Jake, Reinvented

  It didn’t break up right away, though. There was still a lot to go. There were some huge battles over car keys, to keep them in the hands of people who were fit to drive. Couples who had found their way into secluded areas were reappearing, looking bedraggled and sheepish.

  The football calisthenics squad trooped back in, tracking most of the mud in the yard through the kitchen and living room. They were slapping hands, bonking heads, and screaming about their awesome workout. I knew perfectly well that on Monday, when Coach Hammer lined them up for calisthenics, they were going to grouse and moan like he was asking them to dig a tunnel to China with a shrimp fork.

  I caught Jennifer in the kitchen, making out with the starting power forward of the basketball team. I felt a faint twinge of jealousy, but my Jennifer aspirations had been dead since sophomore year. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be much to it. They didn’t bother saying good-bye to each other.

  She looked at me defiantly. “I don’t even like him.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I felt like kissing someone, okay? If I want to do something, I do it. That’s the way it works now. It’s all about me.”

  “Great,” I yawned. “Everybody’s leaving. Is Didi coming with us or with Todd?”

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Jake and Didi stepped out of the laundry room, each with an armload of bottles for recycling.

  I blinked and checked my watch. “Have those two been hanging out all this time? That’s, like, six hours!”

  Jennifer looked at me pityingly. “If you were Didi, would you spend the night listening to Todd put the finishing touches on the lamest lie since ‘Nicotine is not addictive’?”

  “Yeah, but the guy was her math tutor two years ago! They have nothing in common except Chinese food and quadratic equations!”

  “Didi,” called Jennifer. “We’re leaving. Need a ride?”

  Didi looked around. “Has anybody seen Todd?”

  I’d seen Todd—chasing Melissa around the upstairs hall. The big question was, had Nelson seen him?

  Todd appeared around the corner of the dining room. “Right here, Dee. Ready to go?”

  Didi took a step toward him and was almost mowed down by a blur shooting up the basement stairs.

  “Where are my pants?” howled Dipsy.

  I looked to the ceiling fan, but it was clear.

  Dipsy ran all over the house, his chunky derriere wagging in bright orange boxers. You’d think that after last week, the guy would know enough to put on less flashy underwear. I mean, nobody could resist reaching out a hand or foot and taking a swipe at that king-size Day-Glo butt.

  Finally, Dipsy tracked down his tormentors from the Broncos and begged and pleaded for his pants. When that didn’t work, he started shouting. And the words coming out of his mouth had nothing to do with coral reefs just then. He hurled every curse in the book at the bigger, stronger football players.

  The situation had its humorous elements, but really, it was a pretty tense moment. I mean, pudgy Dipsy wouldn’t have lasted five seconds in the ring with those guys. By the time they got through with him, there’d have been nothing left but a Teletubby cowlick and a tiny grease spot between the pizza stains on the carpet.

  Then, all at once, the players were laughing their heads off, slapping him on the back and congratulating him like he’d just scored a game-winning touchdown. In great good humor, they told him his cargo pants were hanging from the exhaust pipe of the water heater in the basement. When he went down to get them, he had about thirty spectators hot on his heels.

  We all saw the pipe at the same time. No pants.

  “They evaporated!” cried one of our wide receivers, which wasn’t a bad joke for this late into the morning.

  Well, the football players—they were practically hysterical. They were rolling on the cement floor of the furnace room.

  “Swear to God!” howled Kendrick Jones, a linebacker. “That’s where we put them!”

  “Come on, guys,” wheedled Dipsy. “I can’t go home without my pants.”

  “Well, they couldn’t have gotten up and walked,” reasoned Jennifer.

  Then we saw them. And for a moment it looked as if they really had gotten up and walked. Or at least crawled. They were slithering across the floor, legs spread wide.

  The first screams probably came because Dipsy’s pants seemed to have taken on a ghostly life. But when we realized what had actually happened, the yelling got even louder. Victor the constrictor had somehow crawled up one leg and down the other, and was making a break for it disguised as cargo pants.

  And then Todd Buckley showed the main advantage of being the first citizen of a high school. In the middle of all that chaos, he turned to Victor’s owner and said, “This is getting boring. Pick up your snake and go home.”

