War and Watermelon Read online

  Mom shakes her head. “Wait until he turns eighteen. He didn’t even finish high school.”

  “Nice campus, though,” Ryan says. “Drew, I mean. The other one was nice, too. But . . .” He lifts one hand, then the other, like he’s comparing the weight of two items. “‘ Nam, Madison. ’Nam, Madison.” He sets his head on the counter again. “I’m exhausted. I’m crashing all afternoon.”

  “Don’t you have to be at work at four?” she asks.

  He shuts his eyes. “Aw, geez. . . . I guess so.”

  “Your father’s been up all night, too,” Mom says. “Don’t ever forget that. Say all you want about his politics, but he’s there for you, Ryan. Every step of the way, he’s there.”

  “I know. Believe me, I was scared to death last night. The best thing I’ve ever seen was him walking into that police station at five o’clock in the morning. Best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Dad comes down a little while later, showered, shaved, and dressed in a business suit. He nods at Ryan and gives him a tight smile. “All in a night’s work,” he says.

  “Yeah,” Ryan says. “Thanks.”

  Dad frowns and pats his own cheek with his palm. Then he clears his throat. “That was . . . brave,” he says, “defending Jenny like that.” He looks at his watch. “I don’t even know the bus schedule for this time of day. Oh well, can’t be too long.”

  “Wait up,” I say. I’ve got twenty minutes before I need to be back at school. “I’ll walk down with you.”

  “Sounds good.” He hands me his briefcase and we leave the house together.

  All in a night’s work.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12:

  A Moment’s Sunlight

  Tony comes by around quarter to seven. Mom sends him up to my room. I just showered, and I’m trying to figure out what shirt to wear to the dance.

  Tony’s wearing his practice jersey. It’s extremely baggy without the shoulder pads, and he’s got the sleeves rolled up. He smells like cologne. He sits on my bed and tells me to hurry.

  “It takes two minutes to walk there,” I say. The Franklin School gym is small and creaky, so they’re having the dance at Euclid. It’s just for seventh and eighth graders, though.

  “I want to walk up the Boulevard a ways,” he says.

  “What for?”

  “See if we see them.”

  “Why waste our time?”

  He stands and closes my door. “Somebody told me Patty said you were okay after all.”

  “Who did?”

  “I forget.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Just that she thinks you’re a good guy.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means we should take advantage of the situation while we can.”

  I think I’ve heard that before. And it backfired. Tony didn’t hear anything; I guarantee it.

  My practice jersey is filthy, and it’s damp from this afternoon. “I can’t wear that,” I say.

  “Suit yourself. But it’s a big advantage.”

  “How?”

  “It just is.”

  I put on a blue button-down shirt that I usually wear to church. We head down my block and turn onto the Boulevard. Sure enough, we get five blocks and see them coming toward us.

  Tony smacks my arm. “Act cool. Like this is no big deal.”

  “Okay.”

  Janet gives a timid wave as we approach. Patty looks half defiant and half welcoming. They stop on the sidewalk in front of the Pork Store.

  “You guys going the wrong way?” Patty asks.

  Tony lifts his hand and opens his palm. “We’re in no hurry.”

  Patty juts her head in the general direction of Euclid, back the way we came. “We’re going to the dance.”

  “Us, too.”

  She smirks and starts walking up the hill toward Burton Avenue, which runs parallel to the Boulevard. That’s the street Euclid is on. Tony falls in next to her. I walk with Janet, a few sidewalk squares behind.

  “Hope this is better than that swim club dance,” Janet says.

  I feel myself blushing. “At least there won’t be all those older people.”

  Tony seems comfortable with Patty. I’m not sure what they’re talking about, but he’s doing most of it and she’s been laughing some.

  “So,” I say to Janet. “Um . . . how’s Corpus Christi?”

  “Fine. How’s Franklin?”

  “Different. It feels, I don’t know, like being cut off from something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Seven years at Euclid. Not that I miss it, but it’s like there’s no safety net at Franklin. Nobody knows you. At Euclid you’d see your second-grade teacher in the hallway. . . . I don’t know. It’s just different.”

  She nods. “I know what you mean, I think. I’ve been at CC since first grade.”

