The Domino Effect (26 page)

He flared his nostrils and prepped himself by digging in his spikes, gripping and re-gripping the bat like he was strangling the poor thing. I stood tall on the mound, with my glove up high, just below my eyes. I began the wind-up with a small step backward and my hands rising, together in the glove, over my head. Then I dug a foot against the rubber and pivoted the other leg around the opposite hip, which launched my whole body forward toward the plate like a human missile. With my front foot in the dirt, I whipped my arm and body forward and prepared to release the ball.

I could feel the stitching between thumb and forefingers, and snapped the ball so hard it looked frozen, hanging high and still for a moment, fighting the spin, before the bottom fell out and the ball dropped two feet, right over the plate.

“Strike three!” yelled the umpire, punching his hand across his chest protector.

The poor guy from York stood there stunned, bat on his shoulder. I gave him a wink and walked toward the sound of applause.

Our team, pumped up by the showdown, didn’t stop hitting until we had a five-run cushion. I mowed down the remaining batters without drama or danger, and when the last looped a lazy fly ball to our right fielder, Hamden Academy had beaten the York School in baseball for the first time in 10 seasons. I felt the crowd coming, but before the team could jump me, I searched the bleachers. Not too many people, really, for the first ball game of the season. Just a few, including Sammie up top and a
Bella Faccia
sitting alone in the front row. Brenda smiled at me, like I had asked her to in the letter. I should have asked for more.

After the hoopla, she was gone. It was late in the afternoon when we walked home, and the sky had turned as blue as the center of a flame. A breeze picked up, signaling the storm, and it dried the sweet sweat on my skin.

Chapter 18

T
hat night at dinner, they made an announcement about my perfect game. The guys on our team, and the lacrosse team, too, chanted “Scholarship! Scholarship! Scholarship!” All that chanting ended when the announcements began about the upcoming wrestling match: the regional semi-final, to be held in our gym, the day after next.

Early the next morning, at my old Sunrise hour, I took a walk across campus with a stuffed knapsack that was practically all I could carry. Light was coming from over the hills and workers from town arrived on campus. A couple of students, like zombies, trudged their way toward detention. I pretended I was one of them, walking slowly, with my head down but, unlike them, I was alert in the early hour, my eyes alive, checking out everything.

A kid read a letter in the mail room, so I waited around the corner, in the shadows, until he left. With no one else in sight, I slipped inside and got right to work. First, I tore down the Support Wrestling signs, letting them scatter over the floor. Then I whipped out the stack of thick books I’d been carrying in my backpack and made a platform. With the spray can in my back pocket, I balanced on top of the books, pulled out the can, and sprayed in blue (our school color), as large as I could and as high as I could: ABORT WRESTLING.

After checking out my work, I stuffed the books and the spray can back into my bag and walked through campus like a regular student. I went to the library, just after it opened, returned the encyclopedias and dictionaries, sat at a table, and pretended for an hour to be studious, though all I worked on were the next parts of my plan. I figured the first phase had been a success, getting those signs down and the new slogan up without being noticed. But someone had seen me come out of the mail room, and if they didn’t know then, they knew for sure by lunchtime what I’d been up to.

The wrestling coach got up on the podium at lunch and made an announcement before the meal even started. His cauliflower ears burned bright as he tried to keep his cool, warning about desecration of school property and respect for tradition. According to this guy, jealousy was behind the “attack,” and this type of outrage was a threat to our institution and would not be tolerated and yeah, yeah, yeah...

Word about the “attack” had reached me by second period. Some kid came into class and told everyone. I heard Meeks holding court in the hallway, and even before lunch, there was a steady line to get into the mail room. After lunch, and the announcement by hot-headed Coach Cauliflower Ears, people packed in there to get a load of what had been done. I had to admit, I was pretty proud. Less impressed was Trent McCoy, who walked into the mail room, right through the after-lunch crowd, and tore that bulletin board off the wall. To tell the truth, I had hoped he’d do something like that, since it made me feel confident about their probable reaction to part two of my plan.

The next part would be a lot harder to pull off, in a lot of ways. I needed help, too, so I looked across the room. Sammie wanted in, right away. He felt bad about everything that had happened, especially to Terence, and didn’t mind risking his ass to try and make things right. I think he felt the same need to do something as I did, though neither of us knew at the time that what we were doing had a lot more to do with us, and the things that had happened to us, than anything else. What I did know was that having Sammie on board meant having a partner, a partner with a key to the wrestler’s locker room.

