Prep Page 2

  “Thanks for the tip.” I felt like such a jackass. Could he tell how desperate I was?

  “No sweat.” He sat down on the sidewalk and leaned up against the metal gate surrounding the front of his house. I noticed that his pants were ripped at the cuffs and he was missing a sock.

  “You have a key?”

  “I did when I left the house,” he said. “Don’t worry, this will wake her up.” He stood up and walked into the street. “KRIS,” he screamed. Looking up at her window, Danny shouted her name again just like Stanley Kowalski in New Orleans.

  A window flew open on the second floor of another building and an overweight man in a white T-shirt stuck his head out. “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled and slammed his window shut.

  “ ’Morning, Cowboy,” Kris said, looking down at me.

  She was leaning out her window in a terrycloth bathrobe and her hands were resting on the windowsill. She looked half asleep but her drowsy smile still jumpstarted my pulse. I didn’t know why but Kris always seemed to fill this hole in my gut. I wasn’t afraid of anything when I was with her except saying good night.

  “I’m locked out,” Danny hollered, trying to get her attention.

  “What are you doing with Nick?” she said.

  “We bumped into each other,” he shouted.

  “I’ll be down in five.” She ducked her head back inside.

  I turned to Danny. “So, what’ve you been up to all night?” I asked, trying to hide my excitement.

  “We were just chasing skirts.” Danny unscrewed the cap on his High Life. “What about you?”

  “Went to a movie,” I mumbled. “What happened to your sock?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” he said, taking a healthy gulp from his beer.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Hey, if I remember what I did, I feel gypped.”

  Kris’s mother sent Danny off to rehab six months ago. The dean of his school caught him selling drugs and threatened to throw him out if he didn’t go to a treatment center. Danny still denies being a drug dealer. According to him, he didn’t make a cent—he wasn’t selling, he was sharing.

  Danny was so drunk and high on his flight to rehab that when the people from the treatment center picked him up at the airport, he had seven flight safety instruction cards, no wallet, and an empty bottle of Ativan. Danny doesn’t remember the flight very well, but he claims he walked up and down the aisles buying the cards from other passengers. He says he just wanted to feel safe.

  Now Danny pursed his lips tightly and inhaled deeply through his nose. “But see, this whole thing tonight wasn’t my fault.”

  “Fine,” I said, smiling. “You’re completely innocent.”

  “Well, we’re hanging out at this party with some good-looking girls, having a pretty big time. I mean, I couldn’t believe how many there were, and there were only like five guys,” Danny said. “I should’ve known something was wrong, but I just thought I was lucky.”

  “So I start talking to this girl, Jessica, you know, about nothing in particular. She went to one of those girls’ schools named after some bird. Well, she was pretty drunk already, and I was fucking gone. So eventually, she says she’s going to be sick and she asks me to come to the bathroom with her.

  “She doesn’t throw up, but I stayed with her to make sure she was okay. Then she tries to stand up and starts to fall over. I catch her on the way down, and we both hit the floor,” Danny said, leaning over as if to imitate his fall. “And we go at it like nobody’s business.”

  “This doesn’t sound awful,” I said.

  “So she goes down on me and starts giving me the classic Easthampton blow job.”

  “I think that’s called a hand job.”

  “Exactly. It’s downright un-American.” Danny sighed. “So everything’s prim and proper until my friend comes in and starts screaming at me that this whole crew from Bruckner just showed up and the leader is looking for Jessica. Have you ever heard of the crew MKII?”

  “Sure. Jessica must be Derrick Small’s girl,” I said, concerned.

  Danny nodded. “Yeah, Derrick’s his name.”

  “Derrick’s out of his fucking mind. Memorial Day weekend, he stabbed some kid from Troy in the arm for buffing his tag.” Most prep-school hoods just get high and crash parties, but kids like Derrick live to throw down and bleed you.

  “Well, I didn’t know square one. So I asked Jessica if he’s her boyfriend, and she just starts laughing and reaching for her nose candy. Right there on the fucking floor. I bug out, throw on my shirt, and run down the back staircase with a hard-on. It’s fucking difficult to run with a hard-on.”

