As I’m jogging back to the bench, I get a congratulatory slap on the butt. It’s that linebacker from the other team, the one who didn’t make the tackle.
He says, “Hey, Vince, remember me from Enza’s wedding?”
That’s how I know the guy! Johnny Somebody. His dad is Rafael, a member of Uncle Uncle’s crew, out by JFK Airport. Sure we were at his cousin’s wedding. Being the top dog, my father gets invited to every baptism, sweet sixteen, and yes, bar mitzvah. These days the vending-machine business crosses all ethnic boundaries.
On the bench, Alex looks almost resentful. “You didn’t tell me you were good.”
I defend myself. “It was a fluke. Honest.”
Pretty soon we get the ball back, and guess who gets sent in to rack up some more yardage? As I take my place in the backfield, the Lions’ defense is looking at me with fear in their eyes. I’m a little confused, but it feels good. This is what it’s like to be a star athlete. And I’m just getting started. Maybe I’m a natural.
Then I hear it, just a whisper from somewhere behind the line: “That’s him. Luca’s kid.”
The wind comes out of my sails so fast that I’m dead in the water. Superstar. Natural. Yeah, right. These guys won’t lay a hand on me because Johnny blabbed about who my dad is. They think if they tackle me, and somehow I get hurt, Dad’ll send Uncle Pampers over to pay them a visit.
I get the ball on every snap. A lot of arms reach for me, but nobody makes much contact. It’s embarrassing! Eventually, I start falling down when I think someone should have made a tackle. But I can’t play offense and defense at the same time. Pretty soon I’ve got another touchdown.
Back on the bench, I’m fuming. Of all the ways my dad’s business screws up my life, this is the most insidious. I mean, Dad’s not here. I made it a point to tell no one at home about the game. But he’s here as surely as if he was sitting in the front row, threatening everybody.
It’s crazy! Dad wouldn’t care if someone tackled me. If I got hurt, he wouldn’t blame it on anybody. It’s like his absence speaks even louder than his presence. It’s not his fault, but in a way it is. If he was a lawyer, or a cop, or a teacher, like other fathers—I’ll bet their kids get tackled.
I can’t even play football because of who I am. I set aside the fact that I don’t really want to play football anyway, and decide to be mad about it.
I turn to Coach Bronski when we take possession again. “I don’t want to go in on the next series.”
He gapes at me, astonished. “You’re eatin’ them alive, Luca!”
“I can’t explain right now, Coach,” I plead, “but you’ve got to bench me!”
“Fat chance!” he roars. “Get out there!”
What can I do? I quit the team.
Alex shoots me a look, as if I just folded a royal flush in the World Poker Championships.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” I mutter, and head for the locker room.
“Hey, wait up! Hey, Vincent!”
I turn around. “It’s Vince.”
I’ve seen this girl at school. Honey-blond, petite. Pretty cute.
“I’m Kendra. Kendra Bightly. I’m covering the game for the Jefferson Journal.”
You can guess that, in my house, reporters are almost as popular as cops. Secrecy is very important in the vending-machine business. On the other hand, I’m not sure that extends to our school newspaper because nobody actually reads it.
“You’re missing the game,” I point out.
“I’m gambling that you quitting the team is the real story,” she says seriously. “Want to talk about it?”
“God, no.”
She doesn’t go away. “You had a fight with Coach Bronski.”
“Not really.”
“Well, that’s what I saw, so that’s what I have to print. Unless,” she adds, “you want to tell your side of the story.”
I trudge into the locker room. She doesn’t stop at the door. “Who wants to read about a fourth-string halfback?” I ask her.
Her face is so completely clueless that I realize she doesn’t know what a fourth-string halfback is. She probably doesn’t know a football from third base. Back in sophomore year, Alex tried to write for the Journal. His first assignment was to cover a dog show—the guy’s so allergic he couldn’t even breathe in the building. It must be some kind of hazing thing they do for the new reporters—sending them on a story they don’t have a prayer of pulling off.
