The Morning After (11 page)

He turned up his plastic bottle and gulped down the last of his water. The cool liquid served as much needed replenishment for T.K.'s thirsty body. “Jerrod, you got a minute?” Track team practice had just ended, and the warmer than normal temperatures had made today's a more grueling session than usual.

“Yeah, Coach D.” Jerrod had defied the heat and run an additional lap around the track. So as the others dispersed to the school to take their showers or meet awaiting guardians, the team's lead sprinter continued to lie with his back flat against the grass, holding his knees to his chest to stretch his quadriceps.

T.K. smiled and grabbed another bottle from the cooler. Those little extras were what made the difference between Jerrod's speed and the charted time of the others. When Jerrod made no effort to stop what he was doing, T.K. occupied the space beside him, laid the unopened bottle on Jerrod's stomach, and began stretching his own legs. “I hear you're a celebrity around these parts,” T.K. joked.

It was enough to make Jerrod sit up and laugh. He took a moment to twist off the cap and refresh himself before responding. “Nah. I ain't no celebrity.” Using the hand towel that lay on the ground beside him, Jerrod wiped his mouth. “It's just that everybody got a kick out of the news thing, that's all. It's all my teachers and friends have been talking about for the last three days. But it'll die down after a while.”

T.K. continued to stretch; not that he really needed to. “Stop being modest, kid. You're doing good in the classroom and on the track, and everybody's proud of you. I know I am.”

Jerrod sported a subdued grin and shrugged. T.K. could tell that he was embarrassing the boy. “Thanks,” Jerrod responded. “Getting good grades is cool 'cause I know I'm freaking out all the teachers from last year who were used to me doing bad. Especially that geeky old Mr. Greene.”

“Mr. Greene?” T.K. dropped his leg to the ground. His first thought went to his pastor's son-in-law, and right away, Jerrod read his mind.

“Not the guy who met with us at Benihana that's doing the newspaper feature on me,” he clarified. “That Mr. Greene is tall and good-looking. I'm talking about the stumpy, ugly dude who teaches freshman English.” Jerrod frowned as he spoke of his least favorite freshman instructor.

“That's not a very nice way to describe anybody.”

“It might not be nice, but it's true. I bet you knew exactly who I was talking about as soon as I said it.”

Jerrod was right, so T.K. didn't even try to dispute him. Instead, he chose not to respond at all.

“He was the worst teacher ever,” Jerrod proclaimed. Then mimicking the teacher's cranky voice, he added, “‘Can you tell the class what a complex-compound sentence is, Mr. Mays?' I used to hate the way he called me
Mr. Mays
, like I ain't had no first name.”

It was hard not to laugh at the boy's antics, but T.K. managed. “Teachers do that sometimes, Jerrod. He probably didn't mean anything by calling you Mr. Mays. I mean, it's a respectful title, right? At least he wasn't calling you something rude.”

“Well, he wasn't trying to be respectful, that's for sure,” Jerrod insisted. “In his mind, he probably was calling me something rude. If he was, I don't care. Every time I called his name, I was thinking something rude in my mind, so if he did the same, it would just make us even.”

T.K. shaded his eyes from the overhead sun and looked at Jerrod in concern. “You sound bitter. I thought we'd gotten past all those grudges.”

“I am past it, Coach D. Most of it, anyway.” Jerrod scanned the distant trees, avoiding eye contact with his mentor. After draining the rest of his water, he added, “It's just that every time I see him in the hallways, he cuts his beady old eyes at me like he wishes I'd just disappear or something. I know I gave him a hard time last year, but that was then and this is now. The other teachers don't diss me like he does. I mean, they don't run up and hug me either, but at least they don't act like I'm some kind of fungus. It don't matter to Mr. Greene that I ain't still doing all the stupid stuff I did as a freshman. It don't matter to him that I'm making better grades, got a better attitude, or that my skills on the track made the six o'clock news. He's always gonna see me as Puppy J.”

