“It looks like you’re waiting for something,” Kelli said.
“Me? No,” David said. “You want anything? I wish I could tell you where Jonathan went.”
“I don’t care. I think he was happy to get rid of me.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” David said. He tried a smile. He was sitting with Kelli in the breakfast nook, a big windowed room off the Floods’ kitchen. David had a similar room up at his country house in Saddle River, only his parents called it the greenhouse and had spider plants in all the spots where a person might want to sit.
They were drinking Heineken from little keg-shaped cans and picking at a bowl of dried Chinese peas. David could never figure out the arrangement that the Floods had with their kids—did they know that there were blowouts every weekend? David’s parents would barely let his friends in the door. And considering that they were both therapists he found that pretty uncivilized, though he’d never exactly felt free enough to say so. They treated him like he was their age and wouldn’t want a bunch of hell-raisers around all their old psychology books and stuff either. He somehow managed to talk to them constantly without ever saying anything meaningful to either of them. He was an only child.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Kelli asked.
David looked up. His can was full. He realized he was barely drinking at all. Amanda. Where was she?
“Yes.”
“Then where is she?”
“I don’t know,” David mumbled. He could hardly get the words out.
“I wish I could talk to that guy Arno again,” Kelli said. “He left me in the middle of a sentence. He seems like a pretty nice guy.” She kept clacking her fingernails against the cream-colored table. She was chewing Savage Sour Apple Bubblicious and she gave David a piece.
“Nice?” David asked. “You think Arno is nice?”
“Sure. Don’t you think he’s nice?”
“No.” But David couldn’t figure out how to pinpoint why, exactly, he didn’t think Arno was nice. Of the five friends, Arno and David were the furthest apart, partly because they’d been the closest back in lower school. Now David trusted Arno the least of any of them. But whenever they were alone, Arno always redeemed himself. He’d been the one who taught David not to walk away when girls said to, and how to lightly brush hair off a girl’s forehead and not turn purple at the same time. But lately David had been so obsessed with Amanda that he’d forgotten all those lessons.
“What about you?” Kelli asked. David glanced at her. Now she was blowing huge green bubbles, popping them, and licking the gum into her mouth. Her eye makeup was much, much thicker and darker than he was used to on a girl. David suddenly wanted to reach out and pop one of the bubbles for her, but when he looked at his hands, they just stayed at his side.
“What about me?” David asked, and took a long sip of his beer.
“You play ball?”
“That’s basically what I do, yeah.”
“You’d fit right in in St. Louis,” she said. “I—”
Kelli was cut off by a gigantic roar from the staircase above. It was a tearing sound, as if someone were trying to rip apart a couch using an electric saw. David and Kelli and a few others who had been getting beer went upstairs to see what it was. When they got to the parlor floor, they saw Mickey Pardo on a white Vespa.
He’d driven the scooter up the front steps, through the door, and into the living room, ripping apart a small entryway rug that was now lodged between the Vespa’s back tire and the fender and currently catching fire.
“Wow,” Kelli said.
David winced. After that “nice” comment about Arno, he could perfectly well imagine what was coming next. She’d walk over to Mickey. And it was right then that David felt the headlock of self-pity and attraction to girls that had pretty much defined every minute of the last several years of his life, save when he was playing ball. He didn’t like Kelli. He missed Amanda, who was clearly avoiding him and he was freaking out, hard, about where she was. But when Kelli walked away from him, twitching her tight butt in that stupid skirt and sort of half-clenching her fingers, he thought, she’s hot. And as usual, he felt bad and told himself that she’d only been killing time with him until a cooler guy came along.
“You’re here,” Mickey yelled to David. “Now where the hell is the rest of us?”
But David just ignored his old friend and yanked the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. Then he went and sat on a couch. He had another Heineken in his kangaroo pocket, and he got it out and opened it, found a straw and put it in. He sipped the beer through the straw and became invisible.
“Hi,” Kelli said to Mickey. “What’s your name?”
“Call me Stuntman Jack,” Mickey yelled, and laughed. He stepped off the scooter, handed it to a freshman who’d been ogling it, and put his hands on Kelli’s hips.
She said, “Ooh.”