Break Every Rule (3 page)

“Fight with my girlfriend,” Mickey muttered. He really didn't want to talk about it, even though talking about it with a stranger was, in a way, preferable to talking about it with his therapist. The chances that he would be asked to describe how it had made him
feel
were infinitely reduced.

“Eh, happens,” the man said.

“What's
your
problem?” Mickey asked, irritated that his truly big problem would be dismissed so easily.

“Eh, you know, average midlife crisis stuff. You have a career retrospective of your work at the Museum of Modern Art, but what do you really
have?”

“Luc Vogel?” Mickey said. “Mickey Pardo.”

“Ricardo Pardo's boy?”

“You got it.”

“Old devil, I should have known. You look just like him. We went to grad school together, you know,” Luc Vogel said, passing Mickey his flask.

“Yeah, I know,” Mickey took a long sip from the flask. Ah, tequila. “Listen, Luc, I think you're being
kind of a wuss. Last I checked you were rich and famous. I mean, what could possibly be missing?”

“Well…” Luc Vogel cleared his throat in an attempt at modesty. “Not much, it's true….”

“Anything…?”

“I'm having a hard time coming up with…”

“
Nuthin
'…?”

“Well, I have always wanted to do a nude crowd scene in a restaurant. There would be something so urbane about that, don't you think? Something lacking in the rest of my oeuvre… sort of Roman, but sort of bourgeois bohemian, too. But people never want to do that. Sanitary issues, I guess.”

“That's what's missing?” Mickey asked incredulously.

“Yes, that's it.” Luc Vogel stood up. He seemed satisfied.

“I think you could probably handle it if you wanted to,” Mickey said, taking another swig of the tequila and passing it back.

“No, no, I have far too many projects already…,” the older man said, moving quickly toward the door. “Too many projects… No, I couldn't possibly…,” he went on vaguely. When he reached the door, he turned to Mickey, and smiled. “But you seem like quite the audacious young man. Set it up. I
dare
you.”

He tossed the flask back to Mickey and was gone.

Patch Flood spent Thursday afternoon flipping through vinyl at A-1 Records on 6th Street and Avenue A, and now he was lying on his bed and listening to the classic T-Rex album he'd found. His cell was ringing again, so he closed his eyes. Patch wasn't really a cell phone kind of guy; his family had lived on a sailboat until they moved to their Perry Street townhouse when he was six. But Jonathan had insisted he get one a few years back, and since Jonathan did kind of freak out when he couldn't get in contact with his friends, Patch figured it was probably the brotherly thing to do.

That didn't mean he picked up his phone most of the time, of course. Patch was tall and sandy-haired and not easily excited or put out by stuff, so girls were always getting infatuated with him and calling him up nonstop. But the phone had been a particular pain in the ass today.

After the record store, he'd gone skateboarding in the basketball courts in Tompkins Square Park. He was
watching some twenty-five-year-old totally blow it on his kick flip, when the cell rang three times in a row. Simon, this gutter kid whom Patch hung out with there sometimes, had been sitting next to him on the bench, and he took the phone out of Patch's pocket and said hello. Then he handed it to Patch and said, “It's for you, dude.”

Patch took the phone and asked what was up.

“Hi, this is Justine Gray from
New York
magazine, and I wanted to—”

“Sorry, not interested.” Patch hung up and shrugged at Simon. “Someone wanted to sell me a magazine subscription,” he said.

The same number showed up in the caller ID window of his phone about once every ten minutes for the rest of the afternoon. He couldn't figure out why someone at
New York
would be trying to call him, but he disliked them on principle because
New York
had published a kind of nasty article about this girl Selina Trieff he used to go out with, about how she was out of control and trashed hotel rooms and stuff. It was supposedly about the rise of teen drinking, but she was the only kid they talked to. They had run a picture of her passed out on the couch with the headline
WASTED BEAUTY
?

