by Stan Parish
“Holy shit.”
Traffic on the thin shoulderless road was backed up for a quarter mile, and the St. Andrews Bay was unrecognizable as the stately, empty hotel that Mike and Casey had checked into. The circular drive was choked with cabs and chauffeured cars, and the entrance was blotted out by floodlights and flashbulbs, the light reflected and amplified by the wall of towering high-sheen screens covered in the logos of a champagne house, my mobile phone provider, and a Scottish bank. People had talked about the fashion show like it was a big deal, but nothing had prepared me for this. I let Clare pay, and we cut across the lawn. There was a red carpet and a maze of velvet ropes leading to the doors, which were barricaded by a mix of bouncer types in black tie and women clutching clipboards. We made our way between idling cars until a bouncer appeared in our path, halting us with a massive hand.
“Would you mind joining the queue?”
“We’re on the designer’s guest list,” I said, following Kelsey’s instructions. “We’re VIP.”
The bouncer looked me up and down, incredulous. He gave our names to a haughty and exasperated woman with a clipboard and an earpiece. After some dramatic flipping back and forth, she found our names and waved us in.
The crowd in the lobby was a mix of dressed-up academics, high-fashion Londoners, and corporate guests in business suits and black ties. There was a family checking in at the front desk, the two young children clinging to their mother’s legs while she and her husband looked around in mild shock. I wondered how the hotel explained this to its guests, how anyone could explain this—a student fashion show where no one looked like a student. From across the room, I spotted Kelsey giving an on-camera interview while a group of older men in suits and ties stood silently at her side, their hands clasped, their eyes wandering to the crowd and back to Kelsey as she took another question from a local access news reporter. One of the men was the president of St. Andrews, and the others looked like executives from the corporate sponsors, all of them stiff and smiling. Kelsey’s dress was simple and black, with sleeves that ended just below her elbows. She looked nervous and happy in a way I hadn’t seen before, and she kept tucking a few strands of hair behind her left ear and letting her fingers slip down her neck while she talked. I tried to remember who I thought she was the first second I laid eyes on her in Kildare’s, when she was sketching in her notebook, preparing for this.
Kelsey shook hands with the president and then motioned for the cameraman to follow her across the lobby and backstage. I didn’t see Casey until he was standing right in front of us, in a dark suit and slim tie he had borrowed from one of Kelsey’s friends. We laughed at the room around us.
“Right?” Casey said. “It’s a circus in here. Your girl got us great seats.”
Clare and I followed him into the grand ballroom—a sea of white tables, white flowers, and enough champagne to drown the crowd. A black spot-lit runway split the room in two.
“Drinks,” Casey said, pointing to a packed bar in the corner. While we waded through the crowd, I picked up a program and discovered that the event had raised more than £200,000 for cancer research the year before, and that the cost of our table was £4,000. I flipped to Kelsey’s bio while Casey placed an order. Born in Bordentown, New Jersey; Wildwood Catholic High School; a Young Designer Award from the New Jersey Fashion Council. Her collection was titled “Day Two.” Casey handed me a highball with a lime wedge, something with tonic, I didn’t care what. We touched glasses. It was gin.
“To ending world hunger,” he said.
Two men were already seated at the table Casey led us to. Kelsey had mentioned that a few suits would be joining us, employees from the Royal Bank of Scotland who got prime seats in exchange for their firm’s donation. Clare and Casey introduced themselves while I watched Jules cross the room to a table where Prince William was sitting with the woman he would later marry. She stood up to kiss Jules, and recoiled in mock horror at the scratches and the swelling on the side of his face, the road rash Casey had inflicted. Jules said something that made her laugh, and then they all sat down. The whole thing was a joke to him.
Casey was talking to one of the bankers, explaining that our friend from home was in the show. The only thing left in my glass by then was ice and lime. I excused myself and made my way to the bar, but the line was longer than before, and after half a minute of rattling the ice in my glass, I found the bathroom instead.
