One young woman’s summer of infinite possibility takes a turn she never saw coming in “this 1980s coming-of-age tale [that’s] chillingly compelling. Get ready to be transported.”-- AN “I haven’t felt this kind of excitement reading a story set in the ’80s since I first discovered Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis.”--Margarita Montimore, bestselling author of There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost? Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,” but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.

Autorentext
Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story, “Boyfriends,” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the notorious “Preppy Murder” of 1986. Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley

Leseprobe
Chapter One

It was the summer of 1986 when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There was a matchbook in her pocket from Flanagan’s, the preppy hangout on Eighty-Fourth Street. Police learned she’d left the bar with him at four a.m. Unbelievably handsome guy, charismatic, popular Flanagan’s mainstay. By nightfall, they had him under arrest. She’d coaxed him into going to the park to have sex, he told the police. Her death had been a terrible accident.

PREPPY SEXCAPADE TURNS DEADLY! screamed the cover of the New York Post.

Of course it had been an accident. Horrible, unthinkable, but an accident. “I liked her very much,” he’d tell police. “She was easy to get along with. Easy to talk to.” Why would a guy like him suddenly decide to kill a girl he liked? It made no sense.

Everyone had known him forever. Buckley, Surf Club, Gold & Silver committee. Remember that time he went down Ajax Mountain on one ski? That epic backgammon game in Palm Beach?

And her? Nice enough, the Flanagan’s regulars said, if a little annoying. She’d been after him all summer. That night, she’d hung around Flanagan’s until closing time, trying to get his attention. Kept going to the bathroom so she could parade by his table in the back where he sat drinking whiskey and playing cards. Outwaited all the other girls—Campbell Hughes, Minnie Potter, Brooke Limbocker. Waylaid him at the door and said, “Wherever you’re going, I’m going too.”

An hour later, she was dead.

Not that it was her fault. But that didn’t make it his.

“She forced my pants down,” he’d tell police, “without my consent,” straddled him, squeezed his balls—made it hurt. He’d yelled for her to stop, yanked her off him. She landed at the base of the tree and didn’t move. He thought she was kidding, but she was dead.

ROUGH SEX GONE WRONG! said the Daily News.

A freak accident, everyone decided. She hadn’t known when to quit.

“She was a very nice person,” he’d say. “She was just too pushy.”

But that wouldn’t be until August. It was still early June, and a different girl was on the cover of all the city tabloids, a young, beautiful model with an ugly gash down her cheek. A pair of lowlifes with razor blades had slashed her face outside a West Side bar the night before, hired by the girl’s landlord after she turned down his repeated advances.

BEAUTY AND THE CREEP, the cover of the Post proclaimed.

Nina Jacobs bent over the doorman’s console to study the photos, wincing at the girl’s 150 black stitches. The model was twenty-four, six years older than Nina, but she looked years younger—round cheeks, angelic smile despite the gruesome attack. She was from Wisconsin. Nina pictured apple orchards and open country roads, log rafts drifting down the river, picnics on its banks with your neighbors. No wonder she looked so good-natured and gracious, even with the Frankenstein stitches. No wonder she’d felt safe meeting the landlord at a bar to get back her security deposit, despite the beard on him that looked like a layer of dirt. Nina wouldn’t have met that beard in Grand Central Station during rush hour. You knew better when you grew up in the city.

She glanced at herself in the lobby mirror. She was headed out to Flanagan’s to celebrate graduation with her Bancroft friends and, while she was at it, scout a candidate to please God take her virginity this summer before her apparatus rusted shut. She’d aimed for the opposite of her usual plain-Jane look: moussed-up hair and thick, dark eyeliner, Spandex skirt, and a satin camisole under a denim jacket. But now, with the model’s wholesomeness in mind, it seemed she’d swung too far in the other direction. “Smile,” she ordered her reflection. “This isn’t a lineup.” She rubbed off half the eyeliner and pushed down her hair.

True, it hadn’t been a banner day, starting with her mother showing up late to Nina’s graduation after Nina and the other graduates had already marched down the aisle and up onto the stage in their floor-length white dresses, where they sat in rows of folding chairs, looking, she imagined, like a choir of virgin sacrifices—as if she needed another reminder of her status. For weeks, her mother’s depression had been heavier and angrier than usual, with Nina and her father taking turns as targets. They hadn’t been sure she’d show up today at all, and Nina couldn’t say she was happy she had, watching the commotion of her entrance, Frances bumping and swerving down the row where Ira had saved her a seat just in case, inexplicably dressed in an argyle sweater and gray flannel skirt even though it was ninety degrees outside. People craned their necks as her mother kicked a man’s leg and hissed that he’d tried to trip her.

“Who is that?” Polly Jessup, seated beside Nina, had asked, but Nina just shrugged, so tense her shoulders got stuck up by her ears.

During the headmistress’s speech, her mother had squatted with her camera in the aisle, hollering Nina’s name like a crazed paparazza (Ohhh, Polly said, inching away) until, lightheaded from Nardil or Darvon, she lost her balance and toppled backward onto her butt. At the reception, she’d raged at the bartender over too many ice cubes in her cranberry juice and then threw one at Ira when he tried to shush her. When Nina tried to intervene, her mother slung what was left of her drink at her, splashing the white commencement dress scarlet.

But at least razor-blade-wielding thugs hadn’t ambushed Nina on the way home from the reception. She could walk into Flanagan’s tonight without a face full of stitches. And in even better news: eighty-six days, ten hours, …