The Domino Effect (21 page)

Overnight, a foot of powder landed. I sat in the window on Sunday morning, staring at the snow-covered campus. Split in the middle by the shoveled path, it looked like a book without words.

After brunch, some students showed up with trays from the dining hall and used them to sled down the slope of the bowl. Snowballs were chucked, and a battle began between Montgomery and Carlyle. A lot of guys were out there, even the big basketball star, Terence. Snowballs flew back and forth. Our side could have used me and my pitching arm, but I didn’t belong with them.

My mind raced. Thoughts kept coming and coming. I couldn’t relax or think straight. A soup of emotions swirled in my head: anger, regret, sorrow, self-pity, concern. I went over the events again and again and couldn’t decide whether to cry or to break things. Despite everything, I missed Brenda more than I knew was possible, and I had this sense of being so far away, even though I could see the crown of her dorm. My reflection in the glass resembled a ghost. My teeth chattered and my body ached, so I ducked under the covers and didn’t come out until the next morning.

I walked to breakfast in nothing but my thickest sweater on top of my second thickest sweater. My last meal had been Saturday’s lunch, only half of a ham sandwich as I’d looked forward to the loss of my virginity in an afternoon delight. That went well.

I wolfed down three breakfasts in the dining hall, then stopped by the mail room before the start of first class. I exchanged the yellow card in my box for a brown grocery bag stuffed to the gills. I carried the paper sack outside and opened it under the Arch. Inside were both of my jackets and a few other things Brenda had borrowed. I put on my leather and opened the envelope on top of the clothes, figuring it would be Brenda’s first attempt at making things right. Another good call by me.

Dear Danny,

How could you leave me like that? Haven’t we been together long enough for you just to hear me out? Are you that shallow? Insecure? That much of a JERK? It wasn’t about me getting over Todd. It was about me getting over what he did to me.

Last summer he invited me to his house, but when I got there no one was home but him. He said his mother really wanted to meet me and that she had to go away for the night, last minute, and would be back in the morning. I didn’t even know his parents were divorced. I should have left. It felt creepy, but he told me how much it would mean to him for me to meet his mom, so I stayed. We drank a little, then started fooling around and he kept saying gross things and grabbing me everywhere, but I kept telling him “no.” I just didn’t feel like we were ready, and I didn’t feel comfortable at all. And I don’t remember anything else. Something happened, but I don’t know what.

In the morning I couldn’t figure anything out. I was dressed and everything, lying in his mother’s bed, but my clothes felt different. I felt different. Todd said I passed out on him and he had carried me upstairs, but I wasn’t that tired and had only drank a little. He was acting weird and secretive and had this creepy look on his face, so I just went home and pretended like everything was normal. But it wasn’t.

I knew something happened, but I didn’t know what. That was the worst part, not knowing. What had he done to me? I knew it wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t know what to do because it was, like, date rape, I guess, kind of. MAYBE? And that’s so hard to prove, especially when you don’t remember anything, and especially when the other person is everybody’s Mr. Wonderful and I was totally there, alone in his house, drinking and fooling around and everything. I felt so stupid and so alone.

I called him a few times and he didn’t call me back, so I sent him a letter saying if he came back to school, I would tell everyone that he did something to me that he shouldn’t have. I would tell everyone that he put a drug in my drink or did something and that he was a criminal. I guess he believed me.

I was a complete wreck before coming back to school, and more so once I got here, even after I found out for sure that Todd wasn’t coming back. Then I realized I just needed to be near home and planned to leave and would have left had it not been for us. I needed to be with you, Danny. I was scared and lonely and thought you were the kind of person who could make me feel better.

For awhile, I did feel better, a lot better. I fell in love with you and started to feel better about everything. I started to think about going away to college again, but that would have been a mistake since I still feel so afraid sometimes, like now.

Todd took something from me, and I want it back. I thought that you could help me, especially after hearing about what happened to you at home with your head and everything. I was wrong.

I hope you realize how wrong you were. How could you leave me there in that room when I needed you so much? You could have put your arms around me and helped me feel better, told me everything was going to be OK, but you didn’t. You wouldn’t even listen to me. You ran. You jerk!

Do not try to talk to me. We are not together anymore, or even friends.

I realized this is something I have to work out by myself or with people capable of caring. I suggest you do the same since you clearly have things of your own to work out.

I feel sorry for you, Danny. I feel sorry for all of us.

Brenda

Her words landed like a cinder block to the stomach. I dropped the bag onto the slushy ground, doubled over, and dumped my lumberjack breakfast into the snow.

“Ewwww!” a group of girls cried as they hurried past. I grabbed the shopping bag, hopped the snowbank alongside the meadow, and booked it through the knee-deep powder, my heart beating down to my soggy shoes. I’d never felt such panic before.

As I ran, the wet bottom of the bag began to give, and my things started dropping out, one by one, as I destroyed the beauty of the previously-untouched meadow.