  “No shit. How many hoods were there?”

  “A dozen too many.”

  “Did they see you?” I asked. Danny didn’t realize how crazy these kids were.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So you made it out?”

  “Yeah, but I just called one of the guys who went to the party with me. They messed him up pretty badly,” Danny said, shaking his head. “Cut up his hands with a butterfly knife.”

  The toughest hoods in Manhattan’s prep schools aren’t like other street thugs. They aren’t poor and angry—they’re just angry. They aren’t outsiders; none of them have spent their lives trying to make it out of anywhere. They go to the best schools and spend their summers in the Hamptons.

  Prep-school hoods try to dress just like hoods from Harlem and Brooklyn, except their clothing is always brand-new designer-label. Their chinos are usually a size too big, so that they hang loosely at the hips and bunch up around their Timberland boots, and bright Tag Heuers are on all their wrists. They normally wear a Tommy Hilfiger or Polo shirt with a nice-size label, and a North Face jacket, hood and all. Some of them even sport crest rings. They’re kind of funny to watch, most of the time, until they decide to put somebody in the hospital.

  “I hate those guys,” I said. “They could never piece. All they ever want to do is fuck people up.”

  Danny laughed. “I forgot I was talking to the all-city graffiti prodigy.”

  “I retired a couple years ago,” I muttered.

  I used to write DOA. On the walls of the West Side Highway, in abandoned subway tunnels, and just about everywhere else I went. My two best friends and I were a three-man crew. Greg Carmichael tagged LUST and Charlie “Kodak” Kohl would usually work fill-ins or run surveillance. For a while, the three of us felt like kings instead of sophomores.

  “You still have two pieces up though, right?”

  “Just one on Twenty-second,” I said, wondering if Danny knew why I’d given it all up. I didn’t feel like talking about that night—I never do.

  “You got crossed out?” Danny asked.

  “Nah, they tore the building down. The piece was a fucking antique anyway.”

  “I can’t imagine you as one of those hoods.”

  “I was never about jumping kids or dealing,” I said, shrugging. “All I cared about was the art and street cred.” These days, piecing seems like an afterthought for most prep-school hoods. They all tag mailboxes and benches, but they’re in it for the attitudes and protection, the styles. I lived for the paint.

  “Did you dress like them?”

  “I guess. It’s not that simple,” I said, trying to push it out of my mind. I didn’t want to think about anything but Kris.

  Danny looked up at Kris’s window. “Where the hell is she?” he cried. “I gotta piss like a racehorse.”

  Kris opened the door to her building and smiled sleepily at both of us. “You look like hell, Danny.”

  Danny looked down at his blue oxford and noticed a tear in the right sleeve. “I thought I looked preppie.”

  Kris sighed. “You’re such a little rebel.”

  “Shantih shantih shantih,” Danny said, walking into their townhouse.

  Kris closed the door behind him and then walked down the steps. “What’s going on?”

  “Couldn’t
sleep,” I said, wondering how ridiculous it sounded. Seeing me on her steps at four-thirty in the morning, she must’ve known something was haunting me. She just didn’t realize who it was.

  Kris sat down next to me. She twisted her hair into a clumsy ponytail and pushed her bangs away from her eyes. Our knees were barely touching.

  Kris yawned into her palm. “Weren’t you supposed to take that girl out tonight?”

  “Waste of time.” I leaned back against her steps. “I bailed after dinner.”

  Kris looked over at me, as if she was about to say something. I didn’t move. Not an inch.

  “That sucks,” she said. “What’d you do all night then?”

  “Hung out with Tim.” Tim was my best friend at Daley, and it seemed like the easiest thing to say.

  I always told Kris the truth about dates and hookups, just in PG-13. We’d spent whole afternoons dissecting some girl’s flirty chatter or ambiguous e-mails. Most of the time, it was more fun to tell Kris about the date than it was to actually go on it. But sitting there next to her, breathing in her apple-scented shampoo, I just wanted Kris to think about us.

  I turned toward her and studied her expression. I had no idea how to begin. “Sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. You know?”

