Hold On Tight (10 page)

“I don't know, man,” Patch said, after a pause, “I mean it's been hella fun being here with you guys, and that party was all right. But maybe Vassar's too close to home, you know? Culturally, I mean. Like everyone already knew who I was here. It made me feel …
bad.”

“I mean, maybe not
here
here,” Mickey went on. “But you know, all of us at the same school, living in weird housing, copying each other's homework—that'd be pefect!”

I smiled, because it really did sound just about perfect, but Patch still didn't look sure. “I know you and Greta really want to go to the same school,” I said. “You think you can convince her to go to an East Coast school?”

And then Patch gave me that wide, sparkly smile that makes people just topple for him. “Sure,” he
said. “That's the way it's gotta be.” Then he muttered, “It's
gotta,”
again, kind of quietly.

So everything seemed pretty okay right then—my friends were all together, taking advantage of the good things, and we were having our horizons super expanded. We had this big chance to remake ourselves as better people just a year away, but
with
each other. All of us together: me, Mickey, Arno, Patch, and …

“Hey guys?” I said, sitting up in my cushy armchair. “When was the last time any of you saw David?”

“Do you have anything to eat?” David asked.

It was five in the morning and he was sitting on one of the geometrical, all-white pieces of furniture in Sara-Beth Benny's apartment, back in the city. Everything in the room that wasn't white was metallic with clean, straight lines. The apartment was also really high up, in one of the tall, shiny black Trump buildings, and most of the walls were made of glass. David was afraid of going too close to the windows, so he had parked himself in the middle of all this whiteness. It was the coldest-feeling space he had ever been in, and even though he wasn't remotely hungry, he thought that putting some hot food inside him might help.

“Eat?” Sara-Beth said, her forehead shrinking a little and her eyes getting kind of wide. She was wearing a white, spaghetti-strap dress that looked sort of prairie-like. It accentuated all her childlike qualities.

“Um, maybe breakfast or something? It was a long drive back from Vassar.”

Sara-Beth's driver had driven them back to the city, but it had taken much longer than usual because she kept complaining that her stomach was upset and insisting that they pull over. David was relieved that she never actually threw up, although the driver said something cryptic implying that it wouldn't be the first time.

“There's no food here,” Sara-Beth said finally, the blue of her eyes growing more intense as she spoke.

“Nothing?” David said. “Maybe we should get out of here, then.”

“You want to get out of here?” She looked so full of emotion that she might burst. “Why? I mean, I told you I was sorry for calling you Arno.”

“We, I said
we
,” David said gently. He would have wrapped this girl up in his arms and squeezed her with all his might if he weren't so afraid of breaking her. “And it's okay about the Arno thing. Sometimes I wish I were Arno, too.”

“Really? Then you understand me. I can't tell you how many times a day I wish I were somebody else.” Sara-Beth's faced crumpled and a tear slid down her cheek. “You're the
only one
who understands me, David, and now you want to leave …”

“I don't want to leave
you
. It's just that… don't take this the wrong way, but your apartment kind of freaks me out. It's really cold in here.”

“I know!” Sara-Beth wailed. “It's horrible. My mom insisted I have this famous interior decorator do it so that
W
magazine would do a piece about me and my apartment and now all I can think about is what if I spill something or someone comes over with dirt on their shoes and …” Sara-Beth stopped talking—she was sobbing so hard that she couldn't get any more words out.

“I understand that,” David said, coming over and sitting next to her on the long white couch and taking her little hand in his. “I think this place is really unfriendly, especially for a girl living by herself.”

“Mm-hmm,” Sara-Beth managed through tears. David stroked her back as she began to calm down. Finally, when the tears had stopped, she turned her face up to him. Her lips were trembling, and her eyes were still that intense blue color. It was visually stunning, and he had a front row seat. “Sometimes I wish I could just throw myself through all that glass,” she said dramatically.

“Don't even talk like that,” David said. He was wondering if maybe he'd inherited the therapy gene from his parents, because all he wanted to do right then was make this girl feel safe. “I think this place is really unhealthy for you. I think you should get out of here, and as soon as possible.”

“But I can't even picture living anywhere but
here …,” she wailed. “I'm like a bird, and this apartment is my cage.”

“But you could go anywhere! There are so many different kinds of places to live. Like, take my parent's apartment in the Village—it's probably a quarter of the size of this place, but it feels cozy and lived in, you know?”

“I love the Village,” Sara-Beth said, sniffling. “Is your apartment near the Magnolia Bakery?”

“Um, kind of …”

“David,” Sara-Beth said, pushing herself up onto his lap and fixing her now-dry eyes on his. “Let me come live with you.”

A few hours and a lot of talking later, David and Sara-Beth were in the Grobart's kitchen, whispering so as not wake up his parents. Sara-Beth was still wearing the white dress, but now she was also wrapped up in David's Potterton sweatshirt. She looked especially tiny in it; he couldn't stop looking at her.

David had considered Jonathan's advice about the whole see-saw thing. He tried to really second-guess what was happening in the cab, which Sara-Beth had insisted on taking because she was afraid her driver would call her mother in Malibu and tell her where Sara-Beth had gone. But then she had crawled onto his lap
and promised never to call him Arno again, and David had pretty much stopped thinking about any playground-equipment metaphors.

“What kind of eggs do you want?” David whispered at her. He was taking breakfast ingredients out of the fridge.

“I don't know,” she whispered back. “What kind of eggs do I like?”

When she said this, she sat up straight as though she were awaiting direction.

“Um, I don't know, what kind did your mom make you when you were a kid?”

“Please don't bring her up,” she said darkly. “That's not what I mean, anyway. What kind of eggs does SBB like, do you think?”

