Break Every Rule Read online

  “I hope the bright young things will excuse me for a few moments so that an old, dull fellow can say some words about one of the masters…,” he began in his signature urbane drawl. “One of the masters, who, I might add, has kept my wife and me quite well fed for over a decade, and one of the masters who, it seems, characteristically, is hiding this evening…”

  Arno looked at Rob, who was silently making the international gesture for “Let’s Party” with his fists in the air. “This is fucking boring,” Arno whispered, though perhaps not as quietly as he could have.

  “Come out, Luc Vogel…,” Alec Wildenburger was saying. “Come out, come out wherever you are!”

  “I think I saw where they are keeping the champagne,” Rob hissed. He was definitely being a little noisier than was socially acceptable. “Let’s go get a bottle for all and start our own party!”

  Arno shrugged at Mimi. “You coming with?”

  She whipped her hair over her shoulder, and smiled knowingly. “I’ll go just about anywhere with you, Arno Wildenburger,” she said.

  Arno smiled to himself again—she was so into him that she’d forgotten all about meeting the brilliant Luc Vogel.

  mickey always takes a dare

  Mickey Pardo got to the MoMA party just as Alec Wildenburger was finishing his speech, which was perfect timing as far as Mickey was concerned. Mickey’s dad was Ricardo Pardo, the sculptor, and he was represented by the Wildenburgers, so Mickey had heard these speeches before. They sucked.

  Mickey was squat and firey, just like his father, so he was instantly recognizable to the crowd of art-world insiders. They nodded at him with affectionate distaste. As Mr. Wildenburger disappeared into the crowd, the music came back on and people started dancing and talking and yelling. It actually looked like kind of a cool scene. Mickey growled sweetly at Philippa Frady, who was his girlfriend again that week.

  She shook her head and looked at him sternly. Then he remembered that he had promised her there would be no outlandish behavior that night. Also, no yelling. He tried to give her a smile devoid of mischievousness, and she sighed and kissed him on the forehead. Mickey and Philippa had been together (on and off) for a long time.

  They had finally agreed last fall that they should just be friends, at least until they went to college, or reached some slightly more advanced stage of adulthood. Their relationship could get a little intense sometimes, and besides, their parents were very invested in breaking them up. But then they managed to be back on just in time for Valentine’s Day.

  “Do you see Jonathan or anybody?” Mickey asked. He adjusted his powder blue tuxedo jacket, which he was wearing over dickies cutoffs.

  Philippa shook her head.

  “Damn,” Mickey said. “You’d think Arno would be at his own parents’ party, right?”

  “Oh, he’s here,” Philippa said. “He and Rob are probably just scamming on freshmen girls somewhere.”

  “Nah, Arno doesn’t date freshmen anymore,” Mickey said as they moved through the crowd. “Bad for his rep, apparently. Hey, why’s everybody staring at us?”

  “Because last week we were broken up. We’re confusing their simple minds.”

  “Oh, right.”

  They moved toward the center of the lobby, Mickey craning his neck for at least one of his guys. “Oh, shit,” he said suddenly, grabbing Philippa by the arm.

  “What?”

  “My dad,” Mickey yelped, pulling Philippa in the opposite direction and into a nook off the main lobby.

  “You haven’t told them we’re back on yet, have you?”

  “No, shhh, that’s just going to cause a lot of yelling,” Mickey said. He turned to see where they’d ended up. “Oh, sweet. Buffet.”

  “Mickey, this makes me really mad,” Philippa said. She was petite and pale and gorgeous, and when she got mad she seemed to be radiating pure heat from the core of her being. Mickey thought she was adorable when she got like this.

  “C’mon,” he pleaded. Then he turned and started heaping his plate with shrimp.

  “Mickey, how could you do this! I had, like, the biggest, suckiest confession session with my parents, and now your parents are going to find out from my parents, and I’m going to look totally stupid!”

  “Phil, you never look stupid,” Mickey said earnestly.

