Pass It On (4 page)

After one of the kitchen staff had let me into the apartment, I went straight to Arno's room, since I definitely couldn't deal with sussing out who knew what right then. Sitting at Arno's desk, I heard Alec Wildenburger say he was going off somewhere and Mrs. Wildenburger, Allie, tell someone she'd be in her bedroom if they needed her.

When everything seemed quiet and I figured the coast was clear, I wandered down the long hall that separated Arno's bedroom and bathroom from the rest of the house. I was famished and wanted to grab some of the food that was inevitably leftover from whatever event the Wildenburgers had hosted lately. Arno's parents were always hosting events since they lived in a double-wide town house on Eighteenth Street near Tenth Avenue and liked to show it off. For some reason, I kept hoping there'd be leftover chicken legs.

The hall was dark, even though it was just eight o'clock. I crept by the Wildenburgers' bedroom. I knew that Allie was dressing to go out for the evening and that Arno had been wrong—there was no big Sunday meal planned at the Wildenburger house.

“Oh, Ricardo,” she said, in her high, wheedling voice. “Stop it.”

I stopped. Ricardo was probably Ricardo Pardo, Mickey's father.

“Yes, of course I'm alone.”

Weird. I had been over at the Pardos' a million times and never seen Ricardo on the phone. Sometimes he'd throw a phone on the floor to
kick it, but I'd never seen him put one to his ear and talk into it. Maybe this was some other Ricardo.

“I can't wait till you're on top of me,” Allie said, “you magnificently hot, bearded man!”

Nope. That was Mickey's dad all right. My eyes rolled up in my head. I stepped to my left. The floorboard creaked. I went still.

“Don't talk about Alec,” Allie said. “It is impossible being married to a man who won't admit he's gay. He's going to dinner with some man from the Department of Justice—goodness knows why.”

I heard the front door lock jangle, fifty feet to my right. I moved quickly, but not before I'd heard more.

“Oh, Ricardo, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish he'd find a man and leave me already. And then you and I can finally be really, truly together.”

The front door banged open and there was an explosion of bright light down the hall.

“Hello!” Arno screamed out.

I was at the door before Arno could turn his head to look for me.

“What's up?” Arno sounded beat, but happy
to see me. “I always scream hello when I come in so the monsters will know I'm here.”

“Why?”

“If I don't, they'll just keep yelling at each other and I'll have to hear some ugly shit I'd be more than happy to not know about, you know?”

“Yes. I know exactly what you mean.”

We went into the kitchen. Arno flipped the lights on. He threw his jacket on a chair and went over to the fridge. The room was huge, with loads of gleaming copper pots on hooks and glass-paned cabinets lit from within.

“I think there's some leftover chicken legs.” Arno started to push around some white cardboard containers in the fridge.

“You must be reading my mind. How's Liesel?”

“What's all that stuff you like to call somebody when you figure they're probably crazy?” Arno was always asking me for language that way—he could never be bothered to make up his own slang.

“Gingko-biloba? Totally wacked? Nutballs? Whoppers with a side of poppers?”

“Yeah. All that is what she is. She's absolutely incredible, but there's no way I can keep up this
thing with her. It's exhausting.” Arno sighed happily. He snagged a bottle of Stella Artois from the fridge and cracked it. He said, “I guess I could have worse problems.” He paused and took a long sip from his Stella, eyeing me. “What's going on with you, man? You seem, you know, spooked.”

I looked down for a minute at the old-school Adidas sneakers I'd put on before I left my house. There was a lot I needed to say, and I knew that right then was the time to say it. “Well, a lot of shit is going on all of a sudden.”

“Yeah, I kind of heard that. What's up?”

I opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of Stella, too. “I just found out my dad's getting remarried to a woman named PISS—Penelope Isquierdo something, something.”

Arno's mom walked in and looked at our beers but didn't say anything. “Were you just saying something about Penelope Isquierdo Santana Suttwilley, Jonathan?”

“Um, yeah. She's marrying my dad, but I guess you knew that?”

