The Domino Effect (5 page)

“You mind?” I asked, pointing to the space where another body could fit.

“Jccht,”
he hitched with his mouth, sort of sucking his teeth, like he was either calling a horse or really pissed off about something. I stood there, waiting for a horse to show up or for him to move over. He moved over, not too fast and with a groan.
Friendly kid,
I thought as I looked toward the front of the room.

Up there stood Mr. Good News from upstairs, – a tubby thirty-something in a bright sweater and black-rimmed glasses. He cleared his throat a couple times until the blabber died down.

“Welcome gentlemen,” he said. “This is Montgomery Hall, for fourth year men at Hamden Academy. If you’re in the wrong dorm, or the wrong school for that matter, now is the time to confess.”

He spoke like he was on stage, but we stared back at him as if the blank TV screen behind his head was more interesting. It might have been.

“Well, kudos then,” he offered, clearing a hunk of rustcolored hair that had fallen over his glasses. “For those who might have forgotten since check-in, I am Mr. Wright, a literature teacher here at Hamden Academy, the director of the Drama Club and, of course, the dorm master of Montgomery Hall.”

The kid next to me called another horse,
“Jccht,”
but no one seemed to notice.

After a rundown of the many dos and many more don’ts, we were asked by Mr. Wright for some information about ourselves, including where we were from. Most of the 30 or so kids were from somewhere New (England, Jersey, York), with others spread out around the East Coast, Pennsylvania, and even into Ohio. There were some spots of color in the room from Asia, the Middle East, and the guy next to me (from some hostile land, wherever that was), but it was, for the most part, a white-bread crowd, though we didn’t look quite like the perfect kids in the pamphlets handed out by the admissions office.

I guess a mixed student body is what you get at a pretty new private school that’s been named after its town, rather than after some loaded dead guy who started the school back before electricity. The second-class status was alright by me, because it was still a good school, but it also had room for refugees.

“I’m Danny Rorro from Queens,” I said to the room when it was my turn to speak. “One thing I like to do is play baseball, and something that makes me unique is that I think this whole grunge-rock thing is a fad.”

I’d said that last thing strictly for Meeks and Grohl, who were into those bands out of Seattle and other soggy places. I heard Meeks groan as I turned to the stranger on my right.

“Terence King from Houston,” is all he said. He didn’t even bother standing up. I guess he didn’t have anything that made him unique, except for the fact that he was the only black dude in the room (the school, actually, but he might not have known that, yet); or that he somehow managed to effectively conceal the eight-foot pole up his ass; or even the fact that he came all the way to the northwestern corner of New Jersey from Texas. Man. Texas. That seemed farther than China.

At Hamden, you didn’t see a lot of kids from the South. I don’t know why but, if I had to guess, it’d be the food. Straight Yankee grub. Beef and potatoes in six rotating forms: stewed, boiled, loafed / mashed, baked, twice-baked. Occasionally, they threw a roasted chicken out there or some WASP version of lasagna homemade by the Stouffer’s Corporation.

“Not exactly an inspiring performance,” Mr. Wright said, rubbing his trimmed brown beard after everyone was finished. I don’t think he was eyeballing anybody in the room for the lead in this year’s drama production. “But it will have to do and, unless there are any questions, we can all be on our merry…”

Everyone started to get up.

“I got something to say,” Trent McCoy blurted.

Everyone sat back down.

“Well, by all means.” Mr. Wright granted him the floor with a theatrical hand gesture. “We have an open floor policy here at Montgomery Hall.”

A yellow-haired slab of meat lumbered up front and he didn’t have to clear his throat to get our attention. They brought this McCoy gorilla in last year to make sure we kept winning National Wrestling Championships. The school had this huge reputation for wrestling, which was good, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing, but bad because it was the only thing we were good at, so knuckleheads like McCoy ran around like they owned the joint, which they kind of did. I’d seen him, of course. You couldn’t miss the kid, always with this look on his face like he just ate something awful (probably the potatoes), but I’d never heard him speak until then, and I thought a few words might change my impression.

