During the afternoon, I bought a new pair of shoes. I don’t want to call this a Friday ritual. It’s not that at all. It’s just that every once in a while, and usually it’s on Fridays, I head up to Madison Avenue and buy a new pair of loafers. Today it was a black leather pair with ridged rubber bottoms from Prada and they were pretty hot. They looked like little Porsche Carreras or something, so I went sockless, with some old khakis and a black hooded Penguin sweatshirt over a black polo. I blew two hours before I got myself over to the Flood house, because I had to stop at home and ditch the shoe box, since I didn’t want to show up with some extra shoes and have to change—I’d never hear the end of it if I did that.
When I got up the stairs and rang the bell, I felt nervous about David and Arno seeing each other, and knowing that I hadn’t handled Flan well wasn’t helping either. At least she wasn’t supposed to be around. She was going to the movies and then staying at Dylan’s house. And I hoped she wasn’t just doing that on account of me being around.
The door opened. David stared at me.
“Everybody here?” I asked.
“Just me and Arno.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. I figured Arno hadn’t told David anything, because David looked sad and normal, not angry.
We went into the living room, which one of the maids had rearranged after last weekend’s blowout. It looked very clean, and Arno was sitting on the couch with his legs crossed, in one of his father’s five-thousand-dollar suits, with a bottle of Grolsch sweating on his knee.
“You look sallow,” I said and sat on a chair between Arno, who hadn’t gotten up, and David, who’d taken the couch across from him.
“What’s that mean?”
“Pale. Limp. Colorless. Shouldn’t you have gotten tan in Florida? How many days of school did you miss?”
“I went in for a while on Thursday,” Arno said. He sounded totally down and David looked unhappy, too. But I didn’t think either of them knew why they were feeling like that. And I didn’t want to say if they didn’t already know.
“I heard they’re still calling you the Most Sensitive Guy in the World,” I said to David.
“Yeah. But that kid Adam Rickenbacher is trying to keep people from saying it so much. Maybe it was him that Amanda made out with and that’s why he’s acting so nice.”
“I doubt that,” I said, and glared at Arno, who was staring at the floor.
Then none of us said anything for a little while. But we were all, I’m sure, mostly thinking that it’d be great if Mickey would show up and fling something that belonged to the Floods against the wall, and then these two could just have it out, discover who did what to whom, and get it over with, so we could all be friends again.
My phone rang and it was Mickey.
“I’m at a dinner,” he said. “Start without me.”
“We can’t start without you.”
“Can’t be there till ten.”
“Where are you?”
“I’ve landed in hell,” he said, and clicked off.