I waited in a locked stall for someone to open a faucet, and then took three quick bumps from Michael Savage’s industrial-sized vial. The men at the sink were talking about football and how they hoped they’d see some tits like last year’s. I leaned back against the white partition with my arms folded and my eyes closed, willing the coke to come up a little faster. The painted metal was cool against my shoulders, and I tried to concentrate on that, and not on the ache created by the distance between Kelsey and me. I wished that nothing had ever happened between us, that the memory of all my time with her could be packed into a box and taken off my hands. Here, you carry this, I can’t hold it anymore. Clare sent a text asking me to come back to the table, which seemed odd because we had ten minutes until the show unless my watch was running slow. Back in the ballroom, I spotted Casey coming toward me, shaking his head. The lights flashed three times, and a booming voice asked people to find their seats.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You missed it,” Casey said. “Clare was pouring champagne and one of those bankers made a crack about him taking the bottle and leaving the country.”
“What?”
“They know who his dad is. Those little cards by everyone’s seat? The school used his real name. I guess they put two and two together. Clare asked me if he should leave.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Is it? It’s pretty tense over there. I’m getting drinks. Go sit down. Clare needs company.”
The look on Clare’s face as I approached the table reminded me of a rabbit I saw as a kid, right after it was dropped into a terrarium with an eight-foot albino python that my mother’s boyfriend owned. There were two empty seats between Clare and the two men who were ignoring him now, talking to a pair of women who had materialized behind their chairs. I sat down between them and Clare, leaving a seat for Casey as a buffer.
“Hey,” I said. “Everything cool?”
Clare ignored me, so I turned my attention to our tablemates. The one next to Casey’s empty chair was either drunk or sunburned on his nose, thick necked, with a razor-shaved haircut that didn’t quite hide his receding hairline. I spotted suspenders under his pinstriped suit jacket as he reached for his drink. His friend was handsome, Indian, and hawkish, his face long and severe. His black hair was swept straight back, the tracks from the comb like grooves in a record. Both of them were men in the sense that I felt eleven years old in comparison, and I dropped my eyes to the table when they caught me staring, which they somehow did at the same time. It was easy to forget your place in the world at St. Andrews, to forget that we were all just kids.
The women behind the bankers’ chairs were laughing and looking uncomfortably at each other, trying and failing not to look at Clare. Then I caught the words criminal royalty and saw that Suspenders had turned his back to us so that he could stab his thumb at his own chest to indicate Clare without Clare seeing. I wondered what was taking Casey so long as the lights went down, and the president of the university walked to the end of the runway, microphone in hand. He was proud, he said, of the creativity the students had demonstrated, and grateful for the generosity displayed by the sponsors and our hosts at the hotel. He talked about how humbling it was to be a part of this, which I understood. The music came up as he exited stage left—a spare track by a Swedish electronic music group with the patter of a steel drum behind the pulsing bass.
The opening collection was Kelsey’s, and the look on the first model seemed a little plain at fi
rst. It was Damien, in slim tuxedo. His hair looked windswept or slept on, and he had a cigarette tucked behind one ear. He walked to the end of the runway and, after a gaping yawn, stripped off his jacket and tossed it to someone sitting at his feet. Then he pulled his bow tie loose and ripped his white shirt wide open, the buttons from the button strip flying into the crowd. When he was down to a white V-neck undershirt, he bent from the waist to retrieve the jacket, which he slung over his shoulder before he turned on his heel and walked away. The next model, a blond boy I had never seen before, wore no shirt, slim gray sweatpants, and a short tuxedo jacket with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. I didn’t get what she was doing until I saw the black rubber sandals on his feet, which stopped my breath. I understood what “Day Two” meant now. She was riffing on the clothes you wound up in after partying all night in a tux, the clothes Clare and I had worn on the morning that I met her. Casey slid into the seat beside me.
“Everything cool?” he mouthed.