“Oh, it's hard to keep track of Penelope. But your father is a lucky man, Jonathan. Penelope makes the rest of us look like paupers.” She said
this while motioning around at their house, which was as big as a mansion in the suburbs and probably worth ten times as much.

“My dad invited me to go on their honeymoon with them through the Caribbean on her two-hundred-fifty-foot sailboat.” I looked at Arno and tried to think how I could possibly segue this conversation into
by the way, my dad stole a bunch of money from your family.
And then, maybe because I felt so guilty, I said, “Maybe you can come, too. I think I can bring one friend.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.” Arno smiled his big handsome smile and I knew I'd just done something really stupid. What about my other guys?

“Language, Arno,” said Allie, but she was already on her way back to her room, so he hardly looked up.

I paused for a second, since I could feel already that these secrets were starting to snowball. I had to tell him.

“Arno, I've got to tell you some—” but instead of going on, I stopped. I couldn't do it. I mean, what if he never had to know? If Penelope was so rich, then maybe this really would just all go away, and I could go on this trip with my dad, and he'd quietly give the money back, and I'd pretend
I never knew about all this awful stuff …

“If you were going to tell me I should go to a party Liesel's hosting uptown tomorrow night even though she makes me crazy, then I should tell you that you're right, because that's what's happening.”

“I wasn't—”

“What?”

“Wasn't I—nothing,” I said.

“Apparently her friends think Monday night is party night.”

“Well, so do we.”

“I just hope we're enough for each other,” Amanda Harrison Deutschmann said.

“We totally are,” David said. “We've been over this. You did something wrong with Arno and I did some bad stuff too, but all that's over.”

“I just wish I felt more sure about that,” she said and pressed her forehead against her windowpane.

They were in her big room in her family's Tribeca loft, decorated in a mix of what Amanda thought was cool now, which was beige late-sixties furniture, and what she'd thought was cool when she was ten, which was white wood and wicker. There were photos on the walls of Amanda with her friends, and a framed picture of John F. Kennedy Jr. surrounded by clouds.

Amanda had been trying on clothes for the party Liesel Reid was having the next night. The girls knew each other from Nightingale.

“You never used to be so … so confident-sounding.”
Amanda stood in front of him in a purple and pink flowered bra and panties from La Petite Coquette. Her parents were out at dinner and she had no brothers or sisters. This was one of the few things that she and David had in common.

David stared at her. She was really short and very pretty. “Come here.” He held his arms out and she came and sat in his lap. He put his big arms around her and she played with his big hands, covering her little ones with them.

“Maybe there's some way to make us a stronger couple.” Amanda put her cheek next to David's. She smelled of a perfume that David couldn't name, something with jasmine. He breathed it in. He looked at his hairy wrist against her ribs.

“I don't know—don't you think we're already pretty strong?” David sighed.

“We could be stronger, like if we swore undying love to each other.”

“We've already done that. Look, you're making me feel all unbalanced and uneven, like I did during the one and only time I did mushrooms and had to spend the whole night at Jonathan's house watching women's tennis. Really, we're going to be fine.”

“
I just want to really believe in our love
,” Amanda whispered into David's neck.

“I don't know what I can do to make it any more real.” David furrowed his brow.

“I know!” Amanda leaped up quickly, throwing on a white silk bathrobe. “Let's get engaged.”

David stood too, and stared at Amanda. She was breathing quickly and her eyes were round. She was so much shorter than him that she often looked straight up at him, and sometimes her round face looked like a plate.

“Um, doesn't that seem a little intense?”

“Look, I don't want to ever cheat on you again and this'll keep my guard up—because it'll be like, illegal.”

“Well, okay. We'll get engaged if you really want to. But right now I've got to get home and do my trig homework.” David bent over and slipped his sneakers back on, which he'd kicked off only a few minutes earlier.

“So you're going to ask me to marry you, right? And then it'll be a pact between us—but of course we don't actually have to get married till we're like, twenty-five,” Amanda said while they walked to her front door.

