The Insiders Read online

  More girls came in the door. I didn’t recognize them, but I heard them whispering about Patch. Would they even get a chance to see him? If I knew Patch at all, the answer was no. I looked both ways before dashing up the staircase to check in on little Flan Flood.

  arno knows exactly where amanda is

  Amanda Harrison Deutschmann and Arno Wildenburger were out in Patch’s backyard. A very light rain, like a mist, was falling.

  “What’re you looking at?” Amanda asked. She was a short girl with very straight blond hair, gray-green eyes, and a killer body that she’d gotten from a lot of sailing and tennis.

  “You, because you’re hot,” Arno said.

  “Oh yeah?” Amanda said.

  “Your eyes are like soft gray clouds on a Saturday afternoon.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  She put her arms around Arno’s neck and opened her eyes wider, at him. Arno took a pull from his beer and swayed Amanda back and forth.

  Arno had come from a small dinner party his parents had thrown for Randall Oddy, a British painter who was having his opening the following night. He’d done several shots of Jaeger with Randall in the kitchen. Randall was only twenty-three, after all, and he’d made Arno swear to hang with him the next night at his opening. And then Arno sailed right out of that party and landed here, with David’s girlfriend, where he really was not supposed to be.

  “Well,” Amanda said.

  “Well what?” Arno asked. He sort of half-glared at Amanda. She licked her lips, so he glared some more.

  “I want to talk to you,” Amanda said.

  “About what?”

  “About …” Amanda paused. “I’m upset about Meg.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, my friend from Brearley who passed out in a bathtub at the American Hotel at Sag Harbor last weekend. Her mom had to come all the way out from the city to get her and even now nobody knows how Meg got there. Meg can’t remember a thing and we’ve had to have all these meetings where we try to recreate her night.”

  “Oh yeah, Meg.” Arno slipped his arm around Amanda and she gave in to him. With his other hand he sipped from his bottle of Grolsch. He wasn’t drunk. Physically, getting rocked took some work—he was almost as big as David, though he wasn’t any good at basketball, and hadn’t been since they’d been cocaptains of the middle school team at Grace Church.

  He took Amanda’s hand in his for a second, and she moved it to his mouth. Did she want him to bite it? He did, and she moaned.

  “When we were in sixth grade,” Arno said, “Mickey got kicked off the basketball team for biting the hand of some kid on the Saint Ann’s team, so David had to be the captain even though Coach Bank said he didn’t have leadership qualities. We ended up with a losing season.”

  “Did you have to mention him?” Amanda asked. She’d slipped her hand underneath Arno’s shirt and he was trying to keep his goose bumps under control.

  “It feels like you lost something inside my shirt and you’re desperate to find it.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” Amanda said. “What we’re doing is a big deal.”

  “Sorry,” Arno said.

  “I just want to talk to you about what’s going on with me,” Amanda said.

  “Okayyy,” Arno said. “What is going on?”

  “Right now, you are.”

  “You’re beautiful,” Arno said. “You know that? You’re built like an eighties Playboy playmate—just like the ones my father has his bathroom wallpapered with. When I was a kid I looked at those all the time.”

  “You looked at those and then what did you do?” Amanda whispered in his ear.

  “Exactly,” Arno said.

  Arno touched Amanda’s round shoulder. He looked around and saw that if someone happened to glance through the windows in the parlor, or in the kitchen, or even on the third floor, they could see what was going on in the garden really easily.

  “You know what?” Arno said. “I need to go to the bathroom. I need to go use a bathroom upstairs and you need to come with me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, forget it,” Arno said.

  “No … well, I’ll follow you up there.”

  Upstairs and tucked safely away in the bathroom, Arno and Amanda got to fooling around pretty seriously. And it was as if she’d been hungry to do something really wrong with him for a while already. They leaned against the white subway tile wall and they both eased their shirts up, like exotic snakes, and then they pulled off their pants, like strippers.

  They were trying to be really quiet. Because even though the party was loud, they were on the top floor, and they were in the bathroom that had doors leading to both Flan’s and Patch’s bedrooms.

