At 3:00 this morning, she was clicking through the pictures she and Juliana had taken in Southampton. When she’d dropped me off, the radio was on a dance music station. Six hours later, she’s blinking and rubbing her eyes. “You should go to the nurse,” I say.
That’s enough to earn a smile that turns into another yawn. “She’s going to ask if I have pink eye, give me a rice cake, and tell me to lie down.” True; this is the typical medical response at Ponquogue High School.
Andreas slams into the lockers ahead of us.
I almost laugh–a stunt to make the girls roll their eyes at him and giggle, of course–until he rebounds, face red, and shouts, “Is that the best you can do?”
I catch a glimpse of Tommy Brown’s freckled face, eyes narrowed and cheeks flushed, and then everyone swarms at once and he’s blocked from my view. There’s no mistaking the slamming of skin on skin. Bodies move in and others push back, fast and hard, until a shoulder drives into mine and rushes forward.
I catch the tips of his T-shirt but can’t hold on long enough. “Marcos, stop!” I call.
There’s no use.
He yanks Andreas back, but Andreas, disoriented and shouting, swings at him and connects with his cheek. Marcos stumbles and pins Andreas to the floor, the crowd jumping back as they fall, and then Dimitri shoves into the middle, picking up Max Pfeiffer by the collar. “You mess with my friends, you mess with me,” he yells in Max’s face.
Right then, the crowd parts on an unspoken cue. Every motion ceases as Mr. Riley strides in. People back away until it’s just Dimitri in the center, sweat dripping from his pale shaved head, panting like he just made a drive down the soccer field. Slowly, he releases Max from his grip. Max slumps to the floor and groans.
“Who would like to tell me what happened here?” Mr. Riley’s voice is pure iron, but there’s something else in his eyes. Real fights don’t break out in the halls of Ponquogue. Maybe some push and shove, a single punch until someone pulls the two parties apart. Nothing like this.
“It was–” Andreas begins, rubbing his jaw.
“Me,” Dimitri interrupts. “I’m sorry, Mr. Riley. This jerk said a racial slur to my friend, and I got carried away.” He looks down at his long blue sneakers.
An immediate flurry of whispers.
Mr. Riley gives all of us a long, hard look. Everyone around me steps back, eyes down. “Alvarez, Brown, Pfeiffer, Bondarenko, Castillo. My office, now. Everyone else, get to the auditorium. Diversity Discussion Day is starting immediately.”
Marcos looks at me as he follows the assistant principal. I stare back at him. I don’t know what to think. He bailed out Andreas again, and what’s it going to cost him? Suspension? Worse?
Under the whispers, I hear hushed comments from voices too low to be recognized. “That’s what happens when you let dirty Mexicans into this country.”
Cassie stiffens beside me. Her mouth twitches like she’s about to say something. I wait for her to let them have it, the way she unleashed her fire on Marcos, on Beth.
Instead, she stays quiet until the crowd disperses. Juliana keeps casting nervous looks in the direction of the office. “They’re going to get suspended,” she says. “There’s no way Riley’s going to believe it was only Dimitri.”
A suspension will jeopardize Marcos’s shot at the Suffolk scholarship, if not ruin it altogether. Frustration burns in my chest. He should have let Andreas handle it, yelled out to Mr. Riley himself, something. Whatever nonsense Tommy and Max said to set Andreas off isn’t worth risking his future for.
I finally find my voice. “Why did Dimitri take the fall?”
“His mom’s on the school board,” Juliana says. “He’ll get out of it. Everyone else, I don’t know.”
When I turn back to Cassie, her chapped lips form one big O. The bell rings, but none of us makes a move toward the auditorium. “You see what I mean?” she says finally.
I do. Unfortunately.
We stand in the back as the speaker talks in earnest about mutual respect and open dialogue. Throughout the whole presentation, there’s the rumble of whispers, of fingers typing text messages, of teachers muttering to each other about what happened earlier.
The thing is, I don’t believe that one assembly with good intentions will be enough to change anyone’s mind. Even Cassie, the most fearless person I know, looks at me and shakes her head.
If it happened once, what’s to stop it from happening again? And what’s Marcos going to do next time?
DURING SIXTH PERIOD, Marcos is still missing along with the rest of the crew taken down to Mr. Riley’s office. I turn into enemy territory: the math and science wing.
My father looks up from grading when I drop my bag on a free desk. His eyebrows lift in surprise that I’ve chosen to visit him during our mutual free period. This has happened a total of…never. As soon as the surprise shows, it’s replaced with the Smirk. “What college was that coach from, by the way?” he says.
“New Hampshire,” I say. “They just signed Emery.” The truth of the latter statement keeps my ears from burning.
“Wow.” He looks impressed. “Did you give them your contact information?”
I’m not doing so hot on that front. Coach Barry has been quiet, and Coach Englehardt has yet to reply to my e-mail. I’ve considered resending it, imagining it got lost in a spam folder somewhere. “Can I ask you a question?” I say instead.
He shuts the laptop. “Shoot.”
“There was a fight earlier today,” I begin.
He nods. “If I’m not mistaken, your boyfriend was involved.” His expression is unreadable, which is about as good as I can hope for.
“There are problems between guys on the soccer team.” This is hard. Since the injury and the end of discussions about my future and which programs would be the best fit for me, I’m out of practice when it comes to having real conversations with my father. I clear my throat. “One of the guys has been making racist comments to Andreas Alvarez, and it reached a breaking point today.”
“Right.” Again, unreadable.