Twelve

by Nick McDonell

  That was what White Mike was thinking.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  CHRIS AND CLAUDE smoke a joint together before they go to the cocktail party. They don’t do this very often, smoke together, and it feels weird to both of them, but what the fuck.

  Auntie lives in a huge prewar duplex way over on the Upper West Side. The rooms are crowded, loud, and smoky. Short Chicana women in black and white servers’ uniforms carry trays with salmon on toast, little piles of sushi, tiny kabobs, and other miniature food.

  Chris and Claude stand together in a corner. They have snatched a whole plate of salmon sandwiches and are eating greedily, if discreetly. Occasionally they are pulled along somewhere by Auntie, who wants to introduce them to someone. They cannot wait to get back home where there are no adults. Claude does tequila shots because no one will bother him about it. Chris thinks about what the older women might look like naked.

  At one point, Auntie drags Chris and Claude over to meet Marcelle, a middle-aged friend of their mother. Marcelle is an unpublished novelist. She prides herself on being hip. Up-to-date. There are lots of adults like this. Marcelle asks Chris what kind of music he listens to. He, in order to extricate himself, responds, “Oh, you know, everything.”

  “What do you think about Eminem?” Marcelle persists.

  “I think he is a great MC,” says Chris, “and he can say what he wants to say.”

  “Oh, I agree, I absolutely love his album.”

  “Which one?”

  Marcelle doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh, you know, the new one. But you know,” she moves on quickly, “you can learn a lot from music.”

  “Of course,” agrees Chris.

  Marcelle smiles. “Now, I’m not religious really. Everything I believe, my philosophy, is in the song ‘Imagine.’ You know, by John and Yoko?”

  “You a Beatles fan?” asks Chris.

  “Yeah, they’re great artists.”

  “Fuck the Beatles,” says Claude.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  BY MIDNIGHT Jessica has done all the Twelve she was saving for New Year’s Eve, Shit, she thinks, when she wakes up later and her sheets are damp with sweat.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  THE KID White Mike sells to is handsome, like a model, wearing shorts and flip-flops, like it’s summer and he has just stepped out of his house for a second to pay for pizza or something. He reminds White Mike of the summer he worked at a camp on the eastern tip of Long Island. It was the last summer before his father sold the house in Amagansett. White Mike and a girl named Alice would hang out behind the boathouse, the spot where everyone went to smoke. Alice was the smartest girl, the girl who was up for anything. She was a pack-a-day smoker. White Mike didn’t smoke. He just went behind the boathouse to be with Alice, who would sit cross-legged against the wall, and smoke and tease him. He was not yet White Mike.

  “First kiss,” Alice said, “first time I tried weed, first time I got drunk, first time I drove, first boyfriend, dumping of first boyfriend. First time I had sex. I remember the dates of all my firsts. Don’t you?”

  “Just some.”

  “Why don’t you drink?”

  “I don’t know,” said White Mike.

  “Existential crisis,” she said. “Read The Plague.”

  White Mike comes out of the memory as he is passing the huge Barnes & Noble on Eighty-sixth Street. When he walks in, the colors are bright, and upstairs there are people drinking coffee while they read. White Mike runs his hands along every shelf of books he passes, feeling the texture beneath his fingers. When he gets to the Literature section, he searches for C, and when he finds it, he kneels down and looks for Camus and then for The Plague, which he buys in hardcover.

  In bed later, he reads again about the death of the rats.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  CLAUDE WANTS TO go out after the cocktail party. He calls Tobias on his cell phone and tells him to come over, enticing him with weed. Tobias tells Claude that he just scored some weed from that pale dealer in the overcoat, but he’ll put on some pants and come over anyway. Claude has no intention of smoking. He wants to stay clear headed. He just wants Tobias for the company, sort of, while he goes downtown. Claude knows exactly where he is going. Back to the part of Chinatown where he bought the weapons. They are somehow just not enough. There has to be something else.

  The two of them, tall and hooded, get off the subway at Spring Street and walk to Mulberry. Soon the smells of hot duck and rabbit flesh and cold fish are floating out in the night. When Claude gets to the next corner, he stops in front of the first store he went into the night before. Tobias is lagging behind a little bit, and Claude decides that he no longer wants the company. He doesn’t say anything and hurries along the street and down an alley. He peeks back out around the corner and watches a confused Tobias call his name and then swing his fist and yell “Fuck!” and then wander off up the street. When Tobias is gone, Claude emerges from the darkness and walks into the store.

  The tiny, fat woman is not behind the counter; instead, a short, wrinkled old man. He and Claude are the only people in the store. He looks at Claude and says, “Yes?” Claude wants to know if any “special products” are being sold.

  The man looks at Claude for a long second, then says, “Wait.” Then he walks to the front door, locks it, and goes into the back room. Claude doesn’t expect much. The man returns with something cloth-wrapped that he sets on the counter. He removes the cloth and reveals an Uzi, black and oiled but worn down, looking, to Claude, like something straight out of the movies.