  During a lull, they heard a soft voice.

  “That’s a cute story,” the voice said. It wasn’t Flan’s. Arno raised an eyebrow at Amanda, who’d been chewing on his neck. He pried her off, and she listened, too.

  “And then tomorrow I’ll probably watch movies with my friends after we go riding,” a different voice said. That was Flan.

  “That sounds nice,” said the other voice, which clearly belonged to a guy. “If I didn’t have to hang out with my cousin I could probably go up to the park and see you ride.”

  Then the voice stopped.

  “Jonathan,” Amanda whispered to Arno.

  “Nah,” Arno said. They both put their ears up to the closed door.

  “Don’t you go out with Liza Komansky?” Flan asked.

  “No way—people said we were going out last year, but that was just because we spent a lot of our time together.”

  “And fooled around constantly and didn’t go out with anybody else,” Amanda whispered. “And now look, Jonathan’s going after little Flan Flood.” Arno kissed her neck. She punched him in the chest. Then there was quiet from Flan’s room.

  “It sounds like they’re fooling around, or maybe just cuddling,” Arno said.

  “No way,” Amanda said.

  Amanda and Arno started giggling then, and covering each other’s mouths. Most of their clothes were off and they were awkwardly leaning against the wall.

  So they had to twist around and help each other stand when Jonathan opened the door to the bathroom to see what was going on. And they clearly couldn’t figure out what to say when Jonathan leaned in the doorway and stared at them, visibly shocked that Arno was in there with Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, their best friend David’s girlfriend.

  “Shit,” Arno whispered. “I really wish you hadn’t been the one to see this.”

  “Because I’m your conscience?” Jonathan hissed.

  “That’s way too nice a way of putting it,” Arno whispered back.

  “Jonathan?” Flan called out.

  Jonathan pointed to Arno and Amanda and put his finger over his mouth to say shhh. Then he pointed to the bedroom behind him, and to himself, and did the whole quiet gesture all over again.

  “Nobody can say anything about anybody else,” Jonathan whispered. “Get it?”

  “Shhh,” Arno said, and fixed his eyes on the floor.

  “Little Flan Flood,” Amanda said, and shook her head. “Jonathan, you are crazy.”

  “She’s just a friend,” Jonathan said. “I’m not doing anything with her that could be construed as crazy.” But he smiled when he said it, and he went a little red.

  “Bullshit,” Amanda said.

  “We didn’t fool around,” Jonathan said, glaring at Amanda. “And even if we did, which we didn’t, I wouldn’t be cheating on somebody who happens to completely love me.” The lights in the bathroom were on a dimmer, and Jonathan touched the switch and made everything a little brighter.

  They were all glaring at each other.

  “Why don’t we all leave each other alone,” Amanda said, “and go back to what we were doing?”

  “No,” Arno said. “I think Jonathan’s right.” He’d found his jeans and he sat down
on the lip of the tub to put them on.

  “Oh, great,” Amanda said, stooping over to gather her clothes. “I hate it when you guys stick together. Jonathan, would you get out of here? Can you not see that I’m practically naked?”

  david is depressed

  “It looks like you’re waiting for something,” Kelli said.

  “Me? No,” David said. “You want anything? I wish I could tell you where Jonathan went.”

  “I don’t care. I think he was happy to get rid of me.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” David said. He tried a smile. He was sitting with Kelli in the breakfast nook, a big windowed room off the Floods’ kitchen. David had a similar room up at his country house in Saddle River, only his parents called it the greenhouse and had spider plants in all the spots where a person might want to sit.

  They were drinking Heineken from little keg-shaped cans and picking at a bowl of dried Chinese peas. David could never figure out the arrangement that the Floods had with their kids—did they know that there were blowouts every weekend? David’s parents would barely let his friends in the door. And considering that they were both therapists he found that pretty uncivilized, though he’d never exactly felt free enough to say so. They treated him like he was their age and wouldn’t want a bunch of hell-raisers around all their old psychology books and stuff either. He somehow managed to talk to them constantly without ever saying anything meaningful to either of them. He was an only child.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Kelli asked.

