So it was true.
Underneath all that, I found mail-order catalogs from Abercrombie and Fitch, Banana Republic, Nike, Ralph Lauren, and J. Crew. There was also a well-thumbed paperback entitled Understanding Football, and, at the very bottom, a county real-estate map, with the school district divisions marked in red.
Jake stepped back into the room. “Sorry, ba—”
He froze when he saw me there, buried up to my waist in his secret history.
I stood, regarding him as if for the first time. “It was all for Didi, wasn’t it? From the very beginning. You threw those parties just because you knew that Didi would eventually show up at one of them.”
The pained expression on his face told me plainly that it went a lot further than that.
“You needed football to attract the right crowd, so you turned yourself into Coach’s long-snapper. That was all about Didi too. You even moved here for her. You planned this—starting the very day she blew you off sophomore year.”
He didn’t deny it. His intensity was almost scary. “Do you know how it feels when the girl you love—who you know could love you—won’t even look at you when she passes you in the hall because you’re not cool enough? Because she doesn’t want to admit to her friends that she even knows you?”
It occurred to me that he would never see the reality of what was being done to him. Because then he’d have to admit to himself that he’d been nothing more than an unimportant footnote in Didi’s book. And that would mean accepting the fact that the last two years of his life had been totally meaningless.
How could you save a guy who wouldn’t let himself be saved?
I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I had a vision of Jake, crouched in his backyard all summer in the broiling heat, long-snapping footballs at a target, or maybe an old tire against the side of the house. In my dream, he was drenched with sweat, his spine aching from the unnatural position, the back of his neck roasted and blistering in the sun. Every few snaps, he’d have to chase down his footballs and start the whole process over again. It was the kind of torture that took an iron will to overcome—especially since he had no interest in the game, never had, and probably never would. But there, hovering just above the heat shimmer, was Didi’s face. And making the team brought him a step closer to her, so he plodded on.
I pictured him poring over those catalogs, staring at the models in J. Crew and Banana Republic, piecing together a look for the new Jake, formerly Jacob, that would catch her eye and win her heart. I could almost see him with his dad’s toolbox, installing the deadbolt on his bedroom door. Talk about a symbolic gesture. How many of us ever get the chance to lock away our old lives so we can reinvent ourselves from the ground up?
And what made it a really good story was that he had pulled it off! What a rush these weeks must have been for him—the house to himself, Didi in his arms! That old Jacob Garrett, Mathlete of the Year, must have seemed a million miles away.
And then everything fell apart.
I went to see Jake’s lawyer, Mrs. Tidmarsh, and begged her to convince her client to come clean.
She was no help either. “Sorry, Rick. I work for Jake and his dad. If they tell me that’s what happened, I have to go with it.”
“But it’s bull! Jake’s protecting this girl, and she’s letting him take the fall! He’s obsessed with her! Crazy, almost! He’s unfit to stand trial!”
“I see you watch a lot of TV,” she commented with a crooked smile.
“Let me be a witness,” I suggested. “I’ll tell the truth if Jake won’t. I saw the whole thing.”
“You want to help out Jake?” she asked seriously. “Fine. Go back to school and round up a bunch of his friends. On the morning of the hearing, you all get dressed up in your Sunday best and stand behind Jake so the judge sees that he’s a nice all-American kid who’s worth a second chance. I’ll put a few of you up as character witnesses—things like that make a difference with a judge who has to look at gang members and juvenile delinquents all day.”
So now I had a purpose. It wasn’t the one I wanted, but as the guy said in that Dickens book, “The law is an ass”—although in this case it went more like “Jake Garrett is an ass when it comes to Didi, and that’s why he’s in trouble with the law.”
Yes, it was stupid to have to defend a person with choirboy testimonials when you had genuine eyewitnesses to his innocence. But if that was the way I had to play it, I would.
