by Andrew Cotto
I sat on the bench in front of the dorm and let the anger and frustration and everything else poisonous inside me swell and rise and then streak down my face. I cried, at first, without sound or motion. Then I bawled like a child, shuddering from spasms. The teardrops fell from my chin, like the blood that had dripped one time from my head, and another time from my hand.
When the tears stopped, I stayed in the stillness, the total stillness, gazing out over the silhouette of tree tops swaying in front the slanted roof from under which the whole school breathed. A wisp of wind brushed across my cheek. Then, just like that, the cloud cover broke. Streaky pieces played hide-and-seek with the slivered moon, and the campus was covered in new light. It was suddenly less cold, too.
Glowing clouds pulled away from the moon. On the pointed tip, I reached up my hand to pierce my finger. Imaginary blood dripped into my mouth. I didn’t taste dirty pennies this time, like when I was a kid in the street with my head busted open. This time, I tasted Italian ice, like when I was a kid — a real kid — and those streets belonged to me. I stayed on the bench for awhile, staring at the wide open sky, a finger in my mouth and my eyes on the moon.
“Ah, we find you dressed, once again,” Mr. Wright teased when he and Terence came into the room after dinner.
“Yeah,” I laughed from behind my desk. “We got that going for us.”
I’d been sitting at my desk with the chair toward the window, tossing a baseball into my soft mitt. Mr. Wright had come down the path with Terence, so I’d known this time that they were coming for me… not that I’d planned on dancing around in my underwear, anyway.
“I have good news for you, Daniel,” Mr. Wright said.
I moved to the window ledge and rested my feet on the trunk between the two desks. Terence came to his desk and sat by my side; Mr. Wright, in the middle of the room, sunk his hands into his pockets. He seemed to be on my side, too.
“Good news for me?” I asked. “This I gotta hear.”
“Well,” he started, swelling his chest, “I talked them into only giving you two weeks of Sunrises for walking out of dinner.”
“Thanks, Mr. Wright.” Really, I figured it’d be worse.
“Headmaster Hurley saw the whole thing, as did I, and he was apparently not pleased with Mr. Chester, but the wrestling instructor…” he began snapping his fingers. “What’s his name?”
“Coach Cauliflower Ears,” I suggested.
“Yes, him,” Mr. Wright smirked. “He was able to convince the headmaster it was all an unfortunate accident.”
“You don’t say?” I asked.
“Yes, not surprising,” he added.
“How many Sunrises did Chester get?”
Mr. Wright frowned. “Like I explained. Coach... what did you call him?”
“Cauliflower Ears.”
Terence cracked up. Mr. Wright smiled.
“Yes, Coach Cauliflower Ears explained to the headmaster that it was all...”
“Oh, never mind,” I waved him off. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“I imagine you do.”
“Those guys have it made. We all know that.”
“You can consider yourself quite lucky, also,” he said, crossing his arms.
“How’s that?”
“Well, if I wasn’t there to take up your defense, and your roommate hadn’t stepped in to stop whatever you had planned with that milk pitcher, you would have found yourself in a considerable amount of trouble.”
“You call that lucky?”
“Why yes — don’t you?”
I looked at Terence, then back at Mr. Wright.
“I guess so.”
Mr. Wright took a deep breath and kept his chest high as he spoke. “The magnificent writer Flannery O’Connor once said that anyone who survives childhood has enough stories to tell for the rest of their lives.”
That kind of sounded true, but maybe not for me. “Yeah,” I said, “but I’m no storyteller.”
“We all have stories to tell, Daniel,” Mr. Wright answered. “And you are certainly in the midst of a very compelling one.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said with a huff, thinking about my last couple of years.
“I imagine,” he said. “And it’s your story to tell, if you so choose.”
Maybe it is, I thought. Maybe it is.
Getting up and out the door by 5:30 in the morning was practically torture, especially the first day. But soon enough, I started to get into the routine: the walk to detention in the new light, the hour of daydreaming behind a desk, breakfast afterward by myself, and finally the stop in the mail room before first class.
I liked the feeling of having a jump on everybody else, having been up and thinking two hours before most of them. I needed the head start.
I paid attention to my classmates and started to recognize their patterns, like who was showered and ready versus those messy-haired and frantic. I noticed wardrobe consistencies and fashion disasters.
Watching people became a habit, and I kept it up throughout the day, putting faces together, recognizing couples and groups of friends. I could tell a freshman from a sophomore by the amount of Hamden gear they wore. I learned and remembered as many names as possible.
I missed Brenda like crazy and felt relieved when she began to walk, once again, with that bounce of hers. I hadn’t gone up to her or even tried to make eye contact. I figured respecting her request to stay out of her face was like an apology that kept on giving. It was hard, real hard, but my slow awakening had me interested in other things, too — and not just things that had to do with me.
I’d kept an eye on the wrestlers. Not just the jar-heads from upstairs, but anybody I saw walking around in blue jackets. It was the height of the season, and the Wanted posters that had covered the mail room earlier in the year had been replaced with ones about their matches, with the date and time posted up top. On the bottom, it read: Support Wrestling. The notices felt like orders.
