“Because you’re a lying piece of crap!” Todd roared in his face. “Something like this doesn’t happen by accident! You think just because we aren’t math geeks like you that we’re too stupid to see what you’ve done to us?”
It went on, growing shriller and uglier by degrees. Todd sounded more like a prosecutor than an angry guy at a party. He was revealing evidence, presenting arguments, asking the jury to throw the book at this outlaw.
Marty looked at me. “He’s kidding, right?”
To my eyes and sinking heart, nobody was kidding. The Fitz kids in the living room sported expressions that were close to triumphant. By God, we knew there was something not quite right about Jake Garrett! We suspected it all along! We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!
Marty, who I didn’t even like, seemed to be the only other person who understood how insane this was. “He got contact lenses, bought some new clothes, threw parties, and wrote a bunch of essays so he could afford to do it. What’s so bad about that?”
Jake just stood there and took it, flushed but composed. I could see Didi, with carefully measured sidesteps, inching away from him.
“I may not be Einstein like you,” Todd finished. “But I’m smart enough to know when I’ve been had. Did you honestly think you could get away with it?”
I found my voice at last. “Hey—”
That was all the speech I got to make. In through what was left of the front door stormed two hundred sixty pounds of Nelson Jaworski. He looked as if he had spent the past several hours stoking his jealous rage into a white-hot homicidal one—which meant he fit perfectly into this place. And when he opened his mouth, his howl seemed barely human.
“Where’s Garrett?”
Frantic, I started to push toward Jake. There had to be some way to smuggle him out of there under cover of chaos. Tomorrow, Mr. Garrett might come home to find his house in ruins, but at least his son would still be alive to try to explain it to him.
“Nelson!” Melissa tried to calm her boyfriend down, but her presence only reminded him of what he was so mad about.
In the middle of all this, a great laughing cheer was heard. Kendrick Jones and a few other Broncos exploded up the basement stairs, completely unaware of the drama unfolding on the main level. They held between them a huge Fourth of July skyrocket. I squinted at the object tied onto the back—a pair of jeans, legs dangling.
Dipsy came waddling up behind them, pantless as usual. “Aw, come on, guys, don’t do this to me!”
But the group aimed the big firework straight out the open front door, determined to put Dipsy’s Levi’s into orbit.
“Who’s got the lighter?”
“I thought you had the lighter!”
That exchange was interrupted by the primordial shriek that came from Nelson as he spotted Jake in the crowd.
I called out a warning. “Run, Jake!”
Todd’s fist came out of nowhere, connecting hard with my jaw. Reeling in shock and pain, I weighed my desire to hit back against the need to help Jake. “Run, man!” But even as I said it, I realized that, in this crowd, there was nowhere to go.
Nelson, on the other hand, had no problem getting around. People either got out of his way, or he flattened them.
Jake tried to make a break for the kitchen, but Nelson was upon him in three monster strides.
“I got it!” Kendrick held up a disposable lighter and raised the flame to the rocket’s wick.
“No!” wailed Dipsy.
I watched in terror as Nelson reached out and grabbed Jake by the throat. And that’s not just a figure of speech. I could see the lineman’s huge hand completely encircling Jake’s slender neck.
“Hey!” cried Marty. Even Todd blanched.
What happened next took place in the space of a split second, yet I remember it as a quick-cut action sequence in a movie—the shower scene in Psycho. Jake’s eyes bulged in horror as his face began to turn a sickly gray-blue. Didi sprang over, and as she moved, she raised the champagne bottle she’d been hugging all night. Then, with a snap of her impossibly delicate wrist, she brought the bottle down on Nelson’s head. It shattered. The big lineman dropped like a stone, releasing Jake, who tumbled free.
A loud crackle cut the air as the skyrocket’s wick burned to the powder cache. At that moment, Dipsy made one last lunge for his jeans, and managed to get a grip on the left leg. Kendrick shoved him off, and in so doing, swung the firework away from the door until it pointed straight into the living room.
