The Domino Effect (23 page)

“Don’t say that, Sammie,” I said as he walked off.

“See you for dinner, Danny.” He went into his room and closed the door. Standing in the hallway, I started to figure some things out. I started to see how the dominoes had already fallen, in a bad way, and how they might fall some more.

Chapter 15

“Y
ou hear about Todd?” Meeks asked. I spun around. He’d snuck up behind me in the laundry room as I dumped some threads in the machine.

“What about him?” I asked.

He dug his hands into his pockets and looked shifty. “Follow me,” he said.

I left my dirty clothes and trailed Meeks into his corner room. Grohl waited empty-handed, his guitar leaned up against the wall.

“What about him?” I asked again.

Meeks sat in his beanbag chair and locked his fingers behind his head. “He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“He doesn’t live at home anymore.”

“You breaking my shoes?”

“No, no. I went there, to his house, and his mother told me,” he insisted.

Suddenly, I was the one greedy for gossip.

“When? When? What’d she say?”

Meeks dished about how he’d been calling Todd every couple of weeks since school started, leaving messages on his private line, until the line was disconnected. Home for the last weekend, Meeks took a cruise up to Todd’s town in Westchester, NY. He went to Todd’s house and knocked on the door. His mother showed Meeks in and told him that Todd didn’t live in their big old house anymore. She told him that a pretty girl had shown up and told her that her son had done something horrible and that his mother should know. That was it.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“She wouldn’t say,” Meeks answered, perturbed. “I even asked her to, you know, describe her or something, but she wouldn’t say anything beyond the fact that the girl was pretty. Big help that is. Every Betty that Todd dated was pretty.”

I knew who it was. I could tell by the way Brenda had found her step. She’d taken back, best she could, what had been taken away.

“And the more I thought about it,” Meeks went on, “the more I realized it could have been a lot of people.”

“How’s that?”

“You know, man,” Grohl said, “Todd was our friend and everything, but he always had to have whatever he wanted, especially with the Bettys. He’s the one who schooled us in the rules of cat chasing, and he took more than a few girls from both of us, especially this sorry-looking dude.”

“Bite me,” Meeks said.

“So?” I said. “I thought all was fair when it came to that crap and you guys?”

“It is and it isn't,” Grohl said. “Todd took it too far sometimes, and he kind of had this reputation.”

“For what?”

“For the rope-a-dope,” Meeks said, kind of mischievous and kind of sad, too.

“The hell is that?” I had to ask.

“Man,” Meeks sighed. “You city boys are rubes, you know that?”

He was right about that, in a way. These suburban kids were into things I knew nothing about. So Meeks explained this drug Rohypnol and how sick guys think it's cool to drop it in girls’ drinks and have their way with them when they’re passed out. Super. It made me feel lucky to have grown up middle-class, under the eye of my mother and father and everybody else in the neighborhood. It also made me sick thinking about the girls this had happened to, especially Brenda Divine.

I asked about Todd and how he’d gotten this reputation, so Meeks clued me in.

“When we were sophomores, there was this senior girl, a super hot fox named Bernadine Thompson, and Todd had been after her, like, all year, but she wasn't having it. At the end of the year, there was a big graduation party at someone's house for the seniors, and Todd was there, of course, and she says he gave her the rope-a-dope.”

“How'd she know?”

“She woke up in one of the bedrooms with a hangover.” So?

“She’s doesn’t drink. She’s allergic to alcohol. And she wasn’t planning on spending the night.”

“OK…” I nodded.

“And Todd was next to her on the bed...”

“And?”

“When she got home she realized her underwear was on inside out.”

I felt sick.

“Bernadine told her parents,” Meeks continued. “And they called Headmaster Hurley.”

“And what’d he do?”

“You know who Todd’s father is?

“All Todd ever said was that he was an asshole who lived somewhere overseas or something.”

“He is an asshole. A rich one. He runs an investment banking firm out of Switzerland.”

Grohl said that Todd’s father had come to Pride Day the previous year, arriving by a helicopter that landed on the soccer field just before the game started.

“He came all the way from Switzerland for Pride Day?” I asked.

“Well,” Meeks coughed. “He sort of had a private meeting with Headmaster Hurley, too. Apparently, some funds were exchanged in order to keep Todd in school.”

“And how do you guys know all this?”

Meeks scoffed. “We find things out. It’s what we do.”

“The freaking Hardy Boys,” I said.

They smiled and slapped each other five.

“So what made this time different?” I asked.

“Whoever it was went straight to Todd’s mom, and Mrs. B already knew about Bernadine Thompson, too, of course. And the way she was talking when I was there, it seemed like there could have been some other times, too.”

“There’s a reason,” Grohl said, “that a connected cat like Todd Brooks goes to Hamden Academy and not one of them Harvard high schools in New England.”

“Super,” I moaned, feeling bad about the world. “So where is he now?” I asked.