I didn’t know who’d want to support those guys, because they really didn’t talk to anybody. I had originally thought it was just tweedle dumb and tweedle dumber who had the major personality defects, but it was really all of them. They were like a separate, hostile student body that occupied the school instead of being a part of it. When a blue jacket passed, people stopped talking. I could tell the wrestlers dug it, in a small-penis kind of way. In public, they nodded and smirked at each other, and I can imagine the laughs they had in private. It was almost like being held hostage by them, and I wanted to know more, so I paid a visit to a friend in the know.
“Hey, Sammie,” I said, entering his room one afternoon. “How’s things?”
“Hi, Danny,” he said from his desk.
His room was well-organized and neatly decorated. He had personal photos taped all over his closet door. Sammie always looked like a different kid in the pictures he had from home. It was funny to see him smile. The walls were covered with tapestries and posters of sad bands like The Smiths and The Cure, sorry-looking fellas with bad hair and pasty faces that made the grunge guys seem cheery. There were also some freaky art prints by that nut Dali, and a poster of Einstein with a quote underneath saying that real geniuses were misunderstood and hated by the morons. Something like that. Sammie came to the throw rug he had between the two beds.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“What?” I responded, acting hurt. “Can’t a guy come down to see his pal?”
“Well, it’s just that you never do.”
“I’m here now, ain’t I?” I said. “And I thought you could take me over to see some wrestling.”
“What?”
“Yeah, well, there’s a game or a match or whatever they call it, and I figured I couldn’t be here for two years without at least going once.”
“OK,” he shrugged. “I guess we can go.”
“Good. Grab your coat.”
An annex to the gym had been converted into this spe
cial little theater for the wrestlers. A steep balcony circled up over the matted floor and the crowd sat over the action. On the mats, both teams warmed up, grabbing and tackling and whatnot. It was kind of dark in there, too, with the only real light coming from the center of the domed ceiling way overhead. “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns-n-Roses blared on the stereo system. It seemed more like a show than a sport.
The air was sticky and damp as a basement. You could smell the sweat soaked into the rubber mat. Banners from all of the team’s national championships hung from the balcony. Sammie led me up there, and we found seats in the back. All the rows below us were filled, but the crowd didn’t seem all that excited.
Last year, when Sammie was the manager, he’d come back to the room after the matches and tell me how the place was so packed, and so crazy, that the balcony would shake. Then I’d tell him how the only people who showed up at the basketball game were the JV squad, because they had to, and some day student’s older sister, who only came to give him a ride home.
Down on the mats, both teams stalked around benches on separate sides of the room, pushing and talking and pumping each other up.
“Anything I need to know?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “They go by weight, so it starts with the lights and works up to the heavies.”
There was actually a kid on each team smaller than Chester, but he wrestled second against a guy right about his size, another kid you could probably cram into a Chinese food carton. They darted around pretty good, and it was like watching the fighting fish someone had in their dorm room last year, little pokes and bites until one fish slowed down. Chester was the tougher fish that day, and he was way up on points when the other guy just gave out and got himself pinned. Chester acted all tough, breathing through his nose like a tiny gladiator, though it was hard to take him seriously in the outfit. I mean, who picked out the wardrobe for this sport? Between the shoes and those leotards, those guys were about as hip as a bowling squad. No wonder some of the fakes on TV wore masks.
Anyway, we watched some more matches, mostly wins by us, until it was time for the heavies. The last match with Trent McCoy was much more interesting than the other ones, and it made me feel lucky, real lucky, to have walked away from our standoff only minus some dignity, a shirt, and a pair of khaki pants. McCoy was smaller than his blubbery opponent, but he used some scary strength and serious technique to toss this tub around like a sack of laundry. It seemed like he could have ended the whole thing anytime he wanted, but he pulled these moves, over and over, that slammed the poor mountain to the mat, again and again. I think the score was like 44 – 2 when it ended.
McCoy hardly breathed heavy when we passed him on the way out. He squinted at me for a few seconds and shot some air out of his nose, before putting his stone eyes on Sammie. We picked up our step and didn’t slow down until reaching daylight.
“What happened with them guys?” I asked as we walked down the path. It was cool and cloudy outside. No signs of life on the trees.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought you were tight with them?”
“No, not really, not anymore,” he said like it was no big deal.
There was still some snow in places but, otherwise, the campus was clean and brown. A couple of guys tossed a football around the field.
“Why not?” I asked him.
“Why not, what?”
“Why aren’t you tight with those guys anymore?”
“I don’t know. I’m just not.”
With eyes straight ahead, Sammie picked up the pace toward home.
“Come on, man,” I begged. “Last year, when you were the manager, you used to tell me they were alright.”
“That was before.”
We were up on Montgomery, and I held the door open for him.
“Before what?” I asked.
“Before I heard them saying things about me,” he said, breezing through the lobby.
I stood there thinking for a second or two. When I made it inside, Sammie was headed for the stairwell. “Sammie,” I called. “Wait up.”
