Twelve Read Free Page B

hands White Mike a hundred dollars and asks if he wants to come in. White Mike doesn’t. He glances over his shoulder at the two girls coming up the steps. He stares at the pretty one for a second, wonders how smart she is, then leaves.
    White Mike walks west, crosses Fifth Avenue, and turns downtown along the east side of the park. The apartment buildings across the street are like fortresses. White Mike thinks about how rich everyone is. So you are born in the capital of the world and you can never escape and that’s how it is because that’s how everyone wants it to be. It is all about want. No one needs anything here. It is about when you wake up in the morning andthe snow is already coming down and it is bright between the buildings where the sun falls but already dark where the shadows are, and it is all about want. What do you want? Because if you don’t want something, you’ve got nothing. You are adrift, you are washed away, and then buried under the snow and the shadows. And when, in the spring, the snow melts, no one will remember where you were frozen and buried, and you will no longer be anywhere.

Chapter Nine
    CHRIS WAITS AT the door for the two girls. Sara Ludlow , Chris thinks, Sara Ludlow. I wonder if she’s still going out with that football-player guy . That would be just his luck. Part of the bad luck of not ever getting laid, even though Chris is seventeen and a half years old and has dark blond hair and blue eyes and is good enough looking, except for the acne, which is part of the bad luck, the same bad luck that he has felt come back to him over and over since he was little. Bad luck like a couple of months ago when he was trying to hook up with some public school girl, and she was so turned on or surprised or whatever when he put his fingers between her belt and her belly to try to ease her pants down that she jerked around suddenly, and Chris’s left pinky got snapped back, and the tendon in that finger tore in two, and the bottom half retracted down into his palm. He had no control over the digit; it hung limp as he moved the rest of his fingers. The girl thought it was funny. He told everyone he had gotten his hand stuck in a drawer, but he wound up with a big cast from thecomplicated hand surgery and lost his confidence. So he waited. And now that the cast is gone and he is mobile and, to his mind, attractive again, he throws parties, looking for the right girl. And here suddenly is Sara Ludlow asking him to show her around.
    â€œI hope it’s a big party,” Sara says. “They’re more fun.” Chris doesn’t know what to say to that, but he is feeling lucky.
    The stone town house rises, clutched in ivy, up from the sidewalk. If you were to take the stairs on a normal weekday, you would be in the perfect artisan sterility of the extremely wealthy. Nothing out of place; tapestries on the walls, real ones, from dead monks near Normandy. Tonight, though, there is a party going on. The tapestries are still there, but things (bodies, cans, parkas, portable DVD players) lie out of place.
    On the sixth floor, a bunch of kids are standing around another kid who is banging on a drum set in an empty guest bedroom. One of them is playing the drums, but his rhythm is suffering for the eight beers he’s had. Lots of beers—Corona Lights, Budweisers, all over the floor in various parts of the house. Across the hall from the drum room a stereo is playing Ben Harper’s “Burn One Down” loud enough so the kids smoking weed on the terrace can hear it. They look out over the street and flick ashes into the ivy. On the fifth floor, there are only two kids, one blond and one dark and pimply, both short and passed out on big leather couches where someother kids left them entwined and drooling. On the fourth floor, about ten kids sit in front of a big flat-screen TV watching Cinemax pornography. One kid, in a big leather chair, has a girl half