1118 PM Marco
Gina said, “Stop it, don’t be mean, I hate you,” and laid her head on his shoulder. She smelled like tequila and rose-scented perfume.
“How much have you had to drink?” Marco asked. Her fingernails were digging into his shoulder. He unpeeled her arm from the back of his neck.
“I don’t know, like, enough.”
“Maybe you should switch to water.”
Gina took a step back. Behind her, the friend she had come with—Brittany, Marco thought—cleaned out something from beneath one of her fingernails.
“You’re my cousin, Marco, not my fucking dad.”
Marco held up both his hands; Gina applied a layer of pink lip gloss.
Technically speaking, he wasn’t even her cousin.
Their parents were old friends back in Los Angeles.
Growing up Marco had been encouraged to refer to them as Uncle Richard and Aunt Lucia, which meant that when Gina was born, she inherited the title of cousin.
He had never given it much thought—his parents had definitely done stranger things—until last week when Aunt Lucia had called and asked if he might look after Gina on New Year’s Eve.
She was a junior at NYU, which was worrying enough, and in the last year or so Lucia had become concerned that Gina had fallen in with the wrong crowd.
Her grades were slipping, and she had pierced her tongue.
She was friends with a bunch of musical theater students at Tisch.
Gina put the cap back on the bottle of lip gloss, securing it with a firm tap of her palm. She said, “There’re a ton of hot guys here.”
Brittany nodded. “Totally.”
“Like that one over there, in the black button-down. He’s so fucking hot.”
Marco turned around to look behind him: the girl from Psych 0400 was gone. He scanned the faces in the kitchen, and when he couldn’t find her, he followed Gina’s finger to where it was pointing.
“That’s Theo Wingate,” he said. “I went to school with him.”
“Introduce me to him.”
“Do you see the woman he’s with?”
“Yeah.”
“I believe that’s his girlfriend.”
“Not for long.”
“I’m not introducing you to him, Gina.”
“Okay, then what about that one?”
Marco followed her finger again.
“That’s Mitch Reynolds. You don’t want to meet him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s just another finance douchebag.”
“Uh, okay, then I definitely want to meet him.”
Marco stepped aside to let Alison Liu pass by him into the living room.
The apartment was well beyond its capacity.
The building itself felt like it was going to collapse at any moment, and now the floor creaked beneath the weight of so many bodies.
There were two small bedrooms, a living room, the linoleum-tiled kitchen in which they currently stood, and a single bathroom with a shower curtain whose seams hid pockets of mold.
If he had had more time, he might have found something better—a studio in Yorkville, or down in Carroll Gardens, something a little quieter than the Lower East Side.
But a month ago, as he was getting ready to leave Bogotá, the last thing Marco felt like doing was navigating the New York rental market.
So when he saw on Facebook that Richie Fournier was looking for someone to fill a second bedroom, he’d immediately sent him a message.
Thirty seconds later, Richie had replied: it’ll be just like freshman year but with even more drugs!
As he read it, Marco had chewed on his lower lip.
He typed haha, then immediately shut his laptop.
He’d walked out of his apartment and into the streets of Chapinero, doing his best to convince himself that he had one less thing to worry about.
Brittany leaned forward, whispering into Gina’s ear. Gina started nodding, then suddenly stopped, her face darkening. She whipped her head around to face her friend.
She said, “I will tear her eyes straight out of her busted-ass head.”
Marco ran a hand over his face. He was still looking for the girl from Psych 0400.
“What classes are you taking next semester?” he asked. “Aunt Lucia said you switched your major.”
Gina took the drink that Brittany was holding and finished it. She said, “Can you please try not to be such a loser?”
The party had been Richie’s idea. Four days ago, Marco had been reading in his bedroom when Richie called out from the kitchen that he had invited some people over for New Year’s Eve.
“A small thing,” he’d said, “just real small and intimate.” Marco had responded with a grunt, and turned the page in his book, and a few minutes later heard the front door open and close.
Setting his book open on his chest, he’d gazed up at the ceiling, listening to the traffic pile up outside on Orchard Street.
He missed Bogotá. He missed how capable he felt in Spanish, and walking to the university, and devoting himself entirely to the quarrelsome work of learning.
He had never considered himself particularly smart.
In Los Angeles he had attended a large public high school, and when he got to Penn he was immediately intimidated by the pedigree and wealth of his classmates.
He’d worked hard to be taken seriously—to take himself seriously—completing all the readings he was assigned and attending office hours and applying for scholarships and awards.
What puzzled him was that most everyone he knew worked very hard on everything except the work itself.
They worked hard on which fraternities they were joining, and the parties they were planning, and generally skating by with doing as little actual studying as possible; in fact, Marco often got the sense that his own diligence was considered deeply unserious in the eyes of everyone else, and that if he wanted their respect, he would have been better off doing keg stands and writing papers on books he hadn’t read.
It didn’t anger him so much as it confused him and made him wonder if there was something wrong or misguided with how he was preparing himself for life.
Bogotá had been a reprieve, but now that he was back and living with his freshman roommate, he was again beginning to worry that he had made a gross miscalculation.
For example: Marco had never seen Mitch Reynolds open a book, not a single time in his entire life, and evidently last year he’d made eight hundred thousand dollars trading foreign currencies.
Gina said, “We’re leaving.”
“What? Where are you going?”