I didn’t expect to get anywhere with Didi, Jennifer, or Todd, and the partygoers from other schools would be impossible to track down. The Throckmorton Hall crowd had a different, but related, problem. After searching the Garrett house, the police discovered Jake’s essay-writing operation, and turned over the evidence to Atlantica University. Now all of Jake’s customers were facing expulsion, and even the people who were innocent didn’t want to be associated with the scandal. As a source of character witnesses, A.U. was out.
That left just the Fitz kids, and they wouldn’t be an easy sell either. Everybody’s parents had read the newspaper accounts of the wild local party that had landed a two-hundred-sixty-pound lineman in the hospital, and very nearly burned a house to the ground. They now knew what their little darlings had been up to all these Friday nights.
My own folks had been running a miniature Spanish Inquisition ever since early Saturday morning when the nearby sirens had woken them up. And they trusted me. I had to assume that similar interrogations were going on all over town.
But Jake needed as many character witnesses as I could wheedle into showing up. I wasn’t sure exactly who to approach at first, and finally decided there was strength in numbers. So I asked them all—everybody I knew, and everybody I recognized as having set foot in Jake’s house. I wasn’t pushy—I knew some people would feel that appearing on Jake’s behalf was an act of disloyalty toward Todd and company. And anyway, Mrs. Tidmarsh didn’t say she wanted to march an army into that courtroom.
I just spread the word about the time and the place, reminding everybody that Jake had shown us a lot of hospitality, and now he needed our help.
I talked Mr. DiPasquale, our assistant principal, into granting a half-day absence to anybody who wanted to go down to the courthouse. This was a school issue, I argued, since Fitzgerald High had made it one. They had canceled Saturday’s football game, forcing the Broncos to forfeit. And they had suspended the team’s long-snapper, pending the outcome of this hearing. I was encouraged to note that Mr. D. was doing a brisk business in passes.
“Just dress like it’s the nineteen-fifties and you’re in one of those lame TV shows,” I advised people. “If we look wholesome, the judge is going to figure that Jake’s wholesome too.”
Following Jake’s lawyer’s advice, I fought down my instinct to argue the facts of the case, or to place blame. We were character witnesses, plain and simple. If someone copped an attitude, I backed right down. Jake’s whole future was at stake here, and it wasn’t going to help him if I ended up screaming at people.
For insurance, I put notices on every bulletin board in the building, reminders that we would be meeting on the east steps of the courthouse at eight-thirty sharp. I had one other thing working in my favor: at our school this year, Friday meant Jake. Only, this week, the party was a whole lot earlier, and I didn’t think the judge would have a keg cooling in the witness box.
I went to bed Thursday night with a nervous knot in my stomach. But at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had done everything I could to help Jake.
Everything, that is, except tell the truth.
chapter sixteen
FRIDAY WAS COLD and gloomy. I got to the courthouse at ten to eight, ridiculously early, I now saw. But I didn’t want any of my character witnesses to show up and then leave, thinking they’d messed up the details or something. I’d appointed myself the standard-bearer, and I had to be there to rally the troops when they came.
It was a supreme
ly uncomfortable vigil. It turned out I had outgrown my one suit, and could remain well dressed only if I didn’t breathe too deeply. There I stood, choking on my tie, trying not to pop any buttons.
I started to get nervous around eight-fifteen. By eight-twenty-five, I was wound up so tight my suit was starting to fit. And I was still alone. I descended the marble steps and looked up and down Eagle Street. There were people hurrying here and there, rushing to get to work. None of them were kids.
The eight-thirty bus lurched to a halt in front of the building. I held my breath as the doors opened. Surely half of Fitz would spill out on the sidewalk. One person exited. She looked to be about seventy.
I knew then. I should have known before. Nobody was coming to stand behind Jake. Not one solitary soul.
As the minutes ticked by, my tenseness morphed into an incredulous sickening despair. Mr. DiPasquale told me he’d given out sixty-three passes. Where were these people?
How could they be so heartless? So rotten? Were they that scared of what Todd thought? It didn’t matter. For whatever reason, they weren’t coming. Jake’s house hadn’t burned down last week. But everything he had built—his image, his status, his popularity—had gone up in smoke. He was unmade, not by fire, but by cold, smooth indifference.