  We get to Burton and turn right. This street is lined with trees and houses, much different from the Boulevard, which is all stores and banks and offices. We walk in the street because there’s no traffic and it just seems cool to be off the sidewalk.

  A block from the school, Tony and Patty stop so we can catch up to them; we’d fallen about thirty yards behind. I can see a crowd near the entrance. And I see Diane among them. We lock eyes for just a second, then she looks away and walks into the school. I feel a chill in my gut. How does this look, showing up with these two?

  There are folding chairs lining both sides of the gym, and a band made up of high schoolers is on the stage. Three guitarists and a drummer.

  Mostly it’s girls on one side of the gym and boys on the other, with a large mixed group standing near the stage. Patty and Janet put their jackets on a chair on the boys’ side and look around. Tony starts to walk toward some guys from the football team (half of them have their jerseys on), but Patty grabs his arm and pulls him back.

  I look around, too. I see Diane staring at us from the opposite corner of the gym. She turns away again.

  The band starts. About eight girls start dancing on one side of the basketball court, and about six guys—all of them eighth graders—on the other. Eventually Magrini and Esposito and some other seventh-grade guys start, too, plus most of the cheerleaders. But no guys are dancing with girls.

  Patty and Janet kind of dance in place, just moving their shoulders a little. I sit on one of the folding chairs.

  When the third song starts—the Stones’ “Satisfaction”—Tony reaches for Janet’s hand and they go out to the center of the basketball court. Two other couples are dancing now, too.

  Patty gives me a challenging look and points her thumb toward them. Then she breaks into a huffy laugh and tilts her head like she’s asking me a question. I feel light-headed and scrawny, but I follow her out there and start dancing, basically trying to copy what Tony’s doing.

  I feel like everybody’s watching me make a fool of myself, but when I look around nobody is. By the time the song ends, about half the people in the gym are dancing. Patty hasn’t looked at me once.

  They start a slow one—“Crimson and Clover”—and just about everybody heads to the sidelines. Tony stays out there with Janet and puts his arms around her shoulders, rocking back and forth.

  I sit down again. Patty doesn’t. She continues that swaying stuff. Some eighth-grade girls come over and start talking to her, all bubbly and excited. When the next song starts, she steps onto the floor with them, dancing in a group. I stay where I am.

  Within five minutes she’s dancing with Magrini.

  Tony and Janet haven’t stopped yet. She appears to be teaching him some dance moves as they go.

  I see Diane walk across the gym toward the exit and I get up before I can think about it and follow her. I let out a sigh of relief when I see her go into the girls’ room instead of leaving the building.

  I wait. When she comes out I go, “Hi! When did you get here?” as if I hadn’t seen her before. Then I remember that we’d locked eyes outside, so
that must sound pretty lame.

  She’s wearing a thin silver chain with a peace sign around her neck. She smiles and says, “A little while ago. I saw you come in.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I was . . . Tony made me . . . be late.”

  One corner of her mouth turns up. “He’s quite the dancer.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You, too, huh?”

  I look down and my face gets hot, but it’s just embarrassment. “Not really.”

  “You looked good,” she says. “She . . . uh—”

  “No.” I shake my head. “She’s just . . . Tony’s with her friend. You know?”

  She shrugs gently. “Sure. I get it.”

  We walk into the gym and stand off to the side of the stage, watching the band. The drummer lives down the block from me and is on the high school track team. Sometimes I see him running sprints up the hill. Two of the guitarists are always sitting in Lovey’s Pizza, staring out at the traffic.

  Diane is doing that same shoulder-swaying thing. I swallow hard, knowing that I should ask her to dance, but it turns out I don’t have to. We just face each other and start moving at the same time. But they’re playing a Beatles song that’s hard to dance to because it’s slow and jerky, so it forces you to exaggerate your movements and then hold them for a split second. She’s smiling at me a lot, though. I start laughing.

  Then they do “Everyday People,” which is a thousand times more fun to dance to. We get cups of soda after that one and sit on the folding chairs and watch the band some more.

  “You learn those dance moves at Woodstock?” she asks with a laugh.

  I can feel my face turning red. “I guess,” I say. “Some of’em.”

