Take It Off

by J. Minter

  “Everyone port side,” Stephanie yelled, and then Patch and Suki scampered over next to Greta and me. Which was a good thing, because I definitely wouldn’t have been able to remember which side was port side right then.

  “What happened?” I asked Patch.

  “I have no idea. I just turned around, and Arno was diving over the side after Mickey.”

  I shook my head.

  “Dare?” he suggested.

  “Yeah, yuh think?” I replied, perhaps a little more sarcastically than necessary. Patch brushed the sun-bleached hair off his forehead and gave me that big, gray-eyed look that was threefourths concern and one-fourth hurt.

  “That island is way farther than they realize,” he said. Then he jumped back up to help Stephanie.

  I had a familiar, sick feeling about this. Especially since I was thinking I had Suki all figured out. My clique has exactly one promise that we’ve all made to each other, and that’s that none of us will ever kiss a girl that one of the others likes. It all started with this girl Molly back in fifth grade. David liked her, and then Arno kissed her, and then David moped and they got in all these fights. So I made us all promise: No more kissing girls that one or the other of us is into. Of course, the promise got broken a few months ago, when Arno kissed David’s girlfriend, Amanda Harrison Deutschmann. That one wasn’t any easier for me to fix. And now I could feel something similar coming on, except this time, David was halfway around the world.

  By the time they got the boat turned around, we couldn’t see Arno and Mickey at all. We agreed that the best thing to do was head back to shore as quickly as possible and try to find them before anybody else did.

  As the boat sailed back to the island, Greta, Suki, and I kept a lookout for Mickey and Arno. Nobody said much until we saw the dock. Then Suki turned to me with a half smile, and said:

  “Why do your friends do such dumb-ass things?”

  From: grobman@hotmail.com

  To: jonathanm@gissing.edu

  Hey man. How’s kicks on the pleasure cruise? Ha ha. Seriously man, why didn’t you respond to my last e-mail? New York is really cold and my parents decided not to start a letter-writing campaign against Ocean Term. Apparently a lot of their clients are friends with Barker, and it seemed ill-advised. They’re still pretending like they don’t care that I got kicked off the trip, but they so obviously do. Whatever. They’re just going to have to deal with the fact that their son might be kind of a rebel, and maybe I’m not going to Yale like they did. I’ve been seeing your mom a lot, though, because Rob’s like my only friend now, ha ha. It’s sort of weird, it’s like your house and family and clothes, except Rob’s been dropped into them. Your mom loves him, though, which is funny to watch. He’s even talking about staying for spring term and doing an internship with her—apparently he’s always been really into interior design. Who knew, right? Oh, I ran into Liza Komansky on the street the other day, she said to say hi to you. Seriously man, write me back this time. I’m bored shitless. See you, David.

  Patch’s world is always warm

  “I still can’t believe your friends,” Stephanie said.

  “Yeah, I know. A lot of people feel that way.” Patch Flood shook his head and passed her the joint. He added softly: “I think their disappearance almost killed Jonathan.”

  They were sitting on the beach in Ses Salines, the Menorcan village where the Ariadne was moored for the night. The beach was long and shallow—it seemed to run the length of the village, and all along it, tourists spilled out of restaurants and bars and went to put their toes in the gentle waves. Ocean Term was docked here for twenty-four hours so that the students could practice sailing. Tomorrow, they were going to the bigger island nearby, Mallorca, for a day trip and then on to Barcelona. It was almost nine o’clock, but there was still light in the sky. The night felt really good to Patch, and he was glad to have escaped the boat. Ever since Barker had chosen Patch as his favorite student, the days had dragged for him.

  Stephanie leaned back on her elbows and said, “Thanks for taking a walk with me. I think I really needed to calm down after this afternoon.” When Patch didn’t say anything, she added: “After spending the afternoon in a rowboat rescuing your friends, I really appreciate it.”

  “Yo, no worries,” Patch said.

  “I mean, when I saw them, I was so happy I could have hugged them! But the whole thing really got me angry, too, you know? I guess that’s why I blew up like that.”

