Hold On Tight

by J. Minter

  “Wow, could you excuse me?” Patch stepped to his side.

  “I understand—laidback and hard to reach is your thing,” the guy said. Then he put a hand on Patch’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Just keep doing what you do so well.”

  Patch climbed the stairs and pushed his way back through the crowd. He was still sort of pissed that Arno had abandoned him here, especially when Patch-enthusiasm was running so high among the Vassar kids, and when Arno knew he had a girlfriend. Patch decided he was done with this place, and moved—as much as he could, with all the girls reaching out to touch his skin for a brief moment—toward the door. As he slapped a particularly persistent hand away, he realized he felt pretty low—almost as low as those horrible two weeks before he hooked up with Greta again. All this attention was making him feel seriously claustrophobic.

  Vassar seemed to offer every cool thing about college except the thing that Patch had been looking forward to most—the chance for him to be anonymous again.

  When he reached the door, he was relieved to see Jonathan and Ted descending the stairs. Ted was saying something to the bouncer guy who had tried to kick Patch out earlier—there were handshakes and smiles— and then Jonathan and his brother and a whole bunch of other people entered the noisy, disco ball-lit bar.

  “Man, where have you been?” Patch said.

  “Sorry dude, it took us forever to get here because my brother knows like every person on campus,” Jonathan said. “Check it out, that’s Ted’s girlfriend.”

  “No way.”

  “Yup,” Jonathan said, surveying the glittering crowd on the dance floor. “What’s going on here? Man, these people are dressed”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s, like, disco night or something,” Patch said.

  “Mug rats are usually pretty New Waved-out,” Jed Silbur said, pulling up next to Jonathan and Patch with a can of beer for each of them. And with a wink, Jed was dancing across the floor.

  “Really glad you finally showed up,” Patch said.

  “Yeah, it’s good to see you, too. Everything okay with Greta?”

  Patch shrugged. “She just texted me that she ran into her ex-boyfriend at Stanford.”

  “Whoa.”

  “It’s not a big deal. I mean, I don’t think anything is going to happen. I just want to talk to her, know what I mean?”

  “Totally.”

  “Hey,” Patch said, swigging from his PBR. “Where do you think the rest of our friends are?”

  “I don’t know,” Jonathan said. He gave his can of beer a little grimace. “But I sure hope Mickey is preparing for his lecture tomorrow. If the students here can dress this well, they must be pretty smart.”

  mickey goes underwater

  Mickey took a long dive, pushing with his arms and legs, froglike, through the water. The night sky was dark, but the underwater lights were illuminating his fellow swimmers. He was surrounded by some fiercely hot legs, treading water on all sides of him, and up above he could hear the muted shouting of some very competitive ladies. He had never played water polo before, much less women’s water polo, but he was a quick convert. It was, he knew already, his kind of game.

  He had also realized that college was going to be a lot like summer camp, except with more breasts.

  He burst through the surface of the pool, lifted his arm, and gave the ball a powerful swat. It sailed into the net. The pool erupted with noise, half of it cheering Mickey’s point, the other half enraged by his flagrant disregard for the rules. Mickey only had a few moments to catch his breath before he was tugged back underwater. By the time he emerged again, his boxers were gone.

  Kicking his way over to the side of the pool, he looked around for David. He hadn’t seen him since roughly the time the girls pulled him into the pool in the first place and assigned him to a team. Mickey pushed himself onto the pool’s edge, and there was some giggling over Mickey’s lack of a bathing suit. Then Mickey really did start to worry. “Where’s my friend?” he shouted loudly.

  It took a few moments for the girls to take his questions seriously, and then they all pointed to the house. There was David, sitting on a lounge chair, sipping from an apparently refilled tumbler. He was still wearing the suit, although he had unbuttoned the jacket and loosened the tie. He appeared to be smirking.

  “Hey!” Mickey yelled. “Hey Grobart! What, you think you’re too good for swimming?”

  “Man, I’m just wondering what happened to your panties,” David replied, taking a sip of his whiskey.

  “C’mon, the water’s fine!” Mickey yelled back. When David just shook his head and laughed, Mickey switched tactics. He inhaled a good whiff of chlorine, and shot a conspiratorial look at the girls to his left and right. Their hair was all loose now, and their chests were heaving, catching their breath after the game. The girls treaded water and waited until Mickey gave them the nod. “Get ‘im!” Mickey cried.

  The girls hurled themselves out of the water, and made a long, wet dash toward David. That was how Mickey got to see his friend hauled into a swimming pool by fifteen water polo-sculpted college girls. Too-small suit and all.

  arno practices going to bed alone

  Arno must have worn himself out walking the campus and looking for his guys, because when he half woke up, in the darkened lounge down the hall from Ted’s dorm room, he had that dreamy awareness of being asleep. He knew that there was no one else in the room, and he heard a voice in his head—definitely Jonathan’s—saying something about the smell. And he knew, even with his brain on autopilot, that the smell wasn’t great, and that the carpet that it clung to was possibly as old as he was.

