Secret Society (2 page)

T
he skirt was to die for.

Lauren Mortimer was standing in front of a rack of new arrivals at Giroux New York, a boutique on Fourteenth Street that she had been obsessed with since she was twelve. The skirt, by an up-and-coming London designer, was short without being slutty short and was constructed of gorgeous folds of gray chiffon. It had an almost 1960s feel to it, which Lauren loved; it would be the perfect thing to wear to Nick's party that night. She would pair it with the little Alexander McQueen leather jacket she had picked up a few weeks ago.

She lived for this, that sartorial moment when something in a store could take your breath away.

Once again, Lauren was in the Meatpacking District, her guilty pleasure, the site of so many of her sins, and she was
trawling for fashion. She was the only person she knew who actually liked that the neighborhood could be so nasty. There was something exciting about stepping over slightly foul-smelling, blood-strewn streets with full shopping bags from Scoop or Catherine Malandrino or Diane von Furstenberg. It always made her feel as if she were in a shoot for French or Italian
Vogue
, that sharp contrast of fashion and filth. Lauren thought of herself as a purist: She loved the fact that designers had moved into the neighborhood, but she hated that it had driven out the nightclubs and the culture (not to mention most of the meatpacking plants). She didn't mean the bridge-and-tunnel-packed clubs that occupied it today; there were still plenty of those, filled with girls with done-up hair and sparkly tops, outfits that made them look like hookers. From everything Lauren had heard, there used to be
real
nightclubs: goth clubs, performance art clubs, that sort of thing. Not that she had ever been to them, but she knew the stories. Her mother's town car used to pull up at Jeffrey when the downtown style mecca was still the street's main fashion outpost and Lauren was about nine years old. Her mother would try on shoe after shoe while a salesclerk with a shaved head and a serpent tattoo would amuse her with sanitized, PG-rated stories of everything that had gone on the night before: the performances, the transsexual go-go dancers, the European designers out with their models, the craziness, the all-night dancing. Lauren could read between the lines: Fashion equaled excitement
and sex and fun, and she wanted to be part of it.

Now Lauren went downtown on her own, in a cab or on the subway (which, weirdly, she sometimes preferred—everyone was so
normal
compared to the people in her life on the Upper East), and explored that world herself. She didn't know where she might fit into it, but what she did know was that she didn't want to be like her mother: drinking gimlets at four in the afternoon, moaning about her failed marriage, poring over photos from her days as a debutante. It was beyond pathetic.
Live in the present!
Lauren wanted to scream at her. But she couldn't, and anyway, her mom wouldn't. It was much easier, after all, to soak in the gin-laced past.

She turned over the skirt's price tag: nine hundred dollars. Would her mother notice if she put it on her platinum card? No, Lauren shopped at Giroux all the time, so what was the big deal? Even if her parents' divorce had frozen her mother's love life, it had done no such thing to her bank account.

 

Later that evening, Nick's best friend, Patchfield Evans III, threw on a pair of wrinkled jeans and a T-shirt as he readied himself for his friend's party. He had printed out the guest list and also emailed a copy to the club's owners, as Nick had requested. He went out to the living room, where his grandmother, Eugenia, was sitting. Her fingers danced gracefully over the keys of the old Steinway, which was, to Patch's ear, a tad out of tune. Every day, she still got dressed, did up her
white hair, put on makeup, even a string of pearls, as though she might be receiving a gentleman caller.

He reviewed his evening plans with her, and she nodded as if they had been on her mind all day.

“Nick will be there?” she asked.

Patch nodded.

“Be careful, yes? If there's a problem, you call on your…you know.”

“Cell phone, Genie, cell phone.” He had saved up and bought her one several years ago, but she never seemed to use it.

“That's right.” She smiled. “Cell phone. I'll be here.”

“I know,” Patch said, chuckling a bit. As if his grandmother would ever leave the apartment at this hour. “You want me to bring you anything?”

She shook her head. “My dear, I have everything I need.” She opened a drawer and held up a stack of delivery menus, giving him an impish grin. “There's a Cary Grant marathon on Turner Classics. I'll be up late.”

