The Domino Effect (19 page)

“You like the beach, right?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t bring my suit.”

“I know how to keep you warm,” she said, leading my by the arm.

We jumped off a small barrier wall into the stiff sand. The water lapped up about ten feet away, delivering moonlight with each wave.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Brenda asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Now where’s that warmth you were talking about?”

She took the pack off my shoulder and unfolded a thick blanket. After sitting down, she broke out a thermos and filled two mugs with a steaming liquid that smelled like boiled apples. She passed a cup and covered our legs.

“Happy New Year, Danny,” she toasted.

“Happy New Year to you,” I raised my mug in return.

I sniffed the strong contents, took a little sip, and reared back. “What is this?”

“Fermented apple cider.”

“If by fermented you mean spiked, I’m following.”

“It really keeps you warm, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not ready to go swimming,” I said before having another sip. “But I’m getting there.”

“Drink it slowly, Danny,” she warned. “It’s strong.”

“No kidding,” I agreed after another sip.

“OK, now,” she said, reaching for my mug. “Let’s take it easy, because we still have to walk home, and my parents will be waiting up for us.”

“I’ll be good,” I promised, and put the cup of rocket fuel in the sand beside me.

She told me to lean back. We lay on our backs, holding mittens and looking at the jet-black sky dotted with a thousand stars.

“It looks like somebody spilled a bag of marbles on the asphalt,” I said.

“Very poetic, Danny,” she laughed.

“Yeah, I have a way with words.”

“I have some words for you now,” she said without moving. “The something I wanted to talk to you about, back in New York.”

I had been thinking on the train ride, as I’d gotten farther and farther away from the city, that she wanted to confess her love for me at home. What else could a lovely Connecticut girl have to confess?

“I know what it is,” I said, sitting up.

“You do?” she asked, springing up like a car seat.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. My heart felt like a little frog trapped in my chest as I sat there looking at her for a few seconds. “You wanted to say that you loved me, right?”

She collapsed back onto her forearms. That went well.

“I didn’t mean to wreck your moment or anything,” I said. “I just figured I’d make it easy on you. That’s all.”

She struggled to catch her breath.

“You OK?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“That was it, right?”

“Yeah, Danny,” she said. “That was it.”

“Good,” I laughed. “You had me scared there for a minute.”

She reached for my arm. “I do love you, Danny.”

“I love you, too,” I said.

Brenda shimmied back against the barrier wall. She covered her face and began to cry.

“You OK?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, but she couldn’t stop shaking. I blamed the cold, and the emotions that could stem from a word as big as love. I put my arm around Brenda and held her close, completely clueless about the real reason for her tears.

The air was still, and the sound of waves was washed away by the voices from the party. They came outside and began to count down from 10. I leaned in toward Brenda just as it approached midnight, and our lips met on zero. There were cheers of “Happy New Year!” Some honking sounds came before a fireworks display: pop, pop, pow... boom.

“How’s that for poetic?” I asked.

“Not bad,” she said, sniffing away more tears. “Now tell me you love me again.”

“I’ll tell you 10 times if you want.”

“Once is fine,” she said, snuggling into me.

“I love you,” I said as the sky filled with light.

Ten times
… I said to myself.

Chapter 12

N
o one was going to write a song about it, but I was in a Connecticut state of mind. I didn’t know if it was the sky, the air, or the way the sky looked through the air, but everything up there seemed so bright. So close. I wanted to bounce a ball off that moon. I wanted to live in a town by the sea.

Back at Hamden, I paid the guidance counselor another visit and learned of a school in Connecticut called Stonington. It was up there on the coast, small and private with a pretty good Division II baseball team. I’d never heard of Stonington College, but Hamden had apparently been sending kids there for years. Who knew?

I imagined myself walking across their leafy campus, with all the good-looking students, climbing the big stairs to the columned academic building as the clock tower bonged out the hour. On weekends, I would parade my gorgeous girl from UConn around, showing her off at parties to all my friends and teammates.

To avoid any problems with Pop, I paid the application fee myself. To avoid Pop altogether, I made plans to go for a scholarship. I found out the name of the baseball coach and sent him a letter bragging about my talents. I asked the coach at Hamden to send something as well, and told him not to be shy with the flattery.

I kept this dream to myself, tucked in my pocket with some of that Connecticut moonlight.

Next to my desire to be with Brenda (only every second of every day) came a craving for the kind of friendships I’d had as a kid, and then again with the guys at school last year. I’d never really appreciated the importance of friends until I didn’t have any. And now I had some.

Things were cool with Terence. The routine of basketball kept him busy, and campus stayed quiet during the winter months. I made a point of popping in on Meeks and Grohl and hanging out with Sammie once in awhile, too. I was a regular social butterfly, and on an off-day from basketball, I brought the whole gang together for an afternoon at the Can.

Winter at Hamden is a drag — long and cold and gray — and the Can was full of people like us, tired of spending so much time in the dorm. After ordering up and settling into a back corner booth, I prompted this story from Meeks about how he got booted out of the house and into boarding school.

“So I come home one night, you know, just as the sun’s coming up,” he began. He sat at the end of the table, in a chair turned backwards between Grohl and Sammie at the end of the booth. “And I’m creeping down the hallway toward my bedroom, right?”

