Monday night
IN THE ROSSES’ LIVING ROOM ELLIOT WAS HOLDING A FORTY-OUNCER by the neck and weaving in the direction of the Lilys who were sharing a blunt the size of a cigar. Nate and Olivia steered clear of them and found their way to the backstairs. A collapsible wooden gate, like for a dog or a baby, had a warning—DO NOT GO UPSTAIRS—taped to it. Olivia hopped over the gate. Nate followed.
The leopard-print carpeting in the hallway upstairs muffled their footsteps. The door to one room was ajar, and Nate could hear a girl giggling softly. “Ben, shhh…I hear somebody.”
Katie Spielkopf.
The door shut.
Elliot’s room—actually it was more like a little apartment—was on the other side of the hall. In the living room part of it, two gray suede couches were at right angles and a giant flat-screen TV took up most of one wall. In the enormous bedroom, the top sheet on one of the king-size beds was folded back diagonally. Resting on the pillow were chocolate wafers with Ross Maharaja printed on the foil. Just like at a fancy hotel…but, duh, this was a fancy hotel. Nate tossed a chocolate to Olivia and opened a cabinet, expecting stereo equipment.
“Man, check this out—there’s like the world’s largest minibar. Wanna beer? Soda? Champagne? Macadamia nuts?”
Olivia was examining stuff in the medicine cabinet. She came out holding something that looked like a fat black magic marker except it was buzzing. “Yuck. A nose hair clipper. Same kind my dad uses.” A minute later she disappeared inside a closet and while he opened a Sam Adams and ripped open a bag of Sun Chips he could hear her pushing clothes hangers around. “And I thought my closet was big,” he heard her say.
Nate walked to the closet. “So? Find anything suspicious?” he said, stepping inside.
They were surrounded by racks of Elliot’s clothes. Nate held out his bottle of beer to her, but she shook her head. “I don’t drink anymore. Don’t do any dope either.”
“Cause of your brother?”
“Yeah, kind of like moral support.” She shrugged as if it was stupid. “I’ll take some Sun Chips.”
Nate shook a few into her hand. As she nibbled on one, he noticed her nails were bitten way down below the quick. Nate put down his beer and the chips on a closet shelf.
“Don’t look at my hands. They’re gross!” She balled them into fists but before she could shove them behind her back, Nate took a step closer and grabbed them both.
They stood, not saying a word. Slowly her hands relaxed in his. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was but he didn’t trust his voice.
“I like that scar,” she said.
“What scar?”
“Let go of my hands and I’ll show you.”
When he did, she touched the corner of his upper lip, then continued slowly tracing the entire outline of his mouth with the tip of her finger. He pulled her toward him.
The next second he was kissing her. He wrapped his arms around her. It wasn’t a dream. It was real, realer than almost anything he’d ever experienced. She pulled back for a moment and he could feel her warm breath on his cheek when she exhaled, soft as a whisper. As they settled into another kiss, he pushed his mouth against hers harder.
Then suddenly he felt her body tense up all over. She pulled back. “Nate,” she whispered. Someone was stumbling around in the bedroom.
Nate felt like he was on ten-second lag time, barely processing what she was telling him. But then he heard someone knocking into furniture. There was a thud on the bed, the sound of mattress springs heaving. A second later, he heard gagging, followed by the thump of feet running to the bathroom, violent retching, and the sound of a toilet flushing. Somebody praying to the porcelain goddess. A faucet turned on, turned off and then the sound of the bed creaking gently again.
Olivia pushed him away and stole a peek into the bedroom. “Shit. It’s Elliot.”
“Maybe he’ll pass out. We should just stay here.” That seemed like an excellent plan to him; he couldn’t resist coming up behind her and kissing her on the back of her neck.
“Stop,” she hissed. “You want to make out with Elliot there?”
Of course he did. He wouldn’t care if it was in front of a full house at Madison Square Garden. But Olivia’s expression made it plain—for her, the moment was over. Her brow wrinkled and she was biting her thumbnail, thinking. “Come on. Let’s just get out of here…. At least we’ll give him a good scare.”
She kicked open the closet door so hard it banged against a wall.
“Holy shi—!” Elliot sprang to a sitting position on the bed. His eyes took a second to focus and then bugged out. “Olivia?”
“Don’t have a heart attack, Elliot,” she said. “We were just going.”
Elliot’s eyes settled on Nate. “You!” His mouth pulled into a crazy grimace. He lurched off the bed and groped for a phone. He turned and blinked. “I’m calling the cops, Lorimer. This is like…like breaking and entering.”
Nate snorted. “Oh please. What’s your fucking problem? Let’s go, Olivia. The party sucks anyway.”
Elliot dropped the phone. “My problem! My problem?” He took a step toward Nate, his Popeye arms swinging a little, his hands starting to clench. “You’re the asshole who brings roofies to school, and you’re asking what my problem is?”
“That you planted on me, you dumb prick!”
“Me? Get the hell out of here. Go fuck your slut in someone else’s closet.”
“What’d you say?” Nate yelled and lunged at Elliot.
“Don’t!” Olivia shouted.
He felt her grabbing the back of his tee shirt but he was already on top of Elliot, punching him in the face and knocking him back on the bed. Elliot snatched a fistful of Nate’s shirt, pulled him closer, and the next thing Nate knew, he was in a headlock and Elliot was punching him in the ribs.
“Stop it!” Olivia was screaming at both of them.
Nate dug his elbow into Elliot’s stomach and heard him grunt. As Elliot relaxed his grip, Nate ducked out of the headlock and punched him again, two short chops to the face.