I shook my head as Mike started down the runway. He was barefoot, with dark makeup around his eyes in artful imitation of dark circles, his black pants rolled up as if he were walking on the beach. The sleeves of his white tuxedo shirt had been torn off so that his tattoos gave the look some color. He had a bottle of a sponsor’s champagne in his hand, and he knocked back a swig at the end of the runway. A pair of women came after him, one in a beautiful embroidered skirt and a Supremes T-shirt, the other in a gown that had been chopped to a jagged edge above her knees. It went on like that—beat-up formal wear mixed with cheap basics and party scraps. I was willing the coke to stop working now, trying hard to slow my thoughts and take this in, asking myself if Kelsey was talking to me, telling me that our first day together had been on her mind ever since.
“Wake up,” Casey said, slapping my thigh under the table.
Something was happening, but whatever it was could wait. Mike came down the runway in what I knew would be the last look of her collection: a pair of dark jeans with a white T-shirt and black lace-ups. The runway stood empty after he disappeared, and I sat there craning my neck, waiting for her to emerge to applause.
“Mate, I asked you a question,” Suspenders said to Clare. “Who bought your ticket? Because these seats weren’t cheap.”
“This girl I know did that collection,” I said. “She got us these seats.”
No one seemed to hear me.
“So this isn’t someone else’s hard-earned cash you’re spending?” Suspenders said, ignoring me. “That’s good. That’s good to know.”
The Indian man had a hand on his friend’s arm, and was telling him to chill out, to save it.
“Let me ask you—” Suspenders started to say, slapping his friend’s hand away, but Clare stood up from the table so abruptly that the man jerked back, his torso bouncing off his chair as Clare stalked through the crowd.
“Guilty conscience,” he said, nervously. “Good riddance.”
He rocked back in his seat, pretending to enjoy the show, ignoring all the eyes on him. I stood up and headed for the bathroom to touch up my high.
I was on my way back to the table when everything—the roaming spotlights, the models they were trained on, the tempo of the music—seemed to slow down all at once. It was something I’d experienced just before both car accidents I’ve been involved in: a slide into slow motion when a threat announces itself in your peripheral vision. The threat, in this case, was a bottle of lager about to be smashed over the head of Suspenders, who was still leaning back in his chair, looking entertained and comfortable. Clare hadn’t left. He’d done a loop around the room or gone back to the bar or wandered out into the lobby and spotted a bottle on a windowsill—I couldn’t say for sure. His nostrils were flared and he had his bottom lip between his teeth, which made him look as if he were in pain instead of ready to inflict it. I saw Suspenders recognize terror in the expression of the woman across from him, and spin around in his chair, which was the worst thing he could have done. The glass didn’t shatter, but its first point of contact was the top of his eye socket, where it split the skin like a razor blade through rubber. Everyone but Casey ripped up from their seats, which seemed to bring the world back up to speed. The man had fallen back against the table, blood already coating half his face. Clare stumbled back as Suspenders stood up to charge him, but then Casey turned his body, dropped his head and tackled Suspenders at the waist, taking him to the floor without standing up.
I stood there, three tables away, frozen between fight and flight. Three models had stalled on the runway, and Mike, in his hurry to hit the floor from backstage, decked the nearest one from behind as the other two jumped down to get out of his way. I watched him take a flying leap off the edge of the runway and disappear from sight. His momentum made up my mind, and I threw myself at the perimeter formed by the banker’s friends, grabbed two handfuls of someone’s suit jacket and hurled him aside as hard as I could. I was just getting my balance back when someone caught my wrist, wrenched my hand behind my back, and took me to the floor. My face bounced against the sharp artificial fibers of the carpet, and I squirmed under the knee in my back, trying to see who this was, and why I had been singled out now that the fight had stalled and everyone was being held at bay and calmed down. I turned just far enough to recognize the driver who had taken Clare and me to visit Michael Savage, who was evidently not a driver. He was signaling to someone, and then a uniformed policeman took his place. I felt the cuffs go on.
