Break Every Rule (19 page)

“You brought a good crowd,” Philippa said, leaning her elbow against Mickey's shoulder and surveying the room. Everyone was surprised and pleased by the chummy, platonic way in which Mickey and Philippa were already getting along.

“Crazy, right?” Mickey was still sort of incredulous that all these people had shown up. “Thanks for coming,” he added.

“Wouldn't miss it. I better go find my group,” Philippa said, pointing to a table of well-put-together, if slightly tough-looking, lesbians. Mickey waved at Sadie, who seemed to have found a new crew to run with, and she waved back.

There were a few hours yet before the dinner rush, but the staff of Fresh was already darting in between tables and refilling carafes of water anxiously. It was naked night, and none of them really knew what to expect.

But Mickey Pardo, who was standing at his post by the entrance, seemed to be looking at exactly what he'd expected. The spare room, with its shiny black bamboo floors and chrome-and-mirror walls, was filled with kids searching for their name cards, shouting hellos and blowing kisses. Mickey crossed his arms over his chest and grinned.

“Hello, beautiful people!” he called out. “Let's all take a seat, please.”

At a table right and center of him, he saw David, Arno, and Jonathan taking their places. They'd come in together, and seemed to be getting along just fine. There was no Patch yet, though. David and Arno were dressed casually, but Jonathan was wearing the same camel suit he'd worn to the MoMA party. He looked pretty dressed up, and Mickey wondered briefly if he was going to have trouble taking the thing off. Mostly he was just glad Jonathan was there.

His assembled friends and acquaintances took their seats, giggling and talking as they did.

The manager of the restaurant came up to Mickey. His names was Yves, and he was nervously rubbing the round protrusion of his belly. “It's already six-thirty,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” Mickey said. He didn't actually know, of course. Mickey almost never knew the exact
time. But the fact that it was six-thirty didn't worry him.

“Well, you know the dinner people are coming soon,” Yves said. “This thing doesn't seem to be moving along very fast. Nobody is naked yet.”

“Yeah,” Mickey said. “You're right.” He thought about this for a moment, and then he called out to the assembled room, “Take yer clothes off!”

The room burst into excited laughter, but nobody moved to disrobe. Then they all went back to talking. Mickey looked at Yves, who looked distressed.

“It has to be kind of like a party, you know what I mean?” Mickey said.

Yves nodded. He motioned to the head waiter. A few minutes later, the waiters moved about the room pouring flutes of champagne and serving little dishes of cold black rice and radish appetizers. This seemed to make everybody happy.

“Great,” Mickey bellowed to the crowd. “Now, show me what you got.”

The crowd was still resisting his commands, so Mickey pulled off his shirt and dropped his camouflage pants to the ground. He did a little naked spin for the crowd, which cheered him. There were catcalls, especially from the lesbians.

Amidst the excitement that followed, a few people
stripped down to their underwear (Philippa and her friends were part of this advanced guard), but pretty soon the guys were just staring at the panty-clad girls, and all disrobing came to a halt.

Besides Mickey, the nakedest dude in there was David, who was a loyal-enough friend that he'd stripped down to his boxers in solidarity.

Mickey was beginning to think that Luc Vogel did actually have it rough. How did he do this, year after year? How was Mickey ever going to get all these people to take their clothes off?

“Can I just say that you look
amazing
in your undies?”

David instinctively distrusted this statement, and not only because it was the first time he'd heard it. He was an athlete, after all—he had the broad shoulders and long muscled legs of a guy who played basketball every day of his life—so he was going to hear something like that sooner or later. No, it was the sickeningly sweet voice of the speaker, sitting over to his right, that made him narrow his eyes.

“Thanks,” he said, turning warily to see whom it was.

“Hey, David,” Lizzie said, smiling. It certainly wasn't Modigliani, whom he'd been looking for all night. In fact, he had been so focused on looking for her that he had somehow not noticed when everyone else stopped taking their clothes off, and now he was the only guy in the room down to his boxers.

