Free Hold On Tight by J. Minter Page A

comment might have sounded a little cruel. “Not that you didn’t have awesome friends or big stuff in the city.”
    â€œBut I didn’t really,” Ted said. “I’m going to tell you something—but don’t let it go to your head. When I first got here, I realized that college is like this crazy chance to be a whole new person. You have to make new friends, and get new interests, and there’s virtually no one around to call you out as a poseur. So I decided I was going to be that New York cool kid who always goes back to the city on weekends for the night life and drinks black coffee and spends all day planning his night on his cell phone. Basically I wanted to be you.”
    â€œBut I don’t drink my coffee black …,” I said in a very small voice.
    â€œThat’s not the point. Or maybe it is. Nobody bought my act, because it wasn’t me. I realized that if I was going to have friends and be happy, I was going to have to be confident about my
real
self. So that’s what I did, but more so—I’m the guy who cares, and I don’t mind everybody knowing that,” Ted said. “And what I found out was, if you’re not hiding your face all the time, people really like that guy. Caring
is
cool.”
    â€œWow,” I said.
    â€œYou might find this all hard to believe,” Margot said, “because high school can be such a shallow time. But a guy who cares is hot. To care is
unbelievably
sexy.”
    â€œAnd that’s who I always was anyway,” Ted said. Then he did finally laugh a little bit. “So I lucked out.”
    â€œWow,” I said again, and gave myself a moment of quiet contemplation to take this all in. When I looked up, Margot and Ted were silently gesturing at me to look over my shoulder.
    When I looked, I saw a dark-haired guy feeding small bites of grilled-cheese sandwich to a blonde in big movie-star shades. I knew immediately that the blonde was Sara-Beth Benny, but it took me another moment to realize that the guy was my friend David.
    As he cut another piece of sandwich with his knife and fork, I heard her ask, “Are you absolutely positive it’s okay to eat carbohydrates after two in the afternoon? My trainer said that …”
    Then I turned back to Margot and my brother, trying not to laugh, and I saw that she had her forehead rested against his, and their lips were almost touching. Suddenly, I felt a little bit sad. I missed doing things like going to the movies orold-fashioned diners with Flan—or maybe just with a girlfriend.
    I glanced at David and Sara-Beth again, and saw that they were now mid-nuzzle, and then back at my brother, but he and Margot were rubbing their noses together in a really intimate way. I rested my eyes on my greasy fries and sucked the last clumps of milk shake from my glass.
    That’s when I decided I was just going to have to find a way to follow Ted’s advice. If I could find a way to care about
something
, maybe I could have a smart and gorgeous girlfriend to feed bite-sized pieces of sandwich to, too. I mean, that sounds reasonable, right?
    Right.

arno gets right
    â€œMickey!” Arno yelled over the crowd. “Yo, Mickey freaking Pardo!”
    The noise around him was intense, however, and there were a lot of people between him and his friend. It felt like his cries were being swallowed up by the crowd. And even though he was being pushed along on a stream of people like he was just anybody, Arno was feeling much less sorry for himself.
    He was still feeling the sickly sweet triumph of being treated like a total outsider the night before. Plus, he had changed into new clothes, which had reminded him that he was only wearing a specific shade of lightly faded black these days, and how cool that was. If he wasn’t deep yet, he felt confident that he was getting pretty damn close.
    And also, he had just watched one of his oldest friends lecture to a