The Insiders

by J. Minter

  the insiders

  j. minter

  for MBB

  contents

  a few words from me, jonathan, the social glue

  friday night makes a fine beginning …

  get ready to deal with my cousin … kelli

  arno knows exactly where amanda is

  david is depressed

  mickey pardo knows how to wake up a room

  i can’t keep track of everybody!

  david tries to get himself and his girlfriend back on track

  liza and i do not discuss our past

  arno turns on the charm

  a breezy saturday in the city

  mickey makes good use of his hospital bed

  i should have known better

  arno introduces kelli to oddy

  david plays at the garden

  even strangers love mickey

  david gets the call

  what happens when a girl likes you and you don’t like her back enough

  arno’s night goes on forever and ever

  the crash known as sunday

  my quiet sunday morning

  mickey and his dad sometimes disagree

  the school week, which can’t be helped

  too late for david and amanda

  is my cousin an evil person?

  mickey gets to see his forbidden philippa

  too little kelli, too many guys

  david can’t even make a layup

  another oddy opening for arno

  mickey blows it big time

  david connects some of the dots

  i take a walk with my little friend

  mickey’s troubles grow

  arno can’t connect his emotions and his actions

  welcome back to friday night

  i never asked to be the referee

  mickey’s dinner in hell

  the search party skids onto arno’s thin ice

  mickey makes it out alive

  arno takes hits from all directions

  I get arno out of there

  david gets a nice surprise

  i go head-to-head with february

  arno had it coming

  mickey rounds up the rest of the gang

  david and arno don’t deal with each other

  the search party rests for the night

  saturday morning, sunny, sixty degrees

  mickey pardo, p.i.

  what do you wear to a search party?

  arno goes back to what he’s good at

  mickey shouldn’t be driving

  david gets back to where he was before

  a perfectly normal dinner with my family

  arno apologizes for real

  the object of our affection

  a little more from the social glue

  sunday brings us near to our end

  the flood family actually sits down together

  arno’s dreamgirl goes home

  fernanda, or flan?

  a few words from me, jonathan, the social glue

  We met Patch in fifth grade and let him into our gang right away. Before that we were four—Arno Wildenburger, Mickey Pardo, David Grobart, and me. My name is Jonathan.

  Back then we had to dress for school in blue polo shirts and khakis, so we looked weirdly alike. And our parents were either friends or were doing business with each other. Those things, plus the fact that we’d all been in school together since kindergarten, were more than reason enough for us to be best friends. We picked each other for dodgeball, shared our science homework, and said laser when we meant penis.

  Then Patch showed up. He was a skater whose family had lived on a sailboat since he was six. That experience left him with heavy freckles, streaky blond hair, and a weird kind of laid-back quality, where even though we had bells between classes, he’d get up and sit down when he felt like it, because even indoors he was telling time by the sun.

  We were eleven, and Patch was the man. The girls were all obsessed with him. Why? He barely noticed them, that’s why. He didn’t play too rough with them like Mickey or tease them like Arno. And he didn’t sulk when they didn’t talk to him like David. Since we were the cool group, we grabbed him, because we were as confused and amazed by him as anyone. And that made us five.

  Patch was so cool that sometimes he forgot to wear shoes to school. He had heavy-lidded eyes and he’d stand and mutter apologies at teachers until they would give him anything. As for the rest of us: Arno was better looking than everybody else, and sharper. His polo shirts came from some special store on Madison Avenue and his black hair stayed in place even when we were beating on each other. He always had this level glare and he wasn’t afraid to use it. Mickey was crazy back then, too. He’d talk back to anybody, anytime. David was always good at sports and considered the normal one, though he was kind of neurotic, if I can use that word about a fifth grader.

  We were all fooling around with girls. We thought it was funny to call it “Seven Minutes in Heaven.” Now we’re sixteen and we don’t call it anything in particular, but we sure do a lot of it.

  Then, at the end of fifth grade, Arno kissed this girl Molly who David liked. And David moped about it and we couldn’t stop them from doing some serious fighting at a sleepover at Patch’s country house in Greenwich. After that we made a pact about not kissing girls that one of us had clearly said we liked, even if the girls asked. It was Patch who begged us not to bother making any other rules. He knew he’d never remember to follow them. So that was our only promise to each other.

  I was always trying to get us to stick together. They called me “the glue.” This was before my parents got divorced and my dad went to live in London, so I don’t have a clue why I was like that, like some shepherd, but I was always gathering us up. It was like I felt better when I could have us all in the room. I thought if we were together, we were better than safe. We were the Insiders. But we never, never called ourselves that.

  There were the five of us, and up to about the time this story starts, that seemed like enough.

  friday night makes a fine beginning …

  get ready to deal with my cousin … kelli

  “Thanks for letting me come out with you,” Kelli said. There was a bit of midwestern twang in her voice that was both sweet and a little grating.

  “We’ll definitely have fun,” I said, and left it at that because of course her coming out with me wasn’t my idea. It was my mom’s. We were in the backseat of my mom’s town car, which we’d been told to send right back to Nobu, after we got dropped off at Patch’s house on Perry Street.

