by Andrew Cotto
“Hello,” she said businesslike. “Ready to go?”
“Sure,” I said, hurrying to get the door for her.
We walked away from her dorm on a path around the grass. Instead of handcuffing herself to me in a flurry of regrets and apologies, she brought up what was already an old subject of the new school year.
“So, um, have you spoken to Todd yet?” she asked.
“Nah,” I answered as we passed the chapel. “Meeks is trying to get ahold of him.”
“You didn’t talk to him at all over the summer?”
“Nope,” I said, as we followed the limestone stairs down to the basement of the academic building.
In an empty classroom, she sat at a front row desk as I hopped up onto the large teacher’s unit. We sat silently for a minute, her eyes on the shaded hill that sloped toward the campus gates, my legs flopping as I thought of something clever to say.
“I know he’s going to be missed around here,” Brenda declared, still staring out the window.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “He was the mayor, alright.”
She kept her eyes away from mine and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Have you heard anything about why he didn’t come back?” she turned suddenly to ask.
“No,” I said, kicking the desk with my heels. “Why do you care so much, anyway?”
“What?”
“I thought you guys broke up?”
“We did,” she insisted.
“Get over it then.” I didn’t mean to say that, or say it like that, at least, but it came out cruel anyway.
“I am. I mean, I’m try…” she fumbled a little before her face curled up like she’d just sucked on a lemon. “I’m just wondering if people knew why he wasn’t coming back, OK?”
“OK,” I said, kind of calm, but then that strange tone came back. “What’s everybody asking me for anyway? What am I, his spokesman or something?”
“He was supposed to be your roommate, wasn’t he?” she asked. “And your friend.”
“He was supposed to be my roommate. That’s true,” I said, crossing my arms. “But he’s no friend of mine.”
“What are you talking about, Danny?”
I couldn’t stand the way she looked at me, like I wasn’t special or anything to her, like she hadn’t been dying to see me the way I’d been dying to see her. She just wanted information from me, information about somebody else. It hurt so much.
“Come on, Bren,” I said, trying to prove my importance. “You of all people should know why that guy is no friend of mine.”
“How long has this been going on?” she asked.
“What?”
“Your animosity toward Todd?”
“Animosity?” I said. “SATs are over, alright? Give it a rest.”
“I’m serious,” she persisted. “Have you been mad this whole time?”
“I’m not mad,” I said, with a face and an attitude that must have proved me a liar. “I’m just not interested in being friends with some guy that steals my girl, that’s all.”
“Your girl?” she repeated. “Your girl? I’m not a possession, you know.”
“Really? You should have told that to Todd.”
She shot to her feet. “Why?” she asked. “What did he tell you? What did he say?”
I could see her coming apart, her eyes and ears and lips kind of moving in different directions. But I spoke anyway, thinking more about my pain than hers.
“He didn’t tell me anything,” I said defensively. “I’m just saying you should have told Todd you weren’t a possession before he wore you around like a hat last year.”
“I can’t believe you just said that,” she said.
I couldn’t believe it either. What a prince. Brenda began to tremble, then she ran from the room with tears falling down her beautiful face.
That went well.
I gave Brenda time to clear before climbing the stairs that left me outside The Can. Through the window, I saw Meeks and Grohl at our regular booth in the far corner with a few girls I didn’t know. A short line waited to order at the counter. Smoke rose from the grill. Upstairs, the Foosball table was open. I jingled the pocketful of quarters I had brought with me and turned for home.
I was damaged — OK, stupid — enough to hurt someone I cared about and still feel like the victim. I went back to the paranoid — OK, stupid — idea I’d held onto since things went bad for me back home: the world had it out for me, simple as that. What a dope.
I was making a sad march home to the dorm, rubbing my scar and feeling sorry for myself, head down and eyes on the path, when a wrecking ball knocked me to the ground. Spun halfway around, I sat up without breath, clutching my throbbing shoulder. Up the path, little Chester patted big McCoy’s back as they continued on their way, laughing hysterically.
