Take It Off Read online

  take it off

  an insiders novel

  by j. minter

  Contents

  Picture yourself on a boat on an ocean …

  Smooth sailing for Arno

  David is to ocean like wet is to blanket

  This is exactly what happens when I can’t see my friends

  I’m too nervous to actually digest Ocean Term fare

  Mickey digs a girl who loves to laugh

  Arno doesn’t care if the ocean is amazing

  If only all this beauty could make me miss Flan less

  Patch’s world is always warm

  You can’t keep a Pardo down

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond …

  Is Arno going soft?

  Patch makes teacher’s pet look like a dream job

  Maybe Arno isn’t on top …

  Mickey and the girls get a taste of the good life

  Patch makes like a hero, again

  As usual, I’m fashionably late

  Patch could use a little saving, too

  Arno tries to be bigger than that

  I like to maintain a certain level of lifestyle no matter what

  There’s always a party at Patch’s

  My nightmare has just begun

  The fastest way to make Jonathan freak out is…

  My head hurts really, really bad

  Patch wakes up with Greta

  The old keep-an-eye-on-her-for-me

  Trouble follows me around

  Arno prefers to be in the lead

  I get through to New York, in the worst possible way

  Mickey’s a survivor

  I love a classy hotel

  Arno versus Nature

  I am reminded of some of Suki’s less attractive qualities

  Is Patch the new Jonathan?

  Suki and I simply cannot keep out of trouble

  I waste time and money

  Arno does it for himself

  Barcelona ♥ Mickey

  Nobody in Barcelona recognizes Arno

  Suki reminds me of our many differences

  Arno at the edge

  Patch is the last man standing

  Mickey in Bohemia

  David tries out a little passive aggression

  The Savage won’t leave me alone

  If Patch checked his e-mail, this is what he would find …

  Patch experiences one of those awkward moments people keep telling him about

  A heart-wrenching beachside reunion

  Yeah, I slept on a beach once

  A daring escape

  I get all nostalgic for something I never had

  Mickey and Arno do some healing

  Arno never responds to e-mail he doesn’t understand

  The dirt on Barker

  I am that close to home

  I get a little peek into my new stepbrother’s life

  Psychoanalysis for breakfast

  Patch says good-bye to all that

  I may actually board an airplane

  The guys are reunited in style

  I fly with the people

  A few last moments suspended in air

  Everything moves roughly in the direction of normal

  Arno goes after what he likes

  Now that I’m in Flan’s house, I’m further away from her than ever

  But I don’t go to Flan’s room, not straightaway

  for ASG

  Picture yourself on a boat on an ocean …

  The single best thing about life on my dad’s new wife’s yacht (you remember, don’t you?) was that, for a short time, almost everyone I really care about was close by and easy to locate. That’s what the last thirteen days were like, and it’s what the next two weeks should hold in store, too. Except now we’re on an even bigger boat, with tons of girls.

  Okay, let’s make a long, twisted story short: My dad married a woman rich even by our standards named Penelope Isquierdo Santana Suttwilley (or PISS, as I like to think of her). She’s got a yacht, one of those two-hundred-fifty-foot deals that you can live on, with a crew and everything, and she and my dad decided to have their honeymoon on it. They invited me and PISS’s son, Serge, and they told me I could bring whichever friend I wanted, which ended up being all of them: Arno, Patch, David, and Mickey. Don’t even ask me how that happened.

  Our days of cruising had their ups and downs, of course. David never got used to the movement of the ocean. In fact, he looked a little like the Jolly Green Giant with the flu from day one. And then Arno started yelling “Where’s the bucket!” whenever he saw him, and that, as you can imagine, got old fast. Mickey took to diving off the yacht unexpectedly. We’d hear a loud scream: “I got my mind on my money and my money on my … yeeaggh!” and turn to see a bright pair of Vilebrequin floral swim trunks lying on the deck, followed shortly by a loud splash.

