Twelve

Nick McDonell

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781843540724
• eBook ISBN: 9780857895127
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Waterstones' Books of the Year Nick McDonell's electrifying novel tells the story of a fictional drug called Twelve and its devastating effects on the beautiful rich and desperate poor of New York City.From page one, this novel pulsates towards its apocalyptic climax. Twelve is cool, cruel and utterly compulsive. Twelve has been adapted for film by Hollywood director Joel Schumacher starring Chace Crawford,
Emma Roberts, and 50 Cent. Praise for Twelve 'As fast as speed, as relentless as acid' -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 'The hype is all true' -- Sunday Telegraph 'Bret Easton Ellis territory...an extraordinary assured debut' -- Harper & Queen 'McDonell is an authentic talent and, long after the storms of hype have died away, his novel will endure as a snapshot of his generation' -- Observer 'Consistently brilliant... One of the most exciting new writers around' -- Independent on Sunday 'A brilliant satirical debut' -- Time Out 'A compulsive elegy to wasted, privileged youth, lives up to the hype... lean, elegant and bleakly witty' -- Elle

Contents

Part I: Friday, December 27

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part II: Saturday, December 28

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Part III: Sunday, December 29

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Part IV: Monday, December 30

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Part V: New Years Eve

Chapter Seventy-Five

Chapter Seventy-Six

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Chapter Eighty

Chapter Eighty-One

Chapter Eighty-Two

Chapter Eighty-Three

Chapter Eighty-Four

Chapter Eighty-Five

Chapter Eighty-Six

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Chapter Eighty-Eight

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Chapter Ninety

Chapter Ninety-One

Chapter Ninety-Two

Chapter Ninety-Three

Chapter Ninety-Four

Chapter Ninety-Five

Chapter Ninety-Six

Chapter Ninety-Seven

Afterword

Chapter Ninety-Eight

Acknowledgments

Part I

Friday, December 27

Chapter One

WHITE MIKE IS thin and pale like smoke.

White Mike wears jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and a dark blue Brooks Brothers overcoat that hangs long on him. His blond hair, nearly white, is cropped tight around his head. White Mike is clean. White Mike has never smoked a cigarette in his life. Never had a drink, never sucked down a doobie. But White Mike has become a very good drug dealer, even though it started out as a one-shot deal with his cousin Charlie.

White Mike was a good student, but he’s been out of school for six months, and though some people might wonder what he’s doing, no one seems to care very much that he’s taking a year off before college. Maybe more than a year. White Mike saw that movie American Beauty about a kid who is a drug dealer and buys expensive video equipment with the money he makes. The kid says that sometimes there is so much beauty in the world that sometimes you just can’t take it. Fuck that, thinks White Mike.

White Mike is not looking at beauty. He is looking at the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is two days after Christmas and all the kids are home from boarding school and everyone has money to blow. So White Mike is busy with a pickup in Harlem and then ounces and fifties and dimes and loud music and packed open houses and more rounds and kids from Hotchkiss and Andover and St. Paul’s and Deerfield all looking to get high and tell stories about how it is to kids from Dalton and Collegiate and Chapin and Riverdale, who have stories, of their own. All the same stories, really.

The city is a mess this time of year, this year especially. Madison Avenue is all chewed up with construction, and there are more bums on Lexington than White Mike remembers. It is crowded on the sidewalks, and the more snow, the worse it gets, and there has been plenty of snow. On some streets when the snowdrifts pile up there is only a salted corridor of frozen dog shit and concrete. It’s been cold since Thanksgiving, very cold, coldest winter in decades says the TV, but White Mike doesn’t mind the cold.

When White Mike first started dealing, it was summer and hot, and he tried to go as long as he could without sleep as a kind of experiment. White Mike already looked pale and scary to the kids he sold to, and then by the third day his jeans and white T-shirt were grimed out and he looked like some refugee James Dean, and the last hours were just a blur and the cars on the street flew past so close to him that people who saw flinched, hut he had the cadences of the city down so tight that he was fine.