It had been months since T.K. had heard Jerrod refer to himself by the name he'd been given during his stint in the now dismantled Dobermans school gang. The boy had been so tame lately that it was easy to forget his wild days. “Look, Jerrod, you're never going to please everybody, so don't even try. There are some folks in all of our lives who will choose to forever know us as who we were, regardless of who we are now, or what we will become in the future. Pleasing people isn't what we should be concerned with anyway. Remember? We've talked about this before. It would be a lost cause, because we could never please everybody, even if we tried. It's all about pleasing God, kid. As long as we do those things that satisfy Him, we're good to go.”

“You sound just like that dude at your church,” Jerrod pointed out.

“What dude?”

“That preacher that had the fine, dark-skinned lady with him when he came over and spoke to us after church last Sunday.”

T.K. chuckled at Jerrod's reference. “You mean Reverend Tides's son?” Jerrod nodded. “Yeah. Not the one who sits in the pulpit all the time. The real cool one.”

“Jerome.”

“Yeah, Jerome; that's his name.”

Being compared to “the cool one” caused T.K.'s smile to linger, even as he reverted back to the original subject. “Jerrod, the point I'm trying to make is that you have to get beyond people like Mr. Greene. Whether he likes you or not shouldn't even matter. You made some mistakes in the ninth grade—big deal. What kid didn't? It's what you do from this point forward that matters. So what if you didn't know what a complex-compound sentence was then? You know now, don't you?”

Jerrod looked down at T.K. and waved off the comment. “Pshhhhh! I knew what a complex-compound sentence was then too. I just used to fake like I didn't just to get him going. And he fell for it every single time.”

Finally sitting up, T.K. gave Jerrod a side glance. “Did you really know what it was?”

Jerrod smacked his lips as though T.K.'s doubtful words were insulting. “A complex-compound sentence is a sentence with at least two independent clauses and at least one dependent clause,” he said with ease. Then he pursed his lips, cocked his head, and gave his coach a look that said, “Now what?”

T.K. patted Jerrod on the back. “Okay, okay, I stand corrected. That was good. Very good, actually. What I don't understand is why you couldn't have just answered the man's question so he would have known that he wasn't wasting his time on you.”

“As far as I'm concerned, he was wasting his time. Mr. Greene is lame. He ain't taught me jack. He ain't taught nobody nothing for that matter. I ain't need him to teach me junk that I learned in middle school. We knew that mess way before we ever got in his class.”

T.K. made a mental note to work with Jerrod on his grammar, but for now, it wasn't the most pressing issue. “Well, that's even better, Jerrod. You should have told him that, so he would know that you not only knew what he was teaching, but you were beyond it.”

“Why?” Jerrod challenged. “He ain't expected me to know it anyway.”

“All the more reason to show him that you did,” T.K. stressed. “Put your thinking cap on, kid. If he really didn't expect you to know, and you acted like you didn't, then you validated his expectations. You let him get the best of you when you had all the ammo needed right in here”—he poked Jerrod's head with his index finger—“to win the battle.”

Still in a seated position, Jerrod pulled his knees close to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. T.K. watched as the boy stared across the field in the direction of the school. Shrugging, Jerrod said, “I wasn't thinking like that. I guess when you know that people ain't gonna believe in you no how, you just don't feel like putting forth the effort to give them a reason to. When they tell you that you ain't nothing long enough, you start to feel like nothing.”

Jerrod had grown a great deal over the past year; both physically and mentally, but as T.K. looked at him now—shoulders slumped, chin resting between his knees—the fifteen-year-old had the demeanor of a boy half his age.

“Well, I'll bet the little stump doesn't know what to make of you now, huh?” T.K. needed to say something to revive Jerrod's deflating spirit, and it worked.

With a wily grin, Jerrod looked at him and replied, “Oh, that little stump didn't know what to make of me
then
. I fixed him real good. I got the last laugh.”

T.K.'s eyebrows shot up, and his mind reverted to the Dobermans, who would do just about anything to get back at teachers they disliked. Ms. Shepherd, a young, first-year administrator who was Jerrod's freshman Algebra teacher, had been forced to resign from a profession she'd dreamed of since childhood, after she was gang raped and brutally beaten by members of the Dobermans who thought she'd mistreated Jerrod. It wasn't until Jerrod and other boys in the group who had played no part in planning or executing the attack, testified against the guilty members during a trial that sentenced them as adults, that Jerrod was able to forgive himself and put the ordeal behind. Ms. Shepherd had forgiven him too, and that helped.

“Got the last laugh, how?” T.K. asked through a held breath. He needed to know that Jerrod hadn't done anything to harm Mr. Greene. “What did you do to get back at him?”

“I aced the test,” Jerrod said to his coach's relief. “I proved my knowledge on the final exam. We had to give several examples of complex-compound sentences on there, and the last one I gave was a good one if I must say so myself.”

This was the first time T.K. had heard this confession. “What kind of sentence did you write? Nothing improper, I hope.”

“I didn't cuss or nothing,” Jerrod said, like cursing was the proverbial line that divided what was seemly and what wasn't, “but he still sent me to Mr. Wright's office.”

“Then it was inappropriate in some way, I gather.”

“Not to me, it wasn't,” Jerrod defended. “He asked for a complex-compound sentence and I gave him one. He didn't say it had to be a sentence he liked. Even the principal couldn't punish me. How could he? I did my assignment and gave a correct answer. Mr. Wright had me to sit in his office for the rest of the period just to pacify Mr. Greene, and that was cool with me, 'cause I woulda rather sat in doggy doo than sit in that English class.”

In the brief silence that followed, T.K. twisted his mouth to prevent himself from laughing. Then the suspense of it all became too much. He asked his next question with caution. “What was the sentence, Jerrod?”

A new smile spread across Jerrod's lips like he had been hoping T.K. would ask. He raised his head high and proclaimed, “Many amphibians live in wetlands, but the boy's English teacher, who is human by most definitions, is shaped just like a bullfrog, but gets to live in a house anyway.”

T.K. didn't want to laugh at the example that Jerrod had given, but he had been caught too unprepared to stifle the eruption. Mr. Greene's peculiar, dumpy, elfish appearance could, in fact, be described as frog-like, making it all the more amusing. Jerrod joined in, and they both had a hearty laugh at the teacher's expense.

“That was so very inappropriate,” T.K. managed to regain his composure and say.

“Maybe, maybe not. But it was still a complex-compound sentence. And I didn't call no names, so Mr. Greene couldn't prove that I was talking about him.”

“But you were.”

“His word against mine.”

T.K. shook his head, but residue laughter lingered in his belly. For a while, only the voices of horse-playing children in the distance filled the empty space around them. Jerrod's voice ended the swelling silence. “You wanted to talk to me about something?”

T.K. hadn't forgotten the real reason he'd asked for some of Jerrod's time. He just needed to talk about something more light-hearted before getting into it. “Yeah; I did.” He squirmed a little and cleared his throat. “Is Jen okay?”

“Ma?” Jerrod's nose crinkled. “She's fine. Why you asking me that? You just saw her a couple of nights ago.”

Monday evening was the last time T.K. had seen or communicated with Jennifer. That was when he'd made the drive to Braxton Park so that they could watch the special news feature together. While both T.K. and Jerrod had been overly excited to see themselves being interviewed on the major network, Jennifer barely responded. Every smile, every accolade, every emotion of any kind that she showed, had to be wheedled out of her, and each one of them lacked authenticity. Jerrod had probably been too immersed in his own exhilaration to notice, but T.K. hadn't been ignorant of her distant behavior. The warm affection that he usually felt around Jennifer had chilled to the point of nonexistence.

“Today's Friday, Jerrod. That was four nights ago when I came over.”

“I'm not talking about then,” Jerrod explained. “I'm talking about Wednesday. Didn't y'all hang out the night before last?”

T.K.'s head snapped in Jerrod's direction. What was he talking about? Unless there was a special occasion, like the one wherein they watched the televised report on Jerrod's impressive track record, T.K. never saw Jennifer on a weeknight. They both had jobs that required early reporting times, and they'd agreed that weekends were best. “Jen went out Wednesday?”