked in front of a huge poster for a new play at The Public Theater and Liesel glanced at it without seeming to comprehend what it was.

“I saw
Topdog/Underdog
at The Public with my parents,” Arno said.

“What's that?”

“A play.”

“Oh. I hope Nina Katchadorian is here tonight. She's awesome.”

“What's awesome about her?”

“You have to meet her. She's so funny.”

“Why?”

“OH, SHUT UP!”

Arno stared at Liesel. He wasn't shocked at all—she loved to yell in the middle of the street. She loved it when people stared at her. She started laughing hysterically, and ran ahead of him. God she was annoying. And then Arno opened his eyes wide—he'd never quite put it to himself like that before.
Uh-oh
. In a flash he realized that here he was, headed in girlfriend direction with someone he kind of couldn't stand.

“Hurry,” she yelled. So they ran ahead. When they got to Spice Market, Mickey was in front of the restaurant straddling a motorcycle. Even though it was freezing out, he was wearing nothing but a black Joy Division T-shirt, torn white shorts, and white combat boots.

“Dude,” Mickey wailed, and threw his arms around Arno. Liesel watched from a few feet away.

“I'm Liesel,” she said. Then louder, “I'm Liesel.” But nobody was paying attention to her.

“I blew it with Philippa.”

“Oh man, I'm sorry.” Arno kept an arm around Mickey. “Let's get you a drink.”

Then Liesel said, “I'm not sure you can get in here dressed like that.”

The two boys stared at her.

“It's like, winter and nighttime,” Liesel said. “And you're dressed for summer and daytime.”

“So?”

“You look like one of the guys who fixes my parents' mopeds at our estate in Jamaica.”

Mickey turned to Arno. Mickey was bleary-eyed and at the point of crying. Arno tried to shake his head, to convey, like,
stop, no. I know she's annoying. But I only figured it out about a minute and a half ago
.

“I mean, I'm not sure I want to be seen with you,” Liesel said.

“Let's just go in,” Arno said. Liesel shrugged and glared. A doorman swept them inside. They were immediately plied with champagne and little crackers with chunks of raw tuna on top, covered with caviar. Arno and Mickey stood there, munching.

“NINA!” Liesel yelled and ran across the room and embraced a short girl who was wearing sunglasses that
almost entirely hid her face.

Arno looked around the restaurant. The whole place was decorated to look like the inside of a Chinese opium den, with lights covered in purple and pink fabric, strings of glass beads everywhere, and lots of heavily carved tables and chairs. At the far end of the room was a group of twenty high school kids lolling on dozens of big embroidered cushions, all of whom Liesel seemed to know. They were air-kissing and laughing and braying and spilling drinks all over each other. Several of the girls were openly staring at Arno.

“What the fuck am I doing?” Arno asked, suddenly.

“I don't know, man.” Mickey tossed back the champagne and set the glass on a table where some businessmen were huddled. They glared at him.

“Philippa broke up with you?”

“Yeah.” Mickey snagged another glass of champagne and some food from a silver plate. He stood there for a moment, chewing thoughtfully, and then he turned to Arno and said, “You know, your new girlfriend was pretty rude to me just now.”

“I know.” Arno turned up the collar of his overcoat, even though it was really warm in the restaurant. “Wait here for a second, will you?”

Arno moved quickly across the room and got close to Liesel. He tapped her on the shoulder.

“Just a moment,” she said. But she grabbed his hand at the same time and rubbed it up and down her back, and then over the place where a normal person's butt would have been.

“Hey,” Arno said.

Liesel turned around suddenly. “Could you please wait a moment? We're deciding whether we should all go uptown or not. I think we will, though. This place is lame.”

“Well, I'm not going with you.”

“Why not?”

“You were rude to my friend.”

Liesel smiled. She had an icy quality around her eyes. Arno could see that they were dusted with something sparkly, but it was more than that.

“Well your friend is kind of gross.”

“Really?”

“Like, if I were wearing shiny Helmut Lang slippers, he could shine them. Or if I were driving one of those cute new Mercedes two-doors, he could polish it.”

Arno burst out laughing. And then he realized he was laughing at himself. Why was he putting up with this person? He didn't even particularly like having a girlfriend, and it wasn't as if looks were the most important thing to him in the first place. Why would they be? He was definitely the best-looking person he knew. Or
at least that's what he told himself right then.

“I'm out of here,” he said.

“You know what you're doing, don't you?”

“Yeah.” Arno took the glass of champagne Liesel was holding, finished it, and handed it back to her. “You're an incredibly wild person. I'm going to miss hanging out with you.”

“You're going to really miss what we were going to do tonight.”

“I'm not sure that's true.”

“Why?”

“Because at the end of the day, even though you're really fun, you're an unbelievably snobby bitch.”

On the way out, Arno locked eyes with a few girls. One was clearly a model and Arno had long ago stopped bothering with models. But another was probably part of the random high school contingent who had been invited to the opening, and she looked really nice. Arno thought,
I'm Arno. I'm hot. I'll be okay.

