The Domino Effect (11 page)

Chased by the noise from the headmaster’s house, I cut across the meadow. On the path, I decided to skip the shack after seeing Meeks and them there, smoking their brains out. Loneliness seeped from my chest, hard and heavy, and I fought the urge to run while picking up my pace down the path. At the dorm, I entered the quiet lobby and, feeling numb and alone as I’d ever been, headed for my room.

“So,” a soft voice startled me. “You finally made it.”

Brenda Divine sat on a couch, a suede jacket laid over her lap, her hair fanned down to the shoulders of a black turtleneck.

I almost fell over.

“Come on,” I said, helping her put on her jacket. “Let’s get out of here.”

We crossed the field and went up the hill and onto a gravel path, past the Language Arts building. After a rocky meadow with a crumbling cemetery in the corner, we hopped a low stone wall and caught a pitched trail through some open trees. The air smelled of earth and leaves. The sound of the crashing waterfall filled our ears before we reached the clearing that opened to an old wooden bridge spanning a falling stream. Brenda took my hand. We walked.

“I miss this place,” she said as we settled on the bridge, our legs dangling between the rungs. The sky was hazy and blank, except for a harvest moon that hung above the trees.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the lights of the small town below. “It’s some spot, alright.”

I remembered how we used to sit on the bridge last year, talking for hours, sometimes not talking at all. And sometimes we would follow the stone steps alongside the waterfall, down to the empty lot that led to Main Street. We would kick around town and stop for lunch at the old diner before acting like little kids in the playground. I liked to push Brenda on the swings, touching the small of her back with my hands.

Once, just outside of town, I chased her through a field covered in dandelions. She laughed as I ran behind. After I caught her (and I’m pretty sure she let me), we stood still as agitated seeds floated around us like wispy fireflies. On the way home, she bought me a T-Shirt in the Five-n-Dime that read: wherethehellishamdenville? I treated that shirt like a trophy, until somebody stole it at the end of the year.

“I’m sorry, Danny,” Brenda broke the silence, bringing me back to the bridge.

“About what?” I asked.

“I’m sorry about what happened last year,” she said. The wind ruffled her bangs.

“Ah,” I waved. “Forget it.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about how hurt you were, and I can understand why.”

“You can, huh?” I picked up a twig and began snapping it into pieces.

“Yes,” she said, taking my arm. “I know that, at first, we liked each other, and flirted and whatever, but you knew I had a boyfriend, and I thought we became, you know, like real friends, and that made me so happy. I can’t even tell you.”

“You can tell me,” I joked.

She poked me with her elbow and kept talking. “It was just that I never had any real guy friends because, every time I made one, it turned out they just, you know, wanted to be with me, and then there was you — this really cute, charming guy who was just happy to be my friend. It was so validating.”

“There you go with them SAT words again, Bren.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “I know it seems, well, self-absorbed, but it meant a lot to me — though I guess I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

“First of all,” I said, dropping the broken twig pieces into the pool below, where they circled, then shot away, “I prefer handsome to cute.”

“Got it,” she noted.

“And I did like just being friends with you; you were like my number one guy there for awhile.”

“Thanks,” she smiled, bumping my shoulder with hers. “I’ve never been anyone’s number one guy before.”

“Yeah, well, that’s good, but I wanted more than that, too, you know. I wanted more than that.” It felt weird to admit what I’d known for so long. My face grew tingly and my throat went dry.

“I know,” she said, taking my hand. “I did, too, and I finally broke up with my boyfriend when I was home for Easter, and I was kind of giving myself some space and everything at first, and I didn’t want to, like, you know, seem egotistical and make some grand announcement about it or anything, but I was going to say something to you. I promise, I was, but then Todd just came out of nowhere. And he came on so strong. He just overwhelmed me with notes and flowers and all this charm. I felt like a princess.”

“I’m going to barf, Bren,” I said. “I swear.”

“No, no,” she begged, taking back my hand. “I’ll stop. I promise. But I want you to know that Todd told me he talked to you about us and everything. He told me he did and you said it was perfectly OK. He told me he talked to you.”

I’m pretty sure my face said all I had to say about that.

“But he didn’t talk to you, right?” she said, real sympatheticlike.

“Not a word, Bren,” I said. “And I mean that, literally, for real.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said and held both my hands in hers. “I just kind of figured that out.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry, too, Bren, that I made you cry like that. You didn’t deserve that.”

“No, I didn’t,” she said quietly.

Then she smiled kind of sad and put her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled like my mother’s fancy shampoo. We sat in the silence. I could feel my heart beating. My body tingled, and I felt super-charged and super-scared at the same time. I can’t believe I was frightened, but I was somehow. I was. Fifteen minutes before that moment, I’d thought my life was crap, total crap, and now what I’d hoped for most of all, for so long, sat right next to me on a bridge, her hands in my lap and her head on my shoulder.

“Would you like to kiss me, Danny?” Brenda asked quietly, her words vibrating through my body.

“Yes!” I yelled, my voice echoing through the trees.

Brenda laughed and pulled back a bit. “Can we be friends again, too?” she asked. “I need you to be my friend again, too.”

“Sure thing, Bella Faccia,” I said. “Anything you want.”