“I guess that's okay. I'll see you tomorrow night.”

“Definitely,” Amanda said. They kissed good-bye, which involved Amanda reaching up to pull David down to a kissable height. It started out as just a peck, but the elevator was taking a long time, so they started
making out pretty seriously against the wall. As David slipped his big hand inside Amanda's robe, he wondered whether or not it was a good thing that Amanda thought they needed to get legally married—engaged, whatever—just so they wouldn't cheat on each other again. This dimly reminded him of some psychological thing his father had once taught him about people who had a hard time controlling themselves, but with Amanda kissing his ear, he definitely couldn't remember what it was.

Arno and I stood in front of a table piled high with neon-colored polo shirts on the second floor of the Ralph Lauren store and mansion on Madison. Gissing Academy let upperclassmen out for lunch and I'd convinced Arno to come with me to buy something for the trip with my dad, since he'd said I should, and Arno had nothing better to do.

We have a funny problem, Arno and I. We're the only people we really get along with at Gissing. I mean, we have plenty of buddies, but we don't take them that seriously. Then the weird part is, of our real friends, we're close, but we're not each other's favorites. I'm better friends with Patch, and then David, and then Mickey, than I am with Arno. And Arno's better friends with Mickey, and then Patch, and then David, who he's had some trouble with over Amanda, which had
made them kind of intense with each other. But the weird part is, because we go to school together, Arno and I hang out pretty much constantly. So we're more like brothers than friends—not that that's a bad thing. And now that I'd invited him to the Caribbean instead of my other guys, it was like we were both questioning if we were actually closer than either one of us thought.

“Do you really think you can pull off hot pink?” Arno asked. He yawned. We had woken up at his house, made ourselves a big breakfast, and then been late to school. We'd muddled through morning classes and now we just had to get through an afternoon full of science, history electives, and Latin, and then we were out.

“Nah.” I wandered toward a tan jacket made of windbreaker material. It had lots of pockets all over it and cost four hundred ninety-five dollars. There was a saleslady called Mary who was hovering around us. She was about my mom's age.

“Do you think it works?” she asked. Mary took me kind of seriously. I'd been buying clothes from her since I was ten.

“I'm not sure,” I said. What the hell does someone need to wear to hike in the waterfalls in Venezuela, anyway? I pulled out my cell phone
and held down the number 4, which speed-dialed Mickey.

He picked up on the third ring and said, “One sec.”

I could hear his teacher yelling at him that no cell phones were allowed in class. After a moment it got quieter and I assumed Mickey was going into the hallway to talk, which is what he always did when I called him during the day at school. Of course talking on cell phones at school wasn't allowed, but Mickey has this way of repelling rules or something. Like he's got a magnetic force, and no matter how much someone yells at him or gives him detention, it never really pans out.

“Dude, I'm in Ralph Lauren and I need your advice on this windbreaker. I like it, but more importantly, I need to know if this is the kind of thing you wear when you're hiking or doing something else outside that's like that.”

“Where are
you
going hiking?” He said this like it was the craziest idea he'd ever heard.

“Well, there's some shit happening with me, and I can't really go into it all, but the most important thing for you to know at this moment is that my dad is getting remarried and he asked me to
go on the honeymoon with him and his new wife and her son, who is named Serge and apparently likes to hike and do stuff like that, and no way am I going to be showed up by some foreign kid who likes adventure shit.”

“Whoa, buddy,” Mickey said. “First of all, that's sort of rough about your dad and I'm sorry. Secondly, where is this hiking happening, and third, can I come? I can help you with the outdoorsy stuff.”

I knew that if this was anyone but Mickey, I'd think he was being a little forward, but the whole candid thing was part of what made him so awesome. And at that moment, I was totally sure he was the guy that I wanted with me to confront my dad and Serge and PISS and whatever weird bugs or other animals might be out in nature. I looked around for Arno and caught a glimpse of him in front of the antique watch counter, flirting with a blond girl in a black suit. She was rubbing perfume into his pulse points.