  Kris grinned and looked at her watch. “I think you’re waking me up at four-thirty-six in the morning.”

  I forced a smile. Those weren’t the words I wanted to hear. She was supposed to say, I know why you’re here or I’m glad you’re here.

  “I just needed to talk to somebody.” I took a full breath and studied the cracks in the sidewalk. “What’d you do tonight?”

  “Hung out with Tracy and her new boyfriend for a while. Tracy always makes herself out to be such a bimbo when she gets around a guy she likes. I mean, she’s twice as bright as those mouth-breathers she dates, but she never shows it.”

  What was I waiting for? “It’s understandable, though.”

  “That’s crazy. What’s she going to do, spend her whole life studying Cosmo’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’?”

  “You could talk to her.”

  “I have,” Kris shook her head. “She just says it’s different for me because I was with Luke for so long. I got so sick of them that I went home and read.”

  I pinched a cigarette and tucked it in the corner of my mouth. “Do you ever feel like that was mistake? I mean, to stay with Luke for so long.”

  She scrunched her pale forehead and tilted her jaw. “I don’t think about it in terms of rights and wrongs. The way I see it, I was supposed to be with Luke for as long as I was. And now I guess I’m supposed to be alone for a while.”

  I stared down the street at the traffic signals, searching for some sort of response to the word “alone.” I felt like lifting the collar of my sweater onto the bridge of my nose and hiding my face.

  “Still on The Sound and the Fury?” I said, embarrassed by my own silence.

  “Finished it yesterday. I just started Two Years Before the Mast.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Never heard of it.”

  “It was written in like 1840,” Kris said. “By this rich kid who left Harvard to work on a ship.”

  “He was failing out?”

  “No, he was losing his eyesight, so he had to drop out.”

  “Do you think I could try that?” I said, turning toward her and tapping my finger on the metal frame of my glasses.

  Kris leaned toward me and squinted. She grinned and rubbed her finger softly against my cheek. “Your date couldn’t have gone that badly.”

  Why hadn’t I checked? Dropping my eyes to the pavement, I wiped the rest of the lipstick off my cheek and tried to smile.

  Saturday

  Nicholas.” My mother’s voice pressed against the door. “It’s nearly one.”

  “It’s Saturday,” I said, pulling the covers over my head. “Let me sleep. Please.”

  “Nicholas.”

  I sat up, startled, and looked at my alarm clock. 1:10 P.M. “What?”

  “Gloria needs to get in to clean your room.”

  “She cleaned it yesterday,” I groaned. Why did we have to do this every fucking weekend?

  I didn’t have much in my room. A long black desk, a drafting board, a chest of drawers, a laptop, a television and DVD player, a bookshelf filled with nearly three hundred DVDs, and two old movie posters from The Hustler. None of it needed dusting.

  “Nicholas, she needs to vacuum.” The doorknob clicked, but it didn’t open. I’d locked it when I came home last night.

  “She vacuumed yesterday.” Why couldn’t she just leave me alone?

  “What?”

  “Ask her.” I pulled the pillow out from underneath my head, rolled onto my side, and covered my ears. I felt like screaming at her, but that would only wake me up.

  “Nicholas?” The doorknob clicked again. “Will you unlock the door?”

  “Nick, it’s Elliot.” My stepfather. Prick. “It’s half-past one, Nick. Your mother wants you out of bed.”

  She wasn’t going to give up. She never did.

  “Nick?”

  I threw the covers off my bed and jumped up to unlock the door. Walking into the bathroom, I grabbed my toothbrush. My throat was killing me from all the cigarettes I’d smoked last night.

  My mother married Elliot four years ago and we moved into his apartment on 76th and Park Avenue. When you live on Park, your sense of reality gets a little warped. Food and shelter are problems for the maid and the interior decorator. Everyone has a doorman; the very rich have two. People are just as miserable, though. They just have more expensive tissues to cry into.

  I could hear my mother walk into my room. “She did vacuum yesterday. Huh.”

  “I told you,” I said through a mouthful of toothpaste. This was worse than the hangover.