He could feel her looking at his crotch, and he was very relieved that he'd been paying enough attention not
to go completely buck naked. “Oh, hi, Lizzie,” he said grudgingly.

The It Girls had stripped down to their bras and jeans, and he could see that her breasts looked kind of swollen—abnormally spherical, almost. A girl he was pretty sure was Mimi ran her eyes up and down David's body approvingly. Who knew if it was really her, though—they still all looked really similar to him, and after several days sans It Girls, he could no longer tell them apart.

“Yo, Lizzie,” Arno called from over his shoulder.

She looked over at Arno, and then quickly turned away.

“Lizzie, it's Arno,” he continued. “I guess Monday didn't work out, huh? Sorry I haven't called, but I guess I programmed your number into my phone wrong.”

“Uh… bummer. Remind me to give it to you before we leave,” she called over her shoulder, before burying her face in Mimi's shoulder and bursting out in giggles.

David was pissed that they were laughing at his friend, and he was about to say something when he was distracted by a stray imperfection in the crew of plastic girls seated next to them. It was a large, dark mole at the narrowest part of a girl's back.

The Modigliani! She was right there! Sitting with the
It Girls, her dark hair twisted over her shoulder, and she seemed to be laughing. She had taken off her shirt and was now wearing a bra and super low-rise jeans. David stood up, and walked over so that he was standing right behind her.

“I've been looking for you everywhere,” he said. She turned around very slowly, and all her blond friends looked with her. Their faces were full of admiration.

“I've been looking for you, too,” she said. She was smiling a perfect, blindingly white smile.

The only thing David could think to say was “Sorry, I thought you were somebody else,” but he couldn't even get that out. He was completely speechless, because it
was
her, but she didn't look anything like before. Now she was just so… bland.

“Do you like it?” she said. He could only assume that she was talking about the perfect ski jump that her once unique nose had been converted to. And he didn't have anything to say about that. “I got it done the day after we met, and I haven't been out until now because I was waiting for the swelling to go down. What do you think?”

David decided that she had definitely had more than just her nose done. She looked just like all the other girls at her table, except that she had brown hair, at least for now. David must have been stunned into honesty,
because he said, “No, I don't think I do like it,” out loud, and then he stumbled backward toward his table, knocking over a chair on his way.

“Hey, you okay, man?” Jonathan said. All his guys cracked up a little bit at his klutziness.

“All these girls think you're hot; don't fuck it up,” Arno said, slapping David on the back.

But David was feeling all quiet and exhausted with disappointment, so he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He was trying to figure out which way the bathroom was when he heard someone calling his name. He turned and saw Sandra Anderson. She was sitting with a bunch of her friends at a table. And he discovered that he was disappointed that she was still wearing all her clothes.

“Did you have a good time at the party last weekend?” he said idiotically. Then he saw the look on Sandra's face, and remembered what Rob had said about her being “super uncool and a little ugly” and realized just
how
idiotic it was. “Hey, I'm sorry about Rob. He didn't act in a way I'd ever want a friend of mine to act.”

“Yeah, that really sucked. Rob, I mean,” she said.

“I know,” David said.

“Well, it's good to see you, anyway.”

“Yeah, um… can I get your number before we leave?” David said. He made a little gesture and said, “I don't have a pen on me, as you can see.”

“Of course you can have my number,” she said, smiling happily.

“Okay, don't forget, though.”

“David, that's really not going to happen.” Sandra winked at him, and David smiled to himself as he walked away.

When he made his way back to his table, he felt like he'd let go of something really heavy and self-destructive.

Mickey was still acting like a cheerleader at the front of the room, and Jonathan and Arno still seemed to be getting along fine. Jonathan hadn't said a single mean thing to him tonight.

“Is he going to be able to do it?” David asked as he sat down. Jonathan still had his suit on, and Arno was wearing jeans but no shirt.