  “Besides, it’s dishonest,” Philippa went on. “My therapist and I were just talking about how the problem with our relationship is that it has a culture of dishonesty, and she’s so dead on. Everything is based on total delusion between us!”

  “It is not!” Mickey yelled. Everyone else at the buffet table looked at them. The waiters cleared their throats. “Besides, my therapist says we temper each others’ worst qualities.”

  “Oh, that is such bullsh—,” Philippa started to say.

  “Excuse me—,” someone said. They whipped their heads around. A girl with layered brown hair was standing next to them. She was holding a plate, and looked about twenty-five. In a voice slightly louder than everyone else’s, and slow, like she was talking to the feeble-minded, she said: “Sorry to interrupt, but are you Mickey Pardo, son of the sculptor Ricardo Pardo?”

  “Who are you?” Philippa asked coldly.

  “Justine Gray, New York magazine,” she said, wiping her hand on her jeans and extending her hand. “I’m a writer, and I’m here doing some last-minute research for our annual ‘Hottest Private School Boy’ issue. I was actually hoping I could talk to you.”

  Philippa held up a perfectly manicured hand, but Mickey was ready for some fun. He knew this issue. It came out every year, and Jonathan always read and talked about it obsessively.

  “I’m hot,” Mickey said. “I go to private school.”

  “Mickey,” Philippa said. Mickey ignored her.

  “This is my girlfriend, Philippa. She’s hot, too. We’re what you call a hot couple.”

  “Mickey—”

  “See, the thing is, our parents don’t want us to see each other. But we can’t be kept apart. That’s how hot we are. We’re practically about to burn this house down. We’re Romeo and freaking Juliet. I mean, we’ve been going out since freshman year, and it’s never been easy. But that’s what makes it so worth it. It shouldn’t matter whether my parents know we’re back together. Right? Right!?”

  “Uh-huh,” the Gray girl said, politely pretending to take notes on a pad of paper.

  “What else do you want to know about me?” Mickey asked, popping a shrimp in his mouth.

  “Mickey,” Philippa hissed, dragging him across the room. “Can I talk to you over here, please?” When they were a safe distance from the reporter person, she said, “You do not, I repeat do not tell my personal shit to random strangers. Is this what going out with you is always going to be like?!”

  “Phil—”

  “I’d hate to think my parents were right about something,” she said pointedly. “Good-bye, Mickey.”

  Mickey watched Philippa walk back across the fabulous lobby, and then turned sheepishly back to the writer. Luckily, she was now engrossed in a cell phone conversation, and staring at the ceiling as she talked. Mickey darted into the adjoining nook.

  He found himself in a small room that had been set up like a lounge, with couches and ashtrays. There was only one dude, sitting and chomping a cigar, and Mickey sat down heavily beside him.

  “What’s your problem?” The man asked, not unkindly. He was on the smallish side and had downy blond hair, even though he was definitely at least forty.

  “Fight with my girlfriend,” Mickey muttered. He really didn’t want to talk about it, even though talking about it with a stranger was, in a way, preferable to talking about it with his therapist. The chances that he would be asked to describe how it had made him feel were infinitely reduced.

  “Eh, happens,” the man said.

  “What’s your problem?” Mickey asked, irritated that his truly big problem would be dismissed so easily.

  “Eh, you know, averag
e midlife crisis stuff. You have a career retrospective of your work at the Museum of Modern Art, but what do you really have?”

  “Luc Vogel?” Mickey said. “Mickey Pardo.”

  “Ricardo Pardo’s boy?”

  “You got it.”

  “Old devil, I should have known. You look just like him. We went to grad school together, you know,” Luc Vogel said, passing Mickey his flask.

  “Yeah, I know,” Mickey took a long sip from the flask. Ah, tequila. “Listen, Luc, I think you’re being kind of a wuss. Last I checked you were rich and famous. I mean, what could possibly be missing?”

  “Well…” Luc Vogel cleared his throat in an attempt at modesty. “Not much, it’s true….”

  “Anything…?”