Patch headed back to his bedroom to finish getting ready. He shared the small two-bedroom with Genie, which he didn't mind, all things considered. Eugenia Rogers Madison was eighty-three years old and knew things about the city and about Patch's life that sometimes he didn't even realize himself. Even though they lived in a landmarked co-op building across the street from the Metropolitan Museum, their
place was a far cry from the sprawling penthouse where Nick lived, ten floors above them. In Patch's apartment, which had been split up from a much larger unit, the linoleum was coming up in the kitchen, and the electrical hadn't been inspected since the 1960s (they nearly had a fire last year when his grandmother plugged too many appliances into one extension cord). Eugenia and her late husband, Patch's grandfather, had bought the apartment in 1953 for less than what a parking space in the city would cost today. His grandfather had never made much money of his own, and Patch's father had died in a terrible drowning accident when Patch was five, without ever having the foresight to purchase life insurance for the family. His mother, sadly, was in an institution upstate. One day, for no reason that was apparent to anyone, she had turned completely catatonic. Patch now saw her only a few times a year.

He sighed as he laced up his dirty Puma sneakers, glancing up to his desk at the video work in progress on the glowing monitor, a grimy old flat screen that Nick had been about to toss. Four years ago, it had been far better than the ancient one Patch had owned at the time, but now it was looking a bit shopworn.

As he reached for his wallet, Patch thought about how he and his grandmother had the oldest kind of old money: the kind that didn't exist anymore.

Patch grabbed the rest of his equipment and headed for the door. He needed to get some good footage for his vlog,
PatchWork, the type that would really impress some of the TV producers he had been meeting with. He was nervous about tonight, and he tried to think past it. He and the producers were in endless “talks” about him directing a reality show set at Chadwick, a situation that was admittedly impressive for a high school junior, but it was not enough for Patch. He had gotten the email two months ago, out of nowhere: “I've been watching your vlog. I produce television shows. Can we meet?” What had followed had been a flurry of lawyers and agents and release forms. The school was thrilled that a high profile project might be shot on school grounds. Their enthusiasm had been surprising, but Chadwick was in need of a shot of energy—and the money the project could raise for the endowment fund wouldn't hurt, either. The biggest benefit was that the headmaster and the administration thought the show might be the boost the school needed to modernize its image, to make it seem less stuffy and stuck up. Patch was in the final round of discussions with a series of producers; he wanted to sign with a team that would really get it, that wouldn't make him feel like he had sold out. He imagined what his idol, Gus Van Sant, would do. That is, if Gus Van Sant shot documentaries about private school kids.

N
ick had shown up at The Freezer half an hour before the doors were set to open. As he entered, saying hello to the doormen, he noticed a strange man in a suit lurking a few doors down. Probably just the usual eurotrash who populated the area, but something about it bothered Nick. He had been looking right at him.

The club manager's iPod was on autoshuffle, so music was blasting, but it wouldn't be long before people started to notice that DJ Apocalypse wasn't in the booth. Nick had gone all out for this party: Patch had designed the flyers, they had sent out emails, Nick had enlisted friends, classmates, older brothers and sisters to spread the word. If all went well, the club would be packed.

The Freezer was a cavernous space on Gansevoort Street
that used to be a meatpacking plant. Multiple rooms surrounded one large dance floor, all a flight of stairs down from the street. Nick hoped that because it was underground, it would have a certain cool factor to it, the feeling of being a den of iniquity. He was disappointed to see, once he arrived, that the club was looking down at the heels. The vinyl upholstery was repaired with packing tape. The DJ booth, upon close inspection, was constructed of cheap, black-painted plywood. The distinct smell of vomit lingered in one of the restrooms. Nick asked Amir if the lights could be turned down any lower, and the club owner obliged. Maybe with the lights dim and the laser effects going, no one would notice that the place was a dump. Thank God they wouldn't be carding for drinks after people got in, and the first hour would be open bar, albeit without a full range of premium vodkas. Nothing like a few free drinks to get things going. Nick tried to push away his sense of dread. What if no one showed?

Adding to his anxiety, his parents had given him a bizarre guilt trip that evening about what he was wearing. They never seemed to care, hadn't made a comment in two years (save for the occasional request for him to tuck in his shirt or straighten his tie), and yet tonight, both his mother and father had sat him down and given him a mini lecture on how he shouldn't be going out dressed in a way that was so shabby, how he was representing his family, how he was a Bell and Bells were expected to look, act, and dress a certain way. Nick
had paid them no mind and had worn his usual obscure punk band T and olive-green German army jacket he had picked up on Bleecker Street in the Village.

At ten P.M., the club's doors opened, and reportedly a line already snaked down the block. Private school kids from all over the city started pouring in, the guys flashing their fake IDs, the girls usually getting in with little more than a flirtatious smile and the air that they were far too busy to be concerned with the possibility of not being admitted. The word had apparently gotten out that this was the party to be at on the first Friday after the start of school. People were chatting, drinking, texting each other, snapping pics on their phones. Nick paused for a moment, satisfied with the turnout, before jumping to the next problem: DJ Apocalypse was clearly flaking on his engagement. Nick was relieved to spot Patch twenty minutes later, the digital video camera—his friend's ever-present social crutch, he sometimes thought-held in front of him. Nick grabbed Patch, who gave him a glare.

