A Gorgeous Excitement

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.

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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—in the pre-attack photo anyway. 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 the 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 her way 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 she 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, and twenty-eight minutes until she finally, blessedly, left for Vanderbilt. Not her first choice, but her top picks had rejected her, maybe because she’d mistakenly checked “Native American” as her ethnicity on the applications. For some reason—she couldn’t rule out the shots of her father’s vodka she’d consumed while she filled them out—she’d honestly thought Native American meant “born in America,” and “Caucasian” somewhere in Asia. The applications were already in the mail to Brown and Georgetown before she realized her mistake. But the silver lining was that Vanderbilt wouldn’t be crawling with New Yorkers: she hoped to bask in the prestige surely afforded a girl from Manhattan at a college in the Deep South.

As she crossed the lobby toward the door, she heard what sounded like belly-dancing music—cymbals and sitars and a man’s tremulous wail—coming from the doorman’s transistor radio. The doormen weren’t supposed to play music while on duty, but she secretly liked the idea of his music seeping into the walls of her uptight apartment building, the echo of thrusting hips and hookah pipes rattling the sugar scions and Daughters of the Revolution who’d barely let the Jacobs family past the co-op board ten years before. Nina still wasn’t sure why her parents so badly wanted to live here. Yes, it was an elegant building in a desirable neighborhood, but how elegant and desirable could Ira and Frances feel when, even now, the co-op board president, Carter Lorillard, insisted on greeting them in the lobby as “the Jewish Jacobses,” as in, “Always good to see the Jewish Jacobses,” or “How are the Jewish Jacobses this evening?” Nina had yet to hear him greet “the Episcopalian Sloanes,” or ask “the Catholic Ryans” how they were doing.

The doorman came back inside from fetching a taxi for a tenant. Freddie was in his thirties, lived in a basement apartment in the Bronx, and dreamed about opening a car wash one day. He gave her a wet-lipped grin as he approached. Nina’s father had once told her that Freddie had escaped some godforsaken country where half his family was still locked away in the bowels of a medieval government prison. His history made her stomach clench, but so did he.

“Black stockings very pretty against Miss Nina’s white, white skin,” he said.

She’d cut the feet off a pair of lace tights to resemble Madonna’s, although now she saw she might have chopped too much since in the lobby mirror they looked more like knickers.

“Leggings,” she corrected him. Her voice was stern, but that didn’t stop him from closing the space between them to embrace her. The doormen also weren’t supposed to touch the residents, but she submitted to his hug for the usual count of five, her unspoken quid pro quo for Freddie not ratting her out to her parents for various transgressions, like the time she and her friends tossed raw eggs out the bathroom window and a pissed-off casualty called the police. Or six weeks ago, over spring break, when she came home drunk from Walker Pierson’s after a humiliating effort to shed her virginity, with bits of her own vomit still caked in her hair.

The first time Freddie had surprised her with an embrace, she figured maybe it was a customary greeting in his country. She later noticed he didn’t hug any of the other residents—or leer at them or comment on their clothing or their figures—but it seemed too late to renegotiate the terms of their tacit agreement.

Freddie clutched the back of her shirt, fingers digging into her spine. Four, three, two, she counted silently, averting her head to avoid inhaling his garlicky sweat and loneliness. No big deal, she told herself as she pulled free. Let it lie. He grinned at her again and tipped his gold-braided hat as she hurried past him out the door.

Outside was a sapphire sky, a moon as round and translucent as an onion. She shook off Freddie’s grope, and the model’s cut-up face, and the Walker Pierson fiasco, and even her raging mother, for now safely ensconced upstairs in a Halcion fog, and practically galloped to Third Avenue.

Most nights, Flanagan’s was a drowsy hangout for divorced lawyers and neighborhood alcoholics, indistinguishable from the scores of other pubs that lined Second Avenue: red-and-white checkered tablecloths, pressed-tin ceiling, potted plants in the windows. But on weekends it transformed into a preppy spectacle, with throngs of kids who’d known each other forever from boarding school or the Maidstone Club or Fishers Island. The girls had stork legs and satin hair. The guys exuded the cocky nonchalance of the chosen. Everyone glowed with crazy good luck and yellow brick road futures. It was thrilling to walk among them, but intimidating, too, if you lacked the bona fides. Bancroft was a prestigious all-girls private school, but Nina’s father, originally from St. Louis, was a tax lawyer with a mid-tier firm, and while the Grossbergs on her mother’s side had done well in construction, they were from Queens, where in fact Nina was born and lived until she was two. She’d bet no one else at Flanagan’s tonight had spent childhood summers in Rockaway, where the ocean was a cold stew of seaweed and sewage, and the beach in the morning often spattered with blood from a late-night gang fight. Or went out for Golden Wok and a movie on Christmas Day. Or got Zuckerman Unbound as a graduation gift.

The handful of times she’d been to Flanagan’s, she’d gone mute

with self-consciousness and spent the night with her head ducked, making towers out of coasters and bracelets out of straws. Tonight she was better prepared: she’d snuck one of her mother’s Klonopin and washed it down with two shots of her father’s Belvedere, a concoction that had gotten her through dinners at her grandmother Pearl’s and dozens of her mother’s explosions. She’d thrown in some Midol and Dexatrim for good measure. She’d also rewatched Kathleen Turner’s hair maneuver in Body Heat. “You’re not too smart, are you?” she says to William Hurt as she gathers her hair in a fist above her head. “I like that in a man”—then drops it in a cascade over her shoulders, which Nina practiced as she approached Eighty-Third Street.

