Pins: A Novel (23 page)

5

Miss Rita Pooley, Joseph’s assigned Case Worker for Family Court Case number 4567blablabla, had hair pulled back in that intricate braided style that made Joseph think she ought to be on a throne in Africa, being served wine in gold cups. Instead, she typed and talked from behind her desk, getting information and reports from Marie and Dino with what his mother would later describe in the car as “a great deal of authority.” In her presence, even his dad shut up.

Dino Nicci seemed relieved that Miss Pooley laid it down clear for them. “You just moved here. He’s squeaky clean, and from what St. Augustine tells me, a top athlete.”

He choked on a laugh.

“What you seem to be suffering from, Joe, is a lot of peer pressure from jumping into the wrong group of buddies, am I right?”

 
He would not be sent up the river, not even across the skyway to the Paterson Youth Authority, where–while his father and mother sued each other for custody–Dink was probably wearing his jeans.

“He’ll get a suspended sentence, most probably.”

It was the ‘probably’ that kept him up nights.

“Unless you do something again,” Miss Pooley stated very clearly. This woman would take no hooey.

“Straight up front; a swift negotiation to turn state’s evidence would almost assuredly relieve him of any duty such as community service, which I strongly recommend you start him on now as a show of faith.”

She tried to joke, smiled, but seemed distracted by the dozen other kids she had to see that day. Her office was neat but there were papers everywhere, files in stacks. She wore a jacket that looked like a man’s, only made different. Joseph didn’t know what it was about her, but something under her methodical behavior and calm eyes made him like her. She took to him immediately, especially when she told him he was a Person In Need of Supervision, or PINS.

Another choked blast. He was asked if he was okay, but when he explained his reason, she smiled. “You might have to show up for a few days, in one of the other boys’ cases, or trials, if it comes to that. But from what I hear, they are going to seek a plea, in um, one case.”

Joseph looked at his file on her desk, trying to read it upside down. His father’s knee, to his left, kept tapping.

“So, he’s gotta do what?” his dad insisted.

“Hold on.” She looked at the forms. “He might perhaps get a suspended sentence for conspiracy, since he waited a day to tell about the incident, but that could be excused because of his intoxication. I’d like to recommend an Ala–Teen group. It’s right in your area.”

Although his parents didn’t speak much, it seemed they understood. Joseph understood, too. They were not being punished for the perceived lack of control over their son, just made to feel that way. She suggested his parents go get a soda while Miss Pooley talked with Joseph alone.

“I’ll be getting the transcript of your sworn statement, but right now you need to tell me a few things, Joseph, things you may not be comfortable telling your parents, but I may tell them anyway.”

“So, their leaving is…?”

“Tell me about this posse, Benjamin and…”

“Bennie and Hunter and Dink.”

“Dink? That would be…” she looked at a piece of paper atop a very thick pile of papers. “…Donald Nicholas Khors?”

“Yeah.”

“Donnie Khors?”

“Uh, sometimes.” Joseph had a very strange feeling. He watched Miss Pooley fuss around with his file. “You know him?”

“We’ve crossed paths.”
 

So Dink wasn’t bullshitting.

“How did he get that nickname? Dink?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know…how is he?”

“I’m sorry, he’s not mine. But I can try to find out.” It seemed there was a moment where Joseph almost spilled everything about Dink, and Miss Pooley saw it, but tactfully put it aside. “Now, can we talk about the night of Anthony’s death?”

“What, like facts?”

“No; feelings.”

“You got a tape recorder in here or something?”

“No, why?”

“Cause I’m getting tired of telling this, y’know.”

The tears didn’t start up again, though. He didn’t need to repeat his attempts to cough, hold his mud. He felt thirsty, sleepy. Telling the first few times had drained him. The formality of the office, the hum of her computer and harsh lights, the buzz of other people outside her office lulled him, that and the fact that he hadn’t slept in two days.

This time he left out the part about Anthony’s hand. Every time he told it, that night got colder, as if it were a movie he heard while half-sleeping on the living room floor. Maybe someday he would convince himself of that.

She left Joseph in the room alone for a minute. Then he heard Miss Pooley talking with his parents, then they all returned. Something was up.

“What is it?”

His father sat beside him while Miss Pooley watched. It seemed to humiliate his father. Dino Nicci sat facing his son. “I’m only gonna ask you this once, because I know you are never going to lie to me about this kinda thing again, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Aside from the drinking, did you do any drugs with those guys?”