Patch turned up the T-Rex and put a pillow over his head. His phone started making a noise a lot like the
chorus of “Stayin' Alive.” It stopped and started again. He picked it up, prepared to hurl it across the room. Then he remembered that Jonathan had assigned his number a special disco ring in Patch's phone so that Patch would know to pick up.

“J,” Patch said.

“Hey, man, where are you?” Jonathan sounded tense, and there were definitely a lot of people in the background.

“Home. Why?”

“Because tonight's the Luc Vogel retrospective. How could you not be here?”

“I dunno. I'm kind of not crazy about the stuff of his we have in the house, so…” Patch trailed off.

“It's, like, a huge party at the MoMA, dude. Arno's parents are hosting it. You so should be here. We all agreed months ago we would come to this thing.”

“I just forgot, I guess.”

“Well, listen, Rob, Arno, and David are running around like a goddamn boy band with bottles of champagne and these skanky uptown girls, and Mickey's nowhere to be found, and…”

“Is Flan there?”

“Yeah, she says hi. And that you should be here. I really don't think I can take more of Rob, Arno, and David's eurotrash extravaganza without backup.”

“Yeah, okay. I'm just gonna…”

“Patch? Hold on a sec, I have a call waiting…”

Patch stood up and wondered where he might have left his shirt. He stretched, twisting his long, lean torso right and left, and thought about whether a shower was absolutely necessary before this party thing. Then Jonathan came back on.

“Dude, I have to take this call. But you're on your way, right?”

“Yeah, okay,” Patch said, and hung up.

His phone flashed him a message that he had twenty-seven unopened voicemails.

I got off the phone with Patch and switched back to the other line. It was this girl who worked at
New York,
Justine Gray. She hadn't told me why she was calling yet, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was about.

“So talk to me. What's up?” I said.

“Hi, Jonathan. Like I said, I'm a writer for
New York
magazine, and I'm working on an article about
the coolest
of cool private school boys. Obviously, you're pretty well known for your taste and all that. I was hoping I could get some quotes from you for the article.”

I looked over at Flan. Her arms were crossed, and she was looking at the ceiling. Pretty much everyone was on the dance floor, which was where she wanted to be. I knew this. But I'd felt weird when we were out there before—Rob and Arno were on the dance floor, too, and kind of making a scene with these three blondes who are
juniors at Florence. Flan goes to Florence, too, and the older girls kept giving Flan looks like they were wondering what she was doing out so late on a school night. It was really irritating me. Plus, Rob kept yelling foreign words, which is just something nobody should have to put up with.

“Yeah, I've read your stuff,” I said into the phone. “I'd be happy to be interviewed. When's good for you?”

“Well, my deadline's tomorrow.”

“Oh. I'm at the Luc Vogel opening right now, but…”

“I know. Me, too. I'm over by the buffet table. How about now?”

I looked over toward the room with the buffet table and saw someone waving at me.

“Absolutely,” I said, trying to hide my enthusiasm since I knew this Justine person was obviously working on the Hottest Private School Boy issue. They've done it eight years in a row now, and it is a huge deal. The guy they pick is on the cover, and they write this very puffy piece about what makes him so hot, with pictures and all that. This issue has
made
people. The inaugural Hottest Private School Boy was Tyler Ash, who was a senior at Gissing then. He dropped out of Yale
his sophomore year and traveled around, and now he writes for
Saturday Night Live.
You've probably seen his name in Page Six, because he is frequently caught canoodling with the female hosts at Lotus or some other place like that after the show.

Most private school guys in Manhattan are supposed to go to good colleges, and most of the HPSBs have. But last year's, Danny Abraham, didn't even bother. He started a nightclub called Ginger as soon as he graduated high school, and it's done very well. You've probably heard of Ginger, too; it's one of those places everybody goes to, but nobody can get into.

Heard of Black-Jack-Point front man Orlando Simenon? Yeah, he was one, too.