I leaped up the stairs of the women’s dorm, slid across the deck, then burst through the heavy door with a shredded brown bag dangling from my hand. “Get Brenda, please,” I begged through heavy breath. The few people in the foyer looked at me like I was crazy. They were right. “Brenda!” I called to the 2
^nd
floor landing. “Brenda!”

A few minutes later, Brenda’s roommate came hustling down the stairs to tell me she wasn’t available. I stayed put. Five minutes later, the lady who ran her dorm came down and asked me politely to leave. Then she asked me, not so politely, to leave or she would call security. I didn’t even know we had security.

I dropped the last strand of my tattered bag on their marble floor and walked outside. Sweat poured out of me into the cold air. Steam rose. My jeans dragged from the waist down and my whole body felt numb as I retraced the trail through the meadow, picking up what I’d dropped. I walked the path back to Montgomery, my arms heavy with all the things that I carried. My classmates were on their way to first period. I went to bed.

I stayed in the room for two days, sleeping off my idiot’s flu. Terence brought me sandwiches and juice from the dining hall, and Sammie hooked me up with Early Birds. Mr. Wright visited twice a day to check up on me and confirm my excused absence from class. Puking in public usually gets you a few days, and the fever and chills that shook me didn’t hurt either.

The real sickness came from the feeling I had about Brenda. I had let her down, abandoned her at the moment she needed me most. I was the opposite of her hero. And because of that, I knew. I knew for sure. She was already over me.

Chapter 14

I
’d been up and out of bed for a week or so, but was still overwhelmed by sickness. I walked around like a mope, not really speaking to anyone or doing anything beyond what was required. I could feel myself slipping into the hermit mode I’d been in back home, during my second year of high school. I felt like calling Dr. DeFuso or somebody to tell them how bad I felt about everything. It was jealousy, I guess, and stupidity, I’m sure, that made me treat Brenda that way. But it was more than that, too. I’d disappeared. I wasn’t myself anymore. I hadn’t been for awhile. And what made it worse was that I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be anybody else either.

The dining hall at Hamden Academy was a long room with shiny chandeliers. The thick blue carpet matched the wallpaper hung with portraits of former headmasters and etched names of valedictorians. The large windows were framed in dark wood. The L-shaped hall was spaced with thick wooden tables, six chairs per side and one at each end. The seating rotation for the students changed every couple of weeks, while faculty stayed put at the heads.

Every student was required to be at lunch and dinner each weekday, semi-formal at night. Attendance was taken right before announcements, with Sunrises dished out to those who were absent or even late. Behavior was monitored and specific rules, both formal and informal, were law.

“You kill it, you fill it,” a perky freshman reminded me after I polished off a pitcher of milk.

I hadn’t spoken a word to the others at my table since we’d started up together the previous week. They all went quiet, and their eyes were on me as the noise from the rest of the hall blathered on around us.

“Right,” I acknowledged, and stood to fulfill my duty while the others went on with their meal.

I refilled the plastic pitcher in the room next to the kitchen. On the way back, with my head low, I began to think about the stupidity of my zombie routine. Common sense came creeping into my mind, until the pitcher was jerked straight down and a flood of cold liquid splashed over my crotch and thighs. I was soaked with milk. Chester snickered as he walked away. The cold shock that shivered me was quickly exchanged for hot rage.

I snatched up the empty pitcher and drew back my arm. I narrowed in on the target, just as I had been coached in baseball. I was going to bounce that thing off the back of his head, but before I could fire the pitch, I was stopped by a grip to my wrist.

“Yo,” Terence said. “The hell you doing, man?”

He had a look of real concern on his face. The whole room was quiet. Heads popped up all over. Everybody stared. I dropped the pitcher and walked out of there, right through the looks and the laughter.

My nerves felt like the lit fuse of a firecracker, and as soon as I got outside, the early March evening started in on my soggy patch. It felt cold down there, for sure, but as I walked, the dark, empty campus began to soothe me. I followed the path slowly, breathing and releasing air in long, steady breaths that drifted toward the darkened sky. Silence seemed to ring.

I sat on the bench in front of the dorm and let the anger and frustration and everything else poisonous inside me swell and rise and then streak down my face. I cried, at first, without sound or motion. Then I bawled like a child, shuddering from spasms. The teardrops fell from my chin, like the blood that had dripped one time from my head, and another time from my hand.

When the tears stopped, I stayed in the stillness, the total stillness, gazing out over the silhouette of tree tops swaying in front the slanted roof from under which the whole school breathed. A wisp of wind brushed across my cheek. Then, just like that, the cloud cover broke. Streaky pieces played hide-and-seek with the slivered moon, and the campus was covered in new light. It was suddenly less cold, too.

Glowing clouds pulled away from the moon. On the pointed tip, I reached up my hand to pierce my finger. Imaginary blood dripped into my mouth. I didn’t taste dirty pennies this time, like when I was a kid in the street with my head busted open. This time, I tasted Italian ice, like when I was a kid — a real kid — and those streets belonged to me. I stayed on the bench for awhile, staring at the wide open sky, a finger in my mouth and my eyes on the moon.