  Patch nodded, but he was looking at all the lights coming on in the little white houses across the bay.

  “They could have cost me my job, you know,” Stephanie said, a little bit defensively. She was silent for a minute and then she added: “And, of course, if anything had happened to those kids on my watch, I just would never have gotten over it.”

  Stephanie was a twenty-three-year-old NYU junior who had taken several semesters off already to do Ocean Term. She was short and tan and she kept her curly, dirty blond hair pulled back from her face in a ponytail. She had big breasts, and they stretched the program’s motto—Be a Student of the World, which was printed on her T-shirt—across her chest in an arc.

  “You just seem so much better at this kind of stuff. Like you enjoy hiking and learning about other cultures, and you’re not always looking for the easy out. Like your friend Jonathan seems like he’s so concerned about his clothes that he can never really appreciate his surroundings.”

  She passed the joint back to Patch.

  “Yeah, Jonathan’s not good at outdoorsy stuff. But he’s good at lots of other things.”

  “You really love Jonathan, huh?”

  “He’s like the one that holds us all together. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it. But other times, it really makes sense and it makes us all really chill. I don’t think I can really explain it.”

  Stephanie threw herself back into the white sand and sighed deeply. “I just don’t know how anybody couldn’t love this. Isn’t it all just so beautiful?”

  Out in the bay, there were a few boats on midnight fishing trips. Patch wished, in passing, that he was out there. “Yeah,” he agreed, releasing a long exhale, “it is.”

  Someone was coming toward them from the party up the beach. Stephanie grabbed the joint and buried it quickly. She took a little bottle out of her purse, which she sprayed in her mouth and then handed to Patch. Patch couldn’t decide whether he should use it or not. The way he’d grown up, the idea of hiding anything seemed sort of alien.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered to Stephanie, “I think it’s Arno.”

  Sure enough, Arno was walking up the beach. He was wearing linen pants and no shirt. And he wasn’t alone.

  “Then who’s that with him?” Stephanie hissed.

  Patch tried to focus his eyes. He wondered for a minute how Stephanie could be so tense, because her pot, well, it was good. The person with Patch was definitely a girl, and she was swigging from a bottle.

  “Suki?!” Stephanie exclaimed, sounding more irritated than concerned.

  Suki and Arno stopped dead in their tracks. Suki put the bottle behind her.

  “Hey, guys,” Arno said, cocking his chin hello to Patch. They all looked at one another suspiciously for a long minute.

  “Well, you kids have a good night,” Stephanie said eventually. “Don’t forget to be on the boat by midnight. We go to Mallorca first thing tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sweet dreams,” Suki called out, carefully maneuvering the bottle in front of her as she and Arno moved down to the dark part of the beach.

  When they were far enough away, Suki turned to Arno and asked, “Is your friend crushing on teacher?”

  “Who cares?” Arno said, putting his arms on her hips and pulling her down into the sand on top of him. “What I’m interested in is who you’re crushing on.”

  Suki looked like she hadn’t heard him. “It would be a shame, that’s all,” she said.

  Then she turned her fac
e toward Arno and looked at him like she’d never seen him before. She brushed a few strands of hair out of his eyes.

  “I should probably tell you that I made out with your friend Mickey last night,” she said, sucking in her breath and widening her eyes sweetly.

  Arno cocked a confident eyebrow and let out a dismissive little laugh. “I thought so,” he said dryly. “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “I’m always getting myself in these dumb situations.” Suki giggled. She almost sounded nervous. “I didn’t mean to kiss him, but then I did and … Oh! I hate myself when I’m dippy like this. Do you … hate me?”

  “Nah.” Arno sat up and dug his toes into the sand. He could tell that Suki was staring at him, and that she wanted to know what he was thinking. He put his hand on her head and played with her hair.

  “I don’t suppose Mickey mentioned Philippa Frady before he kissed you?”

