I Like It Like That (2 page)

“Got it!” Nate Archibald twirled his lacrosse stick over his head, scooped up the ball, and tossed it expertly to Charlie Dern. His flushed cheeks were smudged with dirt, and his golden-brown curls were matted with sweat and bits of dried Central Park grass, causing him to look even hotter than the hottest Abercrombie & Fitch model in the entire catalog. He lifted his shirt to wipe the sweat from his glittering green eyes, and even the pigeons roosting in the trees nearby cooed with pleasure at the sight. The group of junior girls from Seaton Arms watching on the sidelines tittered with excitement.

“Whoa. He must have worked out a lot in prison,” breathed one girl.

“I heard his parents are sending him out to Alaska after graduation to work in a tuna-fish cannery,” said her friend. “They're worried he'll go back to dealing drugs if he goes to college.”

“I heard he's got this heart condition that's really rare. He has to smoke pot so he won't have attacks,” said another. “It's actually kind of cool.”

Nate flashed them an oblivious grin, and the girls simultaneously closed their eyes to keep from falling over backward. God, he was perfect.

It was the beginning of the season and no team captain had yet been appointed, so each boy was on his best behavior. After their usual scrimmage, Coach Michaels had asked them to free-throw for a while. Nate was throwing with his friend Jeremy Scott Tomkinson when he heard his cell phone ring in the pile of coats. He signaled to Jeremy and then sprinted over to answer it.

Georgina Spark, Nate's girlfriend of several weeks, was currently residing in an exclusive drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation facility in her hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut, and was only allowed to make supervised phone calls at certain times of the day. The last time Nate had missed her call, she'd been so bummed out, she'd gone on a bender and had later been found on the roof of the clinic, chewing Nicorette gum and sniffing a bottle of nail polish remover, both of which she'd stolen from a nurse's purse.

“You're panting,” Georgie observed coyly when Nate answered. “Were you thinking about me?”

“I'm at lax practice,” he explained. Coach Michaels spat noisily into the grass only a few feet away. “I think it's just about over, though. Are you okay?”

As usual, Georgie ignored the question. “I love how you're all athletic and healthy and chem-free, and I'm sitting in this jail, pining for you. Just like a princess in a fairy tale.”

Or not.

A few weeks earlier, Nate had been busted by the cops while buying a bag of weed in Central Park and sent to outpatient rehab at Breakaway, in Greenwich. Nate had first met Georgie in teen group therapy. One night, during a tremendous snowstorm, Georgie invited Nate back to her mansion to hang out. They got baked together, and then Georgie disappeared into the bathroom to pop prescription pills. Soon enough, she passed out in her underwear on the bed, and Nate had had absolutely no choice but to call the people at Breakaway to come get her. And ever since then, they'd been boyfriend and girlfriend.

That would be some messed-up fairy tale.

“So the reason I'm calling is … ,” Georgie crooned into the phone.

Nate's teammates milled around him, pulling on their coats and chugging from the bottles of Gatorade they'd brought with them. Practice was over. Coach Michaels spat a wad of phlegm near the toe of Nate's sneaker and pointed a gnarly forefinger at him.

“I'd better go,” Nate told Georgie. “I think Coach wants to talk about appointing me captain.”

“Captain Nate!” She squealed into the phone. “My cute little captain!”

“So I'll call you later, okay?”

“Wait, wait, wait! I just wanted you to know I got my mom to convince these monkeys to let me out starting Saturday, as long as I'm with an adult or responsible mentor, so we're totally going to my mom's ski condo in Sun Valley for your spring break, okay? Will you come?”

Coach Michaels growled something at Nate and put his hands on his old-man hips. Nate didn't have to think about Georgie's question for very long, anyway. Sun Valley sounded a heck of a lot better than regrouting his dad's old catamaran up at their summer house in Mt. Desert, Maine.

“Of course I'll come. Definitely. Look, I have to go.”

“Yippee!” Georgie squealed. “I love you,” she added hoarsely, and then hung up.

Nate tossed the phone on top of his navy blue wool Hugo Boss coat and rubbed his hands together energetically. His teammates had all gone home. “What's up, Coach?”

Coach Michaels took a step toward him, shaking his head as he sucked in snot from his nasal passages.

Yum.

“Last year I almost made you captain when Doherty crapped up his knee,” the coach said. He spat and shook his head again. “Good thing I didn't.”

Uh-oh.

Nate's hopeful smile cracked a little. “Why's that?”

“Because you're not captain material, Archibald!” the coach barked. “Look at you, gabbing on the phone like a playboy while the rest of your teammates are out there dogging it. And don't think I don't know about your getting busted for dope.” He made a little growling sound. “You're no leader, Archibald.” He spat again and turned his back on Nate, jamming his hands in his red Lands' End parka pockets as he walked away. “You're just a rotten pile of disappointment.”