  And that’s exactly the way it unfolded. Guys got their girlfriends calmed down; girls assured their boyfriends that they had been macho enough in the crisis; and we all filed upstairs for the exit.

  Didi left with Todd, and Jennifer and I headed out a few minutes later.

  I paused at the door. “You’ve got a monster cleanup job here,” I told Jake. “I can drop Jen and come back to give you a hand.”

  Relaxed as always, Jake just laughed it off. “Everything’s taken care of, baby. I’ve got it covered.”

  Outside, the rain had settled into a cool mist.

  Jennifer breathed a world-weary sigh. “Another boring Friday night. Nothing ever happens around here.”

  We looked at each other and cracked up laughing.

  As we ran for the car, I noticed that Mrs. Appleford’s upstairs bedroom light was on next door. There she sat at the window, scowling at the departing guests.

  chapter five

  I ALWAYS WENT jogging during football season. But on Saturday, my “morning” run didn’t start until noon. I wasn’t very energetic, either. I consoled myself with the knowledge that a whole lot of people felt worse. I wouldn’t have wanted to have Nelson Jaworski’s head right now, and not just because it was full of rocks.

  I made a point of running past the Garrett house, and what I saw in that picture window stopped me dead in my tracks. There, with a broom in one hand and a vacuum cleaner in the other, slaved the host with the most, Jake Garrett.

  I was blown away. When Jake said the cleanup was all taken care of, I pictured a cleaning lady. Or maybe a professional service where a truckload of guys shows up at your house, and an hour later, you wouldn’t be able to tell there’d ever been a party. In a million years I never would have dreamed that he was planning to do it all by himself. I mean, that house was a bomb crater!

  I rang the bell, but I didn’t wait for him to answer. The door wasn’t locked, so I barged right in.

  “Jake, what’s going on?”

  “Oh, hey, baby.” He was trying to be his old cool self, but it wasn’t quite coming off today. He looked harassed, exhausted, and above all, stressed.

  “Last night you said you didn’t need any help.”

  He scrubbed at a sticky stain on the floor. “Last night I didn’t. But this morning my father called from Kansas City. He’s on an earlier flight. He’ll be here in an hour.”

  “Oh, boy.” I grabbed a garbage bag and started stuffing in plastic cups and pizza-stained paper plates. It was one of those cleaning jobs where the more you work, the messier it seems to get. You pick up a napkin, but that only reveals the mashed-up cupcake underneath it. And that’s pretty discouraging when the clock is ticking, and Jake’s dad is getting closer by the minute. I filled four giant trash bags in the living room alone.

  Then I got a peek into the kitchen. San Francisco must have looked like this after the big quake.

  “We need more garbage bags!” I called into the dining room, where Jake was hanging curtains that had been ripped down during the night’s festivities.

  “Try the pantry,” came the mumbled reply from a mouthful of drapery hooks.
>
  I was lucky I even found the pantry behind all those pizza boxes.

  By the time I ran up the stairs to check the second floor, there were eleven garbage bags standing out by the curb. Jake was rolling the empty keg out to hide in the garage, and Mr. Garrett was only fifteen minutes away.

  Except for the plastic cups, which were strewn like leaves in October, the upstairs was in decent shape. I had to make all the beds, but I only filled one more bag up there.

  I paused in the hall. Jake’s room was unlocked, the door hanging slightly ajar. Well, I had to sneak a look. A guy’s room is a mirror into his soul, and these days, Jake’s was the hottest soul in town. Besides, a smart kid like Jake ought to know that putting a deadbolt on something only makes people twice as determined to get inside.

  I don’t know what I expected to find in there. Definitely nothing X Files, like shrunken heads or a stockpile of machine guns. But I was disappointed to see an ordinary room, maybe a little on the cluttered side. I mean, this was Jake Garrett, the guy who appeared out of nowhere and plastered his name onto the lips of every kid at Fitz. His parties were the talk of the school. Girls he’d never met stuck Post-it notes with their phone numbers on his locker, hoping to be invited to his next Friday-night bash. Freshmen made themselves look important by being able to identify the Garrett BMW in the parking lot. College guys treated him as an equal. He was an absolute star, in his own way, every bit as big as Todd Buckley. After all, most schools had a big-man-on-campus quarterback. But Jake was something that nobody had seen before or ever expected—cool, mysterious, different.

