I caught sight of Mrs. Tidmarsh—not such a bad lawyer after all—standing a few yards away with Jake’s dad and Dipsy.
“That’s awesome,” I breathed shakily. “Congratulations, man! I was freaking out!”
“Thanks for coming, baby,” he said sincerely. He paused. “Just you and Dipsy, huh? You didn’t hear from anybody else, right? You know—Didi?”
I didn’t even try to spare him. If anyone needed a dose of truth, straight up, it was Jake. “I begged her to come. She wouldn’t.”
He looked so devastated that I quickly added, “This is great news. You did it, Jake. You dodged the bullet.”
He hesitated. “Not exactly—” His normally unflappable features seemed to collapse, like the face of a baby about to wail.
“What happened?”
“I have to leave.” He was better, steadier, once it was out, as if, before, he had doubted his ability to say the words. “It was part of the deal. They don’t prosecute, and I don’t stay. I’ve got to go live with my mother.”
I was stricken. It wasn’t jail, but it was exile. Worse, it was Todd Buckley, winning again. But even as I felt hot anger suffusing my cheeks, I realized that this made a lot of sense. Jake couldn’t exactly show up at school on Monday morning as if nothing had ever happened. He was done at Fitz.
I swallowed hard. “It’s probably smart for you to get out of town for a while.”
“Not for a while,” he corrected. “For good. At least until I turn twenty-one, which is the same thing. By then, Didi …” His voice trailed off, the pain almost tangible.
I just stared at him, because there was nothing to say. It was a good thing he was going to Texas. Maybe from a distance, he’d be able to see that Didi wasn’t worth his mindless devotion.
“When do you leave?” I asked finally.
“Tonight.” From his pocket he produced a three-by-five index card and handed it to me. It had an address and telephone number in Houston.
“We’ll keep in touch,” I assured him. “We’ll find a way.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, right. Yeah, copy the number down for yourself before you give it to Didi.”
He must have realized how insulting that sounded, because he suddenly became flustered. “You’ve been great, baby—the best! I—” He enfolded me in an awkward bear hug. But it wasn’t an embrace of friendship. It was more like the desperate grasp of a drowning man.
I didn’t know what to say. “They’re crappy people,” I mumbled in his ear. “You’re worth more than the lot of them put together.”
Over his shoulder, I spotted a slender brunette in a trench coat hurrying down the marble steps. She caught my eye for a split second, and I recognized Jennifer. I hadn’t seen her in the courtroom. Then again, I hadn’t been in there very long before they kicked me out.
She took a tentative step in my direction. I turned away. I wasn’t in the mood for Jennifer just then, and possibly ever.
Still, I was strangely glad she’d come. Jen the Merciless had a shred of conscience. Good for her.
She looked the other way as she rushed past us.
“Jake.” Mr. Garrett’s voice was gentle but firm. “You’ve got a lot of packing to do.”
Jake stuck out his hand. “You’ve been a real friend, baby. I’ll miss you.”
We shook. “Take care, Jake.”
I watched him say good-bye to Dipsy. Then he, his father, and his lawyer got into the Beamer, which was parked at the curb.
And Jake Garrett was whisked out of my life.
That night I saw my mother carrying a FOR SALE sign from the garage. I didn’t have to ask her where it was going.
chapter seventeen
FOOTBALL.
After all this, there was still football. Naturally, I quit the Broncos, but Coach Hammer didn’t accept my resignation. He threatened to flunk me in Phys. Ed., which meant I wouldn’t graduate that spring.
Rah, team.
Actually, there was one advantage to remaining a Bronco. When I ran up to kick that first field goal, there would be a delicious moment where even I wouldn’t know what I’d be sending through the uprights—the ball, or Todd Buckley’s lousy head.
The thought sustained me as I arrived at the field that Saturday. I clung to it, hugging it to my chest like a tiny perfect gem.
I was a little surprised to find the stands crowded, but strangely quiet. Then I realized what was missing. Dipsy—sparkplug, mascot, buffoon—was not in attendance today, screaming his lungs out as he gave his all to the Broncos and a two-pound bag of Doritos. Of course, it was early yet, but I really hoped he was staying away for good. Maybe I didn’t have the guts to boycott this gang of backstabbers, but I loved the idea that the remora had relocated to another reef, where the sharks weren’t so vicious.
In the locker room, the Broncos were trying to rev up some bloodlust without the natural gifts of Nelson Jaworski, who was out of danger, but still hospitalized. Nelson’s dubious career in athletics—any athletics—was over. On the brighter side, he had reconciled with Melissa. His blow on the head had so scrambled his memory that he couldn’t recall why he’d broken up with her in the first place. At least, that was my theory. Nelson wasn’t the forgiving type.
The team mood was not very pleasant. No one was thrilled about last week’s forfeit, and there wasn’t much optimism about our prospects today. We were without our toughest lineman and our long-snapper.
“Damn that Garrett!” Todd spat, lacing his shoulder pads. “First he costs us Nelson. Then he costs us last week’s game. Now he blows town, so we don’t even have our long-snapper. And after all we did for him!”
“Yeah,” I put in. “You even loaned him your girlfriend. Some gratitude.”
