I maneuvered my mouth to Jennifer’s … and froze.
The thrashing around behind the steering wheel had ceased abruptly, to be replaced by whispers—Jake’s voice. It was garbled, but the phrase break up with Todd was unmistakably in there several times.
“Don’t ruin it!” Didi hissed, louder than Jake.
I caught a meaningful glance from Jennifer; she was listening too. Whatever moment had been under construction between us, it was over. We were eavesdroppers now, ears at the keyhole.
Jake was speaking again, his persistence clear even though his low voice was not. Didi kept interrupting, “No! … No! … Shut up! …” until finally she rasped, “Why do you always have to spoil everything? Isn’t it enough that I’m with you now?”
She was back in the passenger seat in a heartbeat. “We’re going home.” It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a proclamation.
It took the Beamer’s defoggers only a few seconds to erase all evidence of their passion.
chapter twelve
OUR OPENING-DAY victory over Liberty convinced Coach Hammer that the key to our season lay in the kicking game. I practiced field goals until I thought my leg would fall off. My mouth worked even harder. With snapper Jake and holder Todd no longer talking to each other, I had to keep up a steady stream of peppy chatter to fill in all the hostile silences. And with those two, every moment was as silent as it was hostile.
Officially—or at least when anybody was watching—Didi seemed to belong to Todd. But I’d seen her VW in the neighborhood late at night. And judging from the undisguised loathing with which Todd and Jake regarded each other, I could tell that neither of them could figure out whose girlfriend she really was and why. I wondered if Didi herself knew.
I hadn’t kicked from a tee all week, so I stuck around after Friday’s workout for a few kickoffs. Most of the guys had already dressed and left by the time I hit the showers.
I was soaping up when I heard a loud crash, followed by full-throated yelling. I rinsed, clambered into jeans, and ran around to the chalk-talk area. Big Nelson Jaworski had hold of Todd underneath the arms, the way you’d pick up a newborn baby. He was shaking our helpless quarterback like a rag doll, slamming him against a row of lockers.
“I trusted you!” Nelson roared. “I thought you were my friend! And it was you the whole time!”
“It wasn’t—” Todd began feebly.
“Shut up!” Nelson hurled him into a rolling rack of footballs. The cart fell over, and Todd fell with it, hitting the concrete floor with the bouncing and wobbling balls.
“People saw you!” Nelson almost shrieked, and I could see how close to the edge he was. “You and Melissa ducking into Jake’s bathroom! Even into one of the bedrooms!”
“No!”
“Nelson!” I shouted.
Don’t get me wrong. I personally had no problem with Todd taking a beating over this. But Nelson was dangerous. In this state, he was like a little kid who had somehow gotten his hands on a pistol. Only here the weapon was two hundred sixty pounds of brute strength, powered by revenge-driven rage.
He noticed me for the first time. “Get out of here, Rick! This is between me and him!”
He picked Todd up by the scruff of the collar and reared back a fist the size of a Christmas ham. I took a running leap at him. He didn’t even flinch when I jumped on his back. It was like striking something totally solid—a tree or a parked car. I grabbed his arm and held on for dear life. He howled with rage and flung me off. I hit the lockers face first and tasted blood.
Nelson wheeled his menace back on Todd, who had managed to scramble to his feet. More important, my side attack had provided our quarterback with the time he needed to come up with the story that might weasel him out of this mess.
“You’ve got it all wrong, man! I never touched Melissa!”
“Liar!” the burly lineman closed in for the kill.
Todd back-pedaled, stumbled on a football, righted himself. “I didn’t want to say anything because we need him for the team. Nelson—it’s Jake!”
“No!” I shouted through swelling lips.
Nelson hesitated. “I never saw Melissa with Jake.”
“That’s his whole style,” our quarterback insisted. “That smooth ‘Hey, baby, how’s it going, baby?’ He brings you to his house, fills you full of beer, treats you like his best friend. Then, when you’re too buzzed to notice, he stabs you in the back.”
“That’s bull!” I snapped. “Jake barely knows Melissa!”