Blood was flowing from Elliot’s nose. Nate leaned back, startled by the sight of blood on his fists. The half-second he let up was all the time it took for Elliot to knee him in the balls. Not a direct hit. But bad, bad enough to send him reeling backwards on the bed, doubled over in pain, not even able to gasp.
When Elliot’s face floated into view, Nate head-butted him. Elliot disappeared and Nate rolled off the king-size bed, thudding to the floor. He was dimly aware of Elliot moaning and Olivia yelling, but all he could do was keep his knees pinned to his chest and rock from side to side, sandwiched in the small space between the two beds, until finally some air returned to his lungs. He let out a long, low groan. Olivia crouched over him asking if was he okay. No, he was definitely not okay, but he couldn’t answer. All he could do was rock from side to side, his eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the nauseating pain to slowly trickle out of him.
He could hear Elliot, muttering and swearing, and when Nate finally cracked open his eyes, Elliot was bent over on his knees, only a couple of feet away, using the edge of a bedspread to wipe blood off his face. Olivia was sitting on the other bed, lighting up a cigarette. Her hand was shaking. When Elliot motioned for one, she threw the pack and lighter at him. He sat back on his heels, and in between puffs kept feeling his nose.
“I think you broke it.”
“Tough shit,” Nate said, although he wasn’t a hundred percent sure the words actually came out or if he only thought them. At last the red-hot pincers squeezing his balls began to loosen their grip, but his head was still ringing.
Olivia was cross-legged on the bed, chewing on the thumbnail of one hand, oblivious to the lengthening ash at the end of her cigarette. Her eyes stayed fixed on Elliot. “Elliot. It wasn’t you who put the drugs in Nate’s backpack?” she finally asked.
“Of course it was,” Nate croaked.
“Get serious. Like I even know which backpack was his?” Elliot pointed his cigarette at Nate. “Look, all I ever did to you was that stuff in the shower room. And that was payback for locking me in the shed.”
“You told the cops I was the one who said Tut better die soon.”
“Okay, yeah. That, too. But nothing else.”
“Lookit. I believe you, Elliot.”
“Olivia, are you nuts?”
Olivia ignored Nate. “The thing is, we know. I’m telling you this for your own good…. Lily told me and I told Nate…so, like we know.”
“Know what? What the fuck are you talking about?”
Nate’s exact same thought.
“About what you did…to Tut,” Olivia went on in a calm and reasonable voice, all the while shaking her head as if she felt really sorry for Elliot. “I mean, I can’t believe you trusted those girls. Don’t tell me you honestly thought they’d keep a secret. Everybody’s gonna know soon….”
Nate managed to raise himself to a sitting position. Elliot was watching Olivia with worried eyes. His Adam’s apple bobbled as he swallowed nervously, and his face seemed to collapse a little. He switched from the floor to the edge of the other bed, where he sat, his head in his hands. “Those bitches! They swore to me.” He looked up at Olivia who was standing now, her hands on the hips of her jeans. “It was their idea, all their idea. Just a prank, they said, to, you know, to scare the old bastard.”
Elliot stubbed out his cigarette. Then he cupped his head in his hands again and started rocking back and forth. “I am so fucked. My dad’ll kill me if this gets out. And Harvard?…Oh shit. I am so fucked.”
“Tell me how you did it,” Olivia demanded.
“It wasn’t like hard. It took two minutes.” He rose and winced. “What the fuck, I’ll show you.”
Nate forced himself to stand so he could go watch Elliot open up Photo Shop on a laptop and scroll down through the fonts until he reached one called Ransom Note. The sample word featured letters in different sizes with jagged edges, appearing as if they’d been cut from a newspaper.
“That’s what we used,” Elliot said, shrugging, and clicked into Word, where he retrieved a document named “Tut” dated a little over three weeks earlier. When it opened, the screen displayed two sentences in giant-size Ransom Note letters, saying, “Watch out. Your days are numbered.”
“You sent this to Tut?” Olivia asked. “Why? Why’d you do that?”
“It was their idea. They just wanted to yank his chain a little.”
Nate’s voice was hoarse when he spoke. “Wait a minute. Let me get this straight…. First you sent that and then you go ahead and murder him? So, he’ll like be—what?—all prepared?”
“Murder? Are you fucking nuts? Who said anything about murder?”
“You did!” Nate said. “Didn’t you?”
“Fuck no!”
“So all you did was send Tut some dumb note because the Lilys thought it’d be a goof?” Olivia dropped her cigarette down the neck of the forty-ouncer.
“You’re crazy if you think I murdered Tut…. My dad dug up some dirt on him. I don’t know what, but it was something Tut didn’t want getting out.” Elliot pressed his nose and winced. “My dad was there early Monday afternoon. He told Tut he was gonna go public if Tut didn’t write me a good recommendation for Harvard.”
“So your father was trying to blackmail Tut? And it was all about getting you into Harvard?” Nate said. “And after I saw you leave, you went straight home with the Lilys?”
“They wanted to stop at Serendipity so we did.”
“Did somebody say our name?”
The Lilys came in and went over to the TV and began fiddling with the remote.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Elliot screamed.
“Excuse me!” Lily G. said.
“You morons told Olivia!”
“Time to go,” Olivia said to Nate.
“Told her what?” Lily B. said. “Shit, how do you get this fucking TV to work?”
As he went down the hallway, Nate heard more shouting. About the only thing he could make out was Elliot screaming, “You bitches are never getting another ride with me again!”