  I poked around, but there wasn’t much to see. On his desk sat a delivery menu from Dante’s Pizza—tool of the party-throwing trade. There was also a neatly printed college essay by someone named Nancy Outerbridge. At the top was written Term Paper, Physics 103, The Abiotic Synthesis of Organic Compounds. Now, where had that come from?

  I opened the drawer and peered inside. A trophy topped with a gold chess king gleamed up at me. JACOB GARRETT—MCKINLEY GRAND MASTER, 2001 was engraved on the base.

  Hidden talents.

  Suddenly, I heard cursing from downstairs.

  I pulled up short, feeling like a kid caught with his finger in the cookie jar. I scrambled out into the hall, leaving the room more or less the way I’d found it.

  “What’s wrong?” I called over the banister.

  “We forgot the basement!”

  I checked my watch. Five minutes!

  We made a mad stampede for the basement. Frantically, we raced around, throwing cups and plates into garbage bags.

  There was the sound of a car door. We froze. Through the casement windows, we could see a taxi pulled up to the curb. Someone was getting out.

  Jake panicked. “My dad! Quick—help me fold up the Twister game!”

  The big plastic sheet was draped over the couch. We each grabbed an end and pulled. If I didn’t have a heart attack right then, I’ll probably live forever. For there, asleep on the sofa, his pants clutched to his heart, lay Dipsy.

  “Do you think he’s been here since last night?” I blurted. It was one of those natural exclamations that sound pretty stupid when you have a minute to think about them. Like, Dipsy had gone home, gotten up bright and early, broken into Jake’s basement, taken off his pants, and crawled under the Twister mat for a snooze.

  Jake shook Dipsy savagely. “Get your pants on, baby! My dad’s here!”

  “Huh?”

  Our luck, Dipsy wasn’t a morning person. We had to shove him into those pants one leg at a time.

  Upstairs, the door slammed. “Jake?”

  “I’m in the basement, Dad!”

  There were footsteps on the stairs. “Jeez, Jake, there are twenty green bags on our lawn. When’s the last time you put out the garbage?”

  And suddenly, there he was, the old Jake. An excuse was required, and the world’s smoothest liar was rising to the occasion.

  “Sorry, Dad. I’m doing a little house cleaning. A couple of guys are here helping me.”

  As it turned out, all Mr. Garrett wanted to do was take a shower and collapse into bed. This was a good thing, because it took a pretty tired guy to miss the fact that Dipsy looked like he’d been rolled in pretzel crumbs.

  “Good to meet you boys,” said Mr. Garrett. “I’m glad to see that Jake’s making friends.”

  I could feel my lips twitch. Making friends? He should have been there twelve hours ago!

  And then Dipsy, king of the non sequiturs, wriggled uncomfortably and announced, “I think there’s snake crap in my pants.”

  I saw Mr. Garrett’s tired eyes pop open for a second, while he tried to figure out what Dipsy could possibly have meant by that. Finally, he yawned and said, “I’ve got to throw in a load of laundry before I sack out.”

  “Oh, I’ll take care of that,” Jake offered. “You get some rest.”

  “You’re a great kid, Jake. Thanks.”

  It occurred to me that the reason why Jake was such a “great kid” was that the washing machine was still full of ice and wine bottles.

  In the end, Dipsy’s cargo pants went in with that load of laundry. So after spending the night in Jake’s basement with no pants on, Dipsy spent the afternoon in the same condition. I have to say he looked totally at home wrapped in a blanket on the couch, staring at a documentary on the sleeping sharks of Isla Mujeres.

  “You know,” I told him, “if you don’t like the way the players treat you, you shouldn’t hang around them so much.”

  He looked mystified. “Who said I don’t like how they treat me?”

  “How could you like it?” I exploded. “They goof on you every minute, humiliate you in front of hundreds of people!”