We kissed on the bridge. Her mouth felt warm and tasted like cream soda. Sitting there kissing, I didn’t feel all that crazy energy like I used to with Genie Martini back in Queens. My body seemed as hollow and weightless as my dangling legs, and I was all of a sudden floored by the thought that maybe, just maybe, if you dreamed about something long enough, and hard enough, and often enough, it could actually come true.

Knocked out by wonder, I kissed and kissed with Brenda Divine, under the yellow moon and above the rushing water that circled and carried some of my pain away. Maybe some of hers, too.

Chapter 6

“I
think we should find a better place to be alone,” Brenda insisted as we came out a doorway into the afternoon light. It had been three weeks since we’d kissed on the bridge, and just as many secret places had been found by me and then rejected by her. My latest spot was a drippy hallway, connected to an abandoned locker room in a forgotten part of the gymnasium. Very romantic.

“I’m telling you,” I said, “nobody comes in or out this way anymore.”

We were on a little hill above the path, behind some bushes and still out of sight, though she acted, even under cover, like the whole school could see us.

“It’s not that,” she said, making sure the blouse she wore under my borrowed jean jacket wasn’t too messy from all my tugging. “It’s just we could stand a little more ambiance, don’t you think?”

I skipped my SAT line. “It’s practically winter,” I observed, with an arm around her shoulder. “What do you want me to do?”

“Find a place that doesn’t give me the heebie-jeebies,” she said. We stopped on the path above the shack. She kissed me for incentive, but I was running out of ideas. Every time we got comfortable — and I had thought we were getting comfortable a few times — she would all of a sudden decide the place wasn’t romantic enough or something. And I could barely even hold her hand in public. She didn’t seem like the same girl who spent last spring on the lap of Todd Brooks. Still, I wasn’t complaining, or giving up.

“How about the Chapel?” I asked.

“No way,” she said. “I am not fooling around in a church.”

“They’re Presbyterians, for God’s sake,” I pleaded as she walked away. “What are they gonna do, report us to the
Catlics?”

I watched her walk into the burning leaves of autumn, my faded jacket covering her narrow shoulders.

“Alright, alright,” I yelled. “I’ll work on it.”

She stuck a finger in the air without turning around.

I laughed like a moron. I was happy about everything those days, and could feel this magic all over me. It was like having superpowers. But, to tell the truth, falling in love was better than having superpowers. It’s better than everything.

On the path toward home, thinking about the next time I’d see Brenda (dinner: 70 minutes and counting), I saw a bunch of blue wool jackets with white leather sleeves outside Montgomery. The jackets were filled with sausages looking up at my window. Those guys — the sausages in blue and white casings — could easily have been waiting for me to go to dinner, if only it was an hour later and I’d actually had friends on the wrestling team.

“Why don’t you come on down here?” Chester challenged the empty window as I arrived. “Are you chickens or what?”

Those two new goons were standing behind him on the grass, with their arms crossed. McCoy paced the path, punishing his palm with a heavy fist.

“Hey,” Chester said to me as I tried to slip past. “Ain’t that your room?”

Super.

“Yeah,” I said. “So what?”

“Well, there’s someone up there saying stuff to us.”

“Like what?”

“Saying that we should get a room, like we’re queers or something.”

“Not in them jackets,” I cracked.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“Then they was laughing at us when we came over,” he said toward my back.

I kept walking, but not fast enough. McCoy stepped in front of the door and crossed his arms. I was trapped: Blockhead in front of me / Blabbermouth behind. I chose the safer route.

“Listen up,” I said, after turning to face Chester. “You must be confused, alright? Because that’s my room there,” I said, pointing to it, “and I’m standing right here.” I pointed at the ground in front of me. “And my roommate, you know, the one I have because of you two numb-nuts,” pointing first at Chester, then over my shoulder to McCoy, “is too smart to get mixed up in that rigamarole with you again. Got it?”

“What?” Chester asked, his face squirreled up with confusion. “
Rigama...
what?”

“I said there’s nothing in that room that has anything to do with you or your stupid shoes, so give it a rest.” I tried to walk away, but the barrel chest of McCoy stopped me.

I’d been bounced back a step, a big step, but I returned to where McCoy and I stared nose to nose, so close I knew he had baloney for lunch and some nostril hairs in need of a trim. I squinted to be tough, digging into his gray, gray eyes, but he didn’t seem all that concerned. I figured he was deciding whether to eat me or kill me. We stared for 10 seconds that seemed more like an hour. When his eyes moved away, I felt relieved (and a little tough), but as soon as I breathed out, McCoy snorted like a rhino and shoved me over the table Chester had made on his knees behind me. I flew for a second, skidded for a bit, and ended up flat on my back on the path. Buttons of my plaid Polo shirt bounced in every direction. I had officially made their list. Super.

“I bet you didn’t see that coming,” Chester bragged over his shoulder as the group walked away, laughing. I thought about getting up and going after them, but I was tired of getting tossed around.

“One of you owes me a shirt,” I yelled.

I brushed myself off and confirmed that the backside of my favorite khakis was torn, as if the gravel in my underwear hadn’t already clued me in. I glared up at the empty window and stomped inside.