He kept on, so I hustled and caught him on the second floor landing.
“When?” I asked. “When’d they say those things?”
“OK,” he sighed, turning to face me. “On the first day of school, I heard they were living in the dorm, upstairs, so I went up to see them, and I heard them talking about me.”
“Like how?”
“Saying how that loser Soifer lived downstairs, and how I gave them a rash.” He said it all very la-di-da. “You know, the same things lots of people say about me.”
“Don’t say that, Sammie,” I said as he walked off.
“See you for dinner, Danny.” He went into his room and closed the door. Standing in the hallway, I started to figure some things out. I started to see how the dominoes had already fallen, in a bad way, and how they might fall some more.
Chapter 15
“You hear about Todd?” Meeks asked. I spun around. He’d snuck up behind me in the laundry room as I dumped some threads in the machine.
“What about him?” I asked.
He dug his hands into his pockets and looked shifty. “Follow me,” he said.
I left my dirty clothes and trailed Meeks into his corner room. Grohl waited empty-handed, his guitar leaned up against the wall.
“What about him?” I asked again.
Meeks sat in his beanbag chair and locked his fingers behind his head. “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“He doesn’t live at home anymore.”
“You breaking my shoes?”
“No, no. I went there, to his house, and his mother told me,” he insisted.
Suddenly, I was the one greedy for gossip.
“When? When? What’d she say?”
Meeks dished about how he’d been calling Todd every couple of weeks since school started, leaving messages on his private line, until the line was disconnected. Home for the last weekend, Meeks took a cruise up to Todd’s town in Westchester, NY. He went to Todd’s house and knocked on the door. His mother showed Meeks in and told him that Todd didn’t live in their big old house anymore. She told him that a pretty girl had shown up and told her that her son had done something horrible and that his mother should know. That was it.
“Who was it?” I asked.
“She wouldn’t say,” Meeks answered, perturbed. “I even asked her to, you know, describe her or something, but she wouldn’t say anything beyond the fact that the girl was pretty. Big help that is. Every Betty that Todd dated was pretty.”
I knew who it was. I could tell by the way Brenda had found her step. She’d taken back, best she could, what had been taken away.
“And the more I thought about it,” Meeks went on, “the more I realized it could have been a lot of people.”
“How’s that?”
“You know, man,” Grohl said, “Todd was our friend and everything, but he always had to have whatever he wanted, especially with the Bettys. He’s the one who schooled us in the rules of cat chasing, and he took more than a few girls from both of us, especially this sorry-looking dude.”
“Bite me,” Meeks said.
“So?” I said. “I thought all was fair when it came to that crap and you guys?”
“It is and it isn't,” Grohl said. “Todd took it too far sometimes, and he kind of had this reputation.”
“For what?”
“For the rope-a-dope,” Meeks said, kind of mischievous and kind of sad, too.
“The hell is that?” I had to ask.
“Man,” Meeks sighed. “You city boys are rubes, you know that?”
He was right about that, in a way. These suburban kids were into things I knew nothing about. So Meeks explained this drug Rohypnol and how sick guys think it's cool to drop it in girls’ drinks and have their way with them when they’re passed out. Super. It made me feel lucky to have grown up middle-class, under the eye of my mo
ther and father and everybody else in the neighborhood. It also made me sick thinking about the girls this had happened to, especially Brenda Divine.
I asked about Todd and how he’d gotten this reputation, so Meeks clued me in.
“When we were sophomores, there was this senior girl, a super hot fox named Bernadine Thompson, and Todd had been after her, like, all year, but she wasn't having it. At the end of the year, there was a big graduation party at someone's house for the seniors, and Todd was there, of course, and she says he gave her the rope-a-dope.”
“How'd she know?”
“She woke up in one of the bedrooms with a hangover.” So?
“She’s doesn’t drink. She’s allergic to alcohol. And she wasn’t planning on spending the night.”
“OK…” I nodded.
“And Todd was next to her on the bed...”
“And?”
“When she got home she realized her underwear was on inside out.”
I felt sick.
“Bernadine told her parents,” Meeks continued. “And they called Headmaster Hurley.”
“And what’d he do?”
“You know who Todd’s father is?
“All Todd ever said was that he was an asshole who lived somewhere overseas or something.”
“He is an asshole. A rich one. He runs an investment banking firm out of Switzerland.”
Grohl said that Todd’s father had come to Pride Day the previous year, arriving by a helicopter that landed on the soccer field just before the game started.
“He came all the way from Switzerland for Pride Day?” I asked.
“Well,” Meeks coughed. “He sort of had a private meeting with Headmaster Hurley, too. Apparently, some funds were exchanged in order to keep Todd in school.”
“And how do you guys know all this?”
Meeks scoffed. “We find things out. It’s what we do.”
“The freaking Hardy Boys,” I said.
They smiled and slapped each other five.
“So what made this time different?” I asked.
“Whoever it was went straight to Todd’s mom, and Mrs. B already knew about Bernadine Thompson, too, of course. And the way she was talking when I was there, it seemed like there could have been some other times, too.”