  The dance ends at nine thirty. I don’t even look around for Tony.

  “I’ll walk you home,” I say.

  “Great.” Diane waves her hand to our right. “I live on Central.” Nine blocks from here.

  Everybody’s leaving at once, so the sidewalks are packed. We joke around about stuff. She says the boys are lucky to be taking shop. “Home Ec is so lame. Half these girls can’t even sew on a button. I’d much rather be using a coping saw.”

  “Really? I’d rather be knitting.”

  She laughs. “Maybe I can teach you.”

  “No thanks.”

  The crowd has thinned a lot by the time we pass Franklin, so we slow down. Then we stand in front of her house for a couple of minutes and talk about the dance, how some of the oddest couples turned up on the floor.

  “So I’ll see you later,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at the house, which has a lot of lights on. I saw her father looking out a window a minute ago.

  “Right,” I say.

  She turns and walks up the driveway. I wait until she’s in, then I start running. Suddenly I have tons of energy.

  I cut back along Burton, but I see a crowd of kids coming toward me, a block away. Tony and Magrini are among them, with Patty and Janet. Maybe Tony’s ready for that group, but I don’t need ’em. I turn down to Terrace and run that way toward home. It’s very dark. I feel great. I start sprinting and go an extra two blocks past home, then circle back. I could keep running all night, but I’ll save it.

  I go straight to bed and listen to the radio until way after midnight. I hear “Sugar, Sugar” three times and “Little Woman” twice. I still can’t stand the Archies, but the Bobby Sherman song is like a virus in my head that I can’t shake.

  Blah, blah blah.

  It turns out that the Mets swept a doubleheader from the Pirates today, a pair of 1–0 victories. That’s nine wins in a row, and they’re already extending their lead in the division.

  Big game for me tomorrow night. If the Mets can go from worst to first, then I can triumph, too. Diane said she’d be there.

  Finally they play “Get Together.” I relax and sing along very, very softly. “We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass. . . .”

  I hear Ryan come in and open the refrigerator. Then he walks quietly up the stairs and shuts his door across the hallway from me. A few minutes later he knocks gently on mine and I say, “Come in.”

  “What’s happening, man?” he whispers. “You still awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d the dance go?”

  I push up on one elbow. Every light in the house is off. “It was all right,” I say. “I had fun.”

  “Just thought I’d check.”

  “Thanks. It was good.”

  “Peace out, then. See you in the morning.”

  “You, too.”

  He steps into the hallway, but I call him back.

  “Ryan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did it work? The protest in Syracuse?”

  “I don’t know.” He takes another step into the room. “I haven’t heard if we had any luck getting the recruiters off campus. But yeah, I think it worked . . . in a small way. Every voice makes a difference. Some are just louder than others. . . . Some people are a lot braver than I am.”

  He closes the door. I turn off the radio and very quietly try to sing myself to sleep.

  Come on people now

  Smile on your brother

  Everybody get together

  Try to love one another right now.

  Tomorrow night could be huge. I can see it clearly: The starters build up a reasonable lead in the first half, and me and Tony and Joey take over the backfield for the second.

  We begin a drive, keeping the ball on the ground, hitting the holes for four, five yards at a crack, piling up the first downs. I’m sweating and my heart is pounding, but I’m confident. I’m not screwing up anymore.

  We cross midfield, into their territory, but then maybe we stall. Tony loses a yard. It’s third-and-eight, and Joey looks around the huddle. He locks eyes with me.

  “Forty-six pitch,” he says.

  We break the huddle. I stare straight ahead and take a deep breath, hands on my knees. The lights are on and the bleachers are full, and all eyes are on us.

  Joey flips me the football, and I hear the crack of the shoulder pads as the linemen ram into each other. I see that hole opening up. I see me bursting through it, hugging the ball and cutting toward the sideline.

  A linebacker angles toward me, but I shift my weight and dodge past him, stiff-arming him and breaking free. I hear the coaches and the spectators yelling. I hear the defenders running toward me.

  I’m in a full sprint now, heading up the sideline, ahead of everyone as I race toward the end zone.

  I see nothing but daylight ahead.