“Yeah,” Rice followed. I sat on the inside, against the wall, across from Terence who sat beside Rice. Both of them paid attention. Santos, next to me, nodded at Meeks. I kept an eye out for Brenda, because we were supposed to meet, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the high backing of the booth.

“And my stepmother comes out of the bathroom,” Meeks continued, “and she’s like, ‘Are you just getting home, Geoffrey?’ And I’m like, ‘No Chippy, I fell asleep watching TV downstairs.’ And she’s like, ‘You slept on the couch downstairs?’ So, I say ‘Yeah,’ thinking what a clever devil I am, until she says, ‘That’s funny, I slept there too, and I didn’t see you.’”

“Ooooh, man,” Terence laughed with the rest of us. “That’s good, but I know they didn’t send you
away just
for that.”

“No,” Meeks confirmed. “But we can get into the rest of it some other time.”

Meeks had a whole catalog of outrageous stories about his suburban shenanigans.

“Chippy’s a reasonable lady,” I couldn’t resist saying.

“Yeah,” Terence said, a sour look on his face.
“S’up
with that?”

“What?” I asked him. “You never met a ‘Chippy’ before?”

“I don’t even know what that shit is,” he said.

“We have a ‘Peachy’ in my town,” Grohl added. “She’s hot.”

“Hey, yo Chippy or Peachy or whatever your name is,” I said in a
Ghoombah
accent. “Get over here, would ya?”

“No, no, it ain’t like that,” Terence corrected. “It’s, ‘Yo, Yo, Chippy girl, shake that sweet thing over here.’”

“Get outta here,” I said with a wave.

“Come on now,” he begged. “Everybody knows black folk is much cooler than the
I-talians.”

“Forget you,” I told him. “No chance. The Italians invented cool.”

“Oh yeah,” he challenged. “How y’all greet someone from ’round the way?”

“How you
doin’?”
I asked in a velvet tone, adding a stylish nod-wink combo.

“
‘Sup?”
he delivered in a relaxed drawl.

“That’s not even a word!” I said.

“Neither is
’doin’
,” Meeks was happy to point out.

“Hey,” I warned him with a finger.

“I’m just saying,” he laughed.

“Alright then,” I said to Terence. “How do you just write something off?”

“Jccht,”
Terence hitched. “Later for that.”

“Not bad,” I admitted, “if you don’t know how to say,
fagettaboutit!”

“Pa-lease,” Terence waved me off. “Later for that.”

“Fagettaboutit!”
I bounced back.

“You got that one,” Sammie was happy to tell me.

“Oh man, Sam,” Terence protested. “I thought you was
my
boy.”

Sammie blushed.

“Let’s settle this,” Grohl said, setting his elbows on the table. “One more for the title, OK?”

“Cool with me,” Terence said.

“Shoot, pretty boy,” I said.

“In the most succinct and complete way possible,” Grohl posed, rubbing his hands together, “put someone down.”

“Yo mama,” Terence said to me, circling his head around.

“Ooohhh,” the judges cooed, as they took turns slapping Terence five.

I struggled for a response as they counted time, “Tick tock, tick tock.”

“Time’s running out there, Chief,” Meeks informed me.

“Can’t I get back to you on this?”

“No!”

“But he got to go first!”

“Come on, Danny Boy!” Rice sang. “Man up, G.”

“Alright,” I agreed, before thinking out loud. “Your mama… Your mama… Your mama MIA!” I said, shaking my raised hand. “Mama Mia! Get it?”

They bounced French fries off my face. Terence smiled, pleased with himself.

“Fine, fine,” I said, “but the Italians are still the coolest.”

“Aw, you
trippin’,
son,” Terence said.

Rice concurred.

“Oh yeah?” I challenged with my forearms on the table. “How about DeNiro, Pacino, Vinny Barbarino! Ralph Macchio, better known as the Karate Kid.” I jumped up from the booth and did the crane pose from the movie. The guys howled. Terence smirked.

“All those greasers just pretending they cool on TV,” Terence said, his mouth tucked to one side. “Besides, Denzel Washington could act all those fools under the table any day of the week.”

“OK,” I said. “Whatever.”

“Look, man,” Terence said smugly. “For cool, there’s a simple rule: if ya wants to be down, you gots to be brown!”

The guys all laughed hysterically, shoulder bumping and slapping fives, despite the fact that it excluded them, except for Santos, sort of, from coolness.

“Oh, OK,” I said. “I see. I see. So by that logic, my mother is cooler than yours.”

The table went quiet. Terence’s eyes pulsed a few times.

“Yeah, you see, my mother’s straight Sicilian, and I can tell you right now, she’s more than a few shades darker than that lady in the picture on your desk.”

Terence reared back as if violated.

“Oooohhhh,” the fellas cooed.

Terence jabbed a finger at me and opened his mouth. But no words came out.

“Its alright, T,” Grohl said. “Rice’s mother is white, too.”

“It’s true,” Rice confessed.

“So’s his daddy,” Meeks whispered loudly.

“You know what?” Terence barked while we laughed. “Y’all just ignorant, that’s all. She ain’t white! She’s light-skinned, and she’s cooler than all
y’
all’s mothers put together.”