Todd’s audience was Nelson, not me. “Think, Nelson! We had a good thing going. We had our girlfriends, played our ball. What’s different? Who came out of nowhere and poisoned everything?”
“Jake.” The big lineman’s voice was uncertain. But I could see the wheels turning deep inside that thick skull of his.
“Don’t listen to him,” I said urgently. I was stuck. How could I get Jake off the hook without turning Nelson right back on Todd? “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“It only happened once—last Friday night,” Todd persisted. “While you were passed out. That’s why I pulled her into that bedroom. I was trying to talk some sense into her. She wouldn’t listen. Jake had her totally snowed.” His expression was open and sincere. “Don’t be too hard on Melissa. It was almost like Jake had her under some kind of spell.”
“He’s dead!” roared Nelson.
“No!” I jumped into his path. “You’ve got it all wrong! Jake would never do something like that—”
As soon as I said it, I felt ridiculous. Jake was doing exactly that to Todd, just like Todd was doing it to Nelson.
Nelson swatted me aside as he stormed to the clubhouse door. He turned to face us. “He’s going to bleed. Tonight—at the party.” And he was gone.
I shot Todd a furious glare. “I understand why you had to lie to save your neck. But why sic that maniac on poor Jake?”
“Poor Jake?” He practically spat it at me. “Do you know what Jake really is?”
“A good guy!” I shot back. “Who happens to have a thing for Didi, because everybody has a thing for Didi! And if you didn’t treat her like bug crap, she wouldn’t be looking for people to have things with!”
“Jake’s nothing but a phony,” Todd argued. “All the clothes, the parties, the ‘Hey, baby’—that’s not Jake. At the recruiting seminar I talked to some guys from McKinley—”
I cut him off. “I don’t care how he was at McKinley. I only know Jake now—a friend.”
“But it’s a lie!” I’d never seen our quarterback so outraged. “He put one over on every kid at Fitz, me included! I was as fooled as the rest of you guys!”
If I hadn’t been so agitated, I would have laughed right in his face. I mean, it was pretty much out in the open that his girlfriend had been cheating on him. And what did he choose to single out as the key injustice in the whole business? The fact that an outsider had broken the commandment against being as happening and popular as Todd Buckley.
“Look, I understand you’re mad at the guy,” I reasoned. “I would be too if I were you. But Nelson’s a live grenade looking for a place to go off. We’ve got to find a way to call him back before somebody winds up in the hospital.”
Todd shrugged. “Not my problem.”
“It is your problem,” I insisted. “Jake never touched Melissa. You did.”
He regarded me sharply. “And Nelson’s never going to find out about that, right Rick?”
“Don’t push me,” I warned. “If it comes down to you or Jake, I choose Jake. I’ll rat you out.”
“He’s got you brainwashed! Just like Didi!”
“There’s brainwashing here, all right,” I shot back. “But it’s not coming from Jake; it’s coming from you. Everybody around here thinks you’re something more than a third-rate quarterback at a third-rate school. And you’re not! If I feed you to Nelson, the sun will still rise tomorrow.”
He was choked with shock and rage. Nobody ta
lked to Todd like this. “Not for you,” he seethed, and stormed out of the locker room.
I knew exactly what he meant. To take sides with Jake against Todd Buckley would be a hanging offense at Fitz. I’d be an instant outcast.
A high-school leper.
By the time I got to Jake’s place on the bus, Marty Rapaport was backing an ancient Chevy Suburban up to the Garrett garage.
“Where’s Jake?” I barked in the window.
He favored me with a grin of recognition. “Hey, cross-bite, how’s it hanging?”
Connor Danvers and a few other party veterans from Throckmorton Hall poured out of the hulking SUV and began unloading a procession of shiny kegs out of the back. I counted four of them.
“Jake bought all this?” I asked Marty.
“Some of it’s mine,” he admitted. “I invited a few friends to stop by tonight.”
“A few?” I asked as the parade of heavy silver barrels entered the house via the back hallway. From a downstairs window next door, I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Appleford scowling at the beer and me.