• • •
Through the frosted windows of the interrogation room, the shadows of planes swept across the flecked linoleum floor tiles, vanishing like water stains, the roar of the engines deadened to a crackling static. It was a clear day at sunrise, judging from the glow behind the glass. Leuchars air base was just across the street. The room contained a table and a pair of chairs—the rickety, bowlegged furnishings of a high school cafeteria—and a poster that explained the rights of government employees under Scottish law. The smell of cheap vinegar was coming from the chilled patches of sweat in the armpits of my shirt. I rolled up my sleeves, trying to look ready for whatever came next. The officer leaning on the far wall shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I touched my tongue to the fresh cut on my bottom lip.
The two of us had been alone for over an hour without speaking a word. Just above the collar of the officer’s blue uniform shirt was a wisp of tattoo—some gothic script, maybe, or a tendril of some flora or fauna—inked into his pale neck. We couldn’t be that far apart in age.
“Hey,” I said. “What happens now?”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Really? Come on, man. No one’s here. Can you please just tell me what the hell is going on?”
He gave no sign that he had heard me, but just then the door opened, and both our bodies jerked. Standing in the doorway was a woman with dyed red hair and green eyes. She looked like someone who worked in the cosmetics section of a drug store.
“They’re ready,” she said to the officer.
• • •
There were forty-two missed calls on my phone when the woman behind the station’s booking desk handed it back to me along with my Rolex, which had stopped at 6:20 a.m., and some paperwork explaining when and where to face the charges against me. I called Casey’s room while I waited for a cab, and was about to leave a message when I heard the call-waiting tone, and realized he was calling me.
“Where the fuck are you?” he asked.
“At the police station. I’ve been here all night.”
“Did you hit a cop or something? How are you the only person who got nailed? Did you just get out?”
“Yeah, with a court date, and a possession charge. What happened to Clare?”
There was a pause. I felt him shifting gears.
“I think Clare’s still in the hospital,” Casey said. “I don’t know for sure. That Indian guy knew how to fight. Sma
shed Clare’s head into the table and got some hard shots in after that. Clare was still out when they took him away.”
“How bad is it?”
“I just told you how bad it is. Clear shit coming out his nose. Awful. Plus assault charges whenever he comes to. Don’t worry about him now, just get your ass to Kelsey’s.”
Damien’s Land Rover was parked across the street from Kelsey’s flat when I climbed out of the cab. Someone tapped a horn; the car was full of people. I crossed the street as Damien rolled down the window. Mike was riding shotgun in tuxedo pants and a hooded sweatshirt, the dark makeup he’d worn for the show still smudged around his eyes. Casey sat behind him, holding a bag of frozen corn over his eye.
“Did you hear anything about Clare?” I asked.
“Get in or get out of the way,” Damien said.
I climbed into the backseat and got my first good look at Casey. A blood vessel had broken in his eye, and the blue of the iris was suspended in a sea of red, surrounded by swollen tissue that was already turning purple. A pair of Kelsey’s oversized sunglasses was hanging from his collar. As we pulled away from the curb, I stared up at Kelsey’s window. Her light was on. I watched for movement, shadows, anything, but there was only a cool glow from inside.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Back,” Casey said. “We’ll swing by your hall and help you pack. I’ll get you a ticket. Time to go home.”
“I have to be in court next week.”
“Not in Jersey you don’t,” Mike said.
The week before my spring semester exams at Rutgers, I was sitting in a diner on the ground floor of a new hotel in Atlantic City. The building was a gutted and remodeled Howard Johnson’s, and investors from around the state had poured money into the project, anticipating a revival of the historic, dilapidated beach town. A Philadelphia restaurateur was responsible for the restaurants and the diner was supposed to be a re-creation of the places where he’d spent late nights and early mornings in his twenties. He must have had good drugs back then, because his remembrance—waitresses whose short skirts matched the shiny plaid of the upholstered stools, a Kobe beef burger, a champagne cocktail list—had nothing to do with the chrome boxes along Route 18. It was a stylized vision of New Jersey that looked out on the real thing: the hourly motels and cash-for-gold shops that flanked Atlantic Avenue.