On that moonless night, way past lights out, we watched from our room as the lights of the small security vehicle shined around the field, past the big buildings and finally through the Arch. We’d timed the trail four times and knew how much time we’d have to do what we had to do. Dressed in dark jeans and sweatshirts, zipped up and with hoods tied tight, Sammie and I crept out of our room, duct-taped the lock cylinder on the front door of the dorm, and skipped from tree to tree in the shadows along the path. In the landing behind the gymnasium, we entered that forgotten door that Brenda and I had probably been the last ones to use back in the fall.

Inside, it felt cold and creepy, and Sammie’s flashlight shone on dripping pipes in the narrow corridor that led toward the abandoned locker room. We crept along like super sleuths, though we probably could have brought a boom box and cranked tunes, since nobody was securing the inside of the gym in the middle of the night.

After going through the halls and into the main gym area, Sammie busted out his key and worked the lock to the annex. We walked across the mats, into the empty, round theater, guided by the dim light that came through the small window up top. There were no windows in the locker room, so we hit the lights and looked around: high ceilings, soda machines, and a doctor’s table; rows of dark blue lockers, full length, with each guy’s last name on a plaque up top; a slogan up high painted across the cinder block walls, above a packed trophy case. Banners and posters and all sorts of memorabilia covered every other available inch.

It smelled pretty bad, being a locker room and everything, but not as bad as I’d figured it would. Sammie said that they had laundry machines in the back, and the manager had to wash their uniforms or practice gear every night. The floors looked mopped, too. There was a mile-high stack of clean towels on a table by the shower stalls.

I felt kind of powerful in there, those guys and their stuff at our mercy. A lot of damage could be done, from just tearing things down and making a mess, to writing something clever with my spray can, to doing something to their uniforms, like cutting them into bikinis before the big match. But that didn’t sit right. Besides, we hadn’t come for that. We had just come to make sure that the big ladder they used to get stuff hung from the Arch was in there. Sammie found it in the back, by the laundry machines. After we left, I poked around the main gym area, trying to find a way up to the roof. Then we went home and waited for the next day.

The new slogan caught on. Most everyone seemed to share it like a juicy secret. People whispered, not too quietly, “Abort Wrestling” as they passed each other around campus. Hands were slapped and looks exchanged. Notes were passed in class, and that day, in three of my five periods, it had been written on the desktop where I sat. “Abort Wrestling” was taking over. At lunch, people at back tables coughed it out loud, voices muffled into their hands.

The dining hall buzzed and the back-and-forth gossip seemed to hover right over the wrestlers’ table. About halfway through lunch, the whole team got up and left together. When the last of them walked through the doorway, the room exploded with applause. The headmaster took to the podium and called for calm. But calm from what? You can’t calm urgency. You can’t calm community. People wanted to come together, and this was something we could come together about. We were just making a little noise. The wrestlers had, sort of, taken our school away; now we were sort of taking it back. Nobody had broken any rules, except for me, and nobody, except for Sammie, knew that it was me who had broken those rules. At least that’s what I figured.

After classes, I was in the dorm, taking a leak, when Terence came into the bathroom. I’d seen him around, of course. He lived right next door and, as much time as he spent holed up in his room, he did have to come out sometimes. So we’d pass each other around campus and around the dorm, sometimes. He always looked mildly sedated.. I didn’t even look at him when he squared off in the urinal next to mine.

“You think you’re slick,” he mumbled. His voice had gotten lower and slower. I wasn’t crazy about talking to dudes when taking leaks, and he kind of caught me off guard, talking mysteriously and everything. I didn’t say anything, just kept staring at the wall in front of me. “I saw your ass coming out of the mail room yesterday morning,” he said, “when I was on my way to detention.”

I peed faster, shook sloppy, fastened up, and made for the door.

Terence sort of huffed, in a mocking way, and put his eyes on me before I could walk out the door.

“I hope you ain’t doing this for me, ’cause I don’t give two shits about none of
y’
all.”

I took a deep breath and thought for a second. “I’m doing it for all of us,” I said, and walked out, leaving Terence with his dick in his hand. I wouldn’t have minded hanging around and talking it out a bit with him. A lot had happened since that first day in the dorm, with that crazy scene in the lobby and then me getting caught dancing in my undies that afternoon when Terence moved in. A lot had happened, alright, but I didn’t have time to talk about it then. I had a wrestling match to attend.

Chapter 19

I
’d been on a school roof plenty of times. Back in the old neighborhood, I’d had to go up there whenever we ran out of balls. I’d get on a ledge by a corner window, where the school was one floor, then jump and catch the edge of the overhang and pull myself up. No problem. Once up there, I’d walk around on the gravel, fetch all the balls, and throw them down into the school yard. I was the only one of the guys athletic enough and gutsy enough to pull this off, and that was why my name was spray painted up higher than all the rest: I’d done it from the roof, hanging down by one hand and spraying DOMINO with the other.