“Several,” he amended. “Jake said it’s no problem.”
“Well, it is a problem,” I told him. “Because the party’s off.”
He laughed. “Sure, it is. Listen, a party like this—it’s bigger than you and me. It’s bigger than Jake. Trust me—it’s happening.”
“Jake!” I barged into the house.
He was in the living room, supervising the placement of the kegs into two ice-filled kiddie pools. “Hey, baby,” he greeted when he saw me. “What do you think? Feed your racehorse an extra pail of oats so he won’t fade in the stretch. This is going to be some party.”
“Send them back,” I told him. “You’ve got to cancel tonight.” I filled him in on the locker-room altercation between Todd and Nelson.
Jake was grim but undeterred. “It’s going to be me and Didi from now on,” he said. “I’ll have to face Todd sooner or later.”
I stared at him. “Todd isn’t the problem here. It’s Nelson. The guy’s got a screw loose anyway, and he’s extra nuts now that he knows Melissa’s been cheating on him.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You’re not being careful!” I accused. “Nelson’s a wild animal! You think anyone’s going to sacrifice themselves by getting between you and him tonight? Definitely not Todd, or anybody who cares what Todd thinks, which is just about everybody.”
“I’m not canceling the party,” he said flatly. “I’ve come too far to turn back now.”
“But you’ve already got Didi,” I argued. “She’s the grand prize, right? If she really likes you, that isn’t going to change because you skipped one Friday night. And if all she cares about is your parties, who needs her, man?”
He hesitated. I realized that was the only way to get through to Jake. If you tried to reason with him, it went in one ear and out the other. The only way to get his attention was to structure your argument in terms of the sole currency of any value to him—wanting Didi, having Didi, keeping Didi.
I knew Jake liked me. But at a certain point our friendship was one-sided, because all he truly cared about was Didi.
At last, he managed to work up a careworn version of the Jake smile. “You’re coming tonight, right, baby?”
“I can’t keep Nelson off you.”
“Not for that. It’s going to be a major blowout! You have to be here.”
The four kegs loomed like the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant. The word meltdown formed on my lips, but I didn’t speak it aloud.
He looked at me hopefully, “Right, baby?”
I sighed. “Right.”
I’ve often wondered if I did the right thing saying yes. I was his staunchest, and pretty much his only ally at Fitz. If I had refused to come that night, would it have been the 911 call that penetrated his laser-beam singleness of purpose? Would he have seen reason and called off the party?
At that moment, even Jake must have realized that something awful was about to happen.
chapter thirteen
IT WAS AS if Jake was throwing a party in the Twilight Zone. So much of it was familiar—the house, obviously. Hundreds of revelers squeezed into a small space, drinking tap beer out of plastic cups. But I didn’t see a single solitary soul I knew. It was strange—like turning on your favorite TV show and finding the entire cast gone, replaced by new actors. Yet the sets, the props, the storylines—they were all the same.
Fully a third of the crowd must have been from Throckmorton Hall and Atlantica University, because they were older than the rest of us. One guy looked about twenty-five and was wearing a wedding ring, although that might have been a gag for his big night slumming it with us high school kids. But even without wedding rings, the college types were easy to spot—and not just because of their age. They were taller, but skinnier (dorm food?), and more of them smoked. A heavy cloud of stale tobacco stench hung just below the ceiling.
Their fashion statements were more extreme. At Fitz, a nose ring or a pierced tongue was front-page news. I spotted an A.U. girl with so much hardware hanging off her face that she could have caused an airport metal detector to self-destruct. Another wore her hair shaved down to quarter-inch length, with a spiderweb pattern razor-cut to her scalp. A few of the guys had so many tattoos that they reminded me of The Illustrated Man.
The high-school kids looked strange too, but only because I didn’t know any of them. I felt like I was balancing on a precarious knife-edge of unease. On the one hand, the outsiders made me nervous; on the other, I wasn’t so anxious to see a familiar face—if that face happened to belong to Nelson, let’s say. A confrontation between that gorilla and Jake seemed inevitable, but I prayed that it wouldn’t come tonight. Maybe Todd wouldn’t show up either—fat chance. The king never missed an opportunity to make merry with his adoring subjects.