  “Nick, your room smells like an ashtray.”

  I didn’t say anything. My mother was always ragging on me for smoking. The quickest way to get through it was to not respond. I know what cigarettes do—I just don’t give a shit.

  “I’ll have Gloria make you some eggs. . . .” Her voice faded.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, walking back into the bedroom. I picked up my white T-shirt from last night and wiped my face dry. “I’m really not.”

  “Why won’t you use a towel?” She sighed. My mother was standing in the middle of my room in the dark blue jumpsuit that she wore to the health club. Her second facelift had taken care of the wrinkles on her forehead, but she still carried around this worried expression, like something was about to start burning in another room.

  “I can’t stand them.” A couple of weeks ago, Elliot had had all my towels monogrammed. I thought I was angry until I saw Elliot’s face when I refused to thank him. It was great watching the veins in his neck swell.

  “You’re being ridiculous. I want you to eat something now, because I’m going to the office in a little bit and so is Elliot.”

  My mother worked part-time for the Asian art division at Sotheby’s and seemed to be stuck in her own perpetual cocktail party. Her job was to know which families were buyers, which families were sellers, and which families would never do anything but drink and talk big.

  “Scrambled,” I said, diving back onto my bed. I loved my comforter. It could heat me up like a coal in five minutes flat.

  “Don’t fall back asleep,” my mother said, walking out into the hallway.

  My phone rang and I sat up in bed, hoping it was Kris. On the weekends, she usually called me around two, but I wasn’t sure if she was annoyed about last night. I lifted the phone off the hook and placed it between the pillow and my ear.

  “Hey, there,” Kris said, through the static. This was my favorite way to begin the day. Some Saturdays I waited for her call to wake me like a bedside kiss.

  “ ’Morning, Kris,” I whispered.

  “I’m walking across the park. You wanna meet at the spot in half an hour?”

/>   “Kool and the Gang,” I said, relieved. Most weekends, Kris and I went to this one giant evergreen in Central Park to hang out.

  “Later.” Kris was better than a hot cup of coffee.

  I’ve only had one real girlfriend, Jamie Murphy. Sophomore year, our English teacher paired us up for an in-class presentation on Henry V. I don’t know whether it was the third-floor cubicles or the St. Crispin’s Day speech, but Jamie and I ended up dating for the next two months. We spent most of our time together working on our kissing—on her roof, in taxis, at school. I knew it wasn’t love but she had these freckled, Irish cheeks and the cutest little smile I’ve ever seen. Then Jamie went on a July Teen Tour in France and met some guy who spoke a few more languages than I did. It chipped my pride but I guess we’d run out of places to neck.

  As I reached to hang up the phone, I noticed the pulsing glow of my answering machine. “One new message. First message left at 12:35 P.M.: Hey, it’s Tim. If you don’t make it to hoops, you should come to Sara’s bash with Nancy and me. I promised her a party. Otherwise I wouldn’t go near the place. And hey, I’m trying to remember the lyrics to that diarrhea song. You remember. First rhymes with burst, third is turd, home and foam, but what the hell is second? I leave you with this question, señor: what is second?”

  I grabbed a clean white T-shirt from my top drawer, put my jeans back on, and laced my Kenneth Coles. Checking myself in the mirror, I fixed my hair. With Kris I had to make sure that I looked good, but I couldn’t try too hard or she might notice.

  I walked down the hallway and headed toward the kitchen. Like every other top-shelf apartment on the Upper East Side, Elliot’s place was decorated to entertain other people. Up until a year ago, I wasn’t even allowed to hang out in the dining room unless there was company over. Elliot and my mother never said it outright, but if he caught me studying in there, he’d always ask, “Isn’t there another room you could do that in?” It sucks not being able to relax in your own home.

  Kris says she could never live on the Upper East Side after growing up on the Upper West Side, but there’s no real difference. West Siders call their maids “housekeepers,” and they drive Volvos instead of Mercedes. The gig’s the same, though. Wealthy West Siders and East Siders may spend their summers on different beaches, but they’ll both lecture the doorman if he doesn’t open their cab door.