“No.”

“Any pot?”

“No.”

“Any supplements or pills or shoot anything?”

“No, no, no. I tole you.”

“Okay, okay, stay calm.” He patted his son’s back. “Miss, I’m sorry–”

“Pooley.”

“Pooley. Sorry, but I think, that, that is good enough for me.”

Miss Pooley sighed in a resigned way, filled out another form. “Unfortunately, it may not be good enough for Family Court, so what I’m suggesting, Joseph…” She stopped writing, gave him another one of those looks, “…is that you undergo a voluntary urinalysis to prove this.”

“A what?”

She explained what, then why. “They searched Bennie’s duffel bag and found steroids. And when they apprehended Donald, they found some marijuana at his home.”

“But, they never said anything about that.” His voice came out high and tinny, in a way the boy now trying to act like a man didn’t, or couldn’t understand could be very grating. “They never did any of that! Dink wasn’t the one who tried to run him down! Bennie did it! I tole you! Hunter was the one ‘at threw a bottle! Dink didn’t do anything! Where is he? Am I ever gonna be allowed to–”

“Joseph,” his mother warned.

“He never even said anything about that, I mean sure they acted funny, but Bennie’s the one, Bennie’s the one that–”

“Joe!” his father barked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Stop.”

Looks, glances all around. He felt his parents being silently checked by Miss Pooley. He saw how they felt more embarrassed by him, how they were being observed by Miss Pooley as a possible cause.

He was going to get it so bad when he got home.

“I’d like to meet with you again next week, Joseph, and one of your parents. You two can trade off. I know how crazy it is with three kids.”

“Oh, you have children?” Marie’s face brightened as she scanned Miss Pooley’s wall for baby pictures. Marie turned back to her son. See? Babies. Family. Just try it.

But Joseph was reading Miss Pooley as another sort of woman, just before she said, “Oh, my sisters do.”

It was then that Joseph found an ally in Miss Pooley.

While she stood, showed off a few pictures, Joseph reached into his backpack to get out the little 1994 appointment book his mother bought him. His old wall calendar had been filled with weight changes, carb intake, workout times, exercise schedules. Now scribbled in were:
 
Health Report on Drunk Driving, due Monday. Miss Pooley, Case Worker, Second floor, Tuesday 3:30pm. School Guidance Counselor, Wednesday, 3pm. Bring list of goals.

“Come on.” His mother was already out the door Miss Pooley held open.

They all shook hands as Miss Pooley reminded them of their next meeting. He trailed his parents through the hallway. One kid, a white boy skatepunk, sat alone. The other three boys were all African-American, all with their mothers, a sister maybe.

Before they headed down a larger echoey hall of the County Family Court door, Joseph looked back. Miss Pooley had already moved on to another group, welcoming the next fractured family.

“Sup,” one boy said. Joseph nodded, realizing that Dink’s jeans were hanging on him excellently. Even if he was a mess inside, at least he was fly.

6

As Mister Clutter defined “fallout,” Joseph cracked a tiny grin nobody else could see, his gaze intent on his left hand. Like one of last semester’s lab experiments that failed to die, his third knuckle erratically twitched.

Although the smallest, it was the more fascinating of his injuries from the previous week, including his ear, which had inflated and been drained of blood. A very colorful shin bruise had flattened to a dull yellow. His neck injury, or, more accurately, re-injury, was fine, with a daily five hundred milligrams of Motrin, courtesy of Mom.

The day’s science class discussion had shifted from energy to atoms to bombs to Nagasaki to anti-war protests and on, anything but Anthony-rama. That, apparently, had been discussed the day Joseph had to leave early to donate a small jar of his pee.
 

Joseph felt his absence creating opportunities for conversations about him. He quickly mastered the trick of ducking through halls quickly enough to get in class early, thus avoiding the wall of eyes and whispers he got after being late for English. Keeping his head down at about a forty-five degree angle kept the false “Hi”s away. He looked at kids’ chests,
 
hunching down.

The comments bounced off the halls, another version of locker room swipes one of the JV runts sputtered about someone “losing all his butt buddies.”

It could have been during his Family Court hearing that conveniently had to happen on Wednesday, the day of the match at Haledon, his first forfeit.

In classes, Joseph could listen, or pretend to listen, and no one noticed him. He was just someone to look at.