I’d earned myself a punch in the face, and I was about to get one when Coach Hammer walked into the room, escorting a large man with a potbelly that extended halfway to infinity.
“Listen up, guys,” barked the coach. “I want you to meet Sam Bloch from Eastern Illinois State. He’s come to take in today’s game. Let’s show him what we’ve got.”
It was the one thing that could divert Todd’s mind from how much he wanted to deck me. When we took the field, Todd’s famous front row would actually be host to a bona fide college scout! This was going to be the first day of the rest of his miserable self-centered life.
“Come here, Sam,” Coach Hammer invited the guest. “Let me introduce you to Todd Buckley. You’ll want to keep an eye on him.”
“Sure,” the big man said with a semi-interested shrug. “But where’s this Garrett kid? I hear he’ll give you a perfect long snap ninety-nine times out of a hundred. A guy like that will always have a place on a football team.”
I glowed in the warmth of that statement all through the game. Glowing wasn’t easy. We got killed, which was definitely justice. I had to hold myself back from cheering every blown snap. Remember, the back-up long-snapper should have been Nelson, so we were down to volunteers. Coach Hammer looked like he was ready to get out there and do the job himself. But nothing would have helped. The final score was 28–3.
I didn’t mind because I didn’t care. I walked out of the clubhouse as the only Bronco with a clear conscience.
Something smacked me in the back of the head, and I wheeled, expecting to face an angry Todd. But there was no one there. My teammates had all hung out for the postgame postmortem.
And then the next projectile was incoming, a crab apple aimed with deadly accuracy at the center of my forehead. I ducked, and it sizzled by my ear.
That was when I saw her, perched in the tree by the end of the sidewalk.
I wasn’t in the mood for our usual games. “What are you doing, Jen?”
She hopped down to the ground. “Hey, Ricky. I just remembered. I owe you an apple-picking.”
Apple-picking. Two years of silence on the subject, and now here it was, out in the open.
I picked up the first crab apple with every intention of winging it at
her. Instead, I said, “Just because I play along with your Warrior Princess crap doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.”
“I have feelings too,” she told me.
“Caffeine dependency isn’t a feeling.”
“That day in the orchard,” she persisted with my favorite subject, “how do you think it made me feel when I heard you’d been making out with Hayley DeLuca the night before?”
I gawked at her. “I never touched Hayley DeLuca!”
“I figured that out,” she snapped. “Later! But when Todd hit me with that story in the middle of a bunch of people, what was I supposed to think?” She looked at me earnestly. “It’s enough to make a girl do something stupid.”
I didn’t know whether to be happy or furious. “Two years!” I exclaimed. “I thought you blew me off! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Would it have made any difference? It still happened. You know me, Ricky. I’m not a then person; I’m a now person. I only talk about the past when there’s something big at stake. Like you and me.”
You and me. I could hardly believe it. It had taken two years, but we’d finally reached a point where there was nothing at all standing in the way of you and me.
But first we had to clear the air.
“Your friends hate my guts.”
She shrugged. “That’s their problem. We’ve all got our faults. I don’t give to Greenpeace.” She looked down with a half shrug. “And I can be sort of kind of a bitch.”
“I think Starbucks is a ripoff,” I volunteered, adding, “but I’ll still go there for your sake.”
She squeezed my hand, disarming me of the crab apple. “I always knew you were a hopeless romantic, Ricky. That’s why I never gave up on you.”
I squeezed back. “I learned from the world champion.”
She nodded sadly. “Jake. What’s going to happen to him?”
I sighed. “He’s going to be miserable for a long time. And then one day, he’ll wake up, and go to his new school. And somewhere between algebra and a tuna-fish sandwich it’ll dawn on him that the world didn’t come to an end.”
“I wonder if he’ll be the new Jake or the old Jake there,” she mused.
“There’s only one Jake,” I said firmly. Understatement of the century.
Still hand in hand, we began to walk away from the school.
“He did it all on purpose, right?” she asked after a moment. “Planned it out like one of his chess matches. Operation Didi or something.”
“Guys have done more to get a girl,” I pointed out.
“Yeah? Name one.”
“That king from the Trojan War,” I replied. “He sent a thousand ships to get Helen back.”
Jennifer whistled. “Man, she must have had it going on.”
“She was hot,” I agreed. “But she was no Warrior Princess.”
About the Author
GORDON KORMAN wrote his first book, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!, when he was twelve years old. He has now written more than 50 books for middle-grade and teen readers. Don’t Care High was his first YA novel. It is based partly on his own experience in high school, where, he says, “the only way to get through alive was by laughing.”
Gordon’s books include the New York Times #1 bestseller The 39 Clues: One False Note, The Juvie Three, Son of the Mob 2: Hollywood Hustle, Born to Rock and Pop.
Born and raised in Canada, Gordon now lives with his family on Long Island, New York.
Also by Gordon Korman
A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag
Born to Rock
Don’t Care High
The Juvie Three
Losing Joe’s Place
Pop
Son of Interflux
Son of the Mob 2: Hollywood Hustle
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ISBN: 978-1-4431-2467-6
Text copyright © 2003 by Gordon Korman.
Cover image copyright © Uwe Krejci/Getty Images.
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First eBook edition: February 2013
Jake, Reinvented Page 13