Hot sparks shot out of the back. With a cry of pain, Dipsy jumped away, relinquishing his grip. Then, in the language of NASA, we achieved liftoff.
You know how real rockets seem to start off slow, picking up acceleration with altitude? Well, this thing was the opposite of that. It shot across the room like it had been fired out of a cannon, clearing the crowd by inches. Kids threw themselves to the floor in a bruising pileup of elbows, knees, and heads.
The big firework sizzled horizontally, then curved upward and slammed into the living-room ceiling. Instead of exploding, it came apart on impact, raining sparks, powder, and burning bits of cardboard over the two wading pools.
There was instant combustion. I gawked. The water was on fire!
That doesn’t happen, I thought numbly, slapping at a smoldering spot on a lampshade. That’s scientifically impossible.
Marty had a theory. “What’s going on? Did somebody put booze in that water?”
“No!” That was when it hit me. Not booze; gasoline! The gas from the Harley must have separated from the paper towels. And gas floats on water!
Coughs and wheezes rang out as the blizzard of airborne powder found its way up noses and down throats. But most of the stuff settled gently over the flames where it ignited into an incandescent display of exploding red, white, and blue. The smells of smoke and sulphur filled the living room.
Just when I thought it was over, I heard a loud but persistent hiss. I stared. The flames had melted the skin of the plastic wading pools. As they slowly deflated, ponds of slush topped with burning gasoline spilled out onto the floor. Flaming streams snaked their way among party guests and overturned furniture.
“Run!” bellowed somebody, but the command was unnecessary. Hundreds of kids stampeded for the door, tripping over debris and each other. They came from everywhere—upstairs, the basement, the laundry room. Cries of “Fire!” and “The house is burning down!” rang out in the groundswell of panic.
The fact that ninety percent of these people had been drinking for several hours did not make for an orderly evacuation. Kids were stumbling on the steps, wiping out themselves and others. One of the Illustrated Men from Throckmorton spotted the flaming trickle below, declared “Lava!” and promptly fell down the stairs, taking a dozen others with him. He had to be physically dragged out of the house, babbling volcanic warnings.
I was about to abandon house myself when my eyes fell on Jake, stumbling around in the smoke and confusion. He looked frantic, which was pretty much the way you’d expect a guy to look when his house was on fire. What he didn’t look like was someone who was leaving.
I ran over and grabbed his arm. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!”
He wheeled to face me, eyes blazing. “Where’s Didi?”
“Outside!” I told him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure!” I wasn’t, really. But I couldn’t see her in the house. And if experience had taught me anything, it was that Didi generally looked after number one.
“I can’t leave without her!” he persisted.
Once again, the extent of his pathological devotion boggled my mind. His carefully created world was quite literally coming down around his ears. His house was filling up with smoke. Whatever happened, this was not something he was going to be able to clean up with a mop and a few garbage bags. And what was his main concern? Didi.
This wasn’t a crush. It wasn’t even true love. It was t
otal obsession.
I took advantage of the one piece of leverage I still had with the guy—I was bigger than he was. I dragged him out of there.
The front yard resembled the scene of an outdoor rock concert minus the Porta Pottis. Some clusters of kids had actually staked out spots on the lawn where they could sit cross-legged to watch the “show”—presumably, the spectacle of Jake’s side-hall Colonial burning to the ground.
I looked beyond the chaos to see two uniformed police officers racing across the grass toward us. For a moment, I couldn’t figure out how they had responded so fast. Then I saw Mrs. Appleford, wrapped in the pink chenille bathrobe she wore twenty-four/seven, hovering on the property line. The neighborhood KGB had finally run out of patience for Jake’s parties. She had complained to the cops just in time for the apocalypse.
“Call the fire department!” I yelled at them.
Distant sirens told me that this had already been done.
The officer in the lead pointed to the smoke billowing out the front door. “Is anybody in there?”
