Chapter One
Two weeks after I moved to New York, I met Jamie Weissman at one of those parties where people don’t talk to anyone they don’t know already. The living room of the Chelsea apartment was packed with girls in headbands and guys with banker butt, a condition that afflicts first-year investment analysts who spend too much time at their desks and too little time at the gym. We were in the gayest neighborhood on earth, but it wasn’t that kind of party.
I knew I had worn the wrong thing when my plaid clam-diggers, perfect for the early September heat, were met with sneers from a group standing in the hallway. Most people were wearing khakis and I looked like I was ready for the beach. In the kitchen, I poured myself several fingers of vodka and mixed in some off-brand cranberry juice. A guy in a pink Polo shirt and glasses with tortoise shell frames came up to me.
“Ever get the feeling you’re at the wrong party?”
I looked down at him quizzically. His curly chestnut hair was receding, more like a thirty year-old’s than someone who was probably twenty-two, twenty-three tops.
“Oh, never mind,” he continued. “Sometimes I just say whatever comes into my head. I’m sort of ADD that way. I take Ritalin for it.”
I never understood people who bragged about the meds they were on. I had been taking sixty milligrams of Paxil every day for the past four years to combat my depression, but I didn’t go around telling people about it.
“Hey, can you pour me some of that?” he asked.
I poured him some vodka, and he dropped in a few ice cubes.
“You want a mixer?” I held up a bottle of tonic water. I thought it was obnoxious when people drank booze straight to show off.
“Naw, it’s a taste I acquired at prep school. Gets you drunk faster.”
“Where’d you go?” I asked. I had gone to a small boarding school in Connecticut, the kind whose glossy catalogs were featured in The Preppy Handbook.
“Oh, it was in Jersey. I was a day student. Actually, most people were day students. But we played all the other prep schools.” He sipped his drink. “You’re not part of this Princeton crowd, are you? ‘Cause I’ve never seen you before.”
“I went to Yale,” I admitted.
“Ecch, New Haven.”
New Haven was a place where your car would be broken into if you left change on the dashboard, but I still hated snobbery about my college town.
We gulped our drinks.
“This is so weird,” he said, “hanging out with so many 924 people. It’s like work.”
“Sorry?”
“Oh, God,” he laughed. He wiped a drop of sweat from his bony forehead. “OK, like the digits on a phone, 429 is G-A-Y, so that backwards is 924, get it?”
“You’re gay?” I should have guessed by the pink shirt; no real men wore preppy pink anymore.
“Yeah, aren’t you? ‘Cause if you aren’t, then I’ve just made a big fucking idiot of myself.”
It could be fun, posing as straight. Should I hold out a little longer?
“No, I am,” I finally said. It must have been my pants that gave me away. “I just didn’t expect to meet anyone—”
“Neither did I! When we got here, I was like, fifteen minutes, that’s it! And then we get into this conversation with this guy, and before I know it, I’ve had four vodkas, and I’m like, shit, where did the night go? Come sit with us, we’re in the bedroom. You can smoke there.” He offered his hand. “I’m Jamie Weissman.”
“Toby Griffin,” I said, shaking his hand in an odd gesture of formality. I followed him through the living room into the bedroom.
The Trouble Boy is available
from Kensington Books.
