The Domino Effect (9 page)

Rice was really William Miller, a moron, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in an Air Jordan sweat suit. He thought he was black, so people called him Rice as a reminder of what he was as white as. He lived in the other dorm, Carlyle, where I wished he still was, instead of
poppin’& breakin’
into our room with his stoner sidekick in tow.

Rice waddled toward Terence like some sort of ghetto penguin. “Bill,” he said, and swung a handshake from the hip. “I’m your power forward, G,” he said.

Terence looked stunned.

“This here’s my boy, Santos,” Rice said, with a thumb dunked back over his shoulder. The pudgy heir to a Puerto Rican rum dynasty stood with his back to the closet and his hands clasped in front of his crotch. His eyes were glassy, and he reeked of weed. He nodded at Terence, and then at me. Santos and that goon McCoy could have had some conversation — nothing but nods and grunts.

Rice helped himself to a seat on my bed, crossing his long legs. “We heard about your all
sitch-eation’
and shit with them man-huggers,” he said to Terence. “They talking about it all over school and shit, don’t
cha
know.”

“Who is?” I asked.

“Everybody, G,” he said. “And you know them wrestlers is feeling it, too, ’cause of them signs and shit they put up in the mail room.”

“What signs?” Terence asked. “Where?”

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, yeah,” Rice said to me with his chin up. “And I heard them fools put a big hit on you and shit out there in broad daylight and shit.”

Super.

“Stop saying that,
and shit,
every time you open your mouth, alright?” I said. “That was an accident out there. They don’t know me from Adam.”

“Sheet,”
Rice tried to drawl. “You
trippin,’
Home Slice. This shit’s on, for real and shit, like it or not, and shit. We got a player now, took one of their scholarships, too.” He turned to Terence and asked quietly, “You got a scholarship to come here, right?”

Terence nodded.

“Solid!” Rice cried, and smacked his hands together. “Who hooked you up? Carolina? Georgetown? Duke Blue Devils?”

“Ah, Brown,” Terence said, fingering the pages of his book.

“Brown?” Rice asked, recoiling. “They got a squad?”

Terence leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Lost to Princeton last year in the Ivy League Championship,” he said. “The same Princeton that beat Georgetown in the first round of the NCAAs.”

“Alright, then. Alright, then,” Rice said, standing up, his stringy hair bouncing above his eyes and over his ears. He began to pace the small space between the beds, talking out loud to no one in particular. “We good. We good. And once we have a season, man, one good season, this school’s going to be about basketball. Basketball. Not that Greco-homo-erotica stuff they doing on them mattresses and shit.”

Santos, with his back still to the closet, nodded as his partner continued. “It’s on alright, and that business with the shoes, and this guy here, this hero, standing up to them, just set it off early. That’s all.”

“Relax, Willy,” I said. “Nothing’s happening.”

“I don’t know about all that,” he said, rapping his knuckles against his chest, “and when it goes down, y’all just
holla’.”
He jerked a thumb toward the neighboring dorm. “We got
cho’
back.”

“OK, then” I said, rapping my knuckles, then pointing toward the door. “Got it.”

He stood up, and smoothed out his sweat suit. “In the meantime, y’all just let us know when you ready to run some ball and shit.”

“We’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “And shit.”

“Do
’dat,”
he said before easing toward the door. “Later y’all.”

Santos nodded and followed his friend out.

After they left, Terence and I resumed our positions of study. I couldn’t help it. I swear. I had to look at him. He looked right back at me. We turned our eyes toward the open doorway that Rice and Santos had just exited. I tightened my mouth to keep from laughing. It was hard.

“The hell
was
that?” Terence asked, his face puckered.

I started to answer, but a howling came from my throat. Terence smacked his desk and tried to hold back a smile. We traded glances and then just started to crack up. A minute later, we were laughing like lunatics, right there at our desks, practically falling to the floor.

When we stopped laughing, Terence straightened his face and raised his chin. “You sure there’s nothing to worry about with those wrestlers?”

“Nah,” I said, trying to seem certain. “Nothing at all.”

I’d been having trouble sleeping, thinking about Rice and everything he said about the wrestlers and their signs. So, after hours one night, I slipped out of the room and down the stairs. Quietly, I entered the corner room. In the dim light, a figure, low to the ground, reclined below the arch of headphones. On the far side of the room, between the desktops stacked with jewel boxes, Grohl sat on the window’s ledge and fingered his guitar in the silvery moonlight. Upon spotting me, he raised his head. I held a finger to my lips as I crept up slowly behind Meeks, pulled the big ear cushions back and released them into place with a snap.

“Ahhhh!” he screamed, flopping from his bean bag chair and onto the floor.

“What are you listening to there, Geoff?” I asked casually.

“You dick!” he squealed.

“Relax there, chief,” I advised. “You’ll get us busted.”

He made a bulldog face and started to get himself together.

Murky sounds leaked from the headphones, and I picked up the CD booklet to look at the Pearl Jam artwork. “Maybe if you listened to some respectable rock-n-roll instead of all this gloom stuff you wouldn’t be so edgy.”

