When Dad dragged in at ten thirty, Josh met him at the door. He told him I had gone out with Law, and I got home no more than ten minutes before Dad.
Of course, I denied it. “Dad, he’s just still mad at me. Law did stop by, but I told him he had to leave. That’s what happened, I promise.”
I don’t think Dad knew who to believe. He was mad, but I don’t know at whom. I don’t think he knew either. He took a wiener and a can of tomato juice from the fridge. He pulled a slice of white bread and a chocolate Pop-Tart from the cupboard and stormed off to his bedroom.
Dad was still in a foul mood the next morning and didn’t acknowledge either Josh or me. He had plenty of reasons to wish neither of us had ever been born, but it was really out of character for him, especially since our all-night talk. I wanted to remind him of his promise to be agreeable, no matter what, but I felt bad for him and didn’t want to do anything to make things worse.
I thought about talking to Law, but his old man was a psycho scumbag. I doubted he would be of much help.
I called Brandon Lupo instead.
“Todd, I’m glad you called. Are you okay?” Then he added, “But I guess that’s not a good question to ask someone who’s been through what you have. What I should ask is, how are you holding up?”
“I don’t know, Brandon. How would you be holding up if you’d been locked up in jail all day not knowing when or if you were ever getting out?” I felt like a jerk the minute the words were out of my mouth. Brandon had been my only adult supporter in all this mess, and there I was running my mouth without engaging my brain.
“I’m not the enemy, Todd.”
“I know that. I’m just bummed out right now.”
“I understand. I work with a lot of troubled kids.
Is that what I am, a troubled kid? All my life, I’ve been a PK—Preacher’s Kid. I guess now I’m a TPK—Troubled Preacher’s Kid.
I asked, “How much trouble am I in? You’ve been around juvenile courts enough to have a pretty good idea, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do, but what say I come by your place so we can talk?”
“I’ll need to ask Dad first. He’s got me in solitary confinement.”
“Is he at his office?”
“I guess.”
“I’ll call him, and if he agrees, I’ll see you in thirty or so.”
As much as I wanted to hate the whole world and everything and everyone in it, it was hard not to like Brandon. I think he really does have what my dad calls the Calling. Dad says God calls some people to do a certain job in life. When they do the thing they’re called to do, they’re good at it. Of course, Dad hasn’t been saying much about his own calling lately. I’ll need to remember to ask Brandon about that when he gets here.
I decided to give Mission to Tulley VI’s Level 10 a quick look-see. I checked my web belt. I had a Blaster Cannon with three rockets, a Spiral Laser, and four Volton Power Tubes, but what I really needed was an Almastic Analyzer. Without it, I’d have to use all my ammo just breaking through the door. I wouldn’t want to fight Dragmu’s guards with nothing but a K-bar knife and two sticks of Plasmastic.
The doorbell rang as I threw the game controller onto my bed in frustration. It bounced off the bed and banged into the dresser. I gave it a quick look to see if I broke it. Thankfully, it was fine. I guess I’m going to have to resort to looking up the Tulley VI cheat site on the net. I called out as I headed for the door. “Hang on. I’m coming.”
Brandon was right on time. I asked him in but didn’t offer him a chair.
“I’m not supposed to have friends over. How’d you get my dad to change his mind?”
Brandon patted me on the shoulder. “I guess he sees my visit as more of a counseling session.”
“Is that what it is?” I motioned to Dad’s recliner as I sat on the arm of the couch.
“It’s whatever you want it to be.”
I nodded.
That’s why I like this guy. He listens more than he lectures. With most older people, it’s the other way around.
I asked, “About my case?”
“From what I’ve seen, your case could go one of two ways. You could get deferred adjudication, or you could get community service and probation.”
“Deferred judication?”
“Ad-judication.”
“Adjudication. That means if I stay out of trouble, they’ll take it off my record, right?”
He nodded.
“If they do that, the colleges won’t have to know, and I still may have a shot at a good school.” I saw a ray of hope.
“It’s true that in Texas, juvenile records are sealed, but a lot of schools require student athletes applying for scholarships to sign a waiver, so it may not work.”
Hope was fading fast.
“But…” Brandon paused and looked up to the ceiling.
“But what?”
“You can petition to have your record wiped out.”
My little ray of hope brightened again. I asked, “Does that take a lawyer?”
“Yes, it does.”
And the last hope died. There was no way Dad would go for hiring two lawyers. With me confessing to the break-in, I wasn’t sure he would still hire one for Josh.
We sat without talking for a time, Brandon waiting on me and me waiting on him. I expected him to offer some advice or encouragement, but he didn’t.
Brandon finally spoke up. “Don’t let this ruin the rest of your life, Todd. You need to stay positive. You have a lot of life left. This is only one very small part. Do you understand?”
“I guess so.” But I didn’t understand. This was going to hound me to the grave, and I knew it.
“There’s something I want you to do. Will you promise me you’ll do it?”
“I guess that depends on what it is.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yeah, I trust you.”
“Then promise me you’ll go to the football banquet on the eleventh.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. There’s no way, man.”
“Hear me out, Todd. I know losing your mother was hard. I understand that. I’ve been there.”
This I didn’t know.
“Although that and everything else good in your world has been turned upside-down, you can’t give up. Your life isn’t over.”
“You sure could fool me.”
“You can’t cave. You’re made of tougher…no, better, stuff than that. I know you are.”
He motioned for me to sit on the couch, and when I did, he leaned forward.
“I lost both my parents, my mom when I was fourteen and my dad when I was twenty. I lost my shot at the pros, and I didn’t have a degree. Like a lot of jocks, I’d always taken the lightest, easiest load possible. You have a lot more going for you than I did, but I didn’t quit. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I understood something you don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah, my life’s not really over. You’ve already said that.”
“Todd, you’re seventeen years old. Life expectancy for a man today is eighty, older if you take care of yourself. I’ll admit that high school can be some of the most difficult years, but don’t let one bad year end your chance at seventy or more good ones.”
It was hard see to past my present situation from the sinkhole I was in.
“Sure, you may have to work a little harder, or alter your plans some, but you can still attain all your goals and have a great life.” Brandon spoke with an air of excitement. A big smile swept his face.
I didn’t answer right away. I was working the math in my head.
Okay, eighty minus seventeen, my age now, and subtract the last ten years, I might be feeble or something. Take off two or three years more bad years. That’s fifty. One really bad year, this one, divided by fifty is …let’s see…twenty…no, this is two percent of the time I probably have left…
“Are you with me?” asked Brandon.
“What?
Uh…yeah, I follow.”
“But you’re still not convinced?”
“I guess I see your point. But what does the award banquet have to do with it?”
“I think you need to suck it up and show these guys you’re not going to let them get to you. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”
“No.” Okay, so maybe I was a little ashamed of slamming Pretty Boy Lance into a building…or two. And then, there’s the field house break-in fiasco.
I said, “Scratch that, I am ashamed.”
“This is how I see it. You confessed and are willing to make things right.”
I mumbled, “I got grizzly”—something between an “I guess so” and a “Not really.”
“They’ve asked me to give the invocation, so I’ll be there in case you need moral support.”
Brandon was a hard guy to turn down. With some hesitation, I toughened up my gut and said I’d go, but deep down, I hoped my dad wouldn’t let me out of the house.
Chapter Thirty-Five
My Dad was never the perfect parent, but I could say one thing about the man, he was one hundred percent predictable, totally and utterly disinterested in anything to do with sports. So when he not only agreed to let me go the banquet, but decided to come along, I was stunned.
He asked, “Are you going to invite Lisa?”
There was another shocker. I was supposed to be grounded, and yet he was willing to let me bring a date.
Wow, so lifelike. It looks exactly like my dad.
I thanked him but said I wouldn’t be bringing a date.
“Too bad, I liked her. What happened?”
Did my dad just show some interest in my social life? Now I know he’s been replaced with a clone.
“Josh will come too. We’ll make it a family thing.”
I didn’t know whether to be pleased or perturbed Josh was coming, given the way he had been acting. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I did leave him twisting in the wind for a while. I guess I might have reacted the same way if things had been reversed.
I hoped, over the next ten days, I’d get a feel for how people would look at my showing up at the banquet, but the messages were mixed. Most of the nonathletes seemed to be easing off, and Tom and Jay Zimmer, twin brothers who lived across the street from us, even asked if I wanted to go to Austin with them next month to see the Harlem Globetrotters. I told them I would if I could, even though I had seen them before. With Law being only other person my own age who would even give me the time of day, I told them I’d have to ask my Dad. And see how things went in court.
Lance, Jamel, and their crew limited their harassment to verbal insults and name-calling. Maybe our little physical confrontations had some effect after all. I couldn’t tell if the other kids were beginning to ease off, or if they were keeping their distance because they didn’t want to irritate Lance and the others on the team.
»»•««
The Branard High School Athletics Achievements and Award Banquet was held at Harrington Hall at Archer University on the north side of town. The college’s cafetorium, or cafeteria-auditorium, was the only venue big enough to feed the two-thousand-plus people who showed up every year to honor the athletes. The crowd would have been bigger had school officials not limited each student athlete to four tickets and each non-athlete student to two. Law said some students scalped the ten-dollar-a-plate tickets for as much as a hundred dollars.
Now, there is proof positive that people in this town take their high school football way too seriously.
I asked Dad if I could ride to the banquet with Law, but he told me not to push it, so I didn’t. As usual, Dad insisted we leave the house an hour before the six o’clock “Meet the Players” session, an event I would have rather missed. It was a time for all the “little people” to hang out with their football heroes before the actual banquet began.
Dad always allowed extra time for unforeseen delays that never came along. In Branard, a bad traffic jam was not being able to drive from one end of town to the other in less than five minutes. There was a fire one morning at Emerson’s Seed and Feed that delayed traffic on the Kachum Highway for twenty minutes, and people talked about the “unbearable traffic” for months.
The evening started with a bang. We left the house at six twenty, allowing a full forty minutes for the six-minute drive from our house on Freesia to the college on Grand Oak. As Dad, Josh, and I were backing out of the driveway, Dad jammed on the brakes. Because I was still in the process of buckling up, the sudden stop sent me bounding first back, then forward, banging my shoulder into the dash. It took a few seconds to discern what it was that had caught his attention.
There in the smoky shadows of early evening, not quite dusk, but not yet dark, Dad clicked the car’s lights on bright, lighting up my truck. The tailgate, and the part of the rear quarter-panel that I could see, were streaked with a shiny opaque substance. On second look, I knew what it was. In my head, I could hear the culprits saying, “Let’s all celebrate the Bulldog’s twelve-and-one season by egging old Nelson’s truck.”
Dad sprang from the car and hustled around the truck, disappearing around the rear corner of the house. He had reacted so fast, I was at least thirty feet behind him. I caught up with him in the back door.
“These thugs. They had to have done this in broad daylight, and I bet not one of our neighbors will admit to seeing a thing.” He looked at me with what I took to be pure pity.
“It’s no big deal. I’m sort of getting used to it.”
Dad said, “It is a big deal. We need to wash that off before it ruins the paint.”
Dad had to tell Josh to get out of the car and help three times before he went into the house after laundry detergent. Dad collected some old towels from the rag shelf in the garage, and I hooked up the water hose. I’d spent a lot of hours working on my ride, and it had begun to show some signs of its prevandalized glory.
I was surprised that neither the sight of ooze dripping off the truck’s metal nor the broken shells sticking to the paint here and there set off my rage like it once would have. Maybe with all I’d been through, I was too numb to feel anything.
We made quick work of the mess, and even Josh eventually fell into line. Once we finished cleaning the truck, we regrouped, brushed off our clothes, and set out for the banquet for the second time. As it turned out, we still made it to the banquet with fifteen minutes to spare, and nothing would do but for Dad to lead our little procession to our seats all the way down to the front of the dining hall, not fifteen feet from the four tables sitting up on the elevated dais.
We weaved our way through the maze of tables. You could hardly miss all the scorching stares, obscene mumbles, grunts, and half-hidden veiled rude gestures. Even Mr. Foley from the corner convenience store smirked and scratched his nose with his middle finger as we passed.
As we reached our table, Dad said, “You can thank Brandon for these great seats. He pulled a few strings and got us some up front.”
Oh yeah, I’d love to tell Brandon how pleased I was to be required to parade all the way to the front of the auditorium, basically walking naked through a minefield of contempt as my classmates shot flaming daggers of hate and disgust.
We saved the chair to Dad’s left for Brandon and settled in for what I knew would be the most miserable hours of my life. And I was a guy who had recently spent nine hours in county lock-up. The buzz started the minute we walked in. Assistant Coach Garrison and Principal Welch’s assistant, Mrs. Collins, were each stationed at one of the step-ups onto the stage. The principal and Coach Garrison both wore dark business suits, white shirts, and dark red ties. They reminded me of two Secret Service agents awaiting the arrival of the President. The trouble was, I was the only one in the place who needed protection from assassination.
Ten minutes later, Brandon joined us at the table. After we all said our hellos, I twisted in my seat to scan the growing audience. I hoped to catch sight of Law. His mom had
to work, but he said he was bringing a “surprisingly hot” date, and I was curious about two points. First, what sort of girl Law would label surprisingly hot, and second, I wanted to see what sort of surprisingly hot girl would be attracted to a guy like Law.
Not that Law was a yeti or anything. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but socially, he was a Yoda. I think the crudeness was a coping thing. Some people giggle when they are nervous or in an uncomfortable situation. Law goes for gross-out. I’m might not be a Don Juanstein, but I’m pretty sure belching the ABC’s all the way from A to T in one breath isn’t a quality most girls look for in a date.
As I continued looking to my left, I was jolted hard from the right. I had to grab the edge of the table to keep from sliding out of my chair.
“Oh, please excuse me.” I looked up to see Jamel standing over me. “I didn’t see you there.” He leaned near my ear. His breath smelled of spearmint Altoids and cigarettes. He lowered his voice to where Dad couldn’t hear. “Or I should say, I’m surprised you had the guts to show up. You don’t belong here.”
I straightened myself in my seat. “You’re wrong. I do belong here.” I grabbed Jamel by his wrist. “Who led the district in tackles for a defensive end? Who set the school record for sacks? I did. So don’t tell me I don’t belong here. I’m a member of the team.” I made no effort to keep my voice down. I didn’t need to see my dad to know he was giving me one of his you-need-to-keep-your-voice-down glares.
Jamel said, “You were a member of the team. Were. Past tense.”
What does that mean? I gave Jamel a whatever shrug and looked away.
Jamel wasn’t finished. “Read the program, numbwad. Read the program.” He jammed his finger onto the evening’s program lying next to my water glass and walked back to a center table where Lance and the rest of that crew had gathered. I waited until Jamel and the other dimwits were otherwise occupied before I began thumbing through the night’s program.
I felt a pop and a sting on my left ear. I turned in the chair, ready to flatten the offender, but stopped short. There was Law grinning like a zombie at a brain buffet.
No sooner had he settled into his chair than a lone loud and long organ note rang through the assembly hall. The crowd noise immediately dropped to a mild chorus of murmurs as Principal Welch said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the national anthem.”
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