Super.
I didn’t feel like getting up. Nothing inside me wanted to fight gravity or anything else. Right there on the ground, flat on my ass, holding my shoulder, seemed like a good place to be. But then I figured that, at some point, somebody would come along and I’d have to tell them what I was doing there on the ground, flat on my ass, holding my shoulder. I didn’t want to bother with that, so I stood up, dusted off, and went on home. I walked into the dorm and straight up the stairs, thinking that at least no one had seen me out there on the ground. I was ready for the quiet of my room.
“You alright, man?” Terence asked as soon as I entered. He was standing behind his desk with his eyes all bugged out.
“What?”
“I saw that shit, man,” he said, pointing out the window. “That was messed up.”
Some day I was having.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, yanking off my dirty pants. “What are you gonna do, right?”
“I don’t know,” he said, with raised brows. “You could punch one of them hillbillies in the eye.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, “but guys like me don’t get off easy,” I said. “And I ain’t going back to Catholic School for nothing.”
“So you just take that from them?” he asked.
“I’ve had worse.”
He raised his head and eyeballed me. “Oh, so it sucks to be you, huh?” he asked.
“There you go,” I said with a wink.
I changed my pants, sat down behind my desk, and looked out the window. It seemed like the best place to be.
Chapter 4
Terence was a room jockey. He spent his free time in our second floor hideaway, riding his chair. I joined him (in my own chair, that is). While the other students did their thing in the warm September weather, Terence kept his head in a book, and I looked out over campus hoping to spot Brenda strolling down the path on some sort of mercenary mission to save me. I knew I was nuts, but still I kept watch.
One afternoon, a couple of buffoons exited Carlyle and made for Montgomery. A minute later, as expected, someone knocked on our door. I ignored it.
“Yo, yo, anybody in dere?” a voice crooned.
I cursed under my breath as I crossed the room to open the door.
“Rice!” I cried. “Where the hell you been?”
“What?” the long, pale figure in the doorway asked.
“A real, live black guy in our class, and you’re just coming by now?”
“Oh, that’s funny, that’s funny,” he nodded. “But we here now, ain’t we?”
“Yeah, too bad,” I said and motioned him in with my head, but he didn’t move. He just stood there with his hand perched out to the side. I didn’t go for the fancy handshake game. Can’t two guys just shake hands without making a show out of it? I let Rice hang there for a bit, with his hand held out all ridiculous like that. Then I eventually, offered him my hand, which he grabbed and groped and squeezed through a couple of poses.
Rice was really William Miller, a moron, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in an Air Jordan sweat suit. He thought he was black, so people called him Rice as a reminder of what he was as white as. He lived in the ot
her dorm, Carlyle, where I wished he still was, instead of poppin’& breakin’ into our room with his stoner sidekick in tow.
Rice waddled toward Terence like some sort of ghetto penguin. “Bill,” he said, and swung a handshake from the hip. “I’m your power forward, G,” he said.
Terence looked stunned.
“This here’s my boy, Santos,” Rice said, with a thumb dunked back over his shoulder. The pudgy heir to a Puerto Rican rum dynasty stood with his back to the closet and his hands clasped in front of his crotch. His eyes were glassy, and he reeked of weed. He nodded at Terence, and then at me. Santos and that goon McCoy could have had some conversation — nothing but nods and grunts.
Rice helped himself to a seat on my bed, crossing his long legs. “We heard about your all sitch-eation’ and shit with them man-huggers,” he said to Terence. “They talking about it all over school and shit, don’t cha know.”
“Who is?” I asked.
“Everybody, G,” he said. “And you know them wrestlers is feeling it, too, ’cause of them signs and shit they put up in the mail room.”
“What signs?” Terence asked. “Where?”
“Ah, don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“Oh, yeah,” Rice said to me with his chin up. “And I heard them fools put a big hit on you and shit out there in broad daylight and shit.”
Super.
