The Happiest of New Years

My apologies again for neglecting this blog - two posts in two months! eep! - and more seriously, for neglecting your blogs. I am sure that in my absence I've missed loads of excellent material. Sadly, I am now entering the final phase of my last year in school, which means I probably won't be making as many appearances here as I would like.

My writing energy lately has been focused on polishing up my aforementioned novel, Hard to Explain, so I'll post the second excerpt of that here. It is also the second chapter; the first one is available here (and the third is now here). Criticism welcomed with open arms and possible cups of tea.

Oh - just before I post that, actually, I may mention a tiny side-project I am (unwisely) embarking on. It's called The Ingénue Diaries, and it is composed of writing which does not belong here because it's all part of one diary. A diary which is of unspecified truth.

Also, may I take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy new year. Here's to a better 2009.

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2

The seatbelt light went off above his head. Beneath him, through the rounded window, Jared could still see the sprawling city, the island of Manhattan, the clawing fingers of the American coastline, and then nothing. He opened his seatbelt and leaned back.

They had thrown a going-away party for him at Sandra’s place. Pretty much everyone he knew from school was there saying they’d miss him and they gave him a card full of Irish money or European money or whatever and it was all way too nice. There was cake. Sandra and Matt made it themselves. He thanked people for coming like a hundred times and said he’d add everyone on MySpace and made sad funny jokes about Ireland not having electricity or running water or American Apparel. Damn it. He would really miss American Apparel.

There was another list to add to “clothes” and “items other than clothes”: Things Jared Would Miss About New York.

Treble. Final Vinyl. That one time Susan from Geology swore that Julian Casablancas came into the Starbucks where she worked. Matthew and Sandra and Louise and Noah and everyone. A whole year of school.

It had all started eight weeks ago.

Jared’s mother would disagree with this statement – they had been unhappy for years now, she would say; they had dealt with Claudia in different ways; there’d been talk since Christmas at least – but for Jared, none of that mattered. His parents splitting up? Big deal. Really. He was seventeen. His parents floated out at the edges of his life. He didn’t want to be callous about it. Sure, he wanted them to be happy: if divorce was making them happy, he wanted them to get divorced. Whatever.

But then there was the fighting. They fought over the flat, the car, the house in Rhode Island; they fought over Jared, even, who was going to Columbia anyway in two years. His father wanted to move back to Florida, and his mother was staying in the city, so they fought about that. They fought about who Jared would stay with for how long and for which parts of the year, and they fought about school and his airfare even – they fought about money, which no one in Jared’s family had ever fought about before. No one in Jared’s family had ever really fought about anything.

And then.

Since he was sixteen, Jared and Matthew plus a bunch of guys and girls from school would try more or less every weekend to get into this club called Treble about four blocks from Jared’s house. Treble was this really small exclusive garage rock club where the girls had short hair and the boys had long hair and everyone wore really tight tapered jeans. They all got in one night about three weeks ago and some security guy came up to them and asked for ID and they got kicked out and parents were called.

Jared’s parents took this as a sign that he was not coping well with the separation. He had grown up with an IRS guy for a father and a maritime lawyer for a mother: at home they watched MSNBC and drank fair trade coffee. He didn’t know how to argue. He didn’t know how to tell them that Treble was an okay kind of place, that nobody had ever tried to sell him drugs, that the music was good – that the music was incredible, it was everything – and he hadn’t fallen in with anyone, it was really just him and Matthew, and he didn’t even drink much alcohol and he was still pretty much a virgin.

Actually, ‘pretty much’ was a massive exaggeration. He was totally a virgin. Like as much as it was possible to be.

The truth was that Jared wasn’t particularly cool. Most kids in school probably didn’t even know his name. Sometimes, he could hear himself and Matthew self-consciously implying themselves into coolness: saying things like “the guys,” when they meant the only two other guys they occasionally hung out with. And they wouldn’t have even known those two if it wasn’t for the school chess club, not that they went to that anymore, but still.

He didn’t know how to say any of that. His apartment was too quiet for him to raise his voice. It was a civilised, talk radio place. It would have been like shouting in the library.

So they decided it would be good for Jared to get out of the country for a while. His mother said it was a bad environment. Jared felt like he always felt, which was like a pinball, bouncing off things without any control whatsoever over what was bad and what was good. His mother had this sister Meg in Ireland who used to come to visit every Christmas when Jared was younger. They’d all gone to stay with her for a couple of months after Claudia and everything, because his mother had thought they just needed to get away. Jared disagreed. Jared had wanted to stay in New York and crawl under Claudia’s bed and bang his head repeatedly, but his mother made him leave. Anyway that was years ago and, yeah, whatever.

His mother was all like “you love Europe, Jared,” which, okay, Jared had been to Paris one time when he was like eight and to be fair, yes, it seemed pretty good. It’s just that it didn’t necessarily follow that he would want to miss an entire year of school to go live in Ireland, just because he got to have chocolate croissants for breakfast once. But lately his mother was always shouting down the phone and crying and it never seemed like the right time to say, actually mom, this whole thing is a terrible idea.

A perfumed stewardess wheeled past and he pretended to be asleep. It would be a long flight.