“Bite me,” he said, wrapping the cord around his headphones.

“And what’s with the flannel?” I asked, flicking the booklet. “They look like the Brawny Paper Towel band.”

“So, what’s up?” he asked. “I thought you only left your cube for classes and dinner these days?”

He had me there. I really had been spending a lot of time in my room. It was nice and quiet up there with Terence. And a little bit lonely, too, to tell the truth.

“Yeah, well, I’m curious about all this noise with the wrestlers,” I said. “Rice came by last week talking a lot of smack.”

“Rice,” Meeks laughed. “He must be touching himself over this.”

I confirmed that fact, then asked if there was anything to it, or if Rice was just being a basket case like always.

“You really should get out of the room sometime, mister,” Meeks said. “Someone yanked down their posters in the mail room, and now all of them, not just McCoy and Chester, are more pissed than ever. There’re even a couple of new goons they got that are extra special scary.” I’d seen them — a square, dark-haired kid who seemed old enough to be somebody’s uncle, and a tall, hyper guy with a buzz cut that made him look like a walking boner. Still, I had my doubts.

“Come on. What? Over some shoes? And some posters?” I asked. “No way.”

Meeks rubbed his hands together and spread his lips into a wide grin. “The working theory out there is that the school’s looking to transition from wrestling to more mainstream sports, and Terence, with his scholarship, is just the first step. They say the headmaster asked him to stay up in his room to, you know, not jeopardize anything.”

“Aw, come on, kid,” I laughed without thinking anything was all that funny. “That’s
fagakada
and you know it. The headmaster didn’t ask anybody to stay in their room.”

He laughed at
my fagakada
line then told me again that that’s what “they” were saying.

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “And who’s ‘they’?”

“Rice,” the roommates said at the same time.

I ran a hand through my hair.

Grohl stopped noodling around with his guitar. “If you think about it there, Dan,” he said with a too-cool tone, “it makes a lot of sense.”

“No,
John
,” I said. “If
you’d
think about it, it makes no sense at all.”

The roommates shrugged in sync, like they’d lived together too long. They had.

“I’m out of here,” I said.

Meeks called me back. “You probably didn’t hear about Pride Day either… ?”

Pride Day was this ridiculous weekend when we play our rival — The York School — in every available sport to make up for the fact that we didn’t have a football team. Alumni and parents came, and everyone yucked it up and pretended they were all best friends for the day. At night there was a bonfire out on the fields. I hadn’t mentioned it to my parents, second year running.

“What about it?” I asked Meeks.

“Todd’s coming.” He jetted his brows, up and down. “Maybe we can put the band back together and have some giggles... that is, if you’re done crying over that Betty.”

I wasn’t.

“No chance,” I said. “But thanks for the info.”

In bed that night, across the room from a steadily breathing Terence, I decided that the best way for him to squash the rumors would be to get out of the room and show his face around campus, even if it meant hanging out with Rice.

I felt a little naked there in the gym, wearing standard-issue athletic shorts from my old Catholic school. They were regular gym shorts, with piping down the side and around the top of the leg. Terence, Rice, and Santos had on these droopy drawers that looked like pajama bottoms. They busted my chops the whole way to the gym, but I thought they were the ones who looked ridiculous, especially Santos, whose shorts nearly touched the back of his hundred dollar high-tops.

“Aight,
” Rice said after we warmed up. “Me and Santos against you two fools, two out of three, up to 11, bring it back to the foul line, winners keep, losers pay for Birds afterward.”

The Early Bird was the best breakfast sandwich on the planet, the Canteen’s masterpiece of bacon, egg, and cheese on grilled sourdough dripping with butter. I took Rice’s challenge, right away, without even checking with Terence.

“Check,” Terence said, bouncing the ball to Rice, who returned it and crouched into what he must have considered a serious defensive pose. Terence snapped a pass over to me on the side of the key, and I waited as he trotted down to the baseline. I had about a foot on Santos, and held the ball over his head until Terence had pushed his back up against Rice. He called for the ball. “Give it up. Give it up.” No problem. Terence caught it with a clap, sending a smacking sound through the gym. After a head and shoulders fake, Terence wheeled around the bean pole, bounced the ball once on his way to the rim, and rolled it in like he was playing by himself.

I laughed. “This ain’t gonna take long.”

An hour later we were at The Can, sitting in a booth with four Early Birds, four Cokes, and a basket of fries. We’d killed those guys, mostly because of Terence’s face-job on Rice, but I’d helped, too. And let me say, for the record, that there ain’t a short, fat, potsmoking Puerto Rican on the planet that can guard me one-on-one. If the league was full of guys like Santos, I might have gone out for the team again, but as it was, I was happy just to do my part in having some fun and earning a free meal.

“You know,” I said, slowly separating two halves of the sandwich, allowing a string of orange cheese to dangle like a telephone wire, “these things taste even better when they’re free.”