“Brittany knows this guy who’s dating a guy who’s throwing a party in StuyTown.”
“Okay, but it’s pretty late, and I told your mom I’d keep an eye on you.”
Gina rolled her eyes, forcing them so far back in her head that they began to flutter. Taking her by the arm, Brittany began dragging her from the kitchen.
“What do you want me to tell your mom?” Marco asked.
“I don’t fucking know, Marco!” Gina set her cup on the counter. “Tell her I died.”
They left, and Marco found himself standing in the kitchen, surrounded by people and feeling completely alone.
He looked through the doorway into the living room, where at last he saw the girl from earlier, standing outside the bathroom with Mitch Reynolds and Courtney Paulson.
She wore a black sweater with the sleeves tucked up around her elbows, and her hair was held up loosely with a brown clasp.
As Courtney spoke to her, Marco could see her eyes narrow and her lips slightly part.
Along the left side of her neck there was a large port-wine stain birthmark, and as she listened to whatever Courtney was saying, she reached up absently to touch it.
He was considering going to talk to her when Richie grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Howdy, howdy,” he said.
“Where have you been?”
“I was in the bathroom with Courtney. That girl is a hoover.” He held up a plastic dime bag, inside which was a fine layer of cocaine. “You want any?”
“No, thanks.”
Richie slipped the bag into the back pocket of his jeans. They were black and tight and had matching tears on each of the knees. His leopard-print shirt was open one button too far.
“Did you ever do any of the blow in Colombia? I always thought that would be very romantic. Like drinking water straight from a spring, or something.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Really? And you were there for a whole year? Why not?”
“Because the cocaine trade is the basis for decades of geopolitical violence and instability.”
“Huh,” Richie said. And then again: “Huh.”
He tilted his chin, looking up into the kitchen’s light as he stroked a scar directly over his left eye.
It was red and shaped like a kidney bean, and he wore his hair long and curly to cover it.
He’d gotten it during his freshman year, when he set up what was anecdotally believed to be the longest Slip ’N Slide in history, through five hallways of Ware College House during Penn’s Spring Fling.
Two hundred and seventy-five trash bags had been used to construct it, and an army of ten freshmen kept its surface slick with an arsenal of Super Soakers.
Richie wore a cape and a pair of red Speedos to take its inaugural slide.
With at least a hundred people watching, he pointed a finger at Marco and said, “Make sure someone’s filming this.
” Then he took a running start, threw his arms out in front of him, and made it through two of the five halls before slamming his head into an open door.
“We’re running low on mixers,” Marco said.
“What? Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
Richie frowned. He began picking up and setting down bottles.
“People can drink T and Ts,” he said.
“What’s a T and T?”
“Tequila and tap water.”
“I don’t think that’s really a thing.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s French.”
A loud crashing sound came from the living room. Marco opened the freezer and looked into it. “We’re also out of ice.”
Richie lit a cigarette. He inhaled, then turned his head, opened the door to the microwave, and blew a plume of smoke directly into it.
“Shit,” he said.
“I’ll go down to the bodega.”
“You’re a hero.” He balanced the cigarette on his lower lip. “Can you get some Hot Pockets too? The barbecue chicken kind?”
“No. That’s disgusting. Before I go, though—”
“Yes?”
“—do you know who that girl over there is?”
Richie turned toward the living room.
He said, “Oh yeah. That’s Mia Hoffmann.”
“Are you friends with her?”
“No. Sort of? No. We took a seminar on the Russian novel the first semester of freshman year. I almost dropped it. The teacher was this hag named Varvara with the worst skin you ever saw. But then she said we’d all get to call each other by Russian nicknames, and I thought, well, that’s kind of cute, so I stayed.
” He filled a plastic cup with a few inches of water from the sink and tapped the ash from his cigarette into it.
“I was Richenka. I think Mia was Michanka. Anyway, she ruined Anna Karenina for everyone. I thought that was hysterical.”
“What do you mean?”
Richie sighed, mildly annoyed. He unwrapped the plastic from the top of a bottle of Absolut. Then he poured himself a shot of vodka, drank it, poured another one, and licked his lips.
“We were halfway through reading it, and before class one day we were all sitting around talking, and Mia said something like, ‘Here’s my review: I could have done with less Russian agricultural theory, and more of Anna throwing herself in front of that fucking train.’ Everyone stared at her.
Then Svetlana, who was this awful, mousy little thing from Paramus, said something like, ‘You know, Mia, some of us haven’t finished the book yet.
’ Mia was like, ‘Oh, okay, well, sorry.’ Svetlana wouldn’t let it go, though.
She kept saying how she’d come to college to learn to think for herself, or some bullshit like that, and she was tired of people like Mia acting like they knew everything already.
Seriously, she wouldn’t shut up, it was like watching someone have a manic episode.
I was about to tell her to put a fucking sock in it, but then Mia just calmly goes, ‘The book is a hundred fifty years old. Wait until I tell you what happened to the Titanic.’ I’ll never forget it.
I was always so hungover in that class, because it met so early, like at noon or something, but that I will never forget.
Watching Svetlana throw her book on the ground and walk out of class was just that hysterical. God, Svetlana. What a loser.”
“I don’t think I knew that’s how Anna Karenina ends.”
Richie tapped the cigarette again. Ash fizzled in the cup.
He said, “Well, now you do.”