by Andrew Cotto
“You’re reminding me of Meeks right now, you know that?”
She didn’t even dignify that with a response.
“OK, Bren.” I pretended to be had. “My father’s name is Dominick, and people think I take after him and, in Italian, ‘ino’ is added to the end of a word to mean ‘little,’ like uccello is bird and uccellino is little bird, so they used to call me little Dom, or Domino. Domino.”
“That’s so cute,” she smiled. “You look alike, that’s it?”
“And maybe we’re both funny sometimes, too.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe there was more to it than that.”
“What can I tell you?” I said. “Now how about a little more wine?”
We continued our slow lunch, dripping honey over Gorgonzola cheese until we couldn’t eat another bite. I motioned to Ronnie but, instead of bringing the check, he showed up with a hunk of meat from Montana big enough to feed the whole state.
“Bistecca per tre,” he said, placing the gigantic platter on the table. “You guys don’t mind if I join you, do you?”
“No, no, of course not, Ronnie,” I said.
“Good. You want some roasted potatoes with this?” he asked, squeezing lemon wedges all over the carved steak.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve already had a lot.” I leaned back and patted my stomach.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “We’ll have beans.”
Ronnie stormed the kitchen and returned with some white beans in tomato sauce and another bottle of wine. He filled our glasses and plates and helped himself to a heaping portion. Brenda and I picked at our food while Ronnie cut and stabbed and chewed like a madman.
“So,” Brenda said to Ronnie after most of the steak, half the beans, and all the wine had been devoured. “Danny and his father look alike?”
“Those two?” he laughed, while I cringed. “Fortunately for this guy, he resembles his mutha.”
“Really?” Brenda asked, with her eyes on me. “How so?”
“Don’t get me wrong, his father’s the greatest,” Ronnie said, still chomping away on the food, “but he’s a short guy, like me, and, you know, normal looking, I guess, but this guy’s mutha… this guy’s mutha is tall and skinny, like him, and what a looker, that one.”
My face prickled as my insides twisted.
“You know,” Ronnie continued, “around the neighborhood, people called her the Italian Audrey Hepburn!”
“Breakfast at Anthony’s,” I mumbled. It was the joke our family always made about that comparison.
“They don’t call her that anymore?” Brenda asked.
“They might,” Ronnie said, tossing a napkin over his bloody plate, “if they were still around.”
“Where are they?”
“Have him tell you,” Ronnie said. “Now who wants coffee or something sweet?”
“Just a coffee for me, Ronnie,” I begged.
“How about you, Doll?”
“Something sweet,” Brenda said.
“Thatta girl,” Ronnie said, and was off for the back.
“What’s he talking about?” Brenda leaned toward me and whispered. “Is that why he doesn’t have a restaurant anymore?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Why are you being so secretive, Danny?”
“I’m not.”
“Yes you are,” she insisted. “And it’s so annoying. I want to know what he’s talking about, about your name and the neighborhood, and don’t get clever.”
She was demanding and nervous, kind of like when she bugged me about the wrestlers. I didn’t want to talk about this subject, either.
“I’m just trying to save you from a boring story.”
Ronnie arrived with a tray full of coffees, liquor, and dessert.
“Allora,” he said, sitting down. “What’d I miss?”
“Nothing,” I said, splashing some Sambuca into my demitasse cup.
“Ronnie,” Brenda said, sitting up straight, her spoon stuck into a pale-green mountain of pistachio gelato. “Domino doesn’t seem to be in a storytelling mood, and I’m curious about what happened to all the people.”
“We left.”
“Why?”
“Because the Spics came into our neighborhood and took the place over.” He said it matter-of-fact, like he wasn’t the only Italian in the whole joint. I downed the espresso and asked for the check.
“Sure thing, kid,” he said getting up. “I know it’s late.”
We didn’t speak until Ronnie returned.
“No, no, no,” I insisted to Brenda as she reached for her black shoulder bag.
“That’s right, Doll,” Ronnie said. “Yours was free, and his was heavily discounted.” He gave me a folded-up piece of paper. I forked over the measly sum and thanked him for the meal.
“Hey, it was my pleasure,” he said, and patted the back of my head. “Tell your folks I was asking for them, and don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t,” I said, helping Brenda with her coat.
“Thanks, Ronnie,” Brenda said.
“Anytime, Doll.” He gave her a kiss. “Take care of yourself.”
We walked outside, but the cool air was little relief to the sickness that filled me. I had lied to Brenda about my name and got caught, which was bad enough, but she also got a taste of what happened back home, what scarred my head and convinced me to change my name in the first place. Wrenched by all these awful emotions and memories, I walked up Mulberry Street, steady as I could, for as long as I could. Then I ducked into an alley and tossed a heavily discounted lunch behind a dumpster.
“Danny!” Brenda screamed as my guts splashed on the asphalt.
I held my hand out to the side, to assure her everything was alright. After spitting the remnants of Montana from my mouth, I bought a club soda from a bodega and took it to a small park on Spring Street.
“Just tell me you’re OK,” Brenda said once we sat on a bench.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said after washing my mouth out.