Those bastards!
When eight-fifty rolled around, I headed up the stairs to take my place as Jake’s one-man circle of friends. Maybe he was abandoned, but not by me.
“Hey, Rick—wait up!”
I wheeled. A pudgy figure in a rumpled suit that fit worse than mine was pounding up the courthouse steps. He looked kind of familiar, but I couldn’t place him at first. Then a heavy footfall jarred loose a thickly-gelled cowlick, which sprang straight up on the crown of his head.
“Dipsy!” He couldn’t have begun to fathom how overjoyed I was to see him.
“Sorry I’m late,” he puffed. “My suit was in a box in the attic. Let’s get in there and join the others.”
“There are no others,” I told him. “It’s just us.”
He gazed at me quizzically, like I was speaking a foreign language.
I spelled it out. “Not one single person showed up for Jake.”
I knew exactly what he was feeling, because I felt it too.
He said, “They used to show up by the hundreds.”
I was bitter. “Yeah, for free beer, free pizza, and free bedrooms. Not for Jake.”
He nodded slowly. “The giant manta ray is often seen with dozens of species surrounding its massive wingspan. But in the end, its fate is to prowl the oceans alone.”
It was unfair to take out my anger and frustration on the only Fitzgerald student who didn’t deserve it. But that was one fish story too many.
“What’s your problem?” I snapped. “Every time something serious comes up, you disappear into 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea!”
“The remora—” he began.
“You’re doing it again!” I practically howled. “Instead of answering me, you’re talking about seafood!”
“But don’t you remember?” he asked solemnly. “I’m a remora.”
“What are you babbling about? What the hell is a remora anyway?”
“The remora is a small fish with a large suction cup on its back. It attaches itself to the bottom of a shark, just below the mouth. And it lives there, feeding off the bits and pieces of food that the shark misses.” He smiled. “It’s smaller than the shark, and weaker. But a shark never eats its remora.”
I was suddenly blown away by what this kid was telling me about himself. It was nothing, yet it was everything about Dipsy. He had attached himself to Todd and his crowd in some kind of unspoken nonaggression pact—they let him hang around, and he put up with their jokes at his expense. And what was in it for Dipsy? He got to experience, albeit on the fringes, a social life that would have been barred to him as a pudgy, funny-looking junk-food addict who spoke in aquatic riddles. He got the scraps that fell from the careless jaws of the sharks.
“Is it worth it?” I asked in wonder.
He looked me straight in the eye. “I used to get picked on. Really picked on. Like, nobody’s smiling when it’s happening.” The famous shrug. “This is better.”
“To be their clown.”
“To fit in the way that works right now,” he said seriously. “Remember, a remora never graduates from the ocean. But next spring, I’m gone from high school.”
I regarded him with a newfound respect. That was always the question with Dipsy—why? The answer was that, the whole time, Dipsy had known it was temporary.
We all had a handful of things we had to endure to get through this four-year ordeal known as high school—the abuse we absorbed, the butts we kissed, the opinions we choked back, the lies we ignored, the boredom we hid. All at once, I envied Dipsy the genius with which he had distilled the complex series of equations that defined his life at Fitz to this single axiom: he could make it, but he had to let a bunch of football players steal his pants. Maybe a similar simplification existed for the rest of us, if only we had the brains and the patience to sit down and work it out.
I put an arm around him. “Come on, remora. Let’s go do this.”
As we entered the courtroom, I tried to smooth down his cowlick. It popped right back up again.
The hearing was nothing like the courtroom dramas in movies or on TV. For starters, there were only eight of us there—Jake, Mr. Garrett, Mrs. Tidmarsh, the prosecutor, the judge, a court clerk, Dipsy and me.
To be honest, I didn’t understand much of what was going on. It definitely wasn’t a real trial. It seemed more like a trial over what kind of trial to have. At seventeen, Jake could be charged as an adult, but he could also be considered a juvenile in the eyes of the law. Jake’s side was clearly hoping for the second option.
