We met Patch in fifth grade and let him into our gang right away. Before that we were four—Arno Wildenburger, Mickey Pardo, David Grobart, and me. My name is Jonathan.
Back then we had to dress for school in blue polo shirts and khakis, so we looked weirdly alike. And our parents were either friends or were doing business with each other. Those things, plus the fact that we’d all been in school together since kindergarten, were more than reason enough for us to be best friends. We picked each other for dodgeball, shared our science homework, and said laser when we meant penis.
Then Patch showed up. He was a skater whose family had lived on a sailboat since he was six. That experience left him with heavy freckles, streaky blond hair, and a weird kind of laid-back quality, where even though we had bells between classes, he’d get up and sit down when he felt like it, because even indoors he was telling time by the sun.
We were eleven, and Patch was the man. The girls were all obsessed with him. Why? He barely noticed them, that’s why. He didn’t play too rough with them like Mickey or tease them like Arno. And he didn’t sulk when they didn’t talk to him like David. Since we were the cool group, we grabbed him, because we were as confused and amazed by him as anyone. And that made us five.
Patch was so cool that sometimes he forgot to wear shoes to school. He had heavy-lidded eyes and he’d stand and mutter apologies at teachers until they would give him anything. As for the rest of us: Arno was better looking than everybody else, and sharper. His polo shirts came from some special store on Madison Avenue and his black hair stayed in place even when we were beating on each other. He always had this level glare and he wasn’t afraid to use it. Mickey was crazy back then, too. He’d talk back to anybody, anytime. David was always good at sports and considered the normal one, though he was kind of neurotic, if I can use that word about a fifth grader.
We were all fooling around with girls. We thought it was funny to call it “Seven Minutes in Heaven.” Now we’re sixteen and we don’t call it anything in particular, but we sure do a lot of it.
Then, at the end of fifth grade, Arno kissed this girl Molly who David liked. And David moped about it and we couldn’t stop them from doing some serious fighting at a sleepover at Patch’s country house in Greenwich. After that we made a pact about not kissing girls that one of us had clearly said we liked, even if the girls asked. It was Patch who begged us not to bother making any other rules. He knew he’d never remember to follow them. So that was our only promise to each other.
I was always trying to get us to stick together. They called me “the glue.” This was before my parents got divorced and my dad went to live in London, so I don’t have a clue why I was like that, like some shepherd, but I was always gathering us up. It was like I felt better when I could have us all in the room. I thought if we were together, we were better than safe. We were the Insiders. But we never, never called ourselves that.
There were the five of us, and up to about the time this story starts, that seemed like enough.