So, Hottest Private School Boy is a very big deal, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't thinking that maybe I'd been chosen. I was even praying for it pretty hard, since I've heard designers start sending you clothes as soon as the issue hits the stands, on top of everything else.

Justine Gray was still waving at me. I waved back and hung up, and then I turned to Flan.

“Hey, gorgeous…”

“Who were you talking to?” she asked.

I tried to make a sighing noise to indicate that it was all very irritating, rather than totally exciting. Flan was not going to like being left alone in the middle of a party. “This… person from
New York
magazine. They want to interview me, I don't know, something about the scene with private school kids now, you know the type of thing. So I'm gonna have to go now. But I'll find you in a little while, okay?”

“
Jonathan
,” she said, her eyes widening, “you cannot ditch me here.”

“I'm not
ditching
you.”

“Oh yeah? What do you call leaving me alone in a room full of strange people who are older than I am?” she asked.

“Flan, this is important.”

“Why? You just made it sound like a big bore.”

This time I sighed for real. “You remember last year when the Hottest Private School Boy issue came out, with Danny Abraham on the cover?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, they do it every spring. I think that's what this is for, and… listen, Flan, if they want to name me Hottest Private School Boy in New York, I really can't say no. You know?”

I kissed her on the cheek, and then I walked over
to the buffet room. The girl who had waved at me was still standing there, waiting. She was wearing a knockoff Chanel jacket and Seven jeans, with a very wide belt and very pointy shoes. She looked pretty hopped up. I tried not to show how excited I was when I introduced myself.

“I'm
so
honored to meet you,” she said loudly. “I think there's a lounge over there. Does that sound like a good place to sit and talk? I want to find out what makes Jonathan tick.”

Okay, who would say something like that to anyone but New York's Hottest Private School Boy? I was
so
in. I nodded like I didn't care at all.

As I followed Justine to the lounge rooms, I turned to see how Flan was doing without me. She was standing against the wall where I'd left her with her arms crossed. She looked uncomfortable, and a little pissed.
She'll thank me when I'm the Hottest Private School Boy,
I thought, and turned back to follow Justine.

“Woohooo!” someone shouted, pretty close to David Grobart's ear. It was his friend Rob Santana, who was doing something that looked like dancing, except dirtier, with one of the three blondes he and Arno had picked up. Rob stuck his tongue out in David's direction and then made another whooping noise. David was doing something like dancing, too, although it was the kind of quasi-dancing that guys like him resorted to only when they really had to. He moved his long limbs around to the beat, approximately.

David was six-four, and he played basketball for Potterton. He was more of a hoodie-and-sneakers guy than an art world guy, but he was doing his best to follow Rob's lead. After all, Rob had been his friend when all his New York guys forgot about him. Plus, the MoMA party that night was a big deal for Arno, whom David had also been spending a lot of time with lately. This seemed like a good thing, because he and Arno had had some beef over the years, like when Arno made
out with David's girlfriend, Amanda Harrison-Deutschmann, last fall. David's parents said it was wonderful they had grown so close again, and that it was an excellent healing process. David's parents were therapists.

Still, David was having a hard time keeping up with Rob and Arno tonight. For one thing, he was pretty sure that Rob had just yelled “I love you, MAMI!” really loud, and for another, the girls they were hanging out with were a little intimidating. They were all physically small, the same shade of blond, and they all had this sort of plastic sheen over their skin. Their noses all ski-jumped in exactly the same way. They were like Amanda Harrison-Deutschmann times fifteen. And there were three of them.

He was also having a hard time telling them apart, because they were so similar-looking.
Could they be sisters or something?
David wondered.

“I have to pee,” said the blonde he was dancing with. Was her name Bunny? It was something like that. She was the one with bangs.

“Okay,” David said, trying not to look relieved. “I'll walk you to the bathroom.”

They waved at Rob, who had his face sunk deep into Bunny II's neck. Nobody noticed as they walked away from the dance floor.