  David looked up. His can was full. He realized he was barely drinking at all. Amanda. Where was she?

  “Yes.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” David mumbled. He could hardly get the words out.

  “I wish I could talk to that guy Arno again,” Kelli said. “He left me in the middle of a sentence. He seems like a pretty nice guy.” She kept clacking her fingernails against the cream-colored table. She was chewing Savage Sour Apple Bubblicious and she gave David a piece.

  “Nice?” David asked. “You think Arno is nice?”

  “Sure. Don’t you think he’s nice?”

  “No.” But David couldn’t figure out how to pinpoint why, exactly, he didn’t think Arno was nice. Of the five friends, Arno and David were the furthest apart, partly because they’d been the closest back in lower school. Now David trusted Arno the least of any of them. But whenever they were alone, Arno always redeemed himself. He’d been the one who taught David not to walk away when girls said to, and how to lightly brush hair off a girl’s forehead and not turn purple at the same time. But lately David had been so obsessed with Amanda that he’d forgotten all those lessons.

  “What about you?” Kelli asked. David glanced at her. Now she was blowing huge green bubbles, popping them, and licking the gum into her mouth. Her eye makeup was much, much thicker and darker than he was used to on a girl. David suddenly wanted to reach out and pop one of the bubbles for her, but when he looked at his hands, they just stayed at his side.

  “What about me?” David asked, and took a long sip of his beer.

  “You play ball?”

  “That’s basically what I do, yeah.”

  “You’d fit right in in St. Louis,” she said. “I—”

  Kelli was cut off by a gigantic roar from the staircase above. It was a tearing sound, as if someone were trying to rip apart a couch using an electric saw. David and Kelli and a few others who had been getting beer went upstairs to see what it was. When they got to the parlor floor, they saw Mickey Pardo on a white Vespa.

  He’d driven the scooter up the front steps, through the door, and into the living room, ripping apart a small entryway rug that was now lodged between the Vespa’s back tire and the fender and currently catching fire.

  “Wow,” Kelli said.

  David winced. After that “nice” comment about Arno, he could perfectly well imagine what was coming next. She’d walk over to Mickey. And it was right then that David felt the headlock of self-pity and attraction to girls that had pretty much defined every minute of the last several years of his life, save when he was playing ball. He didn’t like Kelli. He missed Amanda, who was clearly avoiding him and he was freaking out, hard, about where she was. But when Kelli walked away from him, twitching her tight butt in that stupid skirt and sort of half-clenching her fingers, he thought, she’s hot. And as usual, he felt bad and told himself that she’d only been killing time with him until a cooler guy came along.

  “You’re here,” Mickey yelled to David. “Now where the hell is the rest of us?”

  But David just ignored his old friend and yanked the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. Then he went and sat on a couch. He had another Heineken in his kangaroo pocket, and he got it out and opened it, found a straw and put it in. He sipped the beer through the straw and became invisible.

  “Hi,” Kelli said to Mickey. “What’s your name?”

  “Call me Stuntman Jack,” Mickey yelled, and laughed. He stepped off the scooter, handed it to a freshman who’d been ogling it, and put his hands on Kelli’s hips.

  She said, “Ooh.”

  mickey pardo knows how to wake up a room

  “Ooh?” Mickey asked. “Is that your name?”

  “Keep making entrances like that and you can call me whatever you want,” Kelli said. “Won’t this kid’s parents be upset that you drove a scooter into his house and set fire to the rug?”

  The freshman, whose name was Adam, leaned Mickey’s scooter against the wall. Then he threw beer on the flames until the fire went out and the rug began to smolder.

  “Thanks,” Mickey said, and nodded approvingly. An odor came up from it, something resembling burnt peanut-butter cookies.