“Did you drink too much?”
I’d been drinking around the table with my parents since I was 12 years old. I’d never been drunk, or sick, ever.
“It ain’t that,” I admitted. “But all that about my father and the neighborhood and everything.”
“Tell me,” she insisted.
“OK,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
I took some more water. The sun slanted high on the buildings and shadows covered the ground. Under the bare branches of a peeling Sycamore tree, in the cool of a lateautumn day, I told Brenda Divine the story of me and my old neighborhood. When I was finished with the first year of high school, I parted my hair and let her feel my scar with her fingers. She started to cry, right there on the spot. Then she crossed her arms, tucked into herself, and kept on crying, hard, rocking slowly back and forth.
“It’s alright, Bren.” I tried to console her. “You don’t have to cry for me.”
“I’m not,” she sobbed.
I looked around. “Who you crying for then?”
“All of us.”
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she said, wiping tears from under each eye. “Please tell me that was the end of it.”
I lied and told her it was, figuring the poor kid had heard enough of my sad story.
We sat in the park, with my arm around her shoulder, until dark spots started to appear. We grabbed a cab uptown to Grand Central, for her train to Connecticut and my subway to Queens. After we said our goodbyes and her train rolled away, I remembered she’d come to the city to talk to me. I’d feared that conversation, as soon as she’d brought it up, and figured, now, it couldn’t have been that important. I was wrong. Something had had an effect on her, something big, and I couldn’t be kept from that.
Chapter 8
On Sunday afternoon, after a subway to Grand Central, I caught a bus going west out of the city. Once the ride smoothed out on the highway, I
stared out the window as we rolled along Route 80 and the horizon faded into the cool blue of late afternoon. The trees couldn’t go by fast enough. After dark, a reflection appeared in the window, the face of a kid on his way to the place where he belonged. I tapped my feet the rest of the way and practically jogged from the bus stop in town, across campus, and into the dorm.
I walked upstairs, opened the door, and hit the lights. I thought for a second that I had the wrong room. Everything was upside down, or broken, or torn. The mattresses had been stripped and pissed on, our clothes were all over the floor, our desks turned over, and our books and papers scattered like leaves. All my posters were in a crumpled pile in the corner, except for Christy Turlington, who was laid out neatly in the center of the room, a dry stain of pearls down her face and neck. Across the window, in soap, someone had scrawled “THEIR.”
I dropped my bags and went for Mr. Wright. He followed me down and frowned at the mess. He didn’t say anything for awhile, just rubbed his beard.
“OK,” he eventually said. “I will call the custodian and have him bring two new mattresses. In the meantime, Daniel, if you could be so kind as to begin cleaning this up. The van from the airport is due in at around 8. Mr. King can help you then.”
“That’s it?”
“What more would you have me do?”
“Make those guys come down here and clean this up.”
“What guys?” he asked.
I didn’t even answer. Just looked at him.
“I think we can chalk this up as a prank, young man. An anonymous prank.”
Flipping rooms could be called a tradition at Hamden, and it was kind of normal for a new underclassman to have their room turned upside down. But not a fourth-year student — new or not — and definitely not like this. I thought of Chester’s threat that Brenda had overheard: by any means necessary.
“Really? A prank?” I asked Mr. Wright without patience or respect. “With body fluids and busted property? Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. They got us good, those... those rascals.”
“Daniel...” Mr. Wright sighed, but I cut him off.
“Danny, alright?” I said. “I go by Danny.”
He must have known I had him, because he didn’t even flinch at my tone. “I know this is upsetting, but I have absolutely no means of figuring this out, especially since we were away when the incident occurred.”
The wrestling team wasn’t away. Winter season sports started the first day back, and the wrestlers spent the holiday here, at school, practicing to the last minute, and probably jerking off in a circle and eating the hearts of small animals. I reminded Mr. Wright of this.
“Well, what would you have me do?” he asked. “Put them under bright lights for an investigation? Inject them with truth serum?”
“How about a spelling bee?” I suggested, pointing to the window. “That would do it.”
Mr. Wright laughed out loud, then looked at the window and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Daniel. Danny. I really am, but I just don’t know what to do. I’m afraid if I call more attention to the matter, it will just make things worse. Perhaps if we just treat this as a routine prank, a small fire that we suffocate with silence, there will be no opportunity, no oxygen, for the flames to expand.”
He seemed pleased with his metaphor, but I was starting to think that math teachers might be better than these literary-types at dealing with dorms and the things that happen between kids. The eggheads could put all the numbers together, in every possible way, and know, without a doubt, that things didn’t add up. I had no faith in Mr. Wright figuring it out.
“Whatever you say,” I said to him.
He left me alone with our mess.
I worked like a lunatic. After a few hours, the window sparkled and our clothes had been returned to the closet. The desks sat right-side-up, and the books and papers were back where they belonged. I did the best I could, but by the time Terence showed up, it still seemed that something had gone wrong in our room.
“The hell happened?” he asked. He stood in the doorway, his shoulder bag hanging toward the floor.