“But I haven't been smok—” Nate called after him, his voice trailing off into the wind. The sky was steel gray, and the bare tree branches creaked and moaned. Nate stood alone on the brown March grass, holding his lacrosse stick and shivering a little in the cold. His father was a former navy captain, so he was used to shrugging off the power-tripping tirades of grumpy old authority figures. But it was still pretty outrageous that Coach Michaels thought the only nonstoned guy on the team wasn't fit to be captain. Coach hadn't even given him a chance to defend himself.

He bent down and picked up his coat. If he were stoned right now, he would have smiled serenely at the coach's accusations and lit a joint. Instead, he slung his coat over his shoulders, gave the finger to the coach's retreating back, and trudged across the darkening meadow toward Fifth Avenue.

Charlie, Jeremy, and Anthony Avuldsen were waiting for him on the pathway leading out of the park. Anthony was too much of a stoner even to play sports, except for the occasional game of soccer in the park, but he always met the guys after practice with ready-rolled joints and a big grin on his freckly, blond-goateed face.

Slowly the boys made their way out of the park and onto Fifth Avenue. “Dude, he made you captain, didn't he?” Charlie asked, his voice cracking the way it did when he was high, which was basically all the time.

Nate grabbed the bottle of blue Gatorade out of Charlie's hands and took a swig. Even though these guys were his best friends, he wasn't about to tell them what had happened. “Coach offered it to me, but I turned him down. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm already into Brown, anyway, so it's not like I need lax captain on my transcript. And I'll probably miss a few weekend games hanging out in Connecticut with Georgie. I told Coach to give it to a junior.”

The three boys raised their eyebrows in surprised admiration. “Jesus, dude,” breathed Jeremy. “That's like, huge of you.”

All of a sudden, Nate felt the sort of rush he might have felt if he'd actually told the coach to make a junior captain instead of him. How huge he might have been, if only that was what had really happened.

“Yeah, well.” He smiled uncomfortably and buttoned up his coat. Not only had he lied about the coach offering him the position of captain, he'd also lied about his chances of being accepted at Brown. Sure, his dad had gone there, and sure, he'd had a kick-ass interview, but he'd been baked as a loaf of bread for every exam and standardized test he'd taken since eighth grade, so his grades and scores were barely mediocre.

“Here.” Anthony held out a burning spliff. He had a tendency to forget on an hourly basis that Nate had quit smoking the stuff. “It's Cuban. I bought it from my cousin who goes to Rollins down in Florida.”

Nate waved the joint away. “I have a paper to write,” he said, turning away from the group toward home. It was hard to get used to—not being stoned. His head was so clear, it almost hurt. And all of a sudden there was so much to think about.

Whoa.

When school let out for the day, the formerly scruffy but now fashionably groomed and polished Daniel Humphrey didn't linger outside Riverside Prep with the other senior boys, bouncing basketballs and eating pizza from the slices place on Seventy-sixth and Broadway. Instead, he zipped up his new black APC storm jacket, retied his Camper bowling shoes, and headed across town to the Plaza Hotel to meet his agent.

The ornate gold-painted Plaza dining room was buzzing with the usual throng of gaudily dressed Russian tourists, extravagant grandmothers, and a few loud families from Texas, all toting shopping bags from FAO Schwarz and Tiffany, and all taking high tea. Except for Rusty Klein.

Mwa! Mwa!

Rusty blew kisses into the air on either side of Dan's face as he sat down.

“Is Mystery coming?” he asked hopefully.

Dozens of gold bracelets clanked noisily as Rusty clapped herself on the forehead. “Fuck me! I guess I forgot to mention it. Mystery's on a six-month world book tour. We've already sold five hundred thousand copies in Japan!”

The last time Dan had seen Mystery had been at an open mike at the Rivington Rover Poetry Club downtown. They'd practically had sex on stage as they performed improv poetry together. Then the wan, horny, yellow-toothed poetess had retreated to write, and Dan hadn't seen her since.

“But her book's not even out yet,” he protested.

Rusty piled her fire-engine-red hair on top of her head and stuck a sharpened number two pencil through it. She picked up her martini and guzzled it, smearing hot pink lipstick all over the rim of the glass. “It doesn't matter if the book never comes out. Mystery's already a celebrity,” she declared.

An avid chain-smoker, Dan was suddenly desperate for a cigarette. But smoking was prohibited, so instead he grabbed a fork from off the table and pressed the tines into the palm of his shaking hand. Mystery, who was only nineteen or twenty (Dan wasn't quite sure), had managed to write a memoir called Why I'm So Easy in less than a week. The day she'd finished it, Rusty had sold it to Random House for an astounding six-figure advance, with a film deal attached.