“One of ya’ stole my shoes, and I want em’ back.”

I’d liked him better before. In the dead silence, a couple of people coughed. Someone, Meeks probably, whistled through his teeth, but it couldn’t cut the tension caused by someone stealing from a wrestler. Why rich kids steal, I had no clue, but for whatever reason, things disappeared all the time in the dorm. I knew this personally. But this was different. Much different. Nobody messed with the wrestlers. They were students, technically, but wrestlers really, and, because of that, they had a separate standing or something. They even had their own dorm (or used to), and their own table in the dining hall. Going to their games or matches, or whatever they called them, seemed mandatory, though they never really talked to anybody else. Like I said, nobody messed with them.

“Ah, excuse me,” Mr. Wright interrupted with every adjustable part of his face moving upward. “You believe someone stole your shoes?”

I bet Mr. Wright there was already regretting that open floor policy.

“Wrestling shoes — I won Nationals in them last year,” McCoy barked, somehow thickening his already thick neck. “They got stuff written on the side.”

“Yeah,” puny Jeff Chester jumped up to get his buddy’s back. This kid had come to Hamden from the same hometown in Ohio as McCoy. He wrestled smaller guys. Much smaller. Him I’d heard speak, plenty of times, in class where he asked more questions than a game show host. It wasn’t like he had anything to say, or was even interested in the subject. He was just one of those kids who had to hear his own voice as often as possible. I sat as far away from him as possible, and never ever looked at him outside of class. Now he was living in my dorm, standing in front of the room, and getting ready to do even more talking in his Ohioan twang. Super.

“We was taking a break from moving our things upstairs and left them over in that stairwell there for just, like, 20 minutes before they was gone.”

I didn’t know what they were feeding those kids in Ohio, but it definitely wasn’t brain food.

“Hold on now.” Mr. Wright stepped toward the two wrestlers with his hands up. “Are you absolutely certain?”

“Yeah,” McCoy confirmed, while Chester looked around the room for signs of guilt. Now this was funny, because the kid was, like, 5-and-half-feet, tops, and he couldn’t have weighed more than my mother, but people were actually intimidated by the little loudmouth, just because he was on the wrestling team. Heads started dropping all over the place.

Mr. Wright jumped on the opportunity to act like a teacher. “I see. I see,” he said. “These shoes, in the literary tradition, are more than just shoes. They’re symbols. They mean more than what they represent in the literal sense. They are trophies. Like the white whale in Moby Dick, or Daisy in Gatsby, or...” He continued to run through his list of symbols, but nobody listened. Heads stayed down as Chester continued his scan.

After what I’d been through back home, I wasn’t about to be scared by a pip-squeak with a cold stare, no matter who he hung around with so, when his eyes met mine, I shot him a wink and motioned with my head for him to move on. He didn’t smile or anything, just looked to my right and locked his eyes on the new black kid. Now this was interesting. I didn’t think anyone would say anything out loud about skin color being a big deal or anything, but even more tension entered the room as Chester stared at the only black face in the crowd. Terence King from Houston just sat there, though, staring at his sneakers, messing with his fingernails. Chester crossed his arms and waited. What a tool, that Chester.

Mr. Wright finally stopped his symbolism lecture, and the silence was worse than his words. I swear. A real shift spread throughout the room; you could feel it, like in the movies when nothing is really happening on the screen, but the music changes and the tension builds and builds and builds until you can’t stand it anymore because you know something is about to go down. Terence King from Houston must have felt it, too (about time). He picked up his head and looked around. All the eyes darted away until he came to Chester, who held his gaze.

“The hell you looking at?” Terence King asked.

“Wha-whad’you say?” Chester stammered back.

“You heard me,” Terence said, sitting up.

With proper posture, this guy, Terence, was even taller than he’d seemed all slouched on the couch.

“Oh no, no, no!” Mr. Wright insisted, stepping in front of Chester with both hands up like a traffic cop. “No, no, no!” he said again. Some authority figure. He should have gone back to his lecture on symbolism and bored us into a coma.

Big Boy McCoy side-stepped Mr. No-No-No and bore his eyes down on Terence.

Terence twisted up his face and glared back at McCoy. “Oh, you want some of this?” he asked, rising beside me on his long legs. This all happened fast. Too fast. Sitting right next to Terence, I could feel his energy start to snowball. His hands flexed, his nostrils flared for air, and his shoulders jerked. He, for the first time, checked out all the strange faces in the room. He must have felt very alone.

There was a hint of body odor from the jolt of adrenalin that swirls in the moments before a fight. McCoy studied Terence for a second, then stepped toward him. The room practically burst into flames.

Like most everybody else, I hated fights. They were one of the worst things in the world. Your heart throbs and bloods rushes your brain, and your mouth goes dry in an instant, and you can’t find your breath no matter how hard you try, and all you want, all you want in the world, is to be anywhere but where you are right then, standing there with your body bailing out and your brain cursing you for ever having fooled yourself into believing that fighting was a good idea. But unlike most everybody else, I knew, no matter how it seemed at the moment, a fight wasn’t the end of the world. You survived either way, and you lost either way, and hopefully you were able to avoid such situations in the future by minding your own business, which was my new motto: Mind Your Own Business. And even though I was in the perfect position to help, I sat back and watched. And what I saw was pretty amazing.

Nobody knew what to do. Bodies bumped into each other trying to get out of the way, or separate the guys anxious to fight. Couch legs squealed across the waxy floors, and you could hear people moan and gasp because they wanted to run away but had nowhere to go. Poor Sammie backpedaled into the corner and hugged himself like he was next on McCoy’s hit list.

Tiny Chester tried to sneak around the crowd, but was held down by a few guys smart enough to keep busy with a safe and easy job. A group by us, on the couches in back, stood up and kept Terence from going anywhere as he jabbed a finger and shouted threats over their heads. McCoy, no master of language, passed on the verbal part of the program and moved around the common area furniture. He plowed through the crowd, and it seemed certain he was going to get to Terence and was only a few scared separators away when Mr. Wright — in possibly the boldest move ever attempted in the history of literature/drama teachers — removed his glasses, stepped onto a couch, and leaped through the air onto McCoy’s massive back. I swear.

McCoy staggered forward but didn’t fall, then shrugged Mr. Wright to the floor, bringing everything to a halt. Everyone circled around poor Mr. Wright, who was on the ground and not moving. It was a heavy few seconds, thinking about an adult being hurt, and the reality of reporting to the headmaster that our dorm master had been knocked cold during the first meeting of the year. Great start. But Mr. Wright moved, and everybody began to breathe again. Once on his feet, he pulled his sweater over his exposed belly and, with wild eyes, ordered, “Everyone to their rooms until dinner!”

Cool with me,
I thought.
Time for some tunes.

Chapter 2

F
rom the second story window of my single room, I could see most of campus. The small field in front was empty. The skirtwearing hockey players, with their wooden sticks, must have climbed up the hill beyond the other sideline and returned to their dorms. Being the first day of school, everyone had to be back for a 4:00 orientation. I figured the other meetings had probably gone better than ours had.

To the right of the field, an asphalt path split the backside of campus and sloped up toward the main buildings. The stone, ivy-covered monster in the middle spread across the ridge. Our dining hall was on the first floor, and the younger girls slept upstairs below the slanted roof that shimmered in the afternoon sun.

A patch of trees, just past the field, blocked from view the glass corridor that connected the dining hall to the administrative wing, where more ivy climbed over more stone to where even more girls slept upstairs. The other end of the administration building neighbored the unofficial center of campus — the Arch — which appropriately arched in brick over the campus’s only road before connecting to the mail room. Below the mail room was The Canteen, the only place on campus to get a decent bite to eat.