“Welcome to Hamden Academy,” I said, trying to make it sound like a formality.
“What?”
“You’re not a real student here until you get your room flipped — it’s a tradition.”
Terence walked inside and put his bag down on the bed spring.
“You’re not new,” he said, looking at the bare walls. Smart kid. No wonder Brown was after him.
“Yeah, well, they must have gotten carried away,” I shrugged. My face reddened with shame at my crappy lie.
“Where’s the beds?” he asked.
“Ah, we might have to wait until morning for those.”
“No, I mean where are the old ones?”
“Oh, they got covered in shaving cream,” I said. “I asked them to take them away and get us new ones.” I had actually dragged them, reeking of piss, down to the laundry room.
“Shaving cream, huh?” he asked.
“Yep.”
Terence looked at the toiletry bag that rested on the ledge next to his bed. It had been untouched. The only untouched thing in the room. Or so it seemed.
“Ah, was your toothbrush in there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, picking up the bag.
“You might want to give it a whiff.”
He unzipped the bag, took out the toothbrush and held it to his nose. His head jerked back from the smell. He looked sickened.
I walked over with the trash can and he dumped the bag, toothbrush and all, into the bin. “I’m telling you, it happens to everyone. No big deal.”
I dumped my whole toiletry bag, too, even though it had been with me all weekend. He stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“Someone stuck my toothbrush up they ass, and you’re telling me it’s no big deal?”
“What can I say? It’s a tradition.”
“Well that’s a messed up tradition right there,” he said. “Someone ought to have their ass whooped over that.”
He began to unpack. I could tell by the shake of his head that he knew, inside the closet, his clothes were out of order. He looked around the room, wondering what else had been done. He sucked his teeth and made that sound he was so crazy about. No horses came.
I knew that feeling he was fighting, wondering about an enemy that couldn’t be seen. An enemy who does to your things what they wish they could do to you. The thought of their hands on your stuff makes you sick, them being in your space when you’re not there. Back in Queens, at the big high school, I hated what those pricks did to my locker more than what they did to me. At least I saw their faces when they kicked me around, but I never knew who was scratching messages on my locker or even spitting on me through the crowd. Once, inside my locker, a dead rat was stuffed in my jacket pocket. I had to throw that coat out.
The worst part about this kind of thing is that you don’t know who “they” are. And the unknown makes you afraid. It gives you the creeps and makes you think everyone’s in on it. You trust no one. You shut down to be safe. Crawl inside. I didn’t want to see that happen to Terence. Or to me. Not again.
“Hey, hoops start tomorrow, right?” I said. I lounged across my box spring like it was the most comfortable mattress in the world.
“Yeah,” he said, a flash of light in his eyes.
“You want to borrow my lucky shorts?”
“Hell, no!” he said, breaking into a smile.
He let the smile linger. He dug some framed pictures out of his duffel bag and positioned them on his bedside shelf and desk. He tacked a Houston Rockets poster on the wall.
“So, you guys going to be any good or what?” I asked.
“First scrimmage is soon enough,” he said. “You can see for yourself.”
Chapter 9
The gym rocked during the home opener of the basketball season. It was just a scrimmage, against a nearby prep school from over the Pennsylvania border, but our si
de of the bleachers was jammed with people yelling and stomping on the retractable stands. Last year, the only noise at our home games was the chirping of sneakers on the hardwood floor. Brenda, Sammie, and I climbed the stands and joined up with a group of kids from our class.
“Hey, where were you guys last year?” I called a few rows down to Meeks.
“No offense, White Shadow,” he yelled over the cheer of another basket, “but you guys didn’t have T-Money!”
Rice had been blabbing to everyone about Terence’s practice performances. I had heard him, over and over, saying that Terence’s game was “phat,” “stupid,” and “dope.” All good things on his fagakada planet. I couldn’t help thinking, looking around at all those people cheering and carrying on, that some of this had to do with the fact that Terence was still the mysterious guy who had stood up to the wrestlers. Then I saw a few blue jackets sitting at the end of the bleachers, down from our team’s bench. I’d never seen any wrestler at another game. Ever. They weren’t cheering or anything, just staring at Terence.
He looked pretty sharp in his white uniform with blue trim. He crouched and hounded some poor kid trying to advance the ball past half-court. When the guy tried to spin away, Terence poked the ball free and was on his way down court.
“Here we go again!” Meeks jumped up and called as Terence swooped to the hoop and finger-rolled the ball over the rim. The room roared. Terence got right back on his mark and swarmed all over him again. The other team’s coach called time out.
Our team flopped to the sideline like a pack of puppies. Terence didn’t seem all that happy, though, and he covered his head in a towel while resting on the bench.
After the break, the teams went back at it for a few minutes until the halftime buzzer went off. Our guys stormed the locker room, and I noticed, even with all the commotion, that Rice found the time to hang a sweaty towel over Chester’s head. He stood and fired it back, but Rice kept running, wagging a finger in the air. The floor was empty, but the gym was still alive.
“He’s really good,” Brenda said, tightening her fingers around mine.
“Yeah, but he’s got, like, eight inches on that kid.”