“No!” I shouted back. Then, “I don’t think so.” But how could I be sure there wasn’t some drunk curled up in the basement, fast asleep? “I don’t know!”
They bulled through the crowd and ran into the house. I could hear them crashing around inside. There was cursing as I think one of them tripped over the Harley.
“Over here, Lenny!” rang out loud and clear. “We’ve got a kid down in the living room!”
Desperately, I scanned the crowd. There was Todd, with an arm around Didi and the other holding Jennifer. Marty huddled with some of the college guys. Dipsy was flailing his jeans against a hedge in a desperate attempt to put out a small fire in the seat. Not far away milled his tormentors from the Broncos, chastened and sheepish, hoping no one remembered who it was that had set off a skyrocket in a private home.
I gave up looking. There were hundreds of strangers at this party. The person in there could have been anybody.
The cop ended the mystery with a single comment: “Give me a hand, will you? This guy weighs a ton!”
Nelson!
The big lineman hadn’t moved since Didi had crowned him with that champagne bottle. If it wasn’t for the cops, he would have been left to burn with the house.
I guess it had never occurred to me that he might be really hurt. This was Nelson Jaworski. You couldn’t hurt him with an atomic bomb. He did all the hurting.
But when they carried him out, the raucous crowd grew deathly quiet. His short curly hair was matted with blood, and he was obviously deeply unconscious.
The younger officer was shouting into his walkie-talkie. “We need an ambulance here now! Head wound, possible skull fracture, maybe smoke inhalation—this kid’s in trouble!”
All that was plain as day, yet hearing the words out loud—cop-show words when this was real life—brought a fuzzy party world into jarring razor-sharp focus.
The older officer cupped his hands to his mouth and addressed the crowd in a foghorn voice: “Who saw what happened?”
There was total silence—an uneasy silence, although dozens of people must have been looking on when Didi swung that bottle.
“Come on,” the officer prodded. “He didn’t fall on the top of his head. Somebody hit him. Who did it?”
This officer had obviously never dealt with high-school kids before, because he was going about this in the worst possible way. The natural aversion to being a rat was almost primal, dating back to the first moment your mom told you, “Don’t be a tattletale.”
I could feel the crowd’s resistance stiffening.
“You think this is a game?” The cop was getting angry. “This is a felony investigation! You want me to call for back up and bring fifty Breathalyzers? Tow all these cars, maybe?”
Jake was right beside me, so he saw what I saw—Didi, pale and shaking behind Todd. For an instant, I could read my friend’s mind. I knew what he was about to do, but I couldn’t stop him. I even reached for him, but he had already stepped forward.
“I did it.”
To this day, I blame myself for not reacting faster. But in a million years I didn’t think the confession would hold up. It was such a transparent half-assed attempt at chivalry. Surely someone would vouch for the guy who was being choked half to death at the time! Surely Didi would! If she cared enough about Jake to stop Nelson from strangling him, why would she let him hang himself for something he didn’t do?
A small sigh, almost a moan, rippled through the crowd. Nobody said a word, least of all Didi.
That left me.
“It’s not true! Jake, what are you doing, man?”
But the look of zealous determination on the face of Jake Garrett was one that I recognized all too well. It was the calculated driven fervor that had turned a lowly math tutor into a football player, a fashion statement, a legendary host, and a popularity machine—all to catch the eye of one girl.
Jake spoke up again, louder this time.
“It was me.”
chapter fifteen
THE GARRETT HOUSE didn’t burn down that night. According to the papers, when the fire had worked through all the gas, there was too much water around for the flames to spread to anything else. Jake’s wading pools had saved the day. It’s a good thing we don’t drink warm beer in this country.
In the end, the cops turned a blind eye to several hundred cases of disturbing the peace and underage drinking. They made only one arrest. Jake was led away in handcuffs. The charge: Assault with a dangerous instrument, with intent to cause serious physical injury.
I couldn’t escape the feeling that, if I’d said something a little more quickly, I could have created enough doubt for them to leave him alone. On the other hand, at least the county lockup gave him a place to sleep that wasn’t full of smoke.
