Not Exactly a Love Story (17 page)

I sat down across from Mr. B, who forked a tomato slice onto the top of my egg and toast. He said, “I don’t see you making any friends, Vinnie. Are you getting along okay?”

“Fine,” I said, attacking my meal with knife and fork.

“Who’ve you been hanging around with?”

“Nobody in particular,” I said around the first delectable bite.

“Out of particular, then,” Mr. B said with a note of real concern.

Mom said, “Dom—”

“I’ve gotten to know a few kids,” I said quickly. “Just nobody I want to hang around with.”

“How about girls?”

“Dom!”

I stood up, downing the rest of the egg and half the fried bread in two quickly swallowed bites. “I’ll get around to girls,” I said as I dragged on my backpack. “I’m heading out for my run.”

“I’ll drive you to school,” Mr. B said, rising from the table.

“No. No. I’m still working up to being seen on the track.”

But I’d eaten too fast and my energy drained away as I jogged to the end of the block. I walked toward the bus stop. I saw Patsy there, and then I saw Biff coast up to the corner from the other side of the block.

The girls walked over to the car and talked to him for a minute. Even Patsy. Clearly, she had accepted an apology for Biff’s behavior. Did that mean she’d accept mine?

After a minute, she got into the car with him and he drove off. I could hardly believe my eyes. Okay, they were headed in the direction of the school. But he was history. Wasn’t he history? Does attempted rape get a second chance? Why didn’t she get
him
to find her some Italian names if she thought he was so terrific?

I couldn’t make myself go stand and wait for the bus and have to listen while Brown Bunny commented on this turn of events. I headed back the other way. Steamed, I kept on walking in the wrong direction.

When I turned around, I was already late to school. I ran one block, then walked one. My throat didn’t burn, but I couldn’t expect to win a race if I couldn’t run much farther than a block. It occurred to me that I might have chosen the wrong sport.

If I didn’t regret my commitment to become a track star enough, Mr. B had singled me out for some special attention, even though I missed half the class. He nodded to me approvingly several times, the way he does with his football team. I felt like a complete fake.

Sometimes you can’t win for losing.

Biff was in the locker room afterward. He was in some mood, talking about putting the wow on some girl. I’d already sneered at the dance posters on the way to class, and what he had to say held no interest for me.

But he had a willing audience in the guys standing around the locker room. They received his next line with an
encouraging nod of their heads, and several slaps to the arms.

“So I put a hand on her shoulder in this fatherly way, ya know how I mean, and I brought her up real close, and I said, ‘I really like you, Patsy, better than any girl I ever knew.’ She was eating it up, I swear, and I let my hand drift.”

Anticipatory moans urged him on.

“I was thinking I’d have to sit like that for a while to get her used to it”—ol’ Biff wasn’t one to be rushed through a story he was enjoying so much—“but when I moved in to kiss her, she about swooned—”

I can’t stand guys who do this. I really can’t. But mostly I couldn’t stand listening to Biff do this. I wanted to be the one to say those things to Patsy, do those things with Patsy. Not under the exact same circumstances, of course, but I wanted to be the one. So sue me.

“I went ahead and slid my hand right onto her boob. It did her in, man! I mean, she was so …”

I slammed my locker door, interrupting the party for a split second. Then their heads swiveled back to ol’ Biff. “She’s such a babe, you know, just ripe for it—”

Girls haven’t been that uneducated since the Middle Ages. If then. “You’re a real jerk, you know that?” I said.

“Huh?”

That was Biff, but even I could hardly believe what I said. There was nothing to do but follow up. “Some guys talk like that before they’ve done it. And then either they grow
up or they keep on talking about the girls who are nice to them because
they
have a problem. So which one are you?”

Right then, I was aware that all eyes were on me. It was as if my peripheral vision had widened to take in all the amazed faces. And I don’t think it was my imagination that some of those faces wore a sheepish expression. Not one of Biff’s avid listeners believed a word he said. Which was not to say they weren’t happy to listen and repeat every word to anyone who’d missed show time. The other thing that hit me, I had instinctively chosen the one accusation guaranteed to get under Biff’s skin.

But all that took a heartbeat. And that was all I had.

I don’t think he knocked me out, but I don’t remember hitting the floor. I just remember opening my eyes and going on talking. “No guy worth shit talks—”

He was right on me and knocked the breath out of me, but I kept on talking whenever I could put words together.

“… about a girl … like that … Probably she … wouldn’t …”

I was crying, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I hardly even noticed Biff pounding on me. All I saw was his stupid face in front of me like a red moon and this sound, something roaring all around us. Then somebody grabbed him off me.

Later, somebody told me it took several guys to grab Biff off me,
Mr. B among them. Biff and I spent most of the day in the dean’s office while everybody gave their version of what happened.

Mr. B was in the dean’s office a lot of that time so I know that two lines, often repeated, sealed Biff’s fate. One, that he was saying some pretty coarse stuff about one of the girls, and two, that although I’d called him on it, I’d never lifted a hand to fight.

While I wouldn’t have counted that last thing as a point in my favor, it seemed to work for me here. Biff got three days in-school suspension and a warning that any further disruption would make him ineligible for sports.

He hadn’t succeeded in killing me—that point worked in his favor. And Mr. B still had his star player.

I had a fat lip the nurse treated with ice, and an assortment of lumps and bruises on my head and shoulders that were vaguely purple. But except to say that I could expect some swelling, medical science didn’t have much to offer.