  “I’m having a hard time coming up with…”

  “Nuthin’…?”

  “Well, I have always wanted to do a nude crowd scene in a restaurant. There would be something so urbane about that, don’t you think? Something lacking in the rest of my oeuvre… sort of Roman, but sort of bourgeois bohemian, too. But people never want to do that. Sanitary issues, I guess.”

  “That’s what’s missing?” Mickey asked incredulously.

  “Yes, that’s it.” Luc Vogel stood up. He seemed satisfied.

  “I think you could probably handle it if you wanted to,” Mickey said, taking another swig of the tequila and passing it back.

  “No, no, I have far too many projects already…,” the older man said, moving quickly toward the door. “Too many projects… No, I couldn’t possibly…,” he went on vaguely. When he reached the door, he turned to Mickey, and smiled. “But you seem like quite the audacious young man. Set it up. I dare you.”

  He tossed the flask back to Mickey and was gone.

  everybody wants a piece of patch

  Patch Flood spent Thursday afternoon flipping through vinyl at A-1 Records on 6th Street and Avenue A, and now he was lying on his bed and listening to the classic T-Rex album he’d found. His cell was ringing again, so he closed his eyes. Patch wasn’t really a cell phone kind of guy; his family had lived on a sailboat until they moved to their Perry Street townhouse when he was six. But Jonathan had insisted he get one a few years back, and since Jonathan did kind of freak out when he couldn’t get in contact with his friends, Patch figured it was probably the brotherly thing to do.

  That didn’t mean he picked up his phone most of the time, of course. Patch was tall and sandy-haired and not easily excited or put out by stuff, so girls were always getting infatuated with him and calling him up nonstop. But the phone had been a particular pain in the ass today.

  After the record store, he’d gone skateboarding in the basketball courts in Tompkins Square Park. He was watching some twenty-five-year-old totally blow it on his kick flip, when the cell rang three times in a row. Simon, this gutter kid whom Patch hung out with there sometimes, had been sitting next to him on the bench, and he took the phone out of Patch’s pocket and said hello. Then he handed it to Patch and said, “It’s for you, dude.”

  Patch took the phone and asked what was up.

  “Hi, this is Justine Gray from New York magazine, and I wanted to—”

  “Sorry, not interested.” Patch hung up and shrugged at Simon. “Someone wanted to sell me a magazine subscription,” he said.

  The same number showed up in the caller ID window of his phone about once every ten minutes for the rest of the afternoon. He couldn’t figure out why someone at New York would be trying to call him, but he disliked them on principle because New York had published a kind of nasty article about this girl Selina Trieff he used to go out with, about how she was out of control and trashed hotel rooms and stuff. It was supposedly about the rise of teen drinking, but she was the only kid they talked to. They had run a picture of her passed out on the couch with the headline WASTED BEAUTY?

  Patch turned up the T-Rex and put a pillow over his head. His phone started making a noise a lot like the chorus of “Stayin’ Alive.” It stopped and started again. He picked it up, prepared to hurl it across the room. Then he remembered that Jonathan had assigned his number a special disco ring in Patch’s phone so that Patch would know to pick up.

  “J,” Patch said.

  “Hey, man, where are you?” Jonathan sounded tense, and there were definitely a lot of people in the background.

  “Home. Why?”

  “Because tonight’s the Luc Vogel retrospective. How could you not be here?”

  “I dunno. I’m kind of not crazy about the stuff of his we have in the house, so…” Patch trailed off.

  “It’s, like, a huge party at the MoMA, dude. Arno’s parents are hosting it. You so should be here. We all agreed months ago we would come to this thing.”

  “I just forgot, I guess.”

  “Well, listen, Rob, Arno, and David are running around like a goddamn boy band with bottles of champagne and these skanky uptown girls, and Mickey’s nowhere to be found, and…”

  “Is Flan there?”

