No Sad Songs

by Frank Morelli

  On Friday morning, Carter and I raced to the cafeteria with John biting at our ankles like a neglected terrier. There was already a crowd of real ballplayers surrounding the list—eighth graders with stocky shoulders and peach-fuzz mustaches and five to six inches on either of us. They congratulated each other in front of the bulletin board—the final cut list, where Carter and I would probably find a lot of white space in the spots where our names could have been if we didn’t suck.

  We waited for the smoke to clear and then slowly, cautiously—like terrified wolf pups leaving the den for the first time—we boxed out positions in front of the list. Carter reached one of his dark hands up and ran his finger from the top of it to the bottom. Then again. Then once more. His shoulders dropped. His eyelids lowered. Then he spun away and trudged down the hallway. He didn’t wait for John or me. I guess he wanted to give us a few minutes to adjust, because the very last line of the final roster—way down at the bottom where the edges were frayed and repaired by bubbled-up squares of Scotch tape—was the following entry: LoScuda, G. – 2B.

  There was barely a millimeter of space beneath it—not nearly enough to fit: Willis, C. – 2B. And so, without me even knowing it, the end of my friendship with Carter Willis had begun.

  It was kind of subtle at first. The sandlot games and the horsing around after school took a back seat to my baseball practices and my late evening homework sessions. John’s statistical reports were born out of the team’s sanctioned practices and made no comparisons between the playing styles of Carter and me. Instead, they focused on how far I alone lagged behind the nine regular starters. The phone calls ended. So did our travels together between class periods. We didn’t even meet up on weekends to enjoy marathons of RBI Baseball or Mike Tyson’s Punch Out on John’s Nintendo game system.

  About the only time I’d see Carter once the season began was in the locker room where we changed into our gym uniforms for PE. The locker room—long a true bastion of bullies everywhere—was a dungeon where geeks and nerds received cruel and unusual punishment that harkened back to the Dark Ages. Being the last person cut from a horrendous team (we finished 5-15 that year) somehow placed Carter squarely into both categories. If his life after baseball were illustrated in a Venn diagram with one circle representing “NERD” and the other “GEEK,” poor Carter would find himself directly in the middle of that annoying inner circle where most things never fit. And that couldn’t have been more true for Carter, who didn’t belong anywhere once he deemed himself unfit for friendship with anyone wearing pinstripes—even if one of those guys had been his friend since the days they stored clay in the same cubby hole.

  One particular day in the PE locker room, about midway through the baseball season, Carter approached me. And I was pretty darn happy because I kind of missed the guy.

  “How’s the batting average?” he asked as he punched the combination into his lock.

  “Is it possible to bat .001?”

  “Not unless you had a thousand at-bats,” he replied and he actually had a smile on his face for once.

  “Did John figure that out for you?”

  But he never got to answer, because a whole gang of my teammates—the real players—filed into our row of lockers with their voices cranked up to full volume. As they entered, a few of them slapped me across the back or shoulders in a playful, teammatey sort of way. None of them acknowledