by Andrew Cotto
So another school year ended with me lonely and let down. And another summer was spent at home in Queens, mostly in my room, hoping for better days to come my way in the next year of high school. My last year. My last year and my last chance to make all those things I dreamed about real. They would come, and they would hurt, and it would all be worth it.
The Domino Effect
Chapter 1
The tree line whizzed past. Pop played a jazz station and tapped out a tune on the steering wheel. My mother had given me a thousand kisses before we got in the car. She also mauled my cheeks with giant pinches. She couldn’t make the trip because of some big case she was working on, and she must have felt bad and took it out on my poor face. I felt bad, too, beyond the face job, because it left me alone with Pop for a couple of hours — me, staring out the window… him tapping out jazz on the steering wheel.
We hadn’t spoken since the George Washington Bridge, when we picked up the highway that cut across Jersey. We hadn’t spoken, but Pop looked over at me about a hundred and fifty times. I slouched down in the front seat of our fancy sedan and kept my eyes out the window, wondering about what waited for me at Hamden Academy.
The summer had been long but not in the good way. Our house was quiet, with my mother working lunatic hours as a new lawyer, and Pop and me still without much to say to each other. He did his thing. I did mine, which was going back and forth to a summer job at a supermarket and, at home, sitting in my room listening to Springsteen records and reading comic books. Good times.
But what I did mostly, besides work and sit in my room, was worry. I worried about what was going to happen when I got back to school. Todd Brooks and I had agreed to be roommates in one of the fourth year dorms, but that was before all that end of the year business with Brenda, him stealing my girl and never saying a word about it. Just thinking about Todd Brooks brought the taste of dirty pennies to my mouth. And I was thinking about him hard as we made our way across Jersey.
“Hey,” Pop said. “You going to wear that face the whole way?”
He had on old jeans and sandals and a button-down short-sleeve shirt. In a lot of ways, being a musician and all, he still seemed young; but he seemed old and wise, too.
“What face?” I asked.
He took his eyes from the highway and looked at me. “That funji-face,” he said. “You had it on since we crossed the bridge, makes me think that something’s wrong.” He gave me a wink.
Pop was a great winker. I swear. He used to do it all the time to me growing up, always at the right time, too, to make me feel better about something or other. I got over his winks as I got older and not so nice, but they still made me feel good, even though I didn’t let on.
“Nothing’s wrong, Pop,” I said.
“You sure?” he asked. “Because from where I’m sitting, it seems like something might be wrong.”
Pop’s not a tall guy, really, kind of stocky with big forearms, while I’m taller than him and skinny, like my mother. But Pop always seemed tall, especially when he talked serious to me and, at that moment, he seemed especially tall with me scrunched down so low in the seat I was practically on the floor. So I sat up straight and looked out the windshield.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Pop.”
He turned down the radio.
“My eyes are on you and on the road,” he said. “No matter what I’m doing, my eyes are on you.”
“That’s nice,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Hey,” he said, taking my forearm in his strong grip. He could bend pipes with those things, I swear. “Hey,” he said, again. He liked to repeat himself like that, to make sure he had my attention, especially when I was being a smart mouth. “It’s my job to make sure you’re alright. You’re my son. Not some kid I put food in and clothes on and share a roof with. Or some kid that I drive back and forth to sleep-away school. You’re my son. My son...”
“You said that already,” I interrupted, again with the smart mouth, but he kept on as if I hadn’t said or done anything rude.
“...and you mean more to me than anything, anything, and it’s my job to make sure that you’re OK, and that you’re growing up into a solid young man. A young man your mother and I can be proud of and send out into the world. Capisci?”
I used to answer him back in Italian when I was a little kid, but I didn’t do that anymore.
“Got it, Pop,” I said, starting to slide down in my seat again.
“You know, I could help you, Pal. I could help you with what’s bothering you.”
“Nothing’s bothering me,” I insisted, without too much patience.
“OK,” he said. “Be that way. But know this, alright? Know this. I’m worried about you, and I think we’re running out of time. I was against this whole sleep-away school thing...”
“It’s not sleep-away school, Pop. It’s boarding school,” I interrupted, but he kept on as if I hadn’t said or done anything rude.
“...and that was your mother’s idea and I fought her on it, I’m telling you I did, but she got her way, and that’s how it goes sometimes, but I’m telling you this, I want to see some maturity coming out of you this year. I want to see that kid your mother and I spent a lot of time raising. I want to see that kid become the young man we know you can be. I know you’ve had some hard times. I know it and you know it, but you gotta get over those things or they’ll eat you up. Capisci?”
“OK, Pop,” I said in a way that made it clear I wasn’t taking him all that seriously.
We drove along in silence for a minute, and I could feel his eyes on me.
“So?” he asked.
“So, what?”
“You going to tell me what’s wrong or what?”
I actually thought about it for a second. I swear. Growing up, he’d helped me, plenty of times, sort things out in the neighborhood with my friends and whatnot. So I knew, way down, if I told him the whole story about Todd Brooks and Brenda Divine, he would have some solid advice or something for me, some way for me to deal with the problem waiting in my room. But I didn’t know where to start. Talking about what happened last year, and talking about it with Pop, of all people, seemed too hard. So I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t say anything rude, at least, either. I just sat there with my eyes out the window, watching the tree line whiz past and worrying about what was going to happen when I got to Hamden Academy.
We arrived as the campus was coming alive. Students and their parents lugged suitcases and trunks and whatnot in and out of the dorms. We drove through the area with the main buildings, under the Arch and around a field where the girls played hockey, to a parking lot between the two dorms where the fourth year men lived.
I knew my dorm and room number already from a letter I got over the summer, so Pop and I started to carry in my stuff and stack it on the landing, next to my door, on the second floor. No sign of Todd Brooks yet, and I thought, for some reason, it meant something good that I got there first.
With only a few trips to the car left, Pop disappeared. No sight of him until I brought everything else inside. He came out of the stairwell, wrapped an arm around my shoulder, and nearly cracked my collar bone with a short, hard squeeze.
“Take care of yourself, Pal.”
“You going already?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding and looking around. “Seems like you got things under control here.”
“Where you been?”
“Me?” he asked. “Nowhere, really. Just taking a look around.”
“How’d that go?”
“Not bad,” he said. “Place seems safe.”
“Good to know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, OK, Pal. Take care of yourself. You’ll call home every Sunday, right? And you’ll behave yourself, right? And you’ll look out for other kids and do what’s right, right?”
I nodded to all his demands, not really paying much attention until he walked through the doors. And when he was gone, I went upstairs to chec
k in and get the key to my room.
“Say that again?” I begged the guy who ran the dorm.
He’d just told me something that nearly knocked me over. This guy was turning into my favorite guy, fast. When I’d gotten there, just a minute before, he’d called me by my name, Daniel, even though I’d never met him. I figured he maybe knew who I was because we’d had a big baseball season last year, and I’d been the best guy on the team, and they gave me an award at dinner one night, so maybe he remembered me from that or something, though he didn’t look too into sports, being middle-aged and kind of dorky. He wore glasses. I think he coached the drama team or something. Either way, I was pretty flattered and everything that he knew my name, but more happy about something else he’d said to me, so I asked him to tell me again what he’d told me before.
“Pardon?” he asked, having a hard time keeping up with all that I was thinking and the little I was saying.
“What you said before, about my roommate,” I said slowly.
“Oh, yes,” he caught on. “I’d assumed you would have known this already, but apparently your roommate, Mr. Brooks, will not be returning to Hamden Academy.”
It sounded even better the second time.
I thought about asking him to tell me again, I swear, but instead I had mercy on the guy and signed something on a clipboard, took a key to my single room and got right out of there. Going down the stairs, I squeezed the key in my palm and tried not to trip, though I could barely feel my feet.
Even in all that excitement, I still noticed, on the floor in the stairwell, a milk crate full of trophies and stuff, with a big pair of ugly wrestling shoes on top. They were tied together, bright blue with some sparkled gold writing on the sides. I tried not to notice, but I did. There was something about them that couldn’t be ignored.
Alone in my room for a couple of hours, I unpacked, stuck some posters on the wall, and set up my desk in the back by the window. I stood over the CD player when someone knocked on my door.
“It’s open.”
In came Sammie Soifer, smiling like a goon.
“Hi, Danny!” he called, catching his shoe on the linoleum as he crossed the room. I took a step to meet him and grabbed his hand. The poor kid’s palm, moist and sticky as a raw meatball, reminded me of when I met him the first day of school last year. He’d been my roommate and the first friend I’d made in a while. He was nice as hell to me, all year. I should have treated him better. Everybody should have.
“What do you say, Sammie?” I asked. “How you been? How was summer?”
“Great,” he said, rubbing the back of his arm, up and down. “Great.”
“You in this dorm?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, kind of shy. “Right next door.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “That’s cool.”
He sort of smiled in a relieved kind of way.
I returned to the CD player on the trunk between the two desks. “You’re just in time for some Springsteen.”
His sneaker squeaked again. “We better not, Danny,” he said from the hallway. “We’ll be late for the meeting.”
“Relax,” I said. “What are we gonna miss anyway?”
“You never know,” he said. “It’s… it’s some crowd.”
Sammie seemed nervous. He was always a little nervous, but he seemed especially uptight just then. I’ll never forget his face when I told him we wouldn’t be rooming together for fourth year. The little color he had went right out of him. Unlike me, though, he knew how to forgive. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.
“Alright, alright,” I said. I put the CD away and joined him outside my door. I peeked over the wooden railing at the group gathered for our first dorm meeting. A few new faces along with the many whose names I’d forgotten over the summer. It’s not that I wasn’t a friendly guy or anything; it’s just that I wasn’t good with names. Or faces. I used to be. I swear.
Sammie and I shuffled down the stairs and entered through swinging double doors. In the common area, sunlight flooded the checkerboard floors and white cinder block walls. Sammie joined the guys in back who hadn’t arrived early enough to grab a seat in the lounge area or on one of the small couches dragged over from the lobby. I walked up to a black kid I’d never seen before, hogging one of the frayed Naugahyde jobs in the last row.
“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 star
ted 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.