The Secret Runners of New York Read online

  The Monmouth School’s annual talent show followed that pattern: one cute freshman girl named Jeanne Black had a voice like Adele; a couple of juniors could rap pretty well; two sophomore pranksters got halfway through a striptease before they were yanked off the stage, and Oz Collins performed a magic act.

  The thing was, it was great.

  Dressed in a full Mandrake the Magician outfit (black-and-red satin cape, top hat), young Oz performed his act flawlessly: a couple of linking rings tricks, one disappearing rabbit, and then some exceptional card tricks including a final one that involved getting Ms Blackman to sign a card which he then magically reproduced. (It was also the first time I actually heard him speak and I noticed he had a slight lisp.)

  I thought his act was excellent.

  The problem was, it wasn’t edgy enough to satisfy an auditorium of jaded teenagers. It was too PG-13.

  The tepid applause that followed was cruel.

  Someone called out, ‘Boring!’

  The next morning, as I was walking down a corridor, I saw a couple of big sophomore boys shove Oz against his locker. ‘Hey, Collins. Loved your Dracula costume. Do you wear it to Homos Anonymous meetings?’

  His back to his locker, Oz bowed his head and averted his eyes. But he was trapped.

  The two callow youths moved in for the kill when—

  ‘I thought his outfit looked hot,’ I said loudly.

  The two bullies stopped and turned. Oz snapped up in shock.

  ‘And it was Mandrake, not Dracula.’ I looked the two thugs up and down. ‘Let me give you a tip, boys: girls like a man who’s good with his hands and last night this guy showed that he’s got the touch. Maybe instead of dissing him you should be asking him for pointers.’

  I nodded at Oz. ‘Loved the act.’ And then I did my best twirl-and-depart.

  Even as I did all this, I was surprised at myself. Why was I doing it? And now? I hadn’t stepped in to help Winnie and yet here I was intervening on behalf of Oz. But then, I thought, maybe it was because I hadn’t helped Winnie. I think a quiet fury at the fact that I had let this shit go before had been building up inside me.

  As I strode away, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the two bullies skulk off and I have to say I felt pretty good about myself.

  Somewhere around that time, pre-season training for lacrosse began. At first, it made me sad because it meant seeing less of Red, but it turned out to have an entirely unexpected and very pleasant consequence.

  The boys’ team trained after school at an indoor facility on the west side and sometimes, invited by Red, a group of them would come back to our apartment after training, sweaty and parched, to hang out.

  Now, let me get this out of the way up front: lacrosse uniforms, with their shoulder pads and helmets, are hot.

  I always made sure I was home on training days because when Bo Bradford and Dane Summerhays came in, it was a sight to behold.

  Of course, I ensured I appeared entirely absorbed in something else when they arrived: homework, study, watching TV or flicking through a magazine. (I think Red knew what I was doing but if he did, he never let on. What a great brother.)

  But I always sneaked a peek at them or ‘accidentally’ arrived at the fruit bowl in the kitchen at the same time Bo did, causing a brief but always thrilling conversation. My greatest artifice was creating some reason to enter Red’s bedroom while they were all hanging there (delivering his clean laundry to him was my all-time best excuse; I’d never done that before).

  Red’s room, I should add, was the embodiment of my brother: a carefree mix of weird stuff and pop culture arcana that he somehow made cool.

  It started with his bedroom door. On it hung a thin wooden shield that supposedly came from some tribe of headhunters in Borneo. Carved into its front side was the snarling face of a supernatural demon. It looked like a bad souvenir from Waikiki Beach to me.

  It got better inside his room. It was a man-boy’s nirvana, from the life-size R2-D2 droid from Star Wars that was actually a refrigerator, and the cherry-red couch made out of the winged tail of a 1950s Cadillac (the brakelights worked, bathing the room in a soft red glow), to his pride and joy: a bronze-coloured ‘Graceland’ baseball emblazoned with a picture of Elvis.

  That baseball was, Red said, the cheesiest thing in the world, which was why he loved it so much. (There might have been another reason: my dad had bought it for him during a visit to Graceland when we were six; Red had cherished it ever since.)

  Whenever they hung out there, the guys variously sat on the car-couch or on the bed while Red relaxed in front of the window in the large Balinese rope hammock he’d brought back from a tropical vacation. It was suspended from hooks in the ceiling.

  It was on one of those occasions—as I approached Red’s room from the hallway with some fantastic new excuse—that I heard them talking and I stopped to listen just outside the open door.

  Bo said, ‘So, Red. How’s it going with Verity Keeley?’

  Verity Keeley? I thought.

  Red said, ‘She’s cool. Got a little overly friendly the other night at Dane’s.’

  Dane had held a party the previous weekend while his parents had been away at St Barts. Red had been invited. I hadn’t.

  ‘She’s got a smoking hot body, dude,’ Dane said. ‘Chick works out. And Tony says she’s great for a little mmm-hmm in a dark corner of a party, if you know what I mean.’

  And she’s also a bitch, I thought. Once again, didn’t guys see these things? Didn’t Red?

  I was also thinking about Verity’s stated goal in that English class of finding a young man with a good name and money. I wondered if my brother fit that bill. Given our stepfather’s sizeable name-value and wealth, he probably did.