At Lexington and Eighty-sixth, his friend Hunter saw him and said, Mike, are you feeling okay, and White Mike turned to him and there was a smear of dirt on his face and his eyes were glowing in the neon light from the Papaya King juice/hot dog place. White Mike smiled at him and said watch this and took off running, just running so fucking fast up the block toward Park Avenue. There were a bunch of private school kids walking the same direction, and when they saw White Mike running past them, one of them said, loud enough for White Mike to hear, Madman running. And White Mike turned and walked hack to them saying, Madman, madman, madman, madman, and the kids got scared, and then White Mike ran full into them, and they scattered, and they didn’t think it was funny at all, and then White Mike started barking at them, howling, and they all ran. And White Mike ran after them, barking and howling, and Hunter ran after him, and White Mike let them get away after a couple blocks. Hunter put White Mike in a cab, but he had to convince the cabbie to take White Mike, and pay him in advance. The cabbie was jumpy and looked in the mirror at White Mike the whole ride. White Mike had his head out the window, staring at the pedestrians. When White Mike got home and collapsed in his bed with his shoes and clothes still on, his last thought before sleep was Why not? He had been awake for three days.

White Mike gets out of a cab on Seventy-sixth Street and Park Avenue. He looks at the number of the cab: 1F17. He memorizes the number every time he gets out of a cab, in case he leaves anything behind. This has never happened.

Down Park Avenue there are Christmas lights wrapped around all the trees and bushes, and the wires give the snow better purchase, so the frost hangs low from the branches. When the lights turn on at night the trees almost disappear between the bulbs, and the disembodied points of light outline jagged constellations in the dark air. It is getting past dusk, and White Mike remembers one night, years ago, when his mother was still alive and she sat on the edge of his bed, tucking him in for the night, and told him about Chaos Theory. White Mike remembers exactly what she said. The story she told him was about how if a butterfly died over a field in Brazil and fell to the ground and made a mouse move or a tiny shoot of grass bend, then everything might be different here, thousands and thousands of miles away.

“How come?” he asked.

“Well, if one thing happens and changes something else, then that thing changes something else, right? And that change could come all the way around the world, right here to you in your bed.” She tweaked his nose. “Did a butterfly do that?”

“Did the butterfly die?” he asked her back.

The lights on Park Avenue suddenly turn on. White Mike can feel his beeper vibrating again.

Chapter Two

IT IS TEEN night twenty blocks uptown at the Rec. All the kids who show up to play basketball wear do-rags and Jordans, and they are all black. Two white kids show up, though, every once in a while. The wiry white kid is six feet tall and has the best ups of anybody but the worst ball-handling skills. His name is Hunter McCulloch, and he hustles all the time and makes some of his shots, so he gets to play. Hunter didn’t know what was going on when he first came to the Rec. That was a couple years ago, when White Mike brought him. Everybody called each other nigga, and most of the conversation went by so fast that Hunter couldn’t keep up. Ebonics, as White Mike said, existed. By now, though, Hunter is comfortable with it, and while he still doesn’t use the word nigga, he knows what the dill is. Tonight the dill is this.

Nana is the best ball handler on the court. Fast, strong, and the color of coal under his white tank top, he is playing in a half-court game that Hunter watches from the sideline. Lanky Jerry, the only white kid in the place besides Hunter, is the big man on the other team. Nana goes up for a shot, and Jerry knocks him out of the air. Nana gets up and says something fast about his neck hurting that Hunter can’t understand, and walks up off the court. He climbs up one of the spiral staircases to the mezzanine and sits on the very top step, where he is invisible to those below. His teammates yell that they know he’s up there nigga and to get his ass down and play. Nana ignores everybody. So someone on Nana’s team looks to the sidelines and says he needs one. Hunter takes Nana’s spot. It is toward the end of the night, and no one else is waiting except a short Puerto Rican kid named Arturo who just hangs around and doesn’t get to play much.

Hunter’s doing fine, but the game stops again when Nana comes down and demands his spot back. “I’m playin’.”

“What?” says Hunter. From his first time at the Rec, he never wanted to cause any trouble and sometimes even apologized to his teammates when he fouled or missed a shot. No one else ever apologized, but Hunter was a likable white kid who could get boards, so nobody really thought any less of him.

“I said gimme my fuckin’ spot back.”

“Okay.” Hunter shrugs and moves to get off the court. All the other kids look at one another. This is not cool.

“Yo, man, don’t let him do that,” says the kid who asked Hunter to fill Nana’s spot. “He left. It’s your game.”

“Nah, it’s oka...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents