The Domino Effect (12 page)

After taking the stairs two at a time, I ran into Sammie on the second floor landing, his jaw dropped and eyes bulging. He must have seen the whole thing out his window. He couldn’t have been the only one.

“Whoa, Danny!” Stevie cried. “Are you alright?”

I brushed past him into my room. Terence, slouched across his bed, gave me a sheepish glance. No one else was in there. I sensed Sammie behind me in the doorway.

“Come out already,” I said to the room, but nothing moved. “Get out here,” I ordered.

Laughter blurted from Rice, Santos, Meeks, and Grohl as they emerged from their hiding spots — in the closet and under the desks — slapping each other five.

“The hell are you guys doing?” I asked, pissed off and embarrassed about getting dumped on my ass in public, for the second time.

“Just hanging out and shit, you know,” Rice answered with a shrug.

“That’s it, huh?” I challenged him. “Just hanging out?”

“Yeah, well, you know,” he said, smiling kind of sideways. “We was up here
chillin’
when we saw them man-huggers walking past, and, you know, we couldn’t help teasing them a little bit, that’s all.”

“Really?” I asked. “Couldn’t help it?”

He made some sort of spastic gesture with his body that was supposed, I think, to represent a shrug. There was no talking to that kid. I ran some fingers through my hair, tried to calm down and be smart for a change.

“You should be careful with them guys,” I said to the group before looking at Terence. “Especially you.”

“Hey, man,” he said. “I was just sitting here like this, minding my own business. I didn’t say or do nothing.”

“Yeah, relax, Dan the Man,” Rice advised me. “It’s cool.”

“You call this cool, Bozo?” I ran a hand over my tattered pants and some pebbles tumbled out the bottom.

All of them, even Terence, laughed like hell. All of them except for Sammie. He looked kind of ill.

“You talk to them guys about this at all?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“I thought you were tight with them.”

“Nah,” he mumbled. “Not really.”

“What’s the matter?” Meeks teased. “They didn’t like the way you toweled off their balls last year?”

“Screw you,” Sammie squealed. “That’s not what the manager does!”

Sammie sucked at sports, and he got away with riding the bench for the soccer team in the fall, but he was sunk in winter and spring so, last year. he signed up as the equipment manager for the wrestling team. He even seemed like part of the team there for awhile. They’d given him one of their big, ugly jackets, which he’d worn all winter long. In the spring, after the season ended and I told him we’d no longer be roommates, he still stuck around those guys, even though they’d taken his jacket back.

“Yeah, well,” I said to Sammie, “you’re better off anyway.” As for the others, I told them, again, to watch themselves and, most importantly, to leave me out of whatever they were doing.

“It’s cool,” I was assured, again. “It’s cool.”

It wouldn’t be cool. For me most of all.

Before Thanksgiving break, there was a mandatory meeting for all fourth-year students. We trampled into the chapel and sat in the pews. The school’s guidance counselor, a bald dude with a turtleneck under a corduroy jacket, spoke from the stage about college. We were supposed to be giving serious, serious consideration to the schools on our list, from long shots to safeties. There was some formula to be followed, a formula that had been outlined during previous, private meetings with him. I must have missed those.

I had no first choice. Or second. Or third. My safety, I guess, was St. John’s University in Queens. Both my parents had gone there, and my father was pressing me, big time, to go there, too. He wanted me close to home, but all I knew about college was that it could, like boarding school, get me
away
from home.

The way it was laid out in the meeting, and in the conversations around campus, was that college wasn’t something your parents decided. It was supposed to be our first big decision as adults and, if you got in, you got in. End of story. And even if Pop didn’t think of me as ready for the world, I wanted out of Queens and out of his sight, and college was the way. I listened up as the counselor spoke of deadlines, and of all the brochures with applications still available in his office. I figured I better get moving soon, but I had better things to do first.

After the meeting, I waited on the edge of the meadow. Hats and scarves and heavy jackets covered the people sitting beneath the concrete sky. I dug my hands into the pockets of my thick leather jacket, but still, I shivered with anticipation.

“Hello, Daniel,” Mr. Wright said, coming up beside me. Him, I wasn’t anxious to see.

“Oh, hey Mr. Wright,” I said, blinded for a second by his Technicolor sweater, paired with a bright red scarf. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” he said, pinching his mouth to one side. “I was meaning to have you to my apartment, but I might as well speak with you now.”

“No, no, it’s OK, Mr. Wright. I’ll come upstairs later. I’ll come later. What time works for you?”

“I understand you were involved in an altercation, of sorts, outside the dorm recently.” Not much of a listener, that guy. “And I wanted to let you know how troubled I was by that. Troubled and concerned.”

“Hey. I was just on my way home, and those guys were messing with me. No big deal, though. Nothing happened.”

“Well, I imagine there was more to it than that,” he said, with that all-knowing tone adults have.

“Nah, not really,” I said. “That was it.”

He squinted and crossed his arms. “Despite my efforts, I suspect there is something going on, a rivalry of sorts, between the two camps, and I want it to stop.”

“Talk to them,” I said.

“To whom?”

“The wrestlers.”

“I recently met with their coach, and it is his contention that his players are being provoked.”

He was right, and he was wrong. Like a lot of things, it was kind of complicated. I probably could have provided some insight, some help in figuring things out before they got out of hand, but I didn’t say a word.

“You know, Daniel,” he said. “The reason I brought Mr. King down to your room is that I understood you were someone who could bring people together. An ambassador of sorts.”

“Oh yeah?” I laughed. “Where’d you get that idea?”

“A little birdie told me.”

“Nah,” I said. “That’s not me.”

He stroked his beard and sized me up.

“Hey,” Brenda, thankfully, interrupted

Within the gray surroundings her auburn hair seemed especially bright. She settled next to me, and it felt good having her by my side. With a mitten-covered hand inside my elbow, she shifted her eyes from me to Mr. Wright. I began to move us away, but she held me in place while extending her free hand. “Hi. I’m Brenda, Danny’s friend.”

“Hello Brenda,” said the English teacher. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure. I’m Mr. Wright.”

“Mr. Wright, huh?” She played her own straight man. “My mother said I’d meet you someday.”

He laughed. She smiled. I pulled her along.

“Come on.”

“OK,” she said. “So long, Mr. Wright.”

“Au revoir,”
he called after us. “Think about what I said, Daniel.”

We escaped Mr. Technicolor Sweater and stopped on the road behind the dining hall, beneath a tree with bare branches. Dry leaves scratched past our feet as we kissed.

“What was that all about?” Brenda pulled away to ask.

“What?”

“What Mr. Wright asked you to think about.”

“I forget,” I said. “You ready to go?”

We’d been spending our afternoons in a classroom at the Language Arts building.

It was private and warm, and it only cost me a couple of Early Birds to get Grohl to cough up the information. I should have gone to him right away, because this place worked. I could feel Brenda becoming more and more relaxed, and I got to touch her and she touched me back. It’s all I could think about. I tried to pull her along, on the road behind the dining hall, but she wouldn’t budge that day.

“Was Mr. Wright talking about those boys?”

“What boys?”

“The wrestlers.”

Brenda had heard about what happened. Everyone had heard. And even though I wasn’t happy about it, I wasn’t complaining either, because it was after she’d heard that things had started happening between us in the Language Arts building. I’d take that trade any day. Hell, they could have hung me from the chapel by my undies if it got me closer to Brenda. The bad thing was that she had gotten kind of obsessed with the whole rigamarole regarding the shoes and the wrestlers and my roommate, who still didn’t talk to many people, or even come out of the room that much.

“I’m worried,” she said. “Kyle Chester is in my math class, and he was talking this morning about what they did to you, and how they were going to find out who stole their shoes,
by any means necessary.
Those were his exact words. By any means necessary.”

“Oh, boy,” I laughed, and rolled my eyes. “Don’t worry about those guys, Bren.”

“I do worry,” she said, taking my arm. “I just came from the mail room and they put those awful signs back up. This time in color.”

“Wow,” I cracked. “Color copies — what a time to be alive.”

She smacked me on the arm and then balled the mittens on her hips. She looked so gorgeous and ripe I could have bitten her like a peach. I swear. “OK, you’re right,” I said. “Let’s go to the LA building where it’s safe. It can be, like, our hideout or something.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m busy this afternoon.”

“Busy with what?”

“Well, that meeting about college really got me thinking about sending out a few more applications.” She said it all perky and pleased with herself.

“I thought you were set on Connecticut,” I said. She’d been talking about the University of Connecticut, her home state school, since we’d been together.

“I am,” she insisted. “But a few more applications couldn’t hurt.”

I couldn’t argue with that logic.

“And what about you, Mister?” she said, laying an open palm on my chest. “You haven’t done any yet, far as I know.”

“I know. I know,” I said. “I will. I will.”

“When?” she asked with some doubt. “Thanksgiving is next week, and that’s the deadline for at least getting started, you know?”

“Hey, I was in there, too, Bren. I heard the guy.”

“So… ” She posed, with her hands on her hips again. “Come with me to the guidance office and pick up some applications or, at least, make an appointment with Mr. Dawkins.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Dawkins,” she said. “The guidance counselor, Danny, from the meeting you were just in.” She didn’t actually say ‘duh,’ but the way she spoke and the look on her face had ‘duh’ all over it.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I promise. Just not right now, ‘cause I got something else to do.”

“Fine,” she said, and reached out to pinch my mouth together before walking away. She killed me, that Brenda.

I watched her go, her knees kind-of-knocking, and her butt kind of bouncing and her head held up high. She passed under the Arch and out of sight. Campus was quiet at this in-between hour of the afternoon, so nobody saw me follow Brenda toward the Arch, and nobody saw me slip into the empty mail room, where I tore down all those WANTED posters, just like I had before.

Chapter 7

I
felt kind of jealous when the guys in the dorm talked of homecomings over Thanksgiving with their families, old friends, and local girls. The best I could hope for was to be left alone, for the most part, until it was time to go back to school. That was until I made a plan.

I took the bus from Hamdenville to the city and got to Queens late Wednesday night. We spent Thursday out in Long Island at my mother’s cousin’s house, where I shot baskets in their driveway most of the day, while her kids, younger than me, messed around on their rollerblades playing hockey. Mom was working Friday, and Pop had a football game at the high school he taught at in Brooklyn, with his marching band performing at halftime. He asked me to come with him about a hundred times, and I could tell he wasn’t just being polite, but I had all day Friday set aside for a phone call.