  “Yeah, she says hi. And that you should be here. I really don’t think I can take more of Rob, Arno, and David’s eurotrash extravaganza without backup.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m just gonna…”

  “Patch? Hold on a sec, I have a call waiting…”

  Patch stood up and wondered where he might have left his shirt. He stretched, twisting his long, lean torso right and left, and thought about whether a shower was absolutely necessary before this party thing. Then Jonathan came back on.

  “Dude, I have to take this call. But you’re on your way, right?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Patch said, and hung up.

  His phone flashed him a message that he had twenty-seven unopened voicemails.

  i get a whiff of that ol’ fame and glory

  I got off the phone with Patch and switched back to the other line. It was this girl who worked at New York, Justine Gray. She hadn’t told me why she was calling yet, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was about.

  “So talk to me. What’s up?” I said.

  “Hi, Jonathan. Like I said, I’m a writer for New York magazine, and I’m working on an article about the coolest of cool private school boys. Obviously, you’re pretty well known for your taste and all that. I was hoping I could get some quotes from you for the article.”

  I looked over at Flan. Her arms were crossed, and she was looking at the ceiling. Pretty much everyone was on the dance floor, which was where she wanted to be. I knew this. But I’d felt weird when we were out there before—Rob and Arno were on the dance floor, too, and kind of making a scene with these three blondes who are juniors at Florence. Flan goes to Florence, too, and the older girls kept giving Flan looks like they were wondering what she was doing out so late on a school night. It was really irritating me. Plus, Rob kept yelling foreign words, which is just something nobody should have to put up with.

  “Yeah, I’ve read your stuff,” I said into the phone. “I’d be happy to be interviewed. When’s good for you?”

  “Well, my deadline’s tomorrow.”

  “Oh. I’m at the Luc Vogel opening right now, but…”

  “I know. Me, too. I’m over by the buffet table. How about now?”

  I looked over toward the room with the buffet table and saw someone waving at me.

  “Absolutely,” I said, trying to hide my enthusiasm since I knew this Justine person was obviously working on the Hottest Private School Boy issue. They’ve done it eight years in a row now, and it is a huge deal. The guy they pick is on the cover, and they write this very puffy piece about what makes him so hot, with pictures and all that. This issue has made people. The inaugural Hottest Private School Boy was Tyler Ash, who was a senior at Gissing then. He dropped out of Yale his sophomore year and traveled around, and now he writes for Saturday Night Live. You’ve probably seen his name in Page Six, because he is frequently caught canoodling with the female hosts at Lotus or some other place like that after the show.

  Most private schoo
l guys in Manhattan are supposed to go to good colleges, and most of the HPSBs have. But last year’s, Danny Abraham, didn’t even bother. He started a nightclub called Ginger as soon as he graduated high school, and it’s done very well. You’ve probably heard of Ginger, too; it’s one of those places everybody goes to, but nobody can get into.

  Heard of Black-Jack-Point front man Orlando Simenon? Yeah, he was one, too.

  So, Hottest Private School Boy is a very big deal, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking that maybe I’d been chosen. I was even praying for it pretty hard, since I’ve heard designers start sending you clothes as soon as the issue hits the stands, on top of everything else.

  Justine Gray was still waving at me. I waved back and hung up, and then I turned to Flan.

  “Hey, gorgeous…”

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked.

  I tried to make a sighing noise to indicate that it was all very irritating, rather than totally exciting. Flan was not going to like being left alone in the middle of a party. “This… person from New York magazine. They want to interview me, I don’t know, something about the scene with private school kids now, you know the type of thing. So I’m gonna have to go now. But I’ll find you in a little while, okay?”

  “Jonathan,” she said, her eyes widening, “you cannot ditch me here.”

  “I’m not ditching you.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you call leaving me alone in a room full of strange people who are older than I am?” she asked.

  “Flan, this is important.”

  “Why? You just made it sound like a big bore.”

  This time I sighed for real. “You remember last year when the Hottest Private School Boy issue came out, with Danny Abraham on the cover?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, they do it every spring. I think that’s what this is for, and… listen, Flan, if they want to name me Hottest Private School Boy in New York, I really can’t say no. You know?”