  Needless to say, all the screaming and name-calling gave my new stepmom a case of the nerves, as she told us many times, and she was forced to up her sedative intake. Her nerves gave me nerves, but still, most of the time I could see all my friends from wherever I was standing, and I liked that.

  I’d never seen Patch in a more natural setting. He and the captain’s son would fish off the back of the boat and drink Coronas in the afternoon, and then meet up with rest of us for hors d’oeuvres at cocktail hour, and the chef would cook up the fish they’d caught for dinner. And even I—who had no choice but to deal with this jet set Latin spitfire of a new stepmother, and with having to have “talks” with my dad (who is basically a wealthy deadbeat)—even I was almost perfectly content. Even with Mickey’s erratic diving, I knew there was no place for him to go but back to the big cabin we all shared (unless he got eaten by a shark or something totally awful, which was a possibility I wouldn’t even think about). And that contented feeling pretty much went for all of my friends, too.

  Plus, the whole yacht/white deck shoes/Persol sunglasses/champagne look is something I really got into. Before we set sail from Miami, Dad took me and Serge on a shopping spree to Gucci and Neiman Marcus in Merrick Park, and I got V-neck navy sweaters and some white pants, and the whole look was very sailor-at-rest.

  Of course, the shopping was what cued me in that there was going to be some kind of trouble. That’s when I met Serge. We all drove over together in the vintage Karmann Ghia that Dad keeps in the lower level of the yacht, and the whole way Serge kept sort of squealing, “Barneys Co-op Mee-AH-mee!” But I’m at Barneys all the time in New York, so why would I want to go there? Anyway, to make matters worse, he had this greasy spiked hair that had a sort of unintentional Hives look, and he was wearing oversized wraparound shades and a collared shirt that was open to nipple level, revealing a few curly black chest hairs. This is what we call Eurotrash in Manhattan. You find a lot of these people hanging around the NYU area chain-smoking and looking like they’ve been up all night doing E and talking about life and ratting up their hair. I got over that scene back when I was a sophomore.

  After my new stepbrother got his way and we left Barneys, he pushed down his wraparounds, looked at me, and said, “By the way, Joan-a-tin, nobody calls me Serge but Mama. You can call me Rohb.”

  Serge—I mean, Rob—hated being on the boat, and all the way through the Caribbean he sulked and holed up belowdecks and chain-smoked. That’s how he and David initially hit it off. They both complained about the smell of the ocean, so while the rest of us enjoyed lazy evenings watching the sunset turn the horizon into golden explosions, they’d be downstairs complaining about how much everything sucked for them. David tolerated Rob’s smoking because Rob tolerated the endless videos of Peja Stojakovic’s layups that David had to watch before the beginning of the next basketball season. They watched Peja, inhaled secondhand smoke, and turn
ed pale while the rest of us browned.

  After ten days, once we’d lost count of the picturesque seaside villages and breathtaking natural phenomena, and after we’d visited with the Venezuelan half of PISS’s crazy family, we arrived back in Miami. The night before Dad and PISS flew back to London, he put in a call to Mom. When he handed me the phone, she explained that they had “reached a new level of peace” and that to prove it she was going to have Rob stay at our house, in my brother Ted’s room. It might have annoyed me, except that I was about to sail across the Atlantic with a full crew to pamper me and my friends, and I didn’t have to even think about any crazy parent drama until the program was over. I was feeling pretty freakin’ great about everything.

  Oh, wait.

  Maybe you’re wondering, What program? Where am I? And how’d I get here? Put it this way: Blame my mom. She decided to bring up all that junior year, precollege anxiety while I was packing to go on what I thought would be the worst trip of my life. (I had no reason to assume the trip would be so relaxing and awesome at this point, and she really didn’t, either.)

  Flashback to right before I went down to Miami. I was sitting with my mom, and as usual, I was about to get some weird, weird news.