I did my best to catch Jake’s attention, but he sat sandwiched between his father and his lawyer, eyes front. There was no trace of the Jake smile, or his usual jaunty confidence. He looked miserable. Worse, he looked defeated before this thing had even started.
For some reason, there were no arguments. The prosecutor didn’t present Jake as a serial killer who specialized in champagne bottles, and Jake’s lawyer didn’t counter that her client was a saintly boy scout who was far too busy earning merit badges to commit any crime. Instead, they shuffled a lot of paper, passing documents back and forth. It reminded me of the way my mom had described a real-estate deal—a closing on a house. Law and Order it wasn’t.
I tapped Mrs. Tidmarsh on the shoulder. “When do the character witnesses go on?”
She just shook her head and shushed me. I caught a confused shrug from Dipsy on the bench beside me.
I tried again. “What’s next? Opening arguments?”
“No,” she whispered. “Sentencing.”
“Sentencing?” I must have screamed it, because the judge glared at me and raised his gavel like I was going to get it over the head.
Mrs. Tidmarsh tried to put a hand on my shoulder, and Dipsy grabbed the back of my jacket. But I was already on my feet, yelling at the judge.
“Sentencing? Are you crazy? You don’t sentence a guy who didn’t do it! It was Didi Ray, and this poor jerk thinks he’s protecting her—”
That was as far as I got before a large bailiff ran in and frog-marched me out of the court. He pushed me into the men’s room, and ordered me to splash cold water on my face.
“But I’ve got to get back in there!” I pleaded frantically.
“Not a chance, kid.” And he threw me out of the building.
I was nearly nuts, close to tears and shaking. I pictured the judge sentencing Jake to jail time—and all because of Didi, who never gave a thought to anybody but herself.
Blinded by emotion, I threw the heavy doors open and rushed back into the courthouse. Yes, I’d promised Mrs. Tidmarsh I wouldn’t interfere. But it seemed clear to me that she was a lousy lawyer. Either that or she was in on the conspiracy to railroad Jake.
>
They had to listen to me. Here, of all places, surely the truth meant something.
I never made it back to the hearing. The bailiff was waiting for me. He grabbed me in a bear hug and held on.
“You look like a nice kid,” he said without much conviction. “You don’t want to make me arrest you.”
Back out on the steps, I slumped down and huddled against the banister. Never in my life had I felt such a deep, all-pervading helplessness. People rushed past me, hurrying in and out of the building—court employees, jurors, police officers; I was even caught in the middle of a small wedding, and wound up covered in confetti. The world was carrying on at its usual breakneck pace for everybody except Jake. His life was coming to a grinding halt just inside those doors. Didi could have put a stop to it with a few words out of her exquisitely formed mouth. Instead, she wasn’t even interested enough in the outcome to put in an appearance.
Out of all of them, only Dipsy had cared enough to show up—Dipsy, who they teased and tormented. Maybe there was something about being picked on that was character building, that made you a human being.
The old Jacob Garrett, the nerd from McKinley, Didi’s math tutor, had been no stranger to that kind of abuse. In creating his new self and placing it at the center of their world, he had beaten them at their own game. They were never going to forgive him for that.
“Hey, baby, what’s wrong?”
I looked up, and Jake was standing there.
Jake! I thought I’d never see him again.
I jumped up, grabbed the guy by the shoulders, and shook him like a rag doll. “What happened? What are you doing here?”
“They gave me a suspended sentence,” he explained. “It was part of the deal we made with the prosecutor. That’s why nobody was testifying. It was all over before it started.”
So many different emotions struck me at the same moment that I was torn to bits. I felt stupid for screaming at the judge, and even a little irritated that they’d let me go on believing Jake was in real jeopardy of going to jail. But mostly, a flood of cool relief washed over me. Jake was all right, and that single fact trumped any embarrassment or resentment on my end. Thank God!