  Having said all that, if I was to be brutally honest, I was probably more hurt than concerned: hurt that Red hadn’t told me about any of this.

  Even though we still walked to and from school together most days, I hadn’t known he’d had any interactions—amorous or otherwise—with Verity Keeley. I’d always felt we were close, and that Red would share something like this with me. It made me sad that perhaps we were growing apart.

  Red said, ‘A gentleman never tells, guys.’

  Over the following month, Red and Verity became official and Red started hanging out with her and the cool kids on the East Side after school, leaving me to walk home alone. (It’s funny, around this time, I noticed that he’d started smoking pot; I could smell it on his clothes and detected it in his stare some nights when he came home. He had even gone out and bought a new Zippo lighter to enhance the experience. Not that I’m judging or anything.)

  It was strange for me to see Red rolling with the in-crowd, especially having once been there myself. I found myself wondering if this was my future: destined to be separate, an outsider looking in.

  But ultimately I was happy for him, in my bitter and abandoned kind of way.

  Beloved, cool and enlightened as he was, I had to accept that Red was still a sixteen-year-old human male—and thus beholden to all the hormones, desires and stupid decision-making (like smoking weed) that went with that. So I wished him all the female attention he could get, even if it came from Verity Keeley, and even if it meant that I had to walk home by myself across Central Park in the chill of a New York winter.

  I suppose I just missed my brother.

  But then as November became December, the girls in the common room and the boys at their after-training hang-outs began talking about one topic above all else.

  The Season.

  THE SEASON

  The debutante ball season.

  Growing up in Memphis, I had been dimly aware of debutante balls. They were high-end formal events in which young girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one were ‘presented’ to polite society.

  In the old days, it had been
about rich families putting their daughters on display for potential suitors, hence the virginal white bridal dresses and the elbow-length white silk gloves. But in the gauche, anyone-can-get-rich world of the 1980s and 90s, such balls fell out of fashion.

  And then in the 21st century, something happened to change all that.

  Social media.

  And in this Instagram-fuelled era of conspicuous consumption—or, more importantly, conspicuous displays of status—debutante balls came roaring back.

  They became the hottest tickets in town.

  They became so exclusive that the modern ball was less about presenting bright young women to polite society than it was about who got an invitation and which designer they got to make their bespoke dress.

  It carried so much weight in the social milieu of The Monmouth School, that Chastity Collins had mentioned it in her opening-day speech, when she had highlighted the fact that Misty would be debuting at not one but two balls at only sixteen.

  The unspoken marvel of Misty’s feat was that few girls debuted at such a young age, let alone at two separate balls. That only happened if the girl in question came from a seriously powerful family.

  (Apparently, the linguistic anomaly of debuting twice was lost on just about everyone in New York society. Rather than an oxymoron, it was considered an achievement.)

  And lest you shed a tear for those poor modern maidens who did not garner an invitation to any ball, fear not. Most of the balls had pre-parties, rehearsal dinners, afterparties and after-afterparties that friends, acquaintances and boyfriends could happily attend (a girl’s escort at a ball—her cavalier—was not necessarily her boyfriend). Arguably, with all the booze, cocaine and Molly available at them, these additional parties were considered far more fun than the parent-chaperoned balls themselves.

  In any case, the gossip about the Season began around mid-November.

  It started when Bo Bradford flew off to Paris to escort the daughter of a prominent Viennese family with Habsburg roots to Le Bal des Débutantes.

  ‘Le Bal is cool but it used to be better,’ Misty said in the common room, surrounded by Hattie, Verity, Dane and Red. I sat a short distance away, ostensibly studying but in truth listening.

  ‘It used to be discreet royal families like the Ludovisi, the Bourbon-Parmas and the Auersperg-Breunners. And the cavaliers were gorgeous young counts and marquises. But somewhere along the way, the organisers started allowing rich Arabs and Chinese to essentially buy tickets for their daughters. Now any old nouveau bourgeois who can afford to buy his little girl a Dior haute couture dress can get in. And once you let them in, it defeats the purpose of the ball altogether.’

  ‘And what is that purpose?’ Jenny asked from nearby. It appeared that she, too, was listening.

  Misty smiled that wan, indulgent smile of hers.

  ‘To establish who is polite society and who is not,’ she said. ‘To establish, publicly and clearly, the social strata of a given country or region.’

  Jenny cocked her head in disbelief. ‘Seriously? You honestly think that those people who attend deb balls are being announced as the leaders of society?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Misty said. ‘Because you’ll never go to one.’

  The French ball had started the chatter but it heated up significantly when the Season officially commenced at home with the National Debutante Cotillion and Thanksgiving Ball in Washington, D.C.

  A senior from Monmouth—Grace Carmody—debuted at that one alongside the niece of the Vice President.

  But the talk reached fever pitch when Misty started dress-shopping for her first coming-out ball, the International Debutante Ball to be held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in late December.

  Having spent the better part of October sitting with her girlfriends in the common room flipping through bridal magazines looking for a gown (the virgin-white debutante dress is basically the same as a bridal gown, so they are created by the same designers), in early November she began meeting with designers.