  “Jonathan,” my mom said, sitting on my bed and giving me her serious face. She took a sip of the eggnog that was left over from our Christmas party. “The Grobarts were just telling me about this winter break precollege program. It’s on a cruise ship called the Ariadne, and you board in the Mediterranean, so it would be perfect timing with this trip you’re going on for your father’s honeymoon. When the yacht makes its return trip to Greece for winter storage, you can stay aboard. It would be really good for you, a little something different to put on those college apps. Maybe your friends could go with you. Think about it, okay?”

  She put a brochure on my bedspread, and then said, “I’ll leave you alone,” like she was doing me a favor.

  The brochure said: Ocean Term: Be a Student of the World, and it had a glossy picture of a good-looking girl sitting next to an old, sun-wrinkled man. They were both laughing. The caption said: Stephanie Rayder, Sicily, Winter ’02. Inside, it described how, for two weeks, a “diverse, international” student body of three hundred teenagers would sail from Athens, through the Mediterranean, around the Iberian Peninsula, and on to London. Along the way, we would study classics, history, and sailing. This would provide us with “innumerable character-building challenges,” including an overnight survival test. It all sounded kind of earnest and boring, and I had been planning on coming home quick after my dad’s honeymoon, because things had just started to get good again with Flan Flood and me. Besides, I almost never leave Manhattan, so the idea of four weeks away kind of freaked me out.

  But then, unbelievably, everyone in the group of guys I’ve been best friends with since fifth grade said they might be down to go, and it started sounding fun.

  Patch was easy to convince, because he grew up on a sailboat and has never been comfortable in a conventional classroom. This was kind of like asking him to go to heaven. And Arno’s parents, who are famously crazy New York art collectors, had just confessed that their marriage was a sham and so his whole family life was crumbling very publicly. There had been some gossip column chattering about it, and everywhere Arno went, people stared at him, and not in the usual good way. I couldn’t blame the guy for wanting to blow town. Mickey and his girlfriend, Philippa Frady, had finally admitted to each other that their relationship was just too intense, and had tentatively called it quits, so Mickey was this constant streak of destructive, single-dude energy. He took one look at the girl on the brochure and he was sold. And David? Well, David never really knew how to negotiate New York without us, so he was in, too. Arno, Patch, David, Mickey, and me, Jonathan. It was almost like having just about everything I like about Manhattan come with me.

  I suspect that, besides all that, we were needing more time off from New York than we were letting on. The past couple of months have been filled with more secrets and lies than I can possibly keep straight, but the big ones go about like this:

  1) Back in the ’80s, when everyone was making and losing money like crazy, my dad stole money (okay, a lot of money) from just about all of my friends’ parents. I spent about two weeks slinking around like a criminal, and it cost me a girl I was pretty into.

  2) It turned out that Arno’s dad, Alec Wildenburger, is gay, and that:

  3) Arno’s mom, Allie, was having an affair with Ricardo Pardo, who is a rich and famous artist who is:

  a) represented by Alec Wildenburger, and

  b) also the father of Mickey, Arno’s best friend.

  4) Meanwhile, Mickey’s mom/Ricardo’s wife was having an affair with the guy painting my apartment. Which brings us back to:

  5) Me. And I, unfortunately, still have a secret. Or, at least, I hope it’s still somewhat of a secret. Before we left, I acted like this totally emotionally stunted dude with Flan, and things may be worse between us than I’m letting on.

  6) I especially hope that Patch doesn’t know about that, since Flan is his little sister. And she’s in eighth grade. Patch doesn’t really have any secrets, besides being generally elusive. But something new in his personality seems to be emerging: He acts more mature and capable, and this change in him has us all more twisted out than everything in 1 through 5 combined.

  So, with all of that as recent history, you can see why a couple extra weeks away seemed like a good idea. The plan was for us all to go straight to Ocean Term from my dad’s honeymoon. I figured I’d need another vacation after a vacation like that, anyway. And that’s how we ended up here, on the Ariadne, with a whole lot of other kids. They aren’t really a “diverse, international” group—mostly they’re Brits and Americans. But that’s okay. We can still write it that way on our college applications. And, before I tell you anything else, I should warn you that this trip is going to throw us challenges that that brochure didn’t even hint at.