“Uh,” David said. He almost said poached, but then he realized he didn't know how to poach an egg. “Scrambled?” he said eventually.

She nodded, like she was considering the deeper implications of scrambled eggs. “Yes, that's exactly right. Scrambled, with a side of Northern fruit.”

David took out a pan and was poised to put it on the stove when he heard a footstep in the hall. He froze, pan in the air like he might smack an intruder with it. Sara-Beth, thankfully, did not freeze. She jumped up and leaned against his back, her silhouette
entirely engulfed by his to the person stepping through the kitchen door.

“David,” said Sam Grobart. His hair was sticking straight up and he was wearing boxers and his
Psychoanalysts Do It Better
T-shirt. David realized with relief that he was not wearing his glasses. “What are you doing here?”

“Just making a little snack, Dad.”

“No, what are you doing back home from Vassar?”

“Uh … I came back early to, um, study.”

“Good boy. Well, get some rest.”

David could feel Sara-Beth's hands running up and down his spine, and he was really hoping that his dad would go away soon.

“That's what I'm going to do at any rate,” he said, turning. But before he disappeared back down the hall, something occurred to him. “By the way, David, how did that interview go?”

“Super, Dad,” David said, even as the one person who knew that it had not gone super was blowing on his neck. Or, more in the direction of his neck, as the top of her head was at about his chest level. “Almost perfect, I'd say.”

As it turned out, a weekend away did just the trick. When I got back to the city I was feeling all amped—everything just seemed possible, you know what I mean? It was nice to know that there was a light at the end of the dark tunnel that was high school, and it was called college.

Seeing my brother had been even better than I'd imagined. He hadn't really made me feel better about myself—at least not in the way I'd been expecting—but he'd taught mean important lesson, which is that when you get a little distance from yourself you really can transform. All these icky feelings about being a shallow person who cared too much about that whole HPSB thing didn't really matter, because by the time I got to college I was going to be known as someone who really cared. About something.

I just hadn't quite figured out what, yet. That was
the one little anxiety I brought back from Vassar with me.

Just to get my foot in the door with this whole caring thing, I attended all my classes on Monday. This seemed to go pretty well. We were reading
Romeo and Juliet
for our Drama as Literature class, and after we all went around reading different parts from a couple scenes in act II, Arno raised his hand.

“I think I finally get what this is all about,” Arno said. “I think what Shakespeare is trying to say is that absence is the single most important ingredient to desire.”

We had a sub that day—he graduated from Princeton like last year or something so he's really young, and he just teaches part-time. He looked at Arno in this way that made me think he'd never heard the word desire said out loud before.

“Mr. Preston?” I said, raising my hand. “I just wanted to say that I couldn't agree more. Arno, that was a really intelligent point.”

And you're thinking right now: he's either being sarcastic or very Dr. Phil, but you would be wrong. I raised my hand because I thought that what Arno said was really smart, and I
cared
enough to say so.

After class we went to the computer lab to check our e-mail. This always makes me a little sad, because Flan always used to send me little stories from her day—even before we were going out, when she was just Patch's little sister to me—and she doesn't anymore. Now, sometimes all that's in my inbox is a mass e-mail about a sample sale or something. Flan would definitely know of some way to practice caring, even if it was just the nearest street corner where some kids were trying to find homes for a new litter of puppies.

There was no platonic love note from Flan this time, although there was a forward from Beatrice, this girl from our Drama as Literature class. It was about a benefit that night for this small, experimental theater company called the Sweet Mercy Theater Company that she'd been ushering for. I skimmed the e-mail and immediately perked up. I knew it wasn't really
that
do-gooderish. I mean it was a party—and I'm not really a theater person—but the party was on Ludlow Street, which usually signals it's the kind of party I'd be down for. And even better, it was a start on the caring thing.

“Hey Arno.” I peeked over Arno's shoulder and saw that he was examining the Sarah Lawrence Web site.

“Uh-huh?”

“What are you doing tonight?”

Arno made an indifferent grunting noise and continued scrolling through the pictures in the “campus life” section.

“Do you want to go to a par— a
benefit
with me tonight? It's on Ludlow Street.”

“Whatever.”

And just like that, we had Monday night plans that were very not us.

The cell was going off, and this time it was not the usual annoying jingle. It was the tune of the Beach Boys' “California Girls,” which meant that it was Greta calling. Patch knew the phone was in his room because he could hear it. He just didn't know what part of the room. But he was determined to find it before the call went to voicemail.

Patch reached into the pile of semi-dirty clothes on the left side of his bed and started throwing shirts and belts over his head. But the noise remained just as muffled as before and it was not until he was down on his hands and knees that he saw it, underneath the bed. He came up with the phone flipped open.

“Hello?” he heard Greta saying. “Are you there, hello?”

“Hey, Red,” Patch said, relieved, leaning back against the bed. He had just gotten back from school, and he was wearing his standard white T-shirt and khakis rolled
at the ankle. “I'm here,” he added, kicking off the low-top converse he had been wearing without socks.

“What
happened
to you?” she asked. “I kept calling you all weekend.”

“I know, that sucked. I couldn't get through to you, either. And the one message from you that I got was all garbled.”

“Yeah, I was worried that might happen.”

“So did you have a good time?”

“Oh my god, such a good time. I wish you had been there. All of these kids who I was friends with when I was a freshman and they were seniors were there—I think you would really like them—and we all went out on the party circuit. It was hella fun. I mean, I live pretty much without parental constraints, but those college kids—they're something else.”

“So, was your … ex-boyfriend one of these people?” Patch said, letting his head fall back on the bed. He stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars that Flan had put on the ceiling years ago, as a surprise for his thirteenth birthday. They looked sort of lonely and old during the day.