“You don’t know anything about football,” I accuse her. “So you’ve decided to write about the guy who quit the team.”
Her expression remains tough, but a slight flush starts from under her collar and works its way up her neck to her cheeks. I’m not sure why, but something my mother told me pops into my head: The problem with the young girls these days—they don’t blush anymore. I make a mental note to tell her she’s wrong.
Then I say, “I’m supposed to get changed now.”
Part of me just wants to watch her face turn from pink to crimson. But she’s out of there before I get a chance to see it.
CHAPTER FOUR
MY TEACHERS DON’T have very much in common with my father, but there is one thing they all share: everybody agrees that I don’t work hard enough. Vincent has the potential to be an excellent student if only he’d apply himself: it’s on every report card I’ve gotten since kindergarten. So when Dad gave me that whole lecture about getting motivated, he was just the latest singer of an old song I’d been hearing for most of my life. Teachers: Get motivated about school; Dad: Get motivated about the future; Mom: Get motivated about family; Alex: Get motivated about girls.
What can I say? It’s not me. While a lot of seniors spend their weekends filling out college applications, strategizing about Ivy League schools, and second-choice schools, and fallback schools, I’ve been letting all that slide. It’s not that I’ve got better things to do—God knows I’ve hung up my shoulder pads. I just don’t care that much.
Dad goes ballistic over this. “You could be the first Luca to go to university!”
Never college; college is where Mira went. Harvard, Yale—that’s university. Privately, I think he shouldn’t hold his breath. The only way I’m getting into Harvard is if Dad sends one of the uncles to have a little talk with the dean of admissions. I’m not a straight-A student—at least not since fourth grade, when the Calabrese hit was big news. Back then some of my teachers put two and two together and figured out that I was related to the prime suspect. There was this one art teacher—when my dad showed up to take me to a dentist’s appointment, she ate a piece of clay. She had been demonstrating how to make handles for ceramic pottery and she got so rattled that she just popped the clay into her mouth like chocolate. She wouldn’t spit it out in front of Dad either. She swallowed it. Missed two days of school due to a “stomach virus.”
But no one remembers the Calabrese murder anymore. And even if they do, they’ve certainly forgotten the guy the cops couldn’t pin it on. Thank God. Life in the Luca house is tough enough without CNN camping on the front curb.
Actually, I wouldn’t mind a little of that old notoriety for New Media class. Mr. Mullinicks is the toughest teacher in school. I’m not sure if he knows about my family, but I doubt that would change anything. He’d flunk me. He’d flunk Al Capone, and pack him off to summer school to make up the credits. And if Big Al put up a stink, Mr. Mullinicks would use his trademark line, “That’s your problem.”
“What should our Web sites be about?” asks a girl in the front row.
“That’s your problem,” Mr. Mullinicks informs her. “So long as it’s not obscene and nobody is trying to overthrow the government. And it’s your problem to register your site with all the different search engines so you’ll attract as much traffic as possible. Your grade will be based on one thing and one thing only—how many hits you can generate by the end of the semester.”
Alex raises his hand. “What if you put together a great site, but n
ot that many people find out about it?”
“That’s your problem,” the teacher tells him. “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a noise? This class isn’t about having a magnificent tree; it’s about making a big noise. The challenge of the Internet is to reach customers in an increasingly crowded marketplace.” He scowls at us. “And don’t think you can have your grandmother logging on day and night. I expect to see hundreds of hits. How you accomplish that,” he finishes, “is your problem.”
“It must be nice to be Mr. Mullinicks,” I say to Alex after class. “Everything is someone else’s problem. I’d love to farm out all my problems and lead a trouble-free life.”
Alex is distracted. “What are you wearing tonight?”
He’s talking about Alfie Heller’s party in the city. Alfie was at Jefferson last year. Now he’s a freshman at NYU, and he’s gotten the whole senior class invited to his fraternity’s big bash—at least Alfie’s friends, which means pretty much everybody.