Meeks grinned. “Military school.”

“Say that again?”

“You heard me,” he said, still grinning. “Military school! I guess Mrs. Brooks put her foot down or his father had enough of bailing Todd’s ass out. I don’t know. But that boy is the property of West Point until he turns 18!”

I wanted to kiss Mrs. Brooks. I also couldn’t help thinking that if I hadn’t played my cards right back at home, Todd and I could’ve met at military school instead of at boarding school. At least at military school, I wouldn’t have had to worry about him stealing my girl. Or hurting her.

Poor Brenda. She didn’t deserve what happened to her, of course, but she had stood up to him and maybe stopped some other people from getting hurt. That took a ton of guts. She had taken care of things on her own, the best she could after the fact, but there was still a little something I could do to keep her secret safe.

“I know it wasn’t Brenda,” I lied.

The Hardy Boys questioned me with their eyes. “You sure?” Meeks finally asked. “We were thinking something was up with her, you know, and him not coming back to school this year.”

“Must have been somebody else,” I said. “She dumped him over the summer, fair and square. No big deal.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me,” I said. “She must have figured that guy out first, smart as she is.”

“And what about you?” Grohl asked. “She figure you out, too?”

“Yeah,” I said. But I was going to work on that.

I went upstairs and wrote a letter. I wrote a letter to Brenda that didn’t mention anything about Todd or anything about me. I only asked for her to let me know she was OK with a smile or something.

I sensed a new beginning toward the end of winter. A warm wind danced around campus. Some flat clouds still hung overhead, but there was enough sunlight to make the new air sweet and easy to breath. My dreams were of those incredible things that usually fill a teenager’s sleep. Sometimes, I’d be sad after waking up, but during the day, I walked on green grass and thought about tomorrow. I thought about those things I had been denied, those things I had denied myself but still had coming.

I had other things to do besides dwell on myself and my future. I had work. Piles of schoolwork they dumped on us every day, assignments in history and math and other big-book stuff. I read. I wrote. And I monkeyed around with decimal points even though
‘rithmetic
gave me a rash. And somehow, through the hassle of college preparation, I found time to think of Brenda. Her face and her smile filled every dull moment, every lapse in concentration.

Connecticut, that little state I had never thought about before, became my symbol. My dream. And it was there that I would make good. I’d get a scholarship to Stonington College and impress my parents with my maturity. I’d make new friends and be good to them while working on getting back my old friend, with her beautiful face.

Signs of spring began to arrive, squirrels and birds and buds on trees. And even though it was still a little cold, and it still got dark early, I felt the looming spring had good things coming. So I waited for winter to quietly close.

The basketball season ended on the road, in the first round of the state tournament, and they lost by a lot. According to Rice, Terence had his worst game of the year.
“Homie
barely showed up,” were his exact words. I swear. Future sportscaster, that kid.

Terence didn’t care. Compared to how private he’d been with most everybody all year, he went around now like the Pope on parade, smiling in his Brown sweatshirt, talking to people here and there. I guess you couldn’t blame him. He’d gotten what he wanted out of Hamden: a full scholarship to an Ivy League school. Not bad.

But before he could put away his high-tops, there was one last game. Every team that makes the state tournament gets to play against the faculty. It’s a tradition, and not such a bad one, since it’s kind of fun to get out there in front of the whole school and make the teachers look foolish. Last year, we played them in softball and ran those old-timers into the ground. Wrestling gets skipped, of course, though it would certainly be something to see… especially a rematch between Mr. Wright and McCoy. I’d be the first one there for that, hoping that Mr. Wright had a weapon hidden under his sweater.

Anyway, the teachers played the basketball team on a Friday afternoon. The school made a pretty big deal about it, since it was the first time in a long time we’d done anything in basketball. Wrestling season was still going, and they were on their way toward the state championship before going for the national title. Still, people seemed more excited about basketball.

Both sets of stands were filled, and I hoped to catch Brenda there, with that smile I’d asked for in my letter. But she didn’t show. There were a lot of blue jackets, though, spread out through the crowd in groups of two. I wondered about the spacing, since those guys ran like wolves. I wondered why they were there at all.

The scene on the floor was something else. The two basketball coaches were fairly young guys who still had some game and style, but the rest of the teachers were a wreck — old sneakers, bandaged knees, padded elbows, even some goggles and headbands. I was even embarrassed by the lack of material in some of the shorts they wore. And they played worse than they looked. It was like an old-timer’s reunion of the worst team ever.

The real team dressed in their own gear, with most of them following Terence’s style of baggy shorts and cut-off sleeves. Since the coaches were on the opposing team, Terence ran the player’s side. He directed all his guys around, made substitutions, and even got booed when he took himself out for a minute. Everyone loved him, and he ate it up, smiling and encouraging people, even trying a couple of half-court shots (one of which he made).