He’d become what Dink had termed a Zone Case, kids like Russ Hershler, who returned from a drug rehab program with short hair and speech like a zombie, or Stacey Andress, rumored to have received an abortion for Christmas. There were kids at school with magenta hair, two with nose piercings. They seemed disappointed that no one thought of them as radical, so they just pouted. They were all Zone Cases, and he could feel himself shifting. He didn’t need pot, or speed or mascara, like the stoners, the skatepunks, the other world that didn’t wear varsity jackets, the kids who walked down the halls trying to be invisible or freakish. He saw them all for the first time, they saw him, understood each other in brief silent glances.

As Mr. Clutter rambled about radioactive particles, Joseph kept his arm over his notebook while he converted a swirly doodle into the shape of a boy’s body rising from a box. He didn’t notice it was really a drawing of Anthony’s spirit rising up to heaven until Greg Fletcher leaned over to peek.

He turned to a blank page, looked up, thought back to a day at St. Augustine’s, one of the few times he’d asked a question, “Where do souls go? Are they like atoms?” Brother Michael had burned with anger, saying science had nothing to do with faith. He then explained why, for the next week. The other boys blamed him for the lectures. Joseph learned to shut up after that.

Ahead of him, the tips of Sharon Falconi’s brown hair barely grazed his desk. Why do I not like that, he wondered. Why do I like guys’ heads, short crewcuts with ears sticking out? Was it because he’d spent so many years rolling around with guys?
 
Then why didn’t it make all the other guys gay, like Walt or the twins? Maybe they were, but didn’t say anything.

As if.

Six o’clock and ten o’clock became the dreaded hours when everybody in the northern tri-state area got updates on the condition of “the Lambros killing,” “the teen assault” or the more popular “varsity murder.”
 

Thursday night’s news included the fact that Anthony’s body was still at the morgue, pending an autopsy to determine the cause of death. Bennie’s public defender, it was said, wanted to consider the possibility of death by asthma attack.
 

“Yeah, right.” Joseph took up the habit of talking back to the television.

By Friday, practice continued to creep him. Everybody had finished patting his shoulder, pulling him aside to say how sorry they were about everything, and they were glad he’d stuck it out, done the right thing.

Some had been interviewed in the parking lot, supporting him without naming him; Raul, the Shiver brothers.

What shocked him were the students interviewed who claimed they “didn’t see how Ben would do something like that,” how he was a “prize athlete,” one administrator said, a guy Joseph had never even seen at a match.

Before warm-ups, a few guys rolled around, playing, doing everything in their power to ignore the invisible beast of their teammates’ absence. Joseph wasn’t paying attention while he tried to pry Walt’s arm up to turn him. Walt tousled with Joseph a bit, accidentally elbowing him in the nose. Walt apologized profusely. Joseph waved him off, ignored the pain.

Coach Cleshun clapped his hands, bringing everyone to order. “Start stretching. Stop horsing around.”

“But we’re Colts,” a Shiver brother joked.

Cleshun glared them to silence, except for a few grunts and groans as the boys were led through stretches. Joseph noticed how much more space surrounded him.

Brett Shiver had said that Cleshun had been “put through the wringer” at a special meeting of the school board. Troy Hilas used more colorful terms. “He got his ass totally reamed. They’re this close from cutting the team,” Troy hissed, pinching his fingers close just like the “crushing your haid” guy.

When Troy later offered to show Raul and Joseph a cradle, Joseph felt wary. He couldn’t tell sometimes with Troy.

“So, you miss him?”

“Who?”

“Khors.”

“Yeah.”

“You were close.”

“Huh?”

“I heard you were really…close.”

He just found himself grabbing Troy in a headlock, holding it pretty well, until Coach Cleshun pried him off, dragged him to his feet. Troy lay on the mat, flushed, overdoing it.
 
“What a psycho!”

“Shut it,” Cleshun barked. “Hilas. Twenty laps. The rest, showers.”

Cleshun took Joseph into his office. At some point shortly after the new year, the “Destructive? Prone to Violence? Have we got the shoe for you!” Asics poster had mysteriously disappeared from its honored place on the wall.

“Sit down, Mister Nicci.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. I just, he was–”

“Look, I don’t care about that, or what he said. You have a lot of pressure now goin’ on, and I understand that, but you are going to have to behave like a regular person. You can’t just blow up with whosever tickin’ you off or don’t understand what you’re goin’ through.”