“Stop saying that, and shit, every time you open your mouth, alright?” I said. “That was an accident out there. They don’t know me from Adam.”
“Sheet,” Rice tried to drawl. “You trippin,’ Home Slice. This shit’s on, for real and shit, like it or not, and shit. We got a player now, took one of their scholarships, too.” He turned to Terence and asked quietly, “You got a scholarship to come here, right?”
Terence nodded.
“Solid!” Rice cried, and smacked his hands together. “Who hooked you up? Carolina? Georgetown? Duke Blue Devils?”
“Ah, Brown,” Terence said, fingering the pages of his book.
“Brown?” Rice asked, recoiling. “They got a squad?”
Terence leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Lost to Princeton last year in the Ivy League Championship,” he said. “The same Princeton that beat Georgetown in the first round of the NCAAs.”
“Alright, then. Alright, then,” Rice said, standing up, his stringy hair bouncing above his eyes and over his ears. He began to pace the small space between the beds, talking out loud to no one in particular. “We good. We good. And once we have a season, man, one good season, this school’s going to be about basketball. Basketball. Not that Greco-homo-erotica stuff they doing on them mattresses and shit.”
Santos, with his back still to the closet, nodded as his partner continued. “It’s on alright, and that business with the shoes, and this guy here, this hero, standing up to them, just set it off early. That’s all.”
“Relax, Willy,” I said. “Nothing’s happening.”
“I don’t know about all that,” he said, rapping his knuckles against his chest, “and when it goes down, y’all just holla’.” He jerked a thumb toward the neighboring dorm. “We got cho’ back.”
“OK, then” I said, rapping my knuckles, then pointing toward the door. “Got it.”
He stood up, and smoothed out his sweat suit. “In the meantime, y’all just let us know when you ready to run some ball and shit.”
“We’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “And shit.”
“Do ’dat,” he said before easing toward the door. “Later y’all.”
Santos nodded and followed his friend out.
After they left, Terence and I resumed our positions of study. I couldn’t help it. I swear. I had to look at him. He looked right back at me. We turned our eyes toward the open doorway that Rice and Santos had just exited. I tightened my mouth to keep from laughing. It was hard.
“The hell was that?” Terence asked, his face puckered.
I started to answer, but a howling came from my throat. Terence smacked his desk and tried to hold back a smile. We traded glances and then just started to crack up. A minute later, we were laughing like lunatics, right there at our desks, practically falling to the floor.
When we stopped laughing, Terence straightened his face and raised his chin. “You sure there’s nothing to worry about with those wrestlers?”
“Nah,” I said, trying to seem certain. “Nothing at all.”
I’d been having trouble sleeping, thinking about Rice and everything he said about the wrestlers and their signs. So, after hours one night, I slipped out of the room and down the stairs. Quietly, I entered the corner room. In the dim light, a figure, low to the ground, reclined below the arch of headphones. On the far side of the room, between the desktops stacked with jewel boxes, Grohl sat on the window’s ledge and fingered his guitar in the silvery moonlight. Upon spotting me, he raised his head. I held a finger to my lips as I crept up slowly behind Meeks, pulled the big ear cushions back and released them into place with a snap.
“Ahhhh!” he screamed, flopping from his bean bag chair and onto the floor.
“What are you listening to there, Geoff?” I asked casually.
“You dick!” he squealed.
“Relax there, chief,” I advised. “You’ll get us busted.”
He made a bulldog face and started to get himself together.
Murky sounds leaked from the headphones, and I picked up the CD booklet to look at the Pearl Jam artwork. “Maybe if you listened to some respectable rock-n-roll instead of all this gloom stuff you wouldn’t be so edgy.”
“Bite me,” he said, wrapping the cord around his headphones.
“And what’s with the flannel?” I asked, flicking the booklet. “They look like the Brawny Paper Towel band.”
“So, what’s up?” he asked. “I thought you only left your cube for classes and dinner these days?”