There’s a lot of buzz about it in the school halls. Going to a college party is every high-school kid’s dream. A normal person would be psyched. A superconcentrated mass of hormones like Alex is vibrating like a guitar string.
“I’ll wear clothes,” I say. “Whatever I grab out of my closet. Come on, man, this party’s supposed to be fun. Don’t turn it into a chess match.”
“There are going to be college girls there, Vince,” he insists. “We can’t get cocky about this.”
“Oh, yeah, we don’t want all the success we’ve had with high-school girls to go to our heads.”
He’s testy. “I can’t think with all your negativity bouncing around my skull. Now, what do college girls like?”
“I’m guessing they’re not too fond of an idiot who plans his wardrobe like D-day. When I get there, I’d better not see you stressing out.”
“When you get there?” He’s horrified. “You mean we’re not going together?”
“I promised Tommy I’d drop by his apartment before the party.” Tommy has a place in Greenwich Village, not far from NYU, although Mom keeps his room as if he never moved away. Part of her will never accept that he has.
“A single boy should live with his family until he gets married,” she always says. It’s not really that she misses Tommy, because he’s home practically every day for business. She just has this fifties TV view of what a family should be. Mira married her high-school sweetheart, and Tommy and I are required to be Wally and the Beaver. This casts Anthony Luca as Ward Cleaver. The mind boggles. I could never get a handle on why this is so important to her until I first read Hamlet my junior year: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Alex is distraught. “Why does it have to be tonight?”
I shrug. “He feels bad about the Angela O’Bannon disaster, and he wants to make it up to me. I think he’s taking me out to dinner or something. We have to do that in secret or Mom thinks we’re dissing her cooking. Anyway, I figured since I’m going to be in the city for this party—”
“You decided to blow me off at the most crucial moment of our love lives,” he finishes.
“We don’t have love lives,” I remind him. “Don’t worry, I’ll be right by your side for every humiliating strikeout. Just try to hold off on embarrassing yourself until I get there, okay?”
No one in my father’s business pays for parking. Ever. They just leave their cars any old place—expired meters, school crossings, next to hydrants. They get piles of tickets, and they don’t pay those either. Tommy is proud of his. It’s like the organized-crime version of collecting stamps—Hey, I’ll trade you an expired meter in Brooklyn for a Port Authority bus-loading violation.
The amazing thing is I can’t ever remember anybody getting in trouble for it. It’s hard to explain, but look at it this way. When normal, law-abiding Joe Shmoe does something illegal, he gets caught. But people who live entire lives outside the law are somehow immune, as if the criminal code doesn’t even apply to them. How could you get tripped up by something that’s as alien and irrelevant to you as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead?
Moral of the story: If you’re considering breaking a law, break all of them.
Great lesson, huh? Mobsters, like Charles Barkley, are not role models.
Since I’m a civilian, I aim the Mazda straight for the garage. Thirty bucks for the privilege of parking under Tommy’s high-rise. Expensive, sure, but it seems appropriate for the only Luca who paid for his car using actual money.
Tommy’s astronomical rent leases a smallish one-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor of a luxury doorman building. In the elevator I’m hoping he doesn’t have anything too fancy planned. I’m wearing jeans and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It’s late September, and the days are still hitting seventy-plus.
I ring the bell of suite 23B.
“Hang on,” calls a voice. Definitely not Tommy’s.
How do I describe the individual who answers the door? Not stunning exactly, but hot. You know how supermodels are gorgeous, but there’s an unnatural perfection to them? Well, this girl is about as good-looking as you can get and still be a real person. She’s a little younger than Tommy—early twenties, I’d guess. She’s dressed casually, but her sexiness packs an atmospheric wallop like walking from air-conditioning into a hundred-degree day. Her sweater almost but not quite reaches the waistline of her low-rise jeans, revealing infinity sit-ups’ worth of rock-hard abs. Words fail me, except these two: Oh, my.