  “Nah, they won’t care,” he said. “Patch’s parents are my dad and mom’s oldest friends. They buy all my dad’s art and stuff …”

  Mickey looked down at the damage he’d done. He wasn’t tall, and he was a little squat, like his father, Ricardo Pardo, the famous sculptor. He was wearing a green jumpsuit and black motorcycle boots. There were goggles and a whole bunch of Carnevale beads around his neck. A friend of his mom’s had bleached his black hair blond, and now it had grown out all spiky, so his skull looked like it had sprouted match heads.

  “Actually, yeah,” Mickey said. “They might be annoyed. Have you seen Philippa?”

  “I don’t keep track of girls,” Kelli said. “I came here with Jonathan.” She followed Mickey as he made his way down to the kitchen. On his way, Mickey stopped for a second in front of David.

  “You good?” Mickey asked, and tried to pull David’s hood off. David slapped Mickey’s hand.

  “I can’t find Amanda,” David said.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Mickey said. And that made David feel a little better, even though he knew Mickey would probably forget his promise in the next few minutes.

  Meanwhile, other kids came up the steps and into the house, so what had been only twenty people was quickly becoming forty. They all carefully stepped around Mickey’s stinking Vespa.

  “Well, Ooh. Where did Jonathan find you?” Mickey asked. He slapped hands with guys and kissed girls on cheeks as they moved along, but he didn’t try to lose Kelli for two simple reasons that floated through his mind: 1) she was a friend of Jonathan’s, and 2) he could overlook certain aspects of her, like her ugly pink sweater, and feel the heat-seeking center of her, which was easy, because she was gripping his hand.

  “We’re cousins,” Kelli said. “But he brought me here and ditched me the moment we walked in the door. Now I have no idea where he went. But that’s okay, ’cause I’ve got you now.”

  “What’d you do to David Grobart?”

  “Who’s that?” Kelli asked.

  “Damn,” Mickey said. “I need to work with my man on how to make a better first impression.”

  “The hooded ballplayer? He’s just like the kids back home.”

  Mickey didn’t bo
ther to ask where that was. He snagged a couple of del Sols from someone’s six-pack on the counter and began drinking them. Kelli took one for herself.

  “Listen, Ooh. I’m going to the roof for a sec. I can see my girlfriend Philippa’s house from there and I want to try and figure out if I can like climb over there or something, since her parents are having a dinner party and I can’t just go through the front door. So I’m thinking I’m going to go rooftop to rooftop. You want to come?”

  “Sure,” Kelli said. “You want to get some rope?”

  “Nah, I won’t need it,” Mickey said. And he turned and raced up the stairs. On the way, he knocked up against a girl with big dark eyes and black hair in a ponytail. A cool girl. Liza Komansky. Liza was with Jane Hamilton, whom she always took to parties. Jane was a wispy blond girl, tall, quiet, and widely known to be gay.

  “Hey, Mickey, seen Jonathan?” Liza asked.

  “Nah,” Mickey said. “But this is his cousin, Ooh.”

  “Cousin It?” Liza said, and raised an eyebrow. Mickey saw Kelli slow down as she heard this.

  “Ooh,” Mickey said, and ran up the stairs.

  Kelli stopped on the stairs to shake hands with Liza and Jane. The two girls gave Kelli the once-over. Liza was wearing black Gucci boots, a black Marc Jacobs knee-length skirt, and a matching black silk turtleneck. Jane was wearing blue jeans, engineer’s boots, and a wifebeater T.

  “I’m Kelli,” Kelli said. “I think Jonathan went upstairs, but I can’t find him.” Kelli kept staring at Liza. Liza stared back. “Hey,” Kelli said, “I really like your skirt.”

  “Thanks,” Liza said.

  “It’s cool, but like in a really conservative, non-sexy way. Definitely wouldn’t attract the wrong kind of attention, or any attention. Huh?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Liza said.

  “If I wore something like that back where I’m from I’d practically disappear. But I guess people are more understated here in the city. I mean, I wouldn’t be, but I can see how some girls might choose that road.”

  “Well, I suppose I did,” Liza said.