The Domino Effect (28 page)

We had a game that next afternoon. I struck out three times, got hit by a pitch, and made two errors in the outfield. We lost 8-to-nothing. My head was off somewhere else, thinking about that school year, and the year before that, and the years before that. After the game, I tucked a ball into my glove and walked straight home, across the soggy fields and into the woods behind Montgomery. I pounded the ball over and over. Through the trees, I could hear the sound of voices raised, back and forth, that biting sound of barks.

The voices became recognizable when I reached the parking lot: Ri
ce’s fakadaka
way of speaking up against Chester’s hillbilly twang. They went back and forth, up and down, and over each other. I heard a third voice, too, foreign and unrecognizable. When I got to the lobby, I realized it was the voice of Santos, a voice I’d never heard before. He screamed in Spanish, what I assumed were curse words, at 100 mph. Speed cursing must have been his sport, though nobody seemed to notice.

All eyes, about half the dorm and a pack of wrestlers, were on Rice and Chester in the middle of the common area. Sammie and a couple of other guys upstairs had come out of their rooms to lean over the railings and stare down at the action. Rice and Chester, nose to nose, or nose to neck, really, were attacking each other with threats and insults. Non-stop. Nonsensical. Their words had no meaning… just blathering that spun them toward fists. McCoy stood to the side, restrained by his teammates, ready to rip Rice to pieces. Veins bulged in McCoy’s neck and forehead, his eyes about to burst out of his block head.

There were some calm voices, too. Voices of reason. Wrestlers reminding each other that they had a national tournament at stake. That they had scholarships to colleges. Guys from the dorm even called for Rice and Chester to back off, to go home, to give it a rest already. They must’ve been tired of all the drama. Tired of the effect it had on all of us.

Terence must have been tired of it, too. He stormed from the stairwell and pushed Chester right off his little feet. Just sent his ass flying across the common area. Tough day for that kid. First the stinky shoes, then this. He slid across the floor and all the noise stopped. The wrestlers let go of McCoy. He and Terence stared at each other from across the room. As they began to walk toward each other, I knew I had to do something to keep the dominoes from falling in the wrong direction.

When McCoy crouched and circled to his right, I raised my glove and timed him as he moved around, focusing on my spot. After a few turns, I had him in my sights. I made an abbreviated wind-up and then fired a bullet that caught the big bastard right in the balls. “Uhhh!” he coughed, and crumpled to the ground. All eyes turned to me.

I walked from the doorway to the center of the room. Chester snarled and stepped toward me. I bashed him in the mouth with my right hand. His teeth stung my fist, but I had to admit, having been dumped twice by those guys and intimidated by them throughout the year, it felt good to see them both on the ground at my feet. I felt powerful. That good feeling disappeared as soon as Mr. Wright barreled out of the stairwell. He didn’t have to look too hard to figure out what had happened.

“Oh, Daniel,” he moaned. “What have you done?”

My knuckles began to bleed.

Chapter 20

D
uring dinner, which I wasn’t allowed to attend, I went down to my old room to collect the rest of my things. The hearing with the headmaster had been scheduled for the next morning, but I didn’t need him to tell me to pack. Out the window, over campus, the fading sky was purple as a bruise.

I made steady trips back down to Sammie’s room, and only had the trunk left to drag when Terence walked in. He looked at me as curiously, as if he didn’t know what to make of me, like he had on the first day of school when he and Mr. Wright caught me dancing in my undies. So much had happened between then and now.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked.

“Getting my things,” I said. I tugged the trunk to the middle of the room until Terence blocked my progress. I dropped the trunk.

“You stole them shoes?” he asked.

“No, no,” I said. “I found them, sort of, and figured they might come in handy at some point.”

“The hell you do that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of how I was brought up.”

“Oh man, you trippin’. You know that?”

He walked around me to the back of the room and faced me from the window. “Everyone at dinner saying how they going to throw you out of here for this!”

“I know.”

Terence fell onto his chair and rubbed his hands over his face and hair. I began to drag the trunk again.

“What’d you do that for?” he asked me again. “That was on me, not you.”

“It was on all of us,” I said.

“What?”

“All of us should have done something about them guys, not just you. You think you’re the only person they got a problem with? The only person they gave a hard time?”

“I don’t know about nobody else. All I know is they got a problem with me ’cause of the color of my skin.”

“Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t,” I said. “I don’t know and you don’t know. What I do know is that you’re the one who’s got a problem with the color of your skin, more than anybody else, at least.”

He called a horse and rolled his eyes. Then he tried to laugh. “Come on, man,” he said. “You can’t be serious with that. Ain’t you read your history? Ain’t you ever opened your eyes?”

“Yeah, my eyes are open and and what I see is a boulder on your shoulder.”

“Awwww, shit,” he said smiling, though he wasn’t all that happy. “You too simple-minded to understand all this. Too simple and privileged. That’s all.”

“Privileged?” I laughed. “That’s something from a scholarship guy who speaks French.”

“Fuck you,” he said, standing up.

“Tell me something,” I said, staying calm. “Anybody have a bigger problem with race than you?”