The Garrett house was sealed off with police-line tape. It was the one thing that brought a trace of a smile to my lips in the terrible days that followed—the thought that Mrs. Appleford, self-appointed guardian of the neighborhood property values, now lived next door to a crime scene.
I could only imagine the phone call that had taken place between Jake in custody and Mr. Garrett in his hotel in Pocatello, Idaho. At that point, it would have been too late to get on a plane. So the father, I’m sure, passed a night not much more comfortable than the one endured by his son.
Mr. Garrett finally hit town at about the same time as Nelson Jaworski’s eyes fluttered open at Mercy Hospital. The news was not great. Nelson had sustained a depression skull fracture. He would recover, but there might be permanent side effects. For one thing, he had no memory of the entire evening. This meant even he couldn’t tell who had hit him or, more to the point, who hadn’t.
But short-term memory loss, the doctors said, could be a sign of brain damage. Personally, I’d always felt that Nelson was pretty much brain-damaged long before he got hit. If that sounds callous, then tough. I would have had a lot more sympathy for Nelson if my last sight of him hadn’t been with his hands around Jake’s neck, trying to squeeze the life out of the guy.
I was never a fan of Didi’s nonphysical attributes, but the fact was she had probably saved Jake’s life—that was the most frustrating part. There was no crime here, unless you count the one that Nelson had been trying to commit. All Didi would have had to do was own up, explain the circumstances, and the whole thing would have been over. But at this point, coming forward would have seemed too convenient, inviting questions such as: Why the silence up till now? Had it taken her this long to cook up an excuse to get her friend off the hook? The stupid girl had converted a win-win into a lose-lose. And the big loser was going to be Jake, not her.
Air fresheners sat on every available surface in the Garrett house, but the smell of smoke was plainly evident. It mingled sickeningly with the heavy floral scent.
Jake was in deep trouble. He’d even been kicked out of school, pending his court hearing, since his crime involved an attack
on a student. I didn’t know what the future held for him, but I couldn’t see it being anything good.
And what were his first words to me?
“Thanks for coming, baby. What do you hear from Didi? How’s she holding up under all this?”
“To be honest, Jake, I haven’t talked to her. She’s got Todd running interference.”
He nodded slowly. “I keep calling, but her folks won’t put her on. I guess suspicion would fall on her if she talked to me.”
I was burning. “Suspicion should fall on her! She did it! It’s probably the only thing she did in her life that was for somebody else, but she did it!”
He just sighed. “Poor Didi.”
“Poor Didi?” I repeated. “You’d better start thinking about poor Jake! That girl’s going to let you take the rap for this! Think about it—what kind of person are you protecting? You’ve got to tell the truth and save yourself!”
“I couldn’t do that to her.”
“Why not?” I ranted. “She has no problem doing it to you!”
He acted as if he hadn’t heard. “I just wish there was some way I could make sure she’s all right.”
“She’s fine!” I exploded. “She’s with Todd! She was always with Todd, and she’s always going to be with Todd! And if she breaks up with Todd, she’s going to find somebody exactly like Todd and be with him! She may have a fling every now and then, but the Didis of this world stay with their own kind!”
I’d never seen him look so wounded. The guy was practically under house arrest, a few days away from being charged with a felony, but that barely even registered in his thick skull. All that mattered was Didi.
I wouldn’t leave. I was determined to stay until I could convince Jake to come clean. Even when he was called to the phone to talk with his lawyer, I stayed in his room, pacing like a caged tiger, wracking my brain for some new strategy that would make him see reason.
The closet door was partially open, and a large carton, loaded with stuff, sat on the floor. Curious, I peered inside. Science fair trophies and prize ribbons were piled on top of each other. A certificate signed by the mayor proclaimed Jacob Garrett to be the “2001 Mathlete of the Year.” There were books about chess and Dungeons and Dragons, and pennants from Quiz Bowl and Odyssey of the Mind.