She holds out her hand. “I’m Cece. You must be Vince.”
I shake it, surprised but not blown away. Tommy runs with a fast crowd—okay, Tommy is a fast crowd. He has been known to date some pretty impressive women.
“Where’s Tommy?” I manage.
“He told me to look after you till he gets back,” she says airily. “Want a beer?”
“Coke’s fine,” I reply. “Driving.”
“Coming up.”
I can’t help but watch her as she heads for the galley kitchen. I don’t even try to look away. It’s that kind of attraction.
I sit. She stands behind my chair, asking politely interested questions about me. If she doesn’t care—and, let’s face it, why should a twenty-something knockout want to hear about what courses I’m taking?—she doesn’t show it. That’s class. Tommy has latched onto a real keeper here.
That thought has barely crossed my mind when she starts massaging my shoulders. She’s so smooth that it takes a second to realize that this isn’t the most natural thing in the world.
“Where did you say Tommy was?”
She doesn’t stop. “Oh, just taking care of a few things.”
The last time Tommy took care of a few things, I ended up with Jimmy Rat in the trunk of my car. I start to tell Cece this, but now her hands are off my shoulders and she’s rubbing my chest!
This is not good! I mean, it’s good—it’s great, actually. But not with Tommy’s girlfriend. What the hell is she thinking?
“Uh—uh—miss?”
“Cece.”
Exactly when did her mouth get so close to my ear? I can feel the vibrations of her reedy voice in my pancreas, not to mention other places. Oh, this is so not good!
“Well—it’s just that—uh—” Forget it. I’m jelly. No, worse. I’m a puddle of low-fat milk. “You know—uh—Tommy could walk in here any minute.”
“Relax,” she soothes, expertly springing the buttons of my shirt. “We’ve got a couple of hours.”
“But—aren’t you afraid he’ll find out?”
“Silly,” she laughs. “He already knows.”
“He does?”
“Of course! Who do you think set this up?”
I have these moments—vending-machine moments. It’s at these times when I come to understand that something I assumed was relatively innocent is actually part of Dad’s world. Cece isn’t Tommy’s latest squeeze; she’s a call girl! My brother brought me to his apartme
nt so he could set me up with a hooker! That’s his little gift to make up for the Jimmy Rat thing!
The realization is like a jolt of electricity applied simultaneously to every single cell in my body. I leap out of the chair, shirttails flapping like a flag. She’s got her sweater half off, an image that will forever remain burned onto the back of my retinas. But I’m already running for the door.
Cece twigs to what’s going on. “Hey,” she says softly, the yellow cotton knit bunched around her shoulders. “It’s okay to be scared if it’s your first time.”
“That’s not it—” I babble.
But how could I ever explain it? The problem is where this little gift is coming from. I mean, your first time is pretty important, right? You carry it with you forever. I refuse to put the permanent stamp of organized crime on my love life. On my wedding night, I shouldn’t be thinking…and it all started back in 2002 when Tommy used his Mob connections to hire me a call girl…
The sweater comes off the rest of the way. If I was a pinball machine, my response would be: Tilt. Cece speaks just one more word: “Stay.”
There are encyclopedias that say less. In that single syllable, I can envision the next couple of hours, and they’re rated NC-17.
I can’t take my eyes off her, and I’m equally entranced and bewildered by the fact that in a few minutes, I’ll be seeing a whole lot more. Going all the way. It sinks in that there’s a set limit to how far you can go. It’s not like long jump where you can train really hard and squeeze out another centimeter next time. This is the end. The max. The finish line. Will it be here and now for me?
Sensing the kill, Cece reaches for the clasp of her bra.
It’s the toughest decision I’ve ever had to make, but I make it.
I’m out of there.
CHAPTER FIVE
ALEX ISN’T AS SUPPORTIVE as a best friend should be.
“You idiot! You moron! You stupid brainless dolt!”
He’s waiting for me outside the loft building that houses Gamma Kappa and a few other NYU frats.