  You can’t keep a Pardo down

  As usual, the party was on in Cabin 101. It was Mickey Pardo’s room and, zero-tolerance policy be damned, the booze was flowing. Everyone seemed like they were having a great time except the host. None of his crew as there, and he sat cross-legged in the corner of the bed wearing a straw hat and swigging from a fifth of Cuervo. The six girls dancing at the center of the room were squealing, and everybody else was chain-smoking and sitting or falling into every available inch of floor space. This was one hell of a fire hazard; it was a miracle it hadn’t been broken up yet. Mickey couldn’t be bothered, though. When he heard the new The Streets album, he yelled, “Turn it up.”

  There was a knock at the door and for a minute everyone froze. Then Jonathan came in. Greta was with him.

  “What’s up?” Mickey said. Jonathan and Greta pushed over to him.

  “Mickey, you hate Cuervo. What are you doing?”

  “Where’ve you been?” He looked up blearily. “Hey, Greta.”

  “Hey, Mickey.”

  “Do you know where Suki is?”

  Greta shook her head, and her cheeks reddened.

  Jonathan threw himself down on the bed next to Mickey. He was fidgeting with his fingernails, which Mickey recognized as an anxious twitch. “I just got an e-mail from David.”

  Mickey barely registered this. “Oh, yeah? That’s nice.”

  “Yeah … He sounded … good. And I … still haven’t heard anything from Flan.”

  For whatever reason, that made Mickey laugh. “J, why are you tweaked about this? From what I can tell, you backed way out of that before the trip.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Who’s Flan?” Greta asked.

  “Nobody,” Jonathan said at the same time as Mickey said, “Patch’s pwitty wittle sistuh.”

  “Anyway,” Jonathan continued, “I’d just like to … hear how she’s doing.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Mickey said. He was feeling more lively all of a sudden. “I’m sure you’ll … hear how she’s doing soon.”

  “Thanks. So, what about David?”

  “What about him?”

  “You know, because of Rob.”

  “You stress too much,” Mickey said, jumping up and starting to dance with the girls. “He’ll be fine. We’ll be back in, like, ten days, anyway.”

  “I just feel like he’s trying to take over my life or something,” Jonathan said. He picked up the Cuervo, took a swig, and grimaced. He passed it to Greta. She took a deep breath, tossed her head back, and killed the bottle.

  “Whoa!” Mickey yelled from between two sun-bleached blondes. “Did you see that? That girl can drink.”

  Just then, Arno came through the door. He killed the radio.

  “Yo,” he said, “Stephanie’s coming. You all gotta get out of here.”

  Suki darted in from behind him and grabbed Greta’s hand. She whispered something in her ear, and they disappeared.

  “Yo, what are you doing?” Mickey yelled. “This is my party.”

  “Yeah, well, looks like your party’s over,” Arno said. They glared at each other for a long moment as everyone filed out.

  They began to pick up beer cans and cigarette butts and collect them in a trash bag. The place was starting to look better. Then Mickey said, “I kissed her first.”

  “Yeah? Well, she’s into me now.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “You challenging me?”

  Jonathan took a bottle of cologne out of his canvas tote and sprayed the air. Arno, momentarily distracted, gave him a look of disbelief.

  “It was a free gift from Barneys,” Jonathan said lamely, lowering the spray bottle of Boucheron Homme.

  “Whatever.”

  Mickey twisted the trash bag shut and kicked it under the bed. The cans made a gigantic rattling noise, and that shut Arno up. Mickey crossed his arms across his chest and said, “Challenge.”

  “Guys,” Jonathan said, “can’t you remember one simple rule?”

  Arno shrugged and looked back at Mickey. “Fuck the old rules. May the best man win.”

  “I’m all for that,” Mickey said. He threw his head back and let out a loud war whoop.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond …

  “Two Jäger shots!” Rob yelled over the whooping and howling of the Bulgarian Bar’s Saturday night crowd. The bartender, a petite brunette with a vague whiff of the international about her, nodded impassively and put two shot glasses in front of him. He leaned in against the bar and ran his fingers through his hair. “Make it three. One for me, one for mi amigo Daveed, y uno también para ti, mi amor.”