Terence held out his hands and bugged out his eyes. “Man, those guys been on my shit all year, man. And you saw what went down at the gym. They was picking on my moms. Picking on me for being black.”

“No, they were picking on all that ‘my moms is lightskinned’ bullshit they must of overheard in the Can that day. They must have been there. You think them guys could have come up with that on their own? Who cares if she
was
white? Who gives a crap about that besides you?”

“Come on, man,” Terence said. “You were sitting right next to me at that meeting. Those guys was on me from Day 1.”

“They were pissed off because someone took something from them on Day 1, something valuable, and they wanted it back. And those guys ain’t too bright, no doubt, but still, it wasn’t all them. You were pissed off, too, about being here or whatever, before anyone started with you, and I know that because I was sitting right next to you, remember? And when they did look at you, if you didn’t freak out about it, then maybe none of this would have happened. And even before that, if someone hadn’t stolen their shoes in the first place, maybe none of this would have happened, and had that retard Rice not been so desperate to make things worse, and had everyone else not been so ready to go to all your games and support something besides wrestling, maybe none of this would have happened. And if I hadn’t started messing with them, then, yeah, maybe we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. But like I said before, and there ain’t no maybe about it, the problem wasn’t only theirs or yours or mine. It was all of ours, though the problem with race is mostly with you. Remember all that crap you had with the dorm
master
and the
overseeing?
About Denzel Washington. About your mother
not
being white. I do. It’s been that way all year with you.”

Terence sat back down and rubbed his head. Maybe he was starting to figure some things out.

“Were those guys at dinner?” I asked him.

“Who?”

“The wrestlers.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “The big one was walking kind of funny, and the other guy got himself a nice fat lip.”

“But they didn’t get in any trouble?”

“Naw,” he said. “Well, they say the little one going home soon, for what happened before, you know, but nobody in any new trouble, besides you, that is.”

That’s what I figured.

“People gave them a lot of lip in there, too,” Terence added.

“How?”

“They was sort of hissing and booing every time any one of them walked by.”

“Get out of here.”

“No, no, it was getting rough!” he insisted. “And they were passing out Sunrises like crazy, but that didn’t stop ‘em.”

I would have liked to have been there for that.

“And then Sammie knocked a milk pitcher over the little one when he was walking back from the kitchen.”

“Sammie!” I cried. “That’s my boy right there.”

“Yeah,” Terence nodded. “He’s gonna see sunrise the rest of the year.”

“Ohhh!”

“It’s still better than getting the boot.”

“Isn’t it?” I asked. “Isn’t it better than going home? Having to walk out of here without finishing, giving up everything that could be coming next year.”

He held my gaze for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

I went to the back of the room and stuck out my hand.

“Just think about what I said, alright?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Bet.”

We shook hands, like real friends, and I was kind of OK with what had happened, though I still tasted regret, and it tasted like dirty pennies. Maybe someday, I thought, I’d figure out a way to avoid that taste.

In the morning, Mr. Wright walked me over to the headmaster’s office. We didn’t talk on the way. He spent a few minutes inside alone with the headmaster, then sat with me outside the office waiting for Pop. We’d spoken on the phone the night before, and I told Pop everything that had happened, just like I used to. He listened quietly, then said he’d see me tomorrow.

When Pop showed up, he shook Mr. Wright’s hand like they knew each other already. Right away, the secretary said Headmaster Hurley would see us now. Pop and I were shown right in. Headmaster Hurley was kind of a young guy, tall and lanky, perfect hair and teeth, always smiling and slapping people on the back, cracking up at his own jokes. They said he used to be a Wall Street big shot who retired in his 40s and came out to Hamden Academy to keep busy. I didn’t think much of him, either way, and he’d never said a word to me until the morning Pop and I walked into his light-filled office.

“Good morning, Daniel,” he said like he knew me. He shook my hand from over a large desk. “And how are you, Mr. Rorro?”

Pop said he was good and sat down in the cushy leather chair next to mine. Hurley there made a temple out of his fingers and stared at us for a minute before talking.

“This is your second year here at Hamden Academy, right Daniel?”

I nodded and he kept talking.

“This marks the end of my third, so I’ve got you beat by a year.” He laughed, alone. Then he went on this long blab-fest about himself. I can’t remember the exact words, because it was boring and I was busy trying to figure out, the whole time, what the hell it had to do with me. Then he went on about how the school needed him and his business acumen to be competitive and, in order to be competitive, you had to play the game. That was the best part, about “playing the game.” He went on and on about how Wall Street works and how those who make it know how the game works and all that. What a tool. I covered my mouth as I yawned. I’d been out late, sneaking from the dorm for one last mission. I kept yawning into my hand. Pop drummed his thighs while his mouth twitched. Hurley kept on until Pop held up his hand.

“What does this have to do with my son?”

“Well, sir,” he said, sitting up and tilting his head. “I’m getting to that.”

According to this guy, his biggest challenge was playing the game in a way that made Hamden more prestigious and whatnot without giving up what got us to where we were. He told us all this secret information about a football team coming and a new dorm being built and teachers from “top-notch” programs being added to the faculty so as to help raise academic standards.