Rusty scooted her chair forward and pushed her half-drunk glass of stale tap water toward Dan, as if she expected him to drink it. “I sent ‘Ashes, Ashes’ out to the North Dakota Review,” she told him offhandedly. “They hated it.”

“Ashes, Ashes” was Dan's latest poem, written in the voice of a guy who misses his dead dog, only it was left up to the reader to figure out that the narrator was addressing a dog and not his old girlfriend or something.

It's the first baseball game of the season

I wait for your kiss

Breath meaty like chocolate

My shoes are still there

One in your bed where you left it

The other in the backseat of my car

Dan slumped in his chair. The week his poem “Sluts” had come out in The New Yorker, he'd felt invincible and famous. Now he felt like a schmo.

“Sweetness, I can think of several reasons why your writing may not appeal to everyone the way Mystery's does,” Rusty crooned. “You're young yet, sugarplum. All you need is some good training. Fuck me, I need another drink.” She belched into her fist and then stuck both hands above her head. Within seconds, a sploshingly full martini was set down before her.

Dan picked up the half-empty glass of water and then set it down again. He wanted to ask her about those “several reasons” why his writing didn't appeal to everyone the way Mystery's did, but then again, he was pretty sure he knew. While Mystery mostly wrote about sex, Dan mostly wrote about death, or wanting to die, or wondering if being dead was better than being alive, which was kind of depressing if you thought about it. Also, he wasn't an orphan like Mystery was—according to legend, anyway. An orphan raised by prostitutes. Dan was just a seventeen-year-old kid who lived in a sprawling prewar apartment on the Upper West Side with his outrageous but loving divorced dad, Rufus, and relatively loving, big-boobed little sister, Jenny.

“So was that all you wanted to tell me?” he asked, feeling depressed.

“Are you kidding?” Fueled by the fourth gulp of martini number two, Rusty whipped a cell phone out of her limited edition Snapdragon Louis Vuitton purse. “Get ready, Danny-boy. I'm calling Sig Castle at Red Letter. I'm going to get him to give you a job!”

Red Letter was the most prestigious literary journal in the world. Started five years ago by the German poet Siegfried Castle in an abandoned warehouse in East Berlin, it had recently been bought by Condé Nast and moved to New York, where it was currently thriving in its role as the rogue avant-garde child of the publishers of Vogue and Lucky.

Rusty started dialing before Dan even had a chance to respond. Sure, working at Red Letter would be an honor, but he wasn't really in the market for a job right now.

“But I'm still in school,” he muttered. His agent tended to forget sometimes that he was only seventeen and therefore couldn't meet her for midmorning espressos on a Monday or fly to London on the spur of the moment to attend a poetry reading. Or hold a full-time job.

“Sig-Sig, it's Rusty,” she crooned. “Listen, babes, I'm sending you a poet. He's got potential, but he could use a little sharpening up. Got me?”

Siegfried Castle—Dan still couldn't believe Rusty was actually talking to the Siegfried Castle—said something Dan couldn't hear. Rusty thrust the phone at him. “Sig wants a word.”

Dan's hands dripped with sweat as he held the phone to his nervous ear and croaked, “Hello?”

“I hawen't gut a cwue vho you ahr, but Wuthsty cweated dat vantastic Mystewy Cwaze, so I thuppose I muthst take you athswell, yah?” lisped Siegfried Castle in a snooty German accent.

Dan could barely understand a word, except for the Mystery Craze part. How come everyone had heard of Mystery and no one had heard of him? After all, he'd been published in The New Yorker. “Thank you so much for the opportunity,” he responded meekly. “I have next week off school for spring break, so I can work all day. Once break is over, I can only come after school.”

Rusty grabbed the phone away from him. “He'll be there Monday morning,” she pronounced. “Bye-bye, Sig-Sig.” Clicking off, she tossed her phone into her purse and groped for her martini. “We used to be lovers, but it's better now that we're friends,” she confessed. She reached out and pinched one of Dan's pale, confused cheeks. “Aw. You're Sig-Sig's new intern, his cutie-patootie little intern!”

Rusty made it sound so demeaning, as if Dan would be spending his workdays stirring Siegfried Castle's decaf mochas and sharpening his pencils. But an internship at Red Letter was such a prestigious, impossible-to-get job, he couldn't possibly complain.

“So, is Red Letter named after the letter A for adulteress that Hester Prynne had to wear in The Scarlet Letter?” he asked, genuinely interested.

Rusty stared at him quizzically. “Fuck if I know.”