The Big Splash (3 page)

Nobody knew it at the time, but Vinny was more than just a punching bag. He was a punching bag with a plan: to take control of all illegal activities in school. He started by trafficking stolen exams. First, he recruited kids with honest faces and sticky fingers, promising them big payoffs for hot tests. He hired salespeople in each grade to peddle the goods to whoever would buy. Vinny was true to his word: Sales took off, grades went up, the money rolled in, and everyone was happy.

Next, he went into trafficking candy. He lobbied to stop the cafeteria from selling sweets, playing on the child-obesity fears of well-meaning adults. Vinny became a poster boy for the cause, saying that his weight problem was the fault of the cafeteria's menu. Almost overnight, all the junk food disappeared. The students' desire for junk food, however, didn't go anywhere. Once the attention from adults disappeared, Vinny was more than happy
to feed the students' needs. He got some stickers with
APPROVED
printed on them, then invested in big boxes of candy from one of those wholesale clubs. Only candy “approved” by Vinny was allowed in the school, and he hired some eighth-grade muscle to make sure it stayed that way. Vinny's fortunes grew, and so did his organization.

He recruited more kids to handle the load of his expanding business. Divisions and ranks were forming, but weren't fully in place yet. Vinny offered kids a chance to get in on the ground floor. He developed a system, ways to move up the ranks by performing certain tasks or hitting certain sales goals. The details of the system were kept secret, and only kids in his crew knew how it worked. It was around this time that he approached me with an offer: join his crew as his lieutenant, his right-hand man.

He promised me money and power. I wouldn't have to work my way through the ranks; I could start out at the top, helping him mold and shape his organization. I felt like a diabetic at an ice cream buffet: I was tempted, but I knew it wouldn't be very good for me. I politely declined. Later that afternoon, Vinny made the same offer to Kevin. He jumped at the chance.

I remember being bowled over by the news, and feeling
more than a little betrayed. I confronted Kevin and asked him if he realized that “lieutenant” in this case was just a fancy word for “bully.”

“No it isn't,” he responded. “Vinny's going to put the bullies out of business.”

“Yeah, because they're the competition, you idiot!”

“You don't know what you're talking about, Matt.”

“You're right. Vinny's doing all this illegal stuff out of the goodness of his heart,” I said with mock sincerity. “You're not really that naive, are you?”

Kevin sighed, then looked at me with a weird expression: his mouth pinched in a little frown; his gaze dropped and avoided my face. “There are a lot of reasons to do something, Matt. Not all of them are going to have your approval.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Even with me? Come on, man. I'm your best friend.”

He shrugged as if that didn't mean much at the moment. “Maybe you don't know me as well as you think you do,” he said.

I was suddenly furious. “If you're doing something this dumb,” I said, “maybe I don't know you at all.”

All he did was shrug again and walk away as if our six years of friendship meant nothing. We didn't see much of each other outside of class after that. After a while, I even got pretty good at pretending it didn't bother me. Not that it mattered; Kevin was too busy with his new “job” to notice.

With Kevin's help, Vinny worked his way into forgeries: doctor's notes, hall passes, report cards, anything official. Then they went after the big money: gambling. They set up books for all the school's sports teams. It was a good plan, but it had a major flaw: A lot of kids still didn't respect Vinny, despite the fact that he now controlled every illegal activity in school. When some kids lost their bets, they refused to pay up. They still thought of Vinny as a pudgy little punching bag, and no amount of money or crimes committed was going to change that. Vinny's organization was missing one crucial ingredient: Nicole Finnegan.

I remember seeing Nicole on my first day of sixth, before she went to work for Vinny. She was a cute but unremarkable little red-haired girl. When I introduced myself, she said hello, then politely shook my hand. It was like shoving my hand into a snowbank. She seemed
completely in control of herself, in a way that most girls her age weren't. I remember thinking that Nicole was going to leave a lot of broken hearts in her wake. I had no idea how right I was.

It started with Jimmy Forrester, a seventh-grade hood as small-time as they come. Jimmy used to use Vinny as his own personal ATM, shaking him down whenever he needed a little extra dough. The last time Jimmy tried this, Vinny suggested that he go jump off a bridge. At first, Jimmy laughed—he thought it was a practical joke set up by his friends. When he realized Vinny was serious, he laughed again, then blackened Vinny's eye. He shouldn't have.

A couple of days later, when Jimmy stood up from his lunch table to go throw out his trash, he had a giant wet stain on the front of his pants that hadn't been there when he sat down. Nobody noticed it at first, until someone from the back of the caf yelled: “Jimmy peed his pants!” The kid who yelled must've had great eyes … or a fat wallet.

There were quite a few Jimmys in school, so it took Jimmy Forrester a second to realize that all eyes in the cafeteria were trained on him, or more specifically,
the front of his pants. He looked down to confirm his suspicion. When he looked back up, there was an expression of surprise and horror painted on his face in broad, colorful strokes. His eyes darted back and forth, searching for an escape route. But the crowd's laughter bore down on him like a freight train, freezing him in his tracks, forcing a teacher to wade into the crowd to rescue him. Hardly anyone noticed the little girl who had been seated next to Jimmy just a moment earlier: little Nicole Finnegan, with the innocent face, bright red hair … and empty juice box. Jimmy had been humiliated, one drop of apple juice at a time.

Jimmy was finished at the Frank. Done. He just didn't know it yet. Or maybe he did know, but wasn't ready to accept it. For the rest of the day, he tried to act like he could still take whatever he wanted from whomever he wanted, but the act was like a five-year-old T-shirt: It no longer fit. It didn't matter how big or tough he was; the entire school had labeled him a loser, a baby, a kid who still wet his pants. He had lost his ability to intimidate, and a bully without intimidation was like a new car without a motor: It may look impressive, but it wasn't going anywhere.

I had to give Jimmy credit: He did try. At one point,
he grabbed a kid who he had terrorized on a regular basis, a kid by the name of Terrell Williams. Terrell was the smallest kid in school, but he also had one of the loudest laughs. When Jimmy threatened to rearrange his face, Terrell let loose his laugh. It rose above the regular middle-school hallway noise. Jimmy was confused by the reaction. Then Terrell sealed Jimmy's fate by whacking him in the place where all boys, no matter what their size, are vulnerable. Jimmy dropped to the floor; any illusion that he was still a bully was suddenly gone.

As Jimmy started to accept the change in his status, his appearance began to change as well. The more ridicule and scorn he absorbed from his classmates, the smaller he tried to make himself. He started to walk with a stoop, his shoulders and arms drawn in. He no longer made eye contact with anyone. Walking, talking, running … it didn't matter: His eyes were permanently cast down to the floor. He developed a nervous tic. Nobody, including his old friends, talked to him anymore, unless it was to make fun of him.

Jimmy Forrester had become the founding member of the least popular club in school: the Outs. This club had a highly undesirable method of initiating new members:
humiliation. Vinny was marking the kids that he wanted taken out of the school social system, and the pee stain was the perfect symbol for this. Most kids knew the pee wasn't real, but it didn't matter. Kids laughed at the victims anyway. Why? There's no easy answer to that. Middle school is tough. Everyone's got a reason to be insecure. If someone else is getting laughed at, then that means nobody's laughing at you. And most kids feel like they're always one step away from being the class joke.

Once you were in the Outs, you were there for good. The only kids you could talk to were other Outs. Everyone else treated you with a mixture of scorn and disgust, as if you had a highly contagious disease. I heard about a few kids who convinced their families to move to another town to try to escape the Outs, only to have the tag follow them there. The ridicule was brutal and inescapable. You no longer had any friends, or confidence, or life. Jimmy was the first member; he was by no means the last.

The next victim was Gretchen Jacobson, a popular eighth-grade cheerleader for the school basketball team. Gretchen was like a poorly fed show poodle: pretty, well groomed, and mean. She took great pleasure in embarrassing Vinny, calling him a big, fat pig whenever
she saw him. She began to keep track of how big the crowds were at these roasts, like a marathoner keeping a log of her best times. Each Vinny bashing became an attempt to break her witness attendance record.

One morning when Gretchen was wearing her cheerleading uniform—her privilege on days when the basketball team had games—she passed Nicole Finnegan on her way to her locker. Nicole smiled her brightest, sweetest “Hello!” smile, then pulled out two small squirt guns. In a split second, the front of Gretchen's skirt was completely soaked in cat pee. I heard from a reliable source that the squirt guns disappeared so quickly into Nicole's pockets that they might as well have been made out of steam. In fact, Gretchen and my source might have been the only two kids who saw them. Predictably, Gretchen was furious. As she turned to grab Nicole, the call went out:

“Gretchen peed herself!”

Gretchen tried to turn the tide, but it's hard to drown out a hallway full of laughter when you're covered in cat pee. It wasn't long before the tide swallowed her up, leaving her soaked and sobbing. She didn't show up to the game that night, or any other night for that matter. Her “friends” on the squad had turned on her, like lions on a
wounded antelope. She had ruined her uniform, which to cheerleaders is worse than burning the flag. They kicked her off the squad. When Gretchen finally showed up at school a few days later, she was a shell of her former self.

News started to spread about Vinny's rise to power, but a lot of kids in school still thought it was a joke. What happened to Dickie Dex, however, proclaimed Vinny's arrival in neon letters too bold to miss: Mess with Vinny Biggs and he will ruin you, completely and absolutely.

It happened on a brisk November afternoon. Nobody thought it was odd that an assembly had been called in the middle of the day, with instructions for the entire school to meet on the playground. The eighth graders were the first to make it outside. Consequently, they had the best view of the fate of their unfortunate classmate. I remember stepping outside and hearing a hundred eighth graders gasp in unison. It sounded like a giant getting punched in the stomach. Then the laughter started. It rolled through the crowd, getting stronger as it moved. I remember craning my neck to see, and finally catching a glimpse of what was left of Vinny's old tormentor.

Dickie Dex was semiconscious, slumped over one of the bike racks on the playground. In his mouth was
a pacifier. He was naked except for a diaper, the front of which was soaked with yellow liquid. The back was smeared with a brown substance that suggested that Dickie had no more control of the back functions than he did the front. I heard later through a reliable source that the substance was actually chocolate, but I don't know if anyone that day had the ability or desire to check. From that day forward, Richard Dexter ceased to be the bully known as Dickie Dex; his new nickname was DDD, or Triple D, which stood for “Dirty Diaper Dexter.'” He was so far in the Outs, even the other Outs refused to talk to him.

I remember looking through the crowd that day and seeing a few kids not laughing. Instead they were wearing wide smiles, as if they were watching a repeat of a show they had already seen. Kevin was one of them. So was Nicole. I remember finding Vinny in the crowd, a small grin creasing his chubby face, his eyes cold and set. Then he turned and walked away. The other kids in his crew followed suit. It was a simple act that let everyone know who was responsible. The Franklin Middle School landscape had shifted for good.

Vinny's empire grew. Kids quickly fell into line with the new regime. If they didn't, Vinny had a network of
assassins on call, ready and willing to put them in the Outs. Of these hit kids, Nikki was the best, the fastest, the most feared. As her reputation grew, her look and approach began to change. Gone were the pigtails and cutesy dresses. No longer was she the innocent-looking girl who surprised her marks when she took them out. Now she was always dressed in black, her wild red hair flowing behind her. She was fast, sly, and gorgeous—more than a match for her marks. When she walked through the halls, the crowds parted, kids three times her size scrambling to get out of her way. Vinny was the boss, but it was Nikki you feared, knowing it would be her face you saw right before your life took a turn for the worse. She had it all: the money, the notoriety, the power. Then, at the start of seventh grade, she quit.

Nobody saw it coming, except maybe Vinny, who seemed to see everything coming. Three weeks ago, on the first day of school, Nikki showed up looking like every other seventh-grade girl. Her wild hair had been corralled into a ponytail. She was wearing pink jeans and a light green T-shirt. The color made her emerald eyes blaze, the only hint of what might still be lying underneath her new, tamer surface. Kids still treated her like a shark in a school
of guppies, but she pressed on with her new agenda. She insisted that everyone call her Nicole and treat her like the past year had never happened. Her request was like trying to win the lottery without buying a ticket: damn near impossible.