  Chapter Forty

  WHITE MIKE FALLS asleep with his light on and The Plague on his chest.

  He dreams of skyscrapers. He dreams that he is high on the roof of one and there is a thunderstorm raging around him. The girders under his feet sway and rock in the wind, and forked lightning shoots silently down into the city, and then thunder explodes in his ears. The city is bright and loud, but he is alone at the top of this swaying building, and as it begins to rain he walks to the edge of the building to get a good look at the rest of the city and watch the lightning come down, and in a great flash of white he knows that his building has been struck and he feels himself up and flying over the railing, then falling down through the air. He can see himself flailing on the way down and feel his stomach float up in his body, and in his sleep he kicks out and flails his arms but doesn’t wake up. And he keeps falling and falling and at the end he sees himself land on a car, on his side, and he sees the roof flatten. He watches his body, in overcoat and jeans, from afar as his view tracks out as if it were the final scene in a movie, and the raindrops splatter the crushed metal around his body.

  Chapter Forty-One

  GHOST OF Christmas Past. White Mike was walking down the beach in East Hampton on Christmas break, and he was listening to Alice—whom he had run into out there—tell him about her parents, and boarding school, and everything else. It was all bad. Then it was getting dark and cold. What she did next was take off her clothes and run into the ocean. She came out laughing and crying and freezing to death all at the same time.

  Part III

  Sunday, December 29

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “I THINK I know why you don’t drink,” said Alice. They were in a bar on Second Avenue that served kids. She was drinking a cosmopolitan; he was drinking coffee.

  “Why?” asked White Mike.

  “You like the power you have from being sober all the time around people who are fucked up.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  CHRIS IS HAVING a boxing lesson in the morning sunlight that falls through the windows of the library in his town house. It is an odd place for a boxing lesson, but the coach wants to have it in that room so he can look at the books while the kid works out.

  For Chris’s seventeenth birthday, his father called a gym on Thirteenth Street and hired a coach to teach his son how to box. They went down to the gym together. Chris had been scared in t
he gym, of the dirt and the grime and all the strong dudes beating the shit out of the bags and each other. In the car on the way back uptown, he convinced his father to let him have the lessons at home. So the boxing coach comes to the Upper East Side every Sunday. Chris’s father had a heavy bag and a speed bag installed in the basement, next to the unused stationary bicycle and treadmill. Still, Chris is not a particularly quick study. The big black gloves look like anvils sprouting from his skinny arms.

  “Stay on your toes,” Coach tells him.

  Chris is tired and getting sloppy with his footwork, as he is shadowboxing, and his footwork is suspect to begin with. He is shining with sweat, and it has soaked semicircles into his designer tank top. Coach rolls his eyes every time he sees the skinny kid wearing the stupid-ass thing.

  “All right, that’s enough. Here.” Coach hands him a leather jump rope. “This for ten minutes, and then you’re done.” Ten minutes is a long time. Coach settles himself in an overstuffed leather chair to wait for the kid to finish and go get the cash for the lesson.

  Chris takes the rope and starts jumping, but trips when he hears the door buzzer, then stops jumping and goes to the intercom. “Who is it?”

  “Sara.”

  “Oh . . . yeah, come in.” Chris wonders if he looks good, with the boxing and everything.

  Coach watches the girl walk in the room and notes what she looks like. Pretty, though Coach is not that impressed. The girl looks a little off. But he also suspects she might be a fighter in her own way.

  Sara starts talking immediately. “Chris, guess what? Jessica says she can get some Twelve for the party.”

  “Hey! C’mon.” Chris beckons her up the stairs with him as he drops the jump rope on the floor. “I’ll be right back, Coach.”

  Out of earshot, on the second floor “Are you nuts?”

  “What?”

  “You were just talking about that stuff in front of my coach.”

  “So what? Chill out, he just works for your dad or whatever, right? What’s he gonna do? He probably doesn’t even know what it is.”

  “I didn’t even know you were into drugs.”

  “For the party, stupid.”

  Chris grabs four twenties for the hour of boxing out of his father’s bureau. “I guess. But you shouldn’t talk about it in front of him, okay?”

  Sara says nothing, vaguely perturbed by Chris’s lecture. Back downstairs, Chris hands over the money. Coach gets up and looks at the rope on the floor and then at Chris, who shrugs; Sara arches her eyebrows at the exchange. Coach cracks his knuckles, says, “See you next week.”

  Chris falls into the armchair Coach was sitting in. He is flexing his pecs, as if to make it seem they are always that big. Sara does not notice.

  “Who do you think will come?” he asks.

  “Maybe you.” Sara exercises a grin onto her face for him. Chris practically giggles as he rises to try to catch her and kiss her. She fends him off.

  “But seriously,” he says, “I don’t want to have too many people.”

  “Oh, why not?”

  “You know how it gets. They might wreck the house or break something. Remember Paul’s party?”

  “Yeah. You told me you broke a coffee table.”