Inside the bar, clouds of smoke mixed with Anaïs Anaïs perfume made her eyes burn. She pushed through the crowd, past the long bar and huge brick fireplace and the black-and-white photographs hung all over the walls. Leigh and Meredith were drinking sangria at a round table wedged between two wood pillars. Nina had been friends with them since first grade at Bancroft, although neither had turned out to be a true-blue kindred spirit. It had always been a loose trio of shifting alliances, but the connections had felt especially frayed this past year, the banter off a beat, so half the time you couldn’t tell when someone was kidding. Maybe their impatience to start the next part of their lives turned them all a little tone-deaf. Or maybe it went deeper than that, but Nina hadn’t really wanted to investigate. Turn over the boulder of friendship and who knew what might be wriggling underneath.

Newports and Parliaments littered the table. Nina still craved the whirl of smoke in her lungs, but six weeks ago she’d stopped cold turkey, the morning she learned Pearl had died.

“How’s your mom?” Leigh asked when Nina arrived at the table. She giggled and apologized. “I know it’s not funny, but wow did she wipe out today.”

Nina plastered on a breezy smile. “It was kind of funny.” It wasn’t. It was humiliating, and galling of Leigh to bring it up. Even thinking about it now, twelve hours later, Nina felt the weight of it pressing down on her, threatening to crack her Klonopin-and-vodka cocoon.

But no one wanted a killjoy at a celebration. She forced a laugh as she sat. “Her ass will probably be black and blue tomorrow.”

Everyone complained about their parents, but Nina kept the grimmer details about Frances to herself. It had always been understood in her family that her mother’s condition was not to be publicly discussed, or even acknowledged: it was no one else’s business, and no one else really wanted to know anyway. The times Nina had ventured into forbidden territory with her friends, mentioned her mother flying off the handle over an empty sugar bowl or not leaving her bed for a week, she’d been met with uncomfortable silence and a swift change of subject.

“I was telling Meredith that I saw my gyno the other day,” Leigh said. “To start on the pill.”

Nina squirmed. She was the only virgin at the table, the only one inadvertently abiding by Bancroft’s motto—Honor Virutis Praemium. Was virtue rewarded with honor when one’s virtue was unintentional, not to mention unwanted? She was desperate to join the ranks of the dishonored: Leigh had lost it to her deb ball escort, Meredith to some guy she met at Danceteria. Even Polly Jessup, with her ribbon headbands, Fair Isle sweaters, and A. A. Milne quotes on her yearbook page, had done it in a Pompei alley with an Italian tour guide over spring break. Like, three feet from a cluster of ash-entombed corpses, apparently, but Nina still envied her. Who cared how imperfect or unpleasant the first time was? The Danceteria guy, whom they now called the Hypnotist, had pulled out Meredith’s tampon and swung it back and forth like a pocket watch on a chain. Leigh’s escort couldn’t figure out how to work the condom. Perfect wasn’t the point. The point was the leap to the other side.

“It was so embarrassing,” Leigh added. “He delivered me, and now he’s asking me how often I have ‘relations.’ ” She took a Newport out of a gold-embossed cigarette case from Tiffany, testament to her obsession with all things Jackie Kennedy, who had the same one according to the most recent unauthorized bio.

“I’ve heard you can gain ten pounds on the pill,” Meredith said.

Leigh reached for the pitcher of sangria. “I need to lose ten. Who wants to do SlimFast with me?”

“Blech,” Meredith said, her mouth in a sour twist. “Those shakes taste like dog poo.” She took a sip of sangria, making another face. “This doesn’t taste much better.” Never hugely cheerful anyway, she’d been even crabbier than usual since getting rejected by every Ivy besides Penn, which she called Jap City even in front of Nina but was resigned to starting in the fall. The fact that Leigh was going to Princeton didn’t make things easier.

Nina pinched some excess skin at her waist. “I might start drinking Rum and Tabs.”

“I read in Glamour that even Tab is fattening,” said Meredith, who always gave her own thoughts the credence of written text. Leigh, who always gave credence to Meredith, nodded.

“Doesn’t the commercial say ‘Just One Calorie’?” Nina asked. Meredith gave her a sudden, sly smile. “I wonder how many calories there are in semen.”

Something was up. Nina shifted in her chair.

“I can’t believe people swallow it,” Leigh said. “Talk about blech.” Nina tried to push aside the image of Walker Pierson’s thing in her mouth, jabbing the inside of her cheek. The first blowjob of her life and she tried to give it cross-eyed drunk. What had she been thinking? “What’s the difference between sperm and semen, anyway?” Leigh mused.

Sepia vomit puddling on the bedspread. Walker’s livid eyes.

“You know, Nina,” Meredith laughed, “you might be the only girl in Bancroft history to lose weight giving head.”

Leigh turned red. Nina hadn’t told anyone other than her, since she was the one who’d introduced her to Walker that night.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I only told Meredith, I swear.”

Nina tried to change the subject: “Did you guys hear about that model whose face got slashed to ribbons?”

But Meredith was undeterred. “Did she give an even worse blow-job than you?”

Nina felt her expression go stony. Then she pictured her mother’s face at graduation, contorted with fury, eyes on fire, snakes for hair that rattled and spit. She reapplied her smile. “I don’t know, Meredith,” she said as she poured herself another glass of sangria. “But maybe you ought to worry about the guys at Danceteria. I hear they want their money back.”

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From A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner. Copyright © 2025 by Cynthia Weiner. Published in the United States by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.