by Mike Lupica
Spence, he knew, lived on Central Park West, over on the other side of the park. Spence had proudly pointed out the building one day last spring when their class had taken the short bus ride over to the West Side, a field trip to see some tall ships cruising their way down the Hudson River. Spence, of course, acted as if he owned the entire building.
Zach knew that if you entered the park at 86th Street, it was practically a straight shot to Spence’s building. So this had to be his way home.
Maybe the old Zach would have let this go, not just the ball hitting him in the head, a cheap shot if there ever was one, but the entire way Spence had acted at practice today. Ragging on him every time he saw an opening. And even when he didn’t.
The new Zach wasn’t letting it go.
If he could come into this place at night and scare off a mugger, he could do this with Spence once and for all. Still plenty of daylight left. Coach P. made sure practice started at two-thirty sharp every day so that the kids who lived close enough to Parker to walk to school—or the ones who took the subway home—could get home when it was still light out.
There.
He saw Spence coming.
Listening to his iPod, earbuds in his ears, bopping his head to music Zach couldn’t hear.
Zach hadn’t imagined the scene playing out this way. He’d pictured himself calling out Spence’s name, getting his attention, telling him they needed to have a talk.
Only now Spence wouldn’t be able to hear him.
So Zach ran up ahead and hopped the stone wall. He was waiting for Spence as he came around a bend in Park Drive, planning to jump out at him the way the guy at the reservoir had been planning to surprise that woman jogger the other night.
Not quite.
Spence noticed him and shook his head, more annoyed or just plain disgusted than surprised. He pulled out his white earbuds.
“What?” he said.
“What?” Zach said. “You’re not happy to see me?”
“Harriman,” Spence said, “as much fun as it is to jack you up from time to time—”
He started to pass, but Zach blocked his way.
“Time to time?” Zach said. Trying to grin a Spence grin back at him. “Don’t you mean all the time?”
“I don’t have the time for it today. My mom is waiting for me at home. We gotta do something. As a family.” Air-quoting the word family.
“Well,” Zach said, “even though I hate cutting into your family time, we need to talk.”
“About what?”
“About you being an even bigger jerk than I thought you were,” Zach said. “Which, I have to say, would make you the biggest pain-in-the-butt jerk our age in history. Like we should be studying jerks like you in one of our history books.”
Spence tilted his head, as if this were another time he couldn’t possibly have heard right.
“You must be joking, freak boy.”
Zach shook his head. “No, you heard me,” he said.
“But you’re not hearing me,” Spence said. “I don’t have time for this.”
“Make time, Spence.”
“If I do,” Spence said, “that ball hitting you on the head is going to feel like a love tap.”
“I doubt it.”
Zach wasn’t even thinking about what he wanted to say, the words just kept coming out like he was the coolest, toughest guy in the park.
“Okay, then,” Spence said, shrugging. “Let’s do this.”
“Let’s.”
Zach turned and hopped back over the wall, leading the way. Spence was a few yards behind, speaking quietly into his cell phone, Zach hearing him tell somebody that he was ten minutes away, swear.
Zach had already picked out the spot beforehand, a small clearing between a patch of trees at the top of a hill. He could see a touch football game being played, the shouts and laughter reaching him. Even now, even with what was about to happen between him and Spence, Zach couldn’t help thinking what a big, amazing place Central Park was, how there was a different kind of show going on inside it every hundred yards.
Including this one. Just the two of them.
Zach hadn’t dropped his backpack on the ground yet. He knew and Spence knew that once he did, it was officially on between them, no turning back.
“Is this about me hitting you with the ball?” Spence said. “Get over it. You sucked up the joint today and you know it.”
“Actually it’s about everything, Spence,” Zach said. “Mostly it’s about you being you, the way you are with me. That ends today.”
“Does it?”
“Yeah,” Zach said. “It does.”
Spence grinned, almost like he was enjoying this now. Of course he was. No way he wanted to change the way things were between them. He enjoyed torturing Zach way too much for that.
“Who’s gonna make it end?”
“I am,” Zach said.
Zach shrugged off his backpack, let it drop to the ground. As he did, almost in the same motion, he turned and started to throw the first punch he had ever thrown at another person in his life.
He threw it like this one punch could take out all the Bads at once because, let’s face it, if he was looking to put a face on them, Spence’s would sure do.
He hit nothing but air.
And then the air was coming out of him.
It turned out Spence wasn’t looking to have a fistfight with him or fight by Zach’s rules, that he hadn’t even needed to throw a punch. No, Spence the football player had dropped his shoulder and drove it into him, making Zach feel as if his insides were exploding.
As soon as he’d opened up to throw his punch, he was as defenseless as a quarterback was in football right after he released the ball. And Spence was the same star linebacker he was for the Parker School, driving Zach back and taking him down, nothing to break Zach’s fall as he went down hard into the grass and dirt, his head hitting first.
Spence had been right about one thing.
The basketball hitting him did feel like a love tap now.
There was no chance for Zach to fight back because he couldn’t even breathe. Spence was on top of him, his knee planted firmly into his stomach.
“You wanted to have a fight?” Spence said. He was breathing heavily, his face red, eyes big. “Well, now we’re having a fight.”
He grabbed the front of Zach’s hoodie, then slammed him back into the ground.
“How do you think the judges are scoring it so far?” Spence said.
Spence pulled back his fist now, ready to end this with one punch of his own.
That’s when his cell went off.
The ring tone was a rap song, one Zach didn’t recognize. But it stopped Spence, made him look at his clenched fist, frozen there in midair.
Slowly he pulled his hand down and reached for his phone. Looked to see who was calling. Answered it. Nodded as he heard the voice at the other end of the call.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m practically just crossing the street.”
Even a bully like Spence was somebody’s kid.
He didn’t punch Zach when he snapped the phone shut, just picked him up again, dropping him this time the way you would dirty clothes.
Got up and stood over him.
“Gotta ask you something, Harriman,” he said. “You sure he was your dad?”
Saving the hardest hit for last.
11
HIS dad had always told him that fighting only proved who was the better fighter, and usually you knew that before you started.
Maybe that was another reason why it was over before it started. Or maybe Spence had proved that he was better at Ultimate Fighting, putting a shoulder into Zach and putting him on his back before he knew what was happening.
Zach’s pride had been hurt, that was for sure. And the back of his head hurt a lot, from when it had hit the ground. The good news? There wasn’t a mark on him, at least on the outside.
Inside was another matter.
I
nside hurt as much as the comment about his dad had. Because when Spence took him down as easily as knocking over a toy soldier, it was as if he’d knocked Zach all the way back to the kid he used to be.
The kid who would never have had the rope to take on Spence in the first place.
But because there weren’t any bruises, he didn’t have to explain anything to anybody. After dinner he and Kate went to his room to work on a history project, comparing President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term with President Addison’s.
“How’d practice go today?” Kate said.
“Fine. But what does that have to do with the New Deal, exactly?” he said.
“Not a thing,” she said. “I can help you work on our project and talk about something else entirely at the same time. It’s called multitasking, Harriman. One of my specialties.”
“One of your many.”
“I was about to point that out myself.”
“Tragically,” he said, “I know.”
“Oh, here we go, how full of myself am I?”
“Well,” Zach said, grinning. “Maybe not full. But let’s just say you don’t leave much room for dessert.”
She punched him. “I can’t tell sometimes,” she said. “Are you my biggest fan or my biggest critic?”
“I can be both. It’s called multitasking.”
“Touché,” she said. She closed her history book. “So what about practice?”
“Practice was practice. Why do you suddenly care so much about it?”
“I just noticed you were pretty quiet at dinner.”
“I know this is going to sound crazy,” he said. “But when I don’t have something to say, I don’t talk.”
He actually did have something he wanted to say to her. It just wasn’t about basketball practice, and this didn’t feel like the right moment.
“Look out tomorrow night,” Zach said. “You probably won’t be able to shut me up.”
“Liar.”
“You call me that a lot lately.”
“Because you’re keeping things from me.”
“So you say.”
“No, Harriman, I know. And if you want to say that’s just me being a pushy know-it-all, have at it. I’m not stopping you. But I know something happened today after I saw you in last period, whether it had to do with basketball or something else.”
She was good sometimes. A lot of times. But Zach wasn’t caving. Or giving her the satisfaction of knowing she was right. Somehow telling her about the fight with Spence would have felt like getting knocked down all over again.
“Sometimes you’re wrong,” he said.
“I know that.”
Zach threw up his hands. “Only you can act right about being wrong!”
“Go ahead if you want, change the subject.”
Why not? Zach thought. Why not try it out on Kate before he approached his mom with it? He needed someone to know.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” Kate said, grinning, and made a move like she wanted to hide under the bed.
“Seriously,” he said. Took a deep breath, let it out. Then let it rip. “You want to know what’s up? Here it is. I’m thinking I might want to go and look at the crash site. You know, just to check it out for myself.”
Kate surprised him. She didn’t say anything right away. Just stared off, like she was processing the information. Finally she said, “It’s not a crash site anymore, Harriman. It’s just a big old empty field near some bay out there, before you get to the ocean.”
“I never saw it with my own eyes,” he said. “And I’d just like to, that’s all.”
“And if you do, what then? You’ll let it go, game over, the conspiracy stuff?”
“Yes.”
“Or are you going out there because you’ve convinced yourself there’s some clue that’s just waiting to be discovered by you?”
Zach didn’t know if she meant it to come out as sarcastic as it did. But that’s the way he heard it. He did think back to practice now, Spence using the same tone of voice when he offered to fly the clue flag for him.
“And what if I did think that? You’d think that’s funny?”
“I didn’t say I thought it was funny—”
“Because,” Zach said, “if you do think it’s funny, then you don’t know me nearly as well as you think you do.”
Another time when he was hot, just like that. “Maybe I don’t,” Kate said.
She started collecting her books and pens and stood up, her way of telling him they were done here.
“Sorry I brought it up,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why am I sorry?”
Kate said, “No, why can’t you give this up, stop thinking you’re Sherlock Harriman or something?”
It was like she was asking all the questions he couldn’t answer himself these days, about why he’d go into the park at night or why he’d pick a fight with Spence.
Why he sometimes felt as if somebody else was at the controls of his life.
“I just can’t,” he said.
She turned to leave, then stopped herself.
“When you want to tell me what’s really going on,” she said, “you can. But I can see you’re not ready to do that. And you’re not yourself right now.”
Then she left, the girl who just had to be right not knowing how right she really was.
When he came home from basketball practice the next day, he decided he wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was going to come right out with it to his mom, ask her straight up to take him out to where the plane had gone down.
It was almost as far out as you could go on eastern Long Island, not too far from what was known as Land’s End. Past towns like Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Amagansett and Montauk. Zach had asked his dad once what comes after Montauk.
“Portugal,” his dad had said with a grin. “After a whole lot of ocean.”
Zach was hoping his mom would be alone when he got home. But when he came out of the elevator and around the corner to the living room, he saw that Uncle John was with her.
Not such a bad thing, he thought.
Because John Marshall really was like a favorite uncle, the one who pretty much always took your side or let you do whatever you wanted. Or, better yet, gets you what you want. It was like that even when Zach’s dad was alive. Whenever Zach wanted to get something from his parents—or get something out of them—he went straight to Uncle John, knowing he’d have his back.
It was just another reason why Zach had never thought of him as their family lawyer. Or as an uncle, really. He was more like an older friend, one with serious connections, his dad’s best friend since Harvard, his roommate there, his football teammate, then his lawyer and wing-man for life.
He had a deep voice and looked a little bit like Liam Neeson, the actor, and it was as if he’d been smiling at Zach for Zach’s whole life. Like the two of them were sharing some kind of inside joke.
If Uncle John was over for dinner, Zach knew he could get an extra hour added on to his bedtime. If Zach wanted a new Fathead poster for his room and Uncle John found out about it, done deal. Or a quick trip to Carvel on Lexington with Kate while the grown-ups had coffee after dinner.
“I never had children of my own to spoil,” Uncle John had said to him one time. “So I guess I’ll have to spoil you, Zachary.”
He’d always called him that. Not Zach, like everyone else.
Zachary.
Zach had said, “I can take it.”
And John Marshall had smiled and said, “Be brave, Zachary. Be brave.”
Today Uncle John and his mom looked to be having afternoon tea. Elizabeth Harriman took one look at Zach and said, “Shower. Now.”
“Can’t I even say hello to Uncle John?” he said. “Seriously, Mom. Where are your manners?”
Uncle John said, “How’s the outside shot, Zachary?”
“Getting there. Slowly. Extremely slowly.”
�
��Squaring up the shoulders?”
“When I do, my shot’s wet.”
“Great,” his mom said. “Now you go get wet. In the shower.”
“Need to ask you something before I do.”
“Make it fast,” she said. “I love you more than life itself, but even from over here you smell like feet.”
They were on the couch. Zach took a seat across from them, on the other side of an antique coffee table. John Marshall, as always, was in a dark suit and white shirt and striped tie. Black shoes, shined up and looking brand new.
“Must be serious,” Uncle John said. “The boy sits.”
He told them then. Not just directing it at his mom. At both of them. Throwing in a little Dr. Abbott-speak at the end, saying that he’d been thinking about it a lot and it was the only way for him to get closure, by seeing where the accident had happened.
His mom didn’t take as long to react as Kate had.
“No,” she said.
“But Mom . . .”
“No ‘but Mom,’” she said. “I went out there after it happened. Once was enough, believe me.”
“But at least you went once,” Zach said.
“It’s not a trip I wanted to make,” she said. “Or one you’re going to.”
“This is something you’ve been thinking about a lot, haven’t you?” asked Uncle John.
“Well, yeah,” Zach said. “It’s not like I’m fixed on it. Or it’s something I really want to do. But it’s something I feel like I have to do.”
“Perhaps as a way of feeling some kind of connection to your father?” John Marshall said.
“Hey,” Zach’s mom said. “Whose side are you on here?”
He patted her on the knee but continued speaking to Zach. “It’s something like that, isn’t it?”
Zach said, “I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yeah, maybe it is.”
Go with it. It was like Uncle John was passing him the ball, setting up an open jump shot.
“Think about it however you want,” his mom said. “Both of you. The answer is still no. You’re not putting yourself through that, no matter how swell of an idea you think it is. And I’m not going back there, end of story, end of conversation.”