He had me there. I really had been spending a lot of time in my room. It was nice and quiet up there with Terence. And a little bit lonely, too, to tell the truth.
“Yeah, well, I’m curious about all this noise with the wrestlers,” I said. “Rice came by last week talking a lot of smack.”
“Rice,” Meeks laughed. “He must be touching himself over this.”
I confirmed that fact, then asked if there was anything to it, or if Rice was just being a basket case like always.
“You really should get out of the room sometime, mister,” Meeks said. “Someone yanked down their posters in the mail room, and now all of them, not just McCoy and Chester, are more pissed than ever. There’re even a couple of new goons they got that are extra special scary.” I’d seen them — a square, dark-haired kid who seemed old enough to be somebody’s uncle, and a tall, hyper guy with a buzz cut that made him look like a walking boner. Still, I had my doubts.
“Come on. What? Over some shoes? And some posters?” I asked. “No way.”
Meeks rubbed his hands together and spread his lips into a wide grin. “The working theory out there is that the school’s looking to transition from wrestling to more mainstream sports, and Terence, with his scholarship, is just the first step. They say the headmaster asked him to stay up in his room to, you know, not jeopardize anything.”
“Aw, come on, kid,” I laughed without thinking anything was all that funny. “That’s fagakada and you know it. The headmaster didn’t ask anybody to stay in their room.”
He laughed at my fagakada line then told me again that that’s what “they” were saying.
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “And who’s ‘they’?”
“Rice,” the roommates said at the same time.
I ran a hand through my hair.
Grohl stopped noodling around with his guitar. “If you think about it there, Dan,” he said with a too-cool tone, “it makes a lot of sense.”
“No, John,” I said. “If you’d think about it, it makes no sense at all.”
The roommates shrugged in sync,
like they’d lived together too long. They had.
“I’m out of here,” I said.
Meeks called me back. “You probably didn’t hear about Pride Day either… ?”
Pride Day was this ridiculous weekend when we play our rival — The York School — in every available sport to make up for the fact that we didn’t have a football team. Alumni and parents came, and everyone yucked it up and pretended they were all best friends for the day. At night there was a bonfire out on the fields. I hadn’t mentioned it to my parents, second year running.
“What about it?” I asked Meeks.
“Todd’s coming.” He jetted his brows, up and down. “Maybe we can put the band back together and have some giggles... that is, if you’re done crying over that Betty.”
I wasn’t.
“No chance,” I said. “But thanks for the info.”
In bed that night, across the room from a steadily breathing Terence, I decided that the best way for him to squash the rumors would be to get out of the room and show his face around campus, even if it meant hanging out with Rice.
I felt a little naked there in the gym, wearing standard-issue athletic shorts from my old Catholic school. They were regular gym shorts, with piping down the side and around the top of the leg. Terence, Rice, and Santos had on these droopy drawers that looked like pajama bottoms. They busted my chops the whole way to the gym, but I thought they were the ones who looked ridiculous, especially Santos, whose shorts nearly touched the back of his hundred dollar high-tops.
“Aight,” Rice said after we warmed up. “Me and Santos against you two fools, two out of three, up to 11, bring it back to the foul line, winners keep, losers pay for Birds afterward.”
The Early Bird was the best breakfast sandwich on the planet, the Canteen’s masterpiece of bacon, egg, and cheese on grilled sourdough dripping with butter. I took Rice’s challenge, right away, without even checking with Terence.
“Check,” Terence said, bouncing the ball to Rice, who returned it and crouched into what he must have considered a serious defensive pose. Terence snapped a pass over to me on the side of the key, and I waited as he trotted down to the baseline. I had about a foot on Santos, and held the ball over his head until Terence had pushed his back up against Rice. He called for the ball. “Give it up. Give it up.” No problem. Terence caught it with a clap, sending a smacking sound through the gym. After a head and shoulders fake, Terence wheeled around the bean pole, bounced the ball once on his way to the rim, and rolled it in like he was playing by himself.