  Smooth sailing for Arno

  The students of Ocean Term were supposed to divide up into their orientation groups and sit quietly in clusters on the deck of the Ariadne. It was their third night on the ship, and they had already learned how to turn the evening lectures into covert parties in plain view. There was no moon, and the program director, Roger Barker, was explaining the myths behind various constellations. He used a microphone, and looked at the sky as he spoke and gestured grandly. Meanwhile, the kids carried on quiet conversations and snuck from one group to another. Arno Wildenburger took a flask of Jack Daniels out of his jacket pocket and took a sip.

  Arno’s group’s RA was a British anarchist and antiglobalization protester who called himself Loki. He was more than willing to look the other way.

  Already the students were forming cliques and hooking up with each other. It all seemed sort of immature to Arno, like the New Hampshire summer camp that his parents had sent him to in junior high. Still, a two-week party on a cruise ship with three hundred other kids couldn’t be an entirely bad thing.

  On the first night, Arno had been irritated that he was stranded in this group with none of his New York crew. But he didn’t mind so much anymore. Patch had already become the most talked-about kid on the trip, and of course Arno hated that. Apparently, during Patch’s orientation group’s day trip through ancient ruins on Delos, Patch had caught some looters trying to make off with the head of an ancient statue of Aphrodite. The island’s team of archaeologists had practically asked if they could keep Patch, they loved him so much. And stuff between Mickey and Arno was strained anyway, because of all the parental entanglements that came out around Thanksgiving. They had been steering clear, as it were, since then. There was Jonathan’s mooning over Flan, too, which had gotten a little bit annoying. And, oh yes, there was another reason that Arno was glad to be going it alone.

  He’d met Suki Davison bright and early Monday morning, during their first orientation meeting. She was wearing a sticker
that said: HELLO MY NAME IS: SUKI, BERKELEY, CA. Nobody else had a sticker like that, and Arno couldn’t decide whether this made her cute or geeky. (By that afternoon, when at least ten other girls had managed to get the same kind of sticker and Suki’s had disappeared, he decided she was pretty freaking cool.) She was half Japanese and half California WASP, and she had long dark hair and bangs cut in a straight line over her eyes. There was a small tattoo of a Japanese character on her shoulder, and when they went around in a circle and told the group something about themselves, she said, “Yeah, that is a tattoo, and yeah, it is my name in Japanese. Now none of you have to ask me about it ever again.”

  She wasn’t the kind of cool girl that Arno was used to hanging out with in New York. But she had that sort of laid-back California thing going on that made her a most-desirable in this kind of alternative education setting. When Loki asked if anyone had any questions or problems during orientation, her hand shot up and she said, “I am very concerned that Ocean Term has decided to serve meat in its cafeteria. I don’t want to impose my views on anyone else, but I’d just like to say that financially supporting the meat industry seems contradictory to everything this program stands for.” It wasn’t cool, but Arno had to admit it was sort of sassy. Besides, she had really long legs, and Arno, who was six one, thought he made a better-looking couple with a girl who was almost as tall as he was.

  Arno snuck another sip of the Jack and leaned toward Suki, who was sitting cross-legged next to him and listening to the lecture. He was close enough that when he breathed deeply, and then exhaled, the hair around her ear moved slightly. She smelled exotic and familiar at once, like the perfect mix of incense and girl’s skin.

  “It’s pretty cold out,” he said, even though it wasn’t remotely chilly. “You want a nip?”

  “Thanks,” she said, turning her face so that her nose almost touched Arno’s. After she took a sip, she looked back up at the stars. Barker was saying, “And if you look to your left you can see Dorado, and you’re lucky, because you can only see it in January, and …”