Neither did the dean. He said a few things like he knew I really applied myself to my academic subjects, and it seemed to him that I was going to be an outstanding student. It didn’t hurt that the dean was the track coach. Mr. B must have put in a good word for me, because the dean knew I was going out for the team in the spring. He said he always finds his best men in the long-and-lean types, like me, and he clapped me on the back.

I was okay in his book, that was it, just one of the guys, and with high principles besides. He said I would also have to apply myself to keeping out of trouble, but he said it with this embarrassed expression that meant he believed I’d done something vaguely admirable in any case and he didn’t want to come down too hard on me.

I was right to want Mr. B to like me. He’d had a lot to do with the attitude the dean was taking, I was sure. But I left the office with an odd nagging feeling that I’d sold out. I’d let the dean think I was one of them.

A jock.

Practically all the principals and the superintendents are. My mom pointed this out once, before she married one. When you get them talking, they tell you how in their early teaching careers, right up until they reached higher administration,
they were the proud coaches of this team or that. They talk about it with a glistening eye that turns cloudy when you ask how they feel about accelerated education.

I didn’t want to take the bus home. I decided to run.

It was rough, more so because I was pushing it, wanting the run to be over. I kept going till I nearly vomited, slowed to a walk for several blocks, then ran again, slower.

Patsy was hanging around her front yard as I jogged down the street, making me glad I’d set it up so I looked good on the home stretch. I was conscious of the ugly puffiness under one eye, and of a swollen lower lip that sported my own tooth marks. I hoped it was merely coincidental that she was outside. I didn’t want to talk about Italian anything. But she walked over to meet me.

“Hey, wait up,” she called as I passed her by. I kept going, but she ran alongside as I came up the driveway. “You look awful.”

“Thanks.”

“I don’t mean it like that.” Breathe, breathe. “Did he hurt you much?”

I slowed to a walk. “Not much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why are
you
apologizing?”

“It’s just … he was my boyfriend and all.”

I clenched my teeth over the question I wanted to ask:
Is that what you’re calling him now?

“You didn’t know?”

“Nope,” I said as I reached the house.

I shut the back door behind me. Did I know he was boyfriend material? No, I didn’t. Vincenzo knew, of course, but not me. I was the dumbbell who’d asked her out for Wednesday night. I wasn’t even sure we were still on.

She knocked.

Disbelieving, I opened up. “What is it?”
Now
, my tone implied.

“What did you fight about?”

“It was his fight. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I just wondered why he hit you.”

“You’re talking to the wrong guy,” I said as I shut the door on her again. It hit me halfway up the stairs. I’d hung up.

To top it all off, Dad called. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I was doing victory laps, but … I wasn’t.

“Mom tells me you got into a fight.”

“I didn’t know you talked to her,” I said, but a lot of things I didn’t know instantly came clear. Mr. B had called Mom at her office, and of course that’s when she called Dad, probably before I got through third period.

Dad was saying, “When did we ever stop talking to each other? Besides, we still have you.”

“It wasn’t much of a fight. He hit me. I fell down.”

“Why’d he hit you?”

“Mistaken identity.”

“Mistaken for who?”

“Somebody who’d fight back.”

“Yeah, your mom said he’ll be doing time.”

“It’s not a life sentence, I’m sorry to report.”

We talked for a while, Dad going through his latest funny taxi driver stories, before we said good-bye.

I still had to put on a good face for my mother when she got home. Easier said than done, considering the swelling under my eye.

“Dom, is that permanent?” This was her “hide your horror” voice, but fear was still there, in her eyes. It was kind of gratifying, if you want to know the truth.

“Of course not.”

Mom rounded on Mr. B. “You said it was nothing. He looks like Marlon Brando as a waterfront rat.”

I don’t think Mr. B got the movie reference. Or maybe he was caught between building me up to feel like I’d stormed the battlements and the more subdued story he’d told her.

Me, I was surprised she wasn’t cooler about the whole thing. It suddenly occurred to me that while Mom had appeared to take a “no skin off my nose” attitude to my pinched finger, she probably felt responsible she hadn’t avoided the accident somehow. She’d probably downplayed her own anxieties when she was with me.

Because now Mom was talking like they ought to pack me off to the emergency room. “Or we can drive into Queens and see Dr. Saltzman. He’ll squeeze us in before he goes home for the night.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said, imitating the way Mr. B had once spoken over a gasping body lying on the gym floor. He’d gotten down on one knee, popped a dislocated shoulder back into place, and sent everybody else back to a volleyball game with a reminder of each team’s scores. “I don’t even have a loose tooth.”

“I didn’t even think of his teeth. Have you looked, Dom?”

“I looked. Nothing chipped. I don’t think he needs a doctor,” he told Mom.

If her first reaction could be described as barely controlled hysteria, as the evening went on, her later reaction was made up of two parts “what might have happened” and one part “this wouldn’t have happened if we’d stayed in the city, where we belong.”

I was quick to remind her that I’d had my share of difficulty in the city, and asked if she remembered tripping over my self-defense books for weeks after the mugging. It seemed she’d forgotten how strongly that episode had figured in the move to Long Island.

Mr. B called the swelling “a mouse,” and after we ate the manicotti dinners he’d brought home with him, he said I ought to go up to my room and grab a nap.

I slept through most of the evening, waking up at ten-thirty to start homework. Right then, I turned the dial on the alarm clock and bought myself an extra hour of sleep in the morning.

Running. Who needed it?