  “No, but something like that could happen if we have a lot of people.”

  Sara draws her chin back into her neck, like Eew.

  “It could still just be you and me, alone, you know?” says Chris. “We’re alone right now, actually . . .”

  “No!” She barely holds in another eew. “I mean we have to have everybody cool so it will be the best party ever. A famous party, and we’ll be, like, famous.”

  “I just don’t want too many people.”

  “You want me, don’t you?”

  He nods his head. She moves closer and starts pushing into him, just walking into him as if he isn’t there, pushing him back toward the chair. The backs of his legs hit it, and he sits down. He looks up at her face as she stands over him.

  “Just leave the people to me, okay?” she says.

  Chris is turning red.

  Sara kisses his temple. “Great. Now just give me some cash to pay for your part of the stuff. Jessica said she had to take a lot of money out of her father’s account, and I can’t cover all of it.”

  Chris is not planning on doing any of the drug, but what the fuck, it’s an investment. “Come upstairs, I’ll grab the money. How much?”

  “Two hundred. I’ll stay here, though.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  AFTER HE GIVES Sara the money (“See you tomorrow,” no goodbye kiss), Chris goes upstairs to take a shower. As he passes his brother’s room, he opens the door and sticks his head in. The shades are drawn, and it is dark. At the far end of the room, a single small lamp shines on the table Claude is sitting before. A white cloth is spread over the table and dark bits of metal lie across it, glistening with grease in the halo of light. Claude has grease on his hands. There is a small smear on his neck. He leans over his Uzi with a screwdriver, manipulating some tiny mechanism. His fingers work gently, with a great care that strikes Chris as not like Claude at all.

  Chris remembers when he and Claude were both younger and their father gave them a model plane to build. It had an engine and could fly if put together correctly. About halfway through the project, Claude realized that he had made a mistake and the plane could never be completed. He grabbed the plane out of Chris’s hands and smashed it against the wall. It scared the nanny, who tried to comfort Claude as she cleaned up the shattered bits of plastic and he cried, sobbing and screaming that “nothing ever works.”

  Chris cried too, at the loss of the plane. After Claude stormed off to his bedroom, the housekeeper held Chris in her arms until he cried himself out. The next day, Chris asked his mother for another plane. When he got it, one of the handymen assembled it so he could fly it off the roof of the town house. This is what Chris is remembering when he opens the door to Claude’s room and sees that the television is on in the far corner, the only source of light besides the lamp. A tape of Claude’s beloved professional wrestling plays muted.

  “Hey, Claude.”

  Claude looks up quickly from the gun. The lamp casts yellow light on his features and reflects in and out of the beads of sweat on his forehead.

  “I’m takin’ a shower.”

  Claude decides he wants to take a shower too.

  So the two brothers take showers in their separate bathrooms. Chris uses shampoo and conditioner and masturbates in the shower and then gets out and puts on his acne cream and brushes his hair forward and looks at himself shirtless in front of the mirror. Claude uses only shampoo in the shower. He turns the water as hot as he can take it, and then he turns it ice cold. He grips the shower-curtain bar each time he changes the temperature. And each time it is hotter and colder, and hotter and colder and hotter, until his skin is scalded red.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  MOLLY IS WONDERING what to do about this guy Tobias. He called her again, asking her to come over and “chill” with him. She doesn’t call him back. Instead, she calls her friend Mike and asks if she can come over.

  “Of course.” White Mike is glad she is coming over, but he has to switch modes.

  White Mike and Molly have been friends since that Bahamas trip. And Molly was at the funeral for White Mike’s mom, but she never saw White Mike cry. She saw Charlie cry about it, though, and White Mike’s father. And Molly spent the night at White Mike’s house once when her parents had one of their huge marathon fights. White Mike is always surprised by Molly’s beauty and, for some reason, is glad they didn’t go to the same school. He tidies the house before she arrives.

  “How’s working with your dad going?” Molly wants to know. “Glad you’re taking the year off?”

  “Yeah. It takes up all my time, but I’m learning a lot. I think I know how to run a restaurant.”

  “What do you do? Like, what’s your day like?”

&
nbsp; “I work late.” He hates this. “But the nice thing is that I can sleep late, right, so I go in at around one, and then I’m, like, my dad’s assistant. I do errands and bookkeeping and stuff like that, and then at night sometimes I’ll be the host, or help out the waiters or be a bar bat or whatever. Then I help close up and get home at around three, and read for a while and then go to sleep.”

  “But you have Mondays off?”

  “Not really, but Mondays and Tuesdays are the slowest,” he says, not looking at her. “How about you? Still the smartest girl in school?”

  “Think you’re going to go to college next year?”

  “That’s not what you came over to talk about.”

  Molly throws her hair. He knows her so well.

  “Well, there’s this guy,” she says. White Mike smiles as Molly laughs and shifts in her chair. “Yeah. He invited me to this big New Year’s Eve party. As his date, I guess, I’m not even really sure.”