“Let's go,” Arno grabbed Mickey and they made their way out. “It looks like I'm not going back to having one girlfriend in particular for a while.”

“You and me both,” Mickey said.

Then they went outside and got into an argument over whether Mickey should drive the Triumph home, since he'd managed to slam down about five glasses of
champagne in the fifteen minutes they'd been inside. Arno grabbed the key out of the ignition, where Mickey had left it.

“Gimme it,” Mickey said.

“No.” And then Arno pushed Mickey and his borrowed motorcycle the eleven blocks home.

“So you haven't seen him, Jonathan?” Frederick Flood asked. They were standing in the Floods' kitchen at eight o'clock in the morning on Friday. Frederick and his wife had just come in from Greenwich.

“Who has?” Fiona asked. She glanced around the kitchen, first at me, then at Flan, who was putting on her coat to go outside. Meanwhile the Floods' driver was bringing in suitcases from their car.

The Flood parents were always packing and unpacking at odd times, going back and forth from Manhattan to Greenwich, and then just as often they were headed to Paris or Bermuda or Antigua, or to the horn of Africa for safari. Their lives were a perpetual vacation.

“But you're staying here?” Frederick asked.

“Um, if it's okay.” I said.

“Of course it is. It'd just be nice if we knew
where our son was.”

“I think he said he'd meet us up in the country before Thanksgiving,” Flan said.

“That's this coming Thursday.” Her mother sighed and tightened her cashmere scarf around her neck. “Perhaps he'll check in with us before then?”

“I can call him.” I pulled out my phone, though I knew how completely doubtful it was that I'd reach Patch.

“No, I talked to him before,” Flan said. “He's fine.”

“Jonathan, help me take this pot into the garden,” Frederick Flood said. I stared at him. He was in lemon-yellow corduroys, a cream-colored cashmere sweater, and Gucci loafers. He wasn't smiling at me. At his feet was a small clay pot.

“Okay.” I just sort of stood there, since I couldn't figure how I was going to help him carry the little pot.

“Pick it up and follow me.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“
Careful
,” Flan whispered, as I headed toward the backyard with her father.

The pot was a lot heavier than I'd thought. The
Floods' garden had been planted with the kinds of plants that look good even when they're dead for the winter. We stood there, Frederick Flood and I, puffing air at each other.

“Let me think about where it should go …” So while he thought, I wobbled and hugged the pot to my stomach.

“As you may know, I'm a subscriber to the philosophy put forth by our mutual friend, Sam Grobart.”

“Oh, God.”

“Total honesty, that's my thing. Total honesty, even to a fault. For instance, the moment Alec Wildenburger said Ricardo Pardo's work was over, I saw that he was right and put all my Pardo sculptures up for sale even though I've been friends with Ricardo for more than ten years.”

From inside the house we could hear Flan begin to bicker with her mother over whether she had to wear tights to school. Outside, it was alarmingly crisp and the sky was the same stunning blue that it had been all week. It was the warmest November anyone could remember.

“So Sam—my therapist, my counselor, my friend—has confirmed as truth something that I'd long suspected your father had done.”

“Um.” I looked around the garden, but the wooden fence was easily ten feet high and the stakes were pointed on top. He'd be able to yank me down before I got free. And then he'd probably empty my pockets to get whatever he could to pay himself back for my father's crimes, and then he'd kill me. So even though I knew I couldn't run, I began to back away.

“Can I put this down?”

He didn't look at me.

I heard the front door slam, which probably meant that Flan had left for school.

Sure enough, Fiona Flood came out to the garden. So we were all standing outside in the bright morning sun, and finally I just gave up and set the pot at my feet.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” Frederick said.

“About what?”

“How much did he steal from us?”

“How should I know?” I asked. I took another step backward and knocked up against the fence.

“It's not about the money,” Fiona said.

“Right. My dad said that, too …” But then I decided that probably wasn't the right thing to say right then.

“Well, that's an interesting opinion for him to hold. But yes, it's the principle of the thing. We have tremendous sympathy for your mother. You should know that.”

Frederick glared at me. “Talk!” As I scrambled to come up with an answer, we heard the glass door swing open.

“Why, February,” Fiona said. “We're busy just now, with Jonathan. Can you—”

“Leave him alone.” February Flood winked at me. She and I had been friendly since I'd gotten her into a bona fide private A.P.C. sale a month earlier. And since just a few weeks ago, when she said she appreciated how I handled everything that had been weird with Flan.

“Excuse me?” Frederick Flood turned to his daughter. No two people could have been more different. February looked like Chloë Sevigny after a bad night and Frederick looked like Prince Charles in the middle of a good morning.

“He's a junior in high school and he's going to be late for class and you two are old and mean. If you want what amounts to gossip, you'll have to find it within your own clique.”

“Are you joking?” Frederick asked. “We're just having a friendly conversation.”

“No you aren't.”

I stared at February and her dad. They circled each other, like alley cats about to rumble. I wished I could climb a tree and scuttle out of there. Then, suddenly, Frederick Flood
harumphed
and followed his wife back into the house.