“I don't know, man, this seems like a tough crowd,” Arno said.

Just then, the door opened and a gust of warm night air blew over the nervous, giggling crowd.

I was starting to get worried for Mickey—he had been up there trying to get everyone to take their clothes off for almost an hour now. But then the front door of the restaurant opened, and in came Patch with that girl Greta right behind him.

Everyone got very quiet, and I heard Mimi Rathbone and her crew whispering about how he was the
real
Hottest Private School Boy. I also heard one of them saying, a little louder than was strictly speaking necessary, “But who's he with? She doesn't look like anybody, does she?”

Patch was still talking to Mickey. “Hey, I'm not late, am I?” he said.

“Naw, man, just getting started,” Mickey said back. I wondered if Mickey would be weird about Greta, since after all, he had pursued her hardcore last winter. But then she gave him a very sisterly kiss on either cheek, and everything seemed okay. Mickey pointed them in our direction, and the
whole restaurant watched as we loudly greeted our long-lost friend. Greta gave us each a kiss on the cheek, too.

Then Patch and Greta astounded us all by pulling their shirts over their heads, and pulling their jeans over their ankles. Neither of them had been wearing underwear, and they both looked tan and freckled naked.

They sat on the chairs in front of our table like it was the most natural thing in the world, and then Greta poured us each a glass of champagne, and said, “Cheers, guys. It's really good to see you.”

And then we all clinked.

That did it, I guess, because to my utter amazement, everyone in the room started taking their clothes off right then. Patch and Greta just made being naked look so cool that everyone else became instantly comfortable with it. Arno stripped down to nothing, and then when David pulled his boxers down, he set off another whole round of whistles and appreciative murmuring.

Pretty soon, the whole room was a sea of bare skin and naked thighs and bellies. Mickey started taking pictures, and everyone posed for him and moved as he said. There was a lot of teasing and
laughing, but everyone managed to hold still, more or less, when Mickey told them to.

I couldn't do it, though.

I just couldn't take my clothes off in front of all those people. I stayed right where I was, with my suit jacket on and my shirt buttoned up to the collar.

In my own defense, I'd like to say that the events of Saturday night had been enough public nakedness for me for one week. And somehow the idea of being totally bare in front of your best people is a little frightening. But after some teasing and cajoling, everyone sort of forgot that I was wearing a suit. Maybe it was because it was beige, and I almost blended in.

Otherwise, everyone was extremely naked. There were so many exposed breasts that I didn't even really care about looking at them anymore. The whole thing had kind of turned into a party—even the waitstaff was drinking, and I'm pretty sure they started turning away people at the door, even the ones with dinner reservations. A blue-grass band had appeared out of nowhere and set up in the corner, and were now playing energetically. In the buff.

Me and my guys were all getting along, too. It was almost like we hadn't just spent a lot of time
alienated from and resenting each other. I'd apologized to Arno for being a dick, and he'd blown it off like it didn't matter at all. And then we'd actually hugged. Before he was naked, obviously. Then, when Mickey had taken enough pictures of the room, he came over to the table, and we all toasted to his success.

“Mickey, I think you might be a genius,” Patch said.

“Nah,” Mickey said. “I'm just crazier than all y'all put together.”

“Can I take a picture of you?” Greta said. We all said yeah, and she took a digital camera out of her bag, and stepped away from us so that she could get the best shot. Then the flash went off several times. She laughed happily at the results. “They weren't lying. You guys really are pretty damn hot.” Then she passed the camera around so we could see what we looked like.

There we were, four naked guys and me in my Duncan Quinn suit. And we
did
look cool. Not overly posed or hyped cool, just like a bunch of guys who knew who they were, whether they were totally revealing it or not. I had the feeling that we were all going to be okay with each other after tonight.

They kept Fresh closed to the usual dinner crowd, and most of the naked people stayed really late. It seemed like we had to talk to all of them, but as much as we could, we just talked to each other, filling each other in on where we had been and where we were headed next.