Marty Rapaport’s extra kegs had ratcheted the alcohol consumption up to the next level. This was not social drinking, not even teenage party drinking. And it wasn’t fun anymore, not even crazy fun. It was almost as if they could see the future—that this would be Jake’s final Friday night, and the capital-P Party would be over soon.
I was happy to spot one of the regulars, Dipsy, next to some guys who were taking turns whacking each other about the head and shoulders with a Nerf lacrosse stick.
I greeted him like a long-lost brother. “Hey, Dipsy, do you know any of these people?”
“Thousands of species flock to the reef for its abundance of food and proximity to the sun’s light,” he replied between methodical bites of Pringles.
“Yeah, but are there any fish from Fitz on this reef?”
He pointed into the kitchen. It was jam-packed in there—they were virtually shoulder-to-shoulder—but I managed to catch a glimpse of the Jake smile through the forest of body parts.
As I began to wade into the crowd, Dipsy grabbed my wrist. “You okay, Rick? You look a little—wired.”
“Trust me,” I assured him. “We’re the sanest ones here.”
As I got closer to Jake, I spied Didi with him. I hardly recognized her at first. She was still awesome, of course—nothing was going to change that. But she seemed frazzled, overburdened almost. She was drinking, too, which was unusual for her. Didi was the kind of girl who would park a beer in her hand as a style accessory, not a beverage.
But tonight she held onto the neck of a bottle of champagne like it was the throttle of a stunt plane. Her words weren’t slurred, but she was speaking much too loudly for a subject this private.
“I’ll break up with Todd when I want to break up with Todd. I decide who I break up with and when. How’d you like it if I broke up with you?”
Jake was practically groveling. “Shhh! Didi, don’t talk like that!”
I tried to change direction to escape that pathetic scene, but the crowd had closed behind me, and I was in the kitchen, for better or worse.
“Rick! Over here, baby.”
Ja
ke grabbed me by the arm and dragged me past the Longest Tongue contest to join him and Didi in front of the dishwasher. He continued to cling to me, his lifeline to a world where he still had some self-respect.
“Some night, huh?”
I wasn’t going to lie to him this time. “I’ve got a bad feeling about these people, Jake. They’re going to wreck your house.”
He gave me his coolest gesture of dismissal. “Don’t sweat it, baby. Everything’s under control.”
There was a cry of pain as the edge of a metal tape measure sliced into the soft flesh of one of the contestants’ tongues.
“Is it?” I asked. “Maybe it is, but how would we know? Who are these people? Some of them aren’t even kids!”
“Why are you being such a buzz-kill?” Didi asked petulantly.
Judging by the level of champagne in her bottle, it would take a lot more than my attitude to kill her buzz.
A soft lasso looped over my head, settled around my shoulders, and tightened. I looked down to find myself ensnared by a long rope of silk ties, knotted end to end. Turning, I grabbed the line and yanked hard.
With a squeal, Jennifer came stumbling out of the crowd and ran smack into me.
“Howdy,” she boomed over a slight trace of a hiccup.
I waved the string of ties at Jake. “Maybe you should have put that lock on your dad’s door.”
The theft didn’t bother him. He laughed out loud, completely unconcerned, because that was the way Didi liked him to be.
Jennifer looked wounded. “How do you know I didn’t bring these ties from home?”
I could smell champagne on her breath too. But she, apparently, had finished off her whole bottle, or at least lost it somewhere.
“Okay, I didn’t,” she babbled on. “But I could’ve. That’s your problem, Ricky. You don’t trust people.”
“Should I?” I wriggled out of the lariat, which fell to the slimy floor.
“Probably not,” she admitted. “People are scum. All they care about is sex, sex, sex.” And with that, she turned and walked away. I followed her, mostly because I couldn’t let any conversation end with those three magic words. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of one of the Longest Tongue hopefuls trying to strangle his co-contestant with Mr. Garrett’s ties.