  Earlier that evening, as they consumed a dinner of french fries with mayo and grappa at Le Père Pinard, Rob had described the Bulgarian Bar to David. “It is super-cool, it is like pure chaos. One of the few places you can experience pure Bacchic chaos in our technocratic society of today,” he explained, gesticulating and lighting a new cigarette with his old one. His English vocabulary increased suddenly, as though he were quoting something. David nodded, although this sounded suspiciously like the form of extreme therapy that his father, Sam Grobart, had helped pioneer in the seventies.

  It was a cold night, and they had to walk through a slushy pile of snow left over from the storm to get to the entrance. The place was on the second floor of a building on East Canal Street, and the klezmer/punk/dance music was already deafening as they came up the stairs. David was secretly relieved to see how dense and manic the crowd was. He’d been feeling self-conscious about his usual Nikes/jeans/white T-shirt uniform all night. But the atmosphere inside the Bulgarian was riotous enough that David could be pretty sure nobody cared what he was wearing.

  David stood fidgeting behind Rob, who was laying it on thick with the bartender.

  “Salud!” Rob yelled, elbowing David to pick up his shot. They threw them back. David shook himself back into focus and saw that the bartender was smiling at him mischievously. Before he could think what to do, she leaned across the bar and kissed him full on the mouth. He thought guiltily about Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, his still-sort-of-girlfriend. But then all he could think about was how good kissing somebody new felt. The bartender pulled away and winked at him, and before he knew what he was doing, David leaned over the bar and was kissing her heavily.

  When he stepped back, the crowd around him erupted in cheers at the public make-out session. Rob patted him on the back appreciatively. “Next girl’s mine, okay?” he whispered to David, sounding like he was half kidding. Then he turned back to the bartender. “Another round, bella,” he said, waving a twenty in the air. “And two Heinekens.”

  “Those are on me, boys,” she said in a hard-to-place European accent.

  They took their drinks, the bartender still smiling coyly at David, and headed to one of the booths in the shadows.

  The center of the room was like a high-fashion mosh pit. Skinny Polish girls were being swung around by the jumping, yelling dudes. The music was just about the loudest David had ever heard. They watched for a minute, and then Rob yelled, “C�
��mon!” and tried to pull him up and onto the dance floor. Before David could say “I don’t dance,” he was swept up into a very fast, very drunk crowd of people.

  Girls started to come up to them from the dance floor. David looked over and saw that Rob was dancing pretty suggestively with some girl he thought he recognized from Potterton. Another girl, slightly round with a shock of bleached blond hair and wearing a much-safety-pinned wife-beater, approached David and put her arms around his waist. She looked up at him and smiled a wide, careless, dark-red-lipstick smile. She didn’t move very much, just sort of twitched her hips and kept her eyes down. David tried to follow her rhythm and let go a little bit.

  Finally the music stopped while a new deejay set up. The dancing mob dispersed, and David looked around at the room. The walls were paneled with fake wood, and the ceiling was strung with Christmas lights. There were plastic cups and beer bottles all over the floor, and the tracked-in snow was melting into the spilled drinks to make a dirty lake at their feet.

  “I’m Caroline,” the girl said, looking up, but not taking her arms away from his waist.

  “David.”

  “You want to come over to our table?” she asked. He nodded, and looked around for Rob. Where’d that dick go off to? he wondered.

  Caroline dragged him to a booth crowded with glam-punk types who managed to look very bored despite the raucous crowd all around them. They squeezed in, and she began introductions: “David, this is Leo, Moira, Rex, Bill, Sandra, and February.”

  “February?” David’s mouth hung open.

  “David Grobart,” Patch’s older sister, February Flood, said, tossing back her spiky hair. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

  Is Arno going soft?

  “I don’t get it,” Patch said. He and Arno were lying on their bellies on deck, watching Suki and a bunch of other girls do sunrise yoga. Suki was executing a perfect dhanurasana. Although Arno hated anything remotely New Age—especially any stay-young-forever fad that his mother fell for—he was thinking that Suki’s contortionist pose was kind of pervy-hot. Patch sighed. “I mean, I sort of get it. But she’s totally not your type. Why are you and Mickey ripping each other over this girl?”