  “Do you want to tell me about them?” Kelli asked.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever we’re going to see,” Kelli said, and laughed. She didn’t seem uncomfortable or anything. If I were her I would’ve been, because we were on our way to a party in the West Village, with my best friends, and Kelli was my cousin from St. Louis, and there’s no way she could’ve guessed what she was about to see.

  Kelli was good-looking, in a bleach-haired, Brittany Murphy sort of way. She’d gotten done up in a short white skirt and pink sweater for the big welcome-to-the-city dinner with her mom and my mom and about a half dozen other people, including my mom’s yoga instructor and her business partner.

  And then, when our moms were sipping their Amarettos and waiting for the bento boxes of chocolate soufflé and vanilla ice cream they wouldn’t eat, I decided to get out of there. I got on my Blackberry to Arno, and looked around for the yellow Ralph corduroy blazer I was into that week. Then my mom said “bring her with you” in a stage whisper. Like that was funny.

  Kelli said, “Yeah, bring me!” in a very throaty voice. How was I going to say no? My mom doesn’t tell me what to do very often, but obviously she wanted to keep drink
ing and reminiscing with her recently divorced sister and I knew that if I didn’t get out of there, with Kelli, I was going to hear about it later.

  Kelli had come from St. Louis with her mom to visit NYU and Sarah Lawrence and Barnard. She was a senior in high school, and I was a junior, and in the three years since I’d last seen her, it looked like she’d gotten a little less risk-averse, to put it lightly. Or, she’d been around. But then again, around had been the St. Louis suburbs, which is fine, I’m sure, but it’s not like New York City.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. We were at Canal Street. My knee was jerking uncontrollably. I crossed my legs and rubbed at my brown suede JP Tod’s loafers.

  “What is?” she asked. She had a good voice. Her eyes were green and sort of angled in toward her nose. Cat eyes. She was tall, too. So yes, she was sexy, but in a cheerleader-gone-bad kind of way. And nobody I know has cheerleaders at their school, which is a good way of beginning to explain why I was not that excited about introducing her to everybody.

  “About my friends—it’s really hard to get us all in one place at one time.”

  “Is that like, your job?”

  “No. Not exactly. It’s just—they’re really good guys but we go to different schools now and I’m the underlying thing that keeps us together.”

  “The underlying thing?”

  “More like the master of ceremonies,” I said. “But of course nothing like that.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “I’m just psyched to get away from my mom.” She pulled out a mirror and began painting on some pink lipstick. Worst case was I’d have to put her in a cab and send her back to my house, where her mom had one of the guest bedrooms and she had my brother Ted’s room, since he was now a freshman up at Vassar. No. Worst case was Kelli would get wrecked and end up sleeping on the floor in Patch’s kitchen with her arms curled around a chair leg and a quart bottle of crème de menthe. My aunt Jane would bitch me out to no end. I watched Kelli stare out the window as we got deep into the West Village. She seemed really excited by it all—it was like her whole body was hungry for Manhattan.

  “I came to the city at the beginning of last year,” she said. “It was right after my mom kicked my dad out so my parents weren’t keeping very good track of things and me and a bunch of other girls drove here and we had a total blast. We barely had time to get out of the car—but just driving around for two hours in Times Square, that was wild.”

  “Yeah,” I sniffed. “Wild.”

  Andy, my mom’s driver, pulled over on Greenwich and Perry.

  “Thanks, man,” I said. As usual, Andy said nothing.

  It was early October and cool out. It had rained earlier and fat drops fell on our heads from the trees on Perry. Maybe the street glistened a little. I was trying to not be so analytic and nervous, to just give in to the fact that the night was beautiful and full of promises, even with Kelli along. I straightened my jacket, flipped out the collar on my white Prada button-down, and shrugged the hair out of my eyes.

  “You didn’t explain anything,” Kelli said as I helped her out of the car. “What about a girlfriend? Do you have one? Are we going to meet her?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t want to mention Liza. Or that other thing I was involved with, which I didn’t even want to go into.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll meet everybody. Arno’s the hot guy who looks like you’ve seen him in magazines ’cause you probably have, Mickey’s basically crazy, and David’s completely introverted and overly sensitive. Patch is never around—but this is his house. That’s all you need to know.”

  And then we were up close to Patch’s house and I could already hear a bootleg Neptunes track rattling the Floods’ town house windows.

  We ran up the steps to Patch’s door and hit the buzzer. The door was big, white, and vibrating. So were the windows. Everything else was bright red brick. The music switched to the new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and I checked my shoes once more as the door opened. I also heard the noise of a window above us going up so I knew that somebody was looking down, but I didn’t look, ’cause that would have gotten me into this whole other thing with Flan Flood, Patch’s little sister, and it absolutely was not the right time for that.

  “Oh wow,” Kelli said. I didn’t look behind me. I knew she’d be staring with those hungry eyes and I didn’t want to see that again.

  “Well, if it isn’t Jonathan. And who is this?” Arno asked.

  “This is my cousin Kelli,” I said. “Arno, close your mouth—she’s from St. Louis.”

