I sat in the middle of a booth in the back of Man Ray with David, and Mickey, and Arno. It was just before midnight and Thanksgiving was definitely over. We were all drinking Stellas and generally being relieved that we’d made it through dinner with our families. And then I tapped my glass with my knife, which was something annoying that only our parents ever did, and said I had an announcement to make.
“I talked to my Dad and you are all invited on the honeymoon. And Patch, too, if we can find him before then.”
Everyone cheered and I kept talking. “Because I know this sounds cheesy, but the last week and a half has made me realize that I really need you guys and I think we all need each other.”
Arno started laughing first, but pretty soon they all were.
“Dude, that is so cheesy, but yeah, you’re right.” David threw his arm around my neck and mussed my hair. I spilled a little beer on my new olive G-Star cargo pants that I was trying to break in for the trip, but I didn’t care too much since Billy had broken me of being quite so uptight about my clothes.
“Hell,” Mickey said. “Better to be a cheeseball than to say, get caught in an Upper West Side bathroom with your pants down and a bronze penis-boy standing over you!”
I touched the bruise on the side of my forehead.
“Oh, I’m sorry—that happened to you, didn’t it?” Mickey snorted.
“Yeah.”
My friends were laughing, hard. David had tears running down his cheeks and Mickey was banging his head on the table. Arno was laughing too, but not as hard.
“Everything go okay with your family?” I asked.
“No,” Arno said. “Not at all. But we’re going to figure it out. One thing’s for sure, I can’t wait for us to be seniors and then head off to college, because this living at home is really hard.”
“Well, it’s not like we live at home in any normal kind of way,” I said.
“I know. That’s what’s hard.”
“My dad says that’s a problem.” David caught his breath from the giggles and sipped at his glass of Stella.
“Your dad …” I trailed off.
“I know, I know. I definitely won’t be sharing much with him anymore—especially not about you guys, or me and Amanda.”
“You two got back together?” Mickey asked.
David nodded a guilty yes.
“She’s getting comfortable with how cool I am,” David said. And everyone just stared in shock, and tried not to laugh. Because of course the only person who thought David was that cool was Amanda.
“What’d Philippa say, anyway?” David asked Mickey, suddenly.
“Just that she acknowledged that we’re totally in love but we can’t ever really go out unless we end up at Brown together. But I took her on a motorcycle ride she won’t forget, and then we shot the bike off a pier into the East River, and we made out for a while, even though yeah, we’re over.”
So that relationship wasn’t going away, either. Then everybody turned to Arno.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m definitely done with Liesel.” Arno shook his thick black hair back and forth. “Definitely.”
“Then what’s she doing here?” I asked. And all of us looked, and sure enough, Liesel and Ruth and some girls I didn’t know were headed right toward us. One of the girls came right up to our table. It was Selina Trieff.
“Have you seen Patch?” she asked. Of course Ruth wouldn’t meet my eyes because she’d broken up with me only the night before.
“Not since the weekend,” Mickey said. “You should call Flan and ask her.”
“Yeah,” Selina said. “That’s a good idea.”
I’d looked away when she mentioned Flan. And all of a sudden I realized I didn’t want to see Ruth at all. I wanted Flan.
“Wait, I’ll call Flan,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to do that anyway.”
I shifted my phone out of my pants pocket and dialed Flan’s number. The phone started to ring.
Then they all joined us, and suddenly our booth was very crowded and loud. And Selina was talking to Arno, and suddenly she didn’t seem as worried about where Patch was.
“Excuse me for a second,” I said. And Ruth didn’t seem to want to look at me, which was okay, because I didn’t really want to look at her, either. It had been a fun crush, but I realized that the whole time with Ruth, I never really stopped comparing her to Flan. And even I got what that meant.
“Hello?” Flan said.
“What are you doing?”
“Um, nothing. Eating leftover turkey and watching TV.”
“Well, can I come over and hang out?”
“Sure,” Flan said. “Actually, I’ve been wondering when you were going to call.”