  She had one stipulation. Misty’s dress, I heard her tell her friends, had to complement her necklace.

  Her necklace.

  Because of Monmouth’s strict no-jewellery policy, I didn’t see Misty’s necklace until I began running into her randomly around the San Remo on weekends.

  It was actually one of two. Misty and her mother wore identical necklaces: a gold neckchain from which hung a gorgeous figure-eight-shaped pendant with a striking amber-coloured gem embedded in the middle of it.

  It was a beautiful necklace by any standard and clearly old, too.

  I complimented Misty on it one Sunday.

  She fingered it delicately. ‘Why, thank you. It’s a family heirloom and very precious to me.’

  With this condition in mind, Misty met with Zac Posen, Sarah Burton and Stella McCartney (she flew to London on a weekend to meet the last two). She settled on Sarah Burton: ‘She did Kate Middleton’s—sorry, Princess Catherine’s—dress for her wedding to Prince William.’

  Misty’s made-to-measure one-of-a-kind dress—featuring English lace, an antique white silk-gazar skirt, and subtle gold thread to match the necklace—would cost $86,000 plus tax.

  I saw a sketch of it. It was stunning. It was the most beautiful dress I’d ever seen. Any bride would’ve died to wear it on her wedding day and every other day of her life.

  Misty would wear it once.

  She was already looking for another dress to wear at her second debut at the East Side Cotillion in early March because, she said, ‘It’d be so embarrassing to wear the same dress to two deb balls.’

  After-school fittings were arranged. Misty and her friends would hurry out the school gates, slide into her black Escalade and be whisked away.

  And Misty hit the gym. Hard. On the night of the ball, she would be sewn into her dress, so she had to maintain both her weight and her body shape. Well, okay, she didn’t actually go to a gym. She hired a personal trainer to bust her chops on her parents’ home treadmill and in their weights room. In any case, I could see she was getting visibly slimmer.

  But even when slim, she still looked severe. Skinniness couldn’t alter that dead-eyed stare.

  I watched it all with a kind of detached fascination.

  This was a new world, one that I was privileged to observe from close range yet never be a part of. And I was happy with that.

  But then suddenly that world reached out and pulled me into its vortex in a most unexpected way.

  Someone invited my brother to the International Debutante Ball.

  RED

  The process by which eligible young ladies got selected to attend a major debutante ball was old-fashioned, intricate and largely based on heritage and connections.

  The process of selecting the dashing young men who would escort those young ladies to such a ball was different.

  It was traditional that each debutante would be escorted by two cavaliers: one cadet from a military academy and one civilian lad from a suitable family (if a girl had one, this was often her boyfriend).

  For the girls who did not know any local boys, an event called the Bachelor’s Brunch was held at a local restaurant. And in a world where it’s usually the guy who asks the girl out, it was a rare occasion where the girls got to assess the market and have their pick.

  In any case, Red and his lacrosse buddies had gone to the Bachelor’s Brunch on a lark. Given their inbuilt social cachet, Monmouth boys were always welcome at it, but Red and the guys had really just attended to watch from the edges. But then Red—cool, easygoing Red—had somehow got talking with a young Texan debutante from San Antonio and before you knew it, she’d asked him to be her civilian escort at the ball.

  It caused a happy sensation at Monmouth and suddenly Red was—to use one of my dad’s favourite phrases—cooler than the other side of the pillow.
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br />   As a result, he started to get invited to all the pre-parties in the two weeks before the ball.

  They were high-end affairs to which only the popular kids were invited. Of course, there was booze, weed and Mol at all of them. They would go deep into the night and Red would often return home to our apartment around 3:00 a.m.

  It was soon after the pre-parties began that I started to notice something on the inner forearms of the girls who went to them, girls like Misty, Hattie and Verity.

  Discreet vertical strokes, written in black permanent marker just near the wrist.

  Misty had seven of the strokes, Hattie four, and Verity three.

  Some of the boys who were frequenting the pre-party circuit also exhibited similar vertical markings. Bo had four and Dane Summerhays three.

  And then, in the early hours of the morning after the International Debutante Ball, my brother returned home, energised and adrenalised.

  He rushed into my room and shook me awake, his white bowtie dangling from his collar, sweat in his hair and on his forehead. I worried that he’d taken some amphetamine-type drug that had sent him off on a hyperactive bender.

  ‘Honest, Blue, I swear, I haven’t taken anything,’ he said breathlessly. ‘No. No. I’ve done something way better, way cooler than any drug. I’ll tell you but you’ve got to swear—swear—that you’ll never tell a soul about it. Not Mom, not Dad, not Todd and especially not Misty or any of the girls at school. They were there and they’d kill me if they knew I’d told you, but holy fucking shit, I’ve got to tell someone.’

  I’d never seen him like this. Red was never fazed by anything and here he was babbling like an idiot.

  And then I saw his left wrist.

  There was a single vertical stroke on it.

  ‘What have you done?’ I asked him slowly.

  PART II

  THE SECRET RUNNERS OF NEW YORK

  To keep your secret is wisdom;But to expect others to keep it is folly.