The boy nodded, gaze to the floor.

“If you’re feeling pressured to keep some kind of normalcy, maybe it’s just time to relax. Maybe you want to take a break, when you feel pressure isn’t so hard. Do you want to just maybe take a break?”

He felt a shudder. He would have nothing, no one. His face began to cringe. He couldn’t cry in front of Coach, he couldn’t. “No, sir. Please don’t.”

“Awright. Then you will behave. You will obey. You will take all that negative energy and you will convert it to attacking your opponent and only your opponent. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll try.”

Cleshun sighed in Yoda voice. “Do or not do.”

He had to smile as he returned to the practice room just to sit and stretch, let those who didn’t want to see him get a head start. Cleshun slowly passed behind him, then pressed his arms against Joseph’s back as he stretched over his legs. Joseph soaked up the warmth and silent sort of hug his coach gave him, the ripping tingles down his legs, the feeling of relief to be touched without the intention of doing damage.

He held out until the showers. By then he was so tired he couldn’t even imagine not doing it. It worked. And if he might stay a little late, nobody would notice how red his eyes were. It was the soap, he would say. Just the soap.

When the date of the funeral was announced, kids at school waited in line for passes to get the afternoon off. Joseph stormed past them, brooded outside, awaiting his ten-block escort.

His after–school daycare, should Marie Nicci be foraging out in the hinterlands, Irene DeStefano always had food ready, and Joseph was ready. Without Dink around, the 130 slot was his.
 
Big Woop.

But he didn’t talk shop with Mrs. DeStefano, whom he suspected of being quite the gossip. He bottled up telling her or anyone else about the day’s troubles. To avoid future punishment, he would continue this tactic.

Her idle afternoon gossip proved useful, though, connected to some invisible network he decided he’d better not inquire about. He just compared facts with those on the tube and in the papers.

He learned that while the Khors parents continued their custody battle, Dink was shuttled off to juvenile hall somewhere in Paterson. Irene’s version: “The mother drinks a little. She’ll lose.”

Bennie had been “remanded into custody in Paterson County for attempted sexual assault, attempted manslaughter, reckless endangerment with intent to harm, plus drunk driving charges,” the news said. What the defense was still going off about was determining if Bennie had even killed Anthony.

The steroid issue hadn’t been mentioned, but Irene knew more. “The step-parents are trying to sue the guy who sold Bennie the steroids, like it wasn’t his fault, since he was on drugs, which I find ridiculous.”

Hunter’s father’s lawyer sprung him on bail, was remanded to the custody of his parents, until some “domestic situation” flared up. Irene’s version sounded more colorful: “The boy and his younger brother were fighting and the older one, Andy, he knocked the lights out of him, so his own parents called the cops on him. Apparently the father is a big development honcho, really rich, that sort of thing.”

 
Joseph spent the first Saturday after Anthony’s death in what Dino Nicci joked as “being under the remainder of your father,” helping him work in Cedar Village on a new development of ranch houses with nightmare bathroom configurations. He jokingly threatened to complain to his father’s union, until his father half-smiled and threatened to smack him with a wrench.

The thing was, he liked doing it, working with his dad. He forgot everything for a few hours. At home, he’d always had chores. Now he got to do the dishes, and the laundry, forever.

Actually, it was supposed to be until he graduated from high school, but he figured if things went well, he might be able to take a few weeks off sometime around his senior prom, where he’d bring Dink, and they’d both wear tuxes, then just leave, forever.

Sometimes he had hopeful thoughts amid the desperation, but mostly it was trying not to think again about the moments that led to Anthony’s death. Different imagined possibilities kept ending up the same way. Then Joseph would hear his own breathing, a panting, and he’d find something, anything else to distract him: the headphones, the tube, some food, anything to stop wondering if Anthony had started to turn green or if some creepy guy was injecting him with fluids on a slab somewhere or still poking around for microscopic bits of Bennie.

“I’m going over to Irene’s,” his mother said. Dino was upstairs giving Sophia a bath. “I’ll be right back.”

“Awright.”

“Don’t answer the phone.”

“Huh?”

“Just let the machine pick up.”

“Shields Up!” Mike called out.

“Mikey, put on your PJs on and get ready for bed!”

She slapped the kitchen door shut. Mike yanked his shirt off and began a strange sort of hip-swaying strip tease. Joseph watched, dumbfounded.