  His gaze never left the TV screen. “The remora bides its time on the coral reef—”

  “Forget it,” I interrupted. “I should have known better than to expect you to be serious.”

  “I am being serious.” He was looking right at me now. “I’m a remora.”

  “You’re an idiot if you keep letting those guys treat you like a clown!” I snapped.

  His gaze was penetrating, and I felt ridiculous almost immediately. I was pretty sure he was thinking back to sophomore year. Nobody had stolen my pants that day. But as disses go, it was one of the big ones. If Dipsy hadn’t been there for me, who knows how much of a fool I might have made of myself? Was I really in a position to lecture him?

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I just mean you deserve better, that’s all.”

  He shrugged. “I had a good time last night. I’m having a good time today.” He turned back to his sleeping sharks.

  True enough. And if he didn’t let the Broncos crack on him, he wouldn’t have made the guest list in the first place. Maybe I wouldn’t have either, if I didn’t know how to kick a football.

  It had been almost three hours since I’d interrupted my morning run to help Jake clean up. Suddenly I just needed to get moving again, to lose myself in the mindless simplicity of putting one foot in front of the other.

  Jake saw me to the door. “You were a lifesaver today, baby. Tell you what. I’ll take you to lunch this week.”

  I had to laugh. “It’s a deal. What are we going to get—the chicken nuggets or the Salisbury steak?”

  “Not the cafeteria,” he scoffed. “What do you say to Lakeshore Steakhouse?”

  “That’s downtown!” I exclaimed. “Our lunch lasts forty-two minutes.”

  “Only if you go to next period,” he pointed out. “Come on, it’ll be fun. I know the owner.”

  This was too much. “Movie stars eat at that place, Jake! No way do you know the owner of the hottest restaurant in the city.”

  “His daughter goes to Atlantica,” he explained with a grin. “I’ve done her a couple of favors. I’ll set it up for Monday.”

  Then he launched into a whole speech about how much he had enjoyed meeting Jennifer at the party. Man, I was there. He had barely said two words to Jennifer.
He had spent half the night with Didi, reminiscing about the good old days of being her math tutor!

  “That was a pretty close call with your dad,” I said. “I guess you’d better take a few weeks off parties.”

  He looked surprised. “Wrong, baby. Friday night, same time, same station.” And as I walked away shaking my head, he called after me, “Bring Jennifer.”

  chapter six

  THE E-MAIL WAS waiting on my computer when I got home on Monday afternoon, stuffed to the gills from a three-hour lunch:

  Dear Stud,

  Meet me in the usual place for hot sex and the meaning of life.

  —Warrior Princess

  Jennifer. Even her e-mails drove me crazy. Ninety percent of the time I wished I’d never even met the girl. She was a good friend, no question about that. I could tell her things that I wouldn’t say to anybody else. Yet I couldn’t share the one fact that ate me up from inside every minute I was with her—that being just friends was killing me. And I was starting to ask myself if this relationship was worth it.

  Sophomore year. Sooner or later, it always came down to that. Ever since puberty I’d been wondering if Rick and Jennifer, friends since birth, could turn into something more. I didn’t have the guts—not really. But I forced myself to ask her out.

  It wasn’t exactly a romantic date. Apple picking at Steubenville Orchards. But it was a big deal for me. I had just gotten my license. It was my first solo drive. I had my dad’s car, Jennifer at my side, tunes on the radio, and a clear road ahead. It would be wrong to say I was happy—I was too nervous for that. But on some level I appreciated the beauty of the moment.

  It was Fitz’s annual Saturday at Steubenville, so I knew we’d run into a lot of kids from school. Todd’s was the first familiar face—he was the JV quarterback then, so we were friends through football. I was honestly glad to see him. I’d confided to him my feelings for Jennifer.

  Todd turned out to be an even better quarterback off the field than on. As we hung out near the basket stacks, greeting friends and football acquaintances, he ran my offense perfectly, keeping the conversation rolling, and making sure I had the ball when I needed it. Jennifer was relaxed and laughing, and I was so grateful to my buddy Todd that I would have gladly taken a bullet for him.