“What are you doing? I was in the middle of a sequence.”

“You can always do a cut later. I need your help.”

Patch adjusted his round Harry Potter–style glasses and swept his straight brown hair out of his eyes. “What with?”

Nick motioned to the DJ booth. “The Apocalypse. It's not happening tonight,” he said, attempting a bad joke.

“Probably passed out at the Gramercy Park Hotel,” Patch
said. “I told you that you shouldn't have hired him. How much did you put down?”

“Twelve hundred. Maybe I can still cancel the check.” He groaned. “This is not good.”

“Okay, so what do you need?”

“I need you to DJ. Do you have your iPod?”

Patch nodded.

“Good. Plug it into the laptop. It's all hooked up to the mixing board. No one'll know the difference. You've got all the good stuff on there, right?”

“What do you think I listen to all day?”

“Make it the usual: some Daft Punk, some Interpol, some mashups. Everyone'll think you're the opening act or something, and by the time they realize that he's not coming, they'll be too drunk to care.”

“You're a class act, Bell,” Patch said.

“Piss off. Help me out, okay? This party has to go down well. My name is on the line.”

“You got it. But I'm still filming from the booth.”

“Patch, I don't care if you do Stoli shots there. Just play the music.” Nick cringed as he realized his gaffe: Patch had recently gone straight edge—no booze, no drugs, no cigs—after a series of particularly bad nights over the summer.

Patch nodded and headed for the DJ booth, and Nick saw from afar that he was plugging in his iPod to the laptop and getting acquainted with the system. Sometimes Nick didn't
know what he would do without his friend.

Nick turned around quickly, his blood pumping, ready to troubleshoot the next problem. Amir and Costa had a reputation for romancing their female clientele as the evening wore on, which meant that their attention often wandered. Nick wanted to make sure that his party went down well, that it wasn't one of those lame club nights that sucked because the bar ran out of ice or a speaker blew out. As he turned around, he bumped into someone, a slightly awkward girl in jeans and a white blouse. Tall, pretty, long straight reddish-brown hair, looking a bit frazzled as they collided. He remembered her, vaguely, from handing her a flyer earlier that day at school.

“I'm so sorry,” she said quickly, even though it was clearly his fault.

“New here, right?”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“Well, welcome to my party. It's part of the official Chadwick School welcome kit.”

“Really?” She looked serious.

“I'm kidding. It's totally not. Please.”

“Oh.” She relaxed a bit. “I'm sorry, I feel so clueless here. I just moved to the city. God, that sounds incredibly lame.”

“Don't worry about it. You want a drink ticket?”

“Sure, thanks.”

Nick reached in his pocket, only to realize that he didn't have any. “Dammit. I'm sorry. They didn't give me any yet.
Wanna follow me to the bar?”

The girl nodded. Nick was about to ask her name and tell her his when a foursome of Chadwick girls, all seniors, came up to him, squealing his name.

“Nicky Bell!” one of them exclaimed, using his childhood appellation, in a flutter of perfume and manicured nails. “Your party is
so
cute! We had no idea—I mean, we came down here to stop by after dinner, but this is just darling, really. So
raw
. So
real
. Did you have them do up the place like this? I mean, the silver walls, the—” She lowered her voice. “—
cheap-looking
seating. It's
way
cool.
So
downtown!”

“No, it's sort of—” Nick faltered. “Yeah, sure, we made it work.” Let them think whatever they want, right? “Do you know…” He turned around to look for the girl he was supposed to go to the bar with, but she had gotten caught up with the crowd. It was the part of throwing parties that he hated: You never really got to talk to anyone, and sometimes, if you weren't quick enough, you didn't even catch their names. Everyone always thought of Nick as a party boy, but it wasn't how he thought of himself. The parties were just something to do, something to pass the time. They weren't what he wanted to do with his life. Part of it was to tick off his parents. His mother and father had made it very clear that throwing downtown parties was not an appropriate vocation for someone of his, in his mother's words, “social class.” He was supposed to be teaching sailing or working on his tennis game or studying
an extra foreign language.

The four girls ran off. Nick was relieved to be rid of their patronizing comments. Even he found senior girls intimidating, although he had known those girls most of his life. But now, he realized, he had started to find them downright annoying.

Looking around, he saw that the girl with the reddish-brown hair had disappeared.