  “Your mom’s sister’s little girl,” Arno said.

  “You’ve heard about me?” Kelli asked.

  “Nah—wild guess,” Arno said. He started laughing as he pulled us both into the house. Arno’s half Brazilian and half German. His mom and dad are art dealers and he lives in a town house in Chelsea that’s filled with huge art. He really does model, too, for magazines like Black Book. He’s six foot one and better looking than anyone I’ve ever met. He was wearing a ripped purple polo shirt, Helmut Lang jeans, and Gucci loafers.

  “Where you been?” he asked, and burped.

  “Family dinner.”

  “I hope you at least got to slam down some good wine,” he said.

  We’d put all the expensive stuff in Patch’s living room away earlier that day. Then we lit several dozen candles and put them in all the nooks where the sculptures and stuff had been. We’d pulled all the couches into a loose circle and thrown every pillow we could find on the floor, so the living room looked like one of those new super-sleek hotel bars in downtown L.A. Then we’d hauled a dozen cases of beer down to the ground-floor kitchen. Already at least twenty kids were drifting up and down the stairs, getting beer, and forming groups for drinking games.

  “Wow,” Kelli said. She was staring at Arno, like she’d saved up all her allowance and now she wanted to buy him.

  “Where’s Patch?” I asked Arno.

  “Stop it,” Arno said. “I don’t know.” Some girl from Spence came up and started swinging on Arno’s arm.

  As usual, Patch Flood, who was our whole reason to be there, was nowhere to be seen. He’s the kind of guy who wears the same khakis for six months until they harden up and have to be removed with gardening scissors because he’s so forgetful and messy and just … just so cool about it. He’s like a guy who floats by you on a happy cloud. You jump up and try to get him, but he’s always out of reach.

  Patch’s parents are at their estate in Greenwich most of the time, so they’ve practically deeded the Perry Street house to their kids: Patch, Zed, who is up at Vassar with my brother, and Patch’s big sister February, who is twenty and currently taking her second year off before college while supposedly doing an internship at Alvin Adler’s design studio in Tribeca. Then there’s little Flannery, known as Flan, a cute eighth grader who may or may not have been at the window when I came in with Kelli.

  Arno pulled me into the dining room, stepping in some freshman girl’s lap while he moved—and she seemed to cradle his foot for a second before he pulled away.

  “Where’d you say you picked this Kelli up?” Arno asked. “The West Side Highway for twenty bucks and a Happy Meal?”

  “I said she was my cousin,” I said.

  “Class runs thinner than water in your family,” Arno said.

  “At least my parents aren’t art dealers,” I said. It wasn’t that I thought Arno’s parents weren’t cool. But Arno’s easy to confuse—we have English class together at Gissing Academy and I’m always feeding him nonsense to say. Then he says whatever I come up with so charmingly to our teacher, Ms. Rodale, that she convinces herself that the junk I told him to say makes sense. It’s a vicious circle and now my whole class agrees that P. Diddy is basing his whole existence on the world Fitzgerald built in The Great Gatsby.

  “Mickey was looking for you. He broke into Philippa’s house earlier and her dad called the cops,” Arno said.

  “Was he upset?” I asked.r />
  “Jackson Frady? No, he loves it when Mickey does that,” Arno said. “He asked him to set their house on fire next time.”

  “Don’t crack wise,” I said. “You can’t keep it up.”

  Arno didn’t answer. Instead, he threw an arm over my shoulder and we started punching each other’s ribs.

  “Where’s the beer?” Kelli shouted over the music. She definitely wanted a do-over with Arno. He smiled at her, let go of me, and took her by the hand.

  “You want to show her where she can get her drink on?” I asked.

  “Would you put it that way?” Arno said to Kelli. But her grin for him was so big that she couldn’t answer, and when Arno saw it, he started laughing, too. I eyed the staircase. Flan was up there. Probably in bed. She always got up early to ride horses in Central Park on Saturdays.

  Somebody grabbed my lapel and I grabbed his arm and tried to rip his hand off my clothes.

  It was David. “Have you seen Amanda?” he asked. He had his Yale sweatshirt on and the hood was pulled over his head. I tugged it off. He pulled it back on. He was the tallest of all of us. David was the best basketball player at Potterton. He was a really good listener, and, save for some deep neuroses, an all-around normal guy. So somehow, between good listening and being one of us five, he’d gotten this hot girl, Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, who was absolutely the most conniving person I’d ever met. Partly because of her, he was David the Mope.

  “I haven’t seen her tonight,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. What would I do, lie to you?”

  “I hope not,” he said. “Would you?”

  “David. Why would I? She’s your girlfriend. She’s probably just not here yet.”

  “She is. And I can’t find her.”

  “Don’t be a mope.”

  “I can’t help it,” David said. He walked off, trailing the laces on the vintage ’86 Jordans I had bought in Williamsburg from a guy called Shigeto for four hundred dollars. They were way too big for me, so I gave them to David, who had no idea how valuable they were and kept treating them like normal sneakers. I wished he would tie the laces.