  He drifted off again, although it wasn’t a particularly restful sleep. Thoughts of superficial college girls who judged guys by the number of times they’d appeared in cheesy magazines danced through his head. He flopped from one side to the other, shifting under the scratchy blanket, which was made of the kind of wool he imagined soldiers slept under if they were stationed in Germany. His dreams were shifting to a battlefield, circa 1942, where the world was very cruel and senseless. But then bubbling, giggling voices came erupting up the stairs, and a light switched on somewhere near him, and he knew he was going to be awake again.

  Now that people were actually near him, he remembered that he’d spent his whole night alone. Wandering. Like a real outsider. He decided to hang onto that feeling a little longer, and continue to be asleep. Or at least pretend to be.

  “No, it’s really fine,” a male voice was saying.

  “Are you sure?” That was Jonathan.

  “No, little brother, I want you to have my bed,” the first voice said in a really sweet tone. Arno realized it was Ted. “And I can sleep at Margot’s anyway. You and Patch should stay in my room. It’s more comfortable than the lounge.”

  Arno realized they hadn’t even noticed him. He really was being left out. They continued talking about what a fun night it had been and what their plans were for the next day, but Arno was too busy concentrating on what an outsider felt like to really listen. That’s when he heard the click of high-heeled boots walking past him, and the sigh of the couch across from his. He cracked an eye.

  And there was the most beautiful-in-a-meaningful-sort-of-way-looking girl that he had ever seen. She had precise, dark little features, and she was wearing a long skirt and a threadbare tank top that fit her perfectly and was thin enough to show the outline of her light-pink bra. The light from the hall seemed to be glowing on her slender limbs like moonlight. She had all these silver bangles on her wrists, but she was managing not to move them much as she carefully rolled a cigarette.

  Arno was acutely aware that his hair, which he had artfully greased earlier in the evening, was now sticking up like crabgrass, and not all of it in the same direction. But he couldn’t stop watching as the girl put the hand-rolled cigarette in her perfect little mouth and lit it.

  “Lara,” another girl called, from somewhere over near Jonathan and his brother.<
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  “Shhh …,” said the girl sitting across from Arno. She had a husky voice, even when she was whispering. “There’s someone sleeping here.”

  “Oh,” the first girl said. She was giggling. Then she hissed: “C’mon, we’re going back to my place. Ted’s brother and his friend can sleep here.”

  “Okay,” Lara drawled back. She put the cigarette in her mouth and stood up.

  Arno cracked his semi-open eye a little wider and watched as she moved between the ugly dorm furniture toward the hall. When she reached the doorway, she turned back toward him, parted her lips in a sexy smile, and winked.

  david just can’t stop winning

  The morning sunlight streaming through the windows woke David from a dream in which he was being crowned Mister America in a seaside ceremony that involved numerous old-timey bathing beauties, a fleet of FBI men for protection, and an ocean of whiskey. Literally, an ocean of whiskey, although that was also the part of the dream he couldn’t remember so clearly. He scratched his bare head and sniffed himself. He smelled of chlorine.

  Pushing himself up, he realized that he was on the floor of a really nice room. There were several legs extending from the grand, fluffy bed, and he recognized the short, muscled, non-female ones as Mickey’s. He gave himself a little inner nod of satisfaction; this Vassar place was all right. From the numerous, handsome clocks in the room he gleaned that it was a quarter past ten, and from the nervous feeling flowing through his body, he knew that he was up for a reason.

  The interview was at eleven-thirty: That was why he was awake so fully and suddenly. He wouldn’t have been so nervously anticipating it, except that he was a nervous person born of nervous people, and any sort of rejection was crushing for him. It also occurred to him, as he walked across the shiny, antique-looking floorboards and surveyed the two water polo players who were softly snoring next to his friend, that he probably didn’t want to blow his chances of getting into this particular school.

  That was when he reached the bathroom mirror and realized that he was wearing boxers, a dress shirt with two red, smeary splotches on the chest, and black mid-calf-high socks. It was not an outfit that recommended his scholarly abilities. His suit jacket was draped over the shower curtain rod. The only item of clothing that hadn’t ended up in the pool were his pants (somehow they had been pulled off of him on his way to being tossed into the pool). He found them a few moments later in a bedroom farther down the hall, where two more water polo players slept. At least they smelled more like the Grobart’s hall closet than the Vassar pool. But then David remembered how the pants made him look like an overgrown child.

  David scratched his head nervously and fought the urge to call his mother and demand that she fix everything. Then he took a few slow breaths and told himself that if he expected to get into a top-tier college he better quiet his inner sissy and start thinking creatively.

  Forty-five minutes later, David was hustling across the grassy quads of Vassar looking about as preppy-hipster as he ever had. He had found the master bedroom of the President’s Guest Cottage, with its clean stock of campus casual wear. The blazer and white V-neck shirt he’d borrowed weren’t labels he knew, although he was sure Jonathan did, and as he made his way toward the admissions office in the main building he was keenly aware, for the first time, why people sometimes paid so much for clothes. What he had on now smelled and fit better than anything he’d ever worn in his life.

  David didn’t feel remotely like a little boy anymore. He felt comfortable and in control, the way athletes were supposed to. He felt a little more like a real man.

  By the time he’d sat down in a wood-paneled and book-lined office, opposite a guy dressed more or less exactly as David was dressed (Anson DeLine,Vassar ‘01), he was feeling pretty confident indeed.

  “So you’re a ball player?” Anson DeLine asked, clasping his hands and leaning his elbows on his desk so that his face came toward David with a wide, if slightly disingenuous, smile.

  “Yeah,” David said, “I’ve played varsity since sophomore year, and I plan to play next year.” Anson nodded at him leadingly, so David went on, “And I’d like to play in college, too.” He cleared his throat. He had rehearsed this line in his head during the car ride, and now he actually felt bold enough to use it. “But what’s really great about basketball is how it’s informed the rest of my life, especially my academic life. It’s taught me to jump high and hustle, and that’s one of the reasons I think I would be the kind of well-rounded person Vassar looks for in prospective students.”

  Nice, David thought to himself. The interviewer seemed to think so, too. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head like he and David were old buddies just hanging out at the Eating Club.

  “Tell me what you’ve been reading lately,” Anson said.

  David’s stomach clenched up suddenly. How could he have been so stupid as to not have anticipated this question? He opened his mouth to mumble something about Madam Bovary, which he was reading for his English class, when there was a loud noise from the hall. It sounded like a door being slammed, and then slammed again several more times. David’s interviewer look alarmed, and when he jumped up and headed toward the hall to see what was happening, David followed behind him.

  The door to the office next to the one they had been sitting in was indeed being slammed, repeatedly. The person doing the slamming was a miniature blonde in a tiny miniskirt and oversized sweater, and David knew immediately that it was Sara-Beth Benny, the child star whom his friends had hung out with on the educational cruise they’d taken last winter. He knew (because Jonathan had told him) that she partied a lot in New York, and also that she was always on the verge of breaking down.

  “Susan, are you okay?” Anson called over Sara-Beth’s shoulder to the person yelling from behind the door. David was suddenly reminded of his interview and decided that diffusing this situation might be a good recovery from the fumbled book question.

  “Hey, Sara-Beth,” he said gently. She ignored him and continued slamming the door. Then he stepped closer, slipped his arms around her waist, and gently pulled her back. To his surprise, she didn’t fight him. Instead, she collapsed against his chest and began to sob. “Hey,” he whispered, looking apprehensively at his interviewer and the woman who had come out from behind the door.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Sara-Beth said between teary gasps. David paused and tried to think how to take this. He had just been hoping she would remember him at all, but the touchy friendliness they were engaging in now was definitely without precedent.

  “Um, you too,” he said, trying not to sound surprised. “Are you okay?”

  “No!” she shrieked.

  The two interviewers looked at David expectantly. “What happened?” asked Sara-Beth.

  “This moo-cow, she … she …” Sara-Beth started sobbing again, and for a moment it seemed like she wasn’t going to be able to finish her sentence. David took the opportunity to inhale the vanilla smell wafting up from her heaps of multihued blond hair. “They asked me to do the routine.”

  “What routine?” David said. He realized immediately that this was probably the wrong thing to say, but he was just glad that his mouth was still able to form words.

  “You know, the opening dance routine from Mike’s Princesses.”

  “Oh.”

  Mike’s Princesses, the show Sara-Beth started acting in when she was six years old, began with a song and dance routine in which she and her two fictional older sisters introduced themselves and their basic personality traits. It was very show-tuney and, even to a bunch of second graders, very obviously lame. It ended with Mike’s swinging all the girls around until they squealed, and then kissing them on the forehead.

  Sara-Beth whimpered into David’s borrowed white V-neck as he turned to look at the two interviewers. The funny protective feeling he was feeling toward her must have shown on his face, because the woman named Susan gave him this apologetic look and p
laintively said, “I’m a fan.”

  This elicited a loud sob from Sara-Beth, and she took a fistful of David’s shirt.

  “Well, I really don’t think that’s very appropriate,” David said. He could feel Sara-Beth nodding vigorously into his chest. He cleared his throat and raised his voice. “Or very classy.” The interviewers stepped back. They did actually look sort of chastised. David moved away from them toward the entryway, half supporting, half dragging Sara-Beth. He wondered briefly if the clothes were transforming him into a more confrontational person, but before his doubts could slow him down he was saying, “And, come to think of it, there’s no way I could consider attending a school like Vassar where stuff like this is allowed to happen!” He had the door open, and he and Sara-Beth were practically out of there. The interviewers were staring at them, mouths agape.

  Sara-Beth didn’t let go of David until they were safely outside, with the quiet campus all around them. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “It was nothing,” David said. “I just feel bad for you.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Sara-Beth said as she picked up his hand and squeezed it. “Arno, no one’s ever done anything remotely like that for me before.”

  Um, Arno?

  art chicks are crazy

  “I find your work especially courageous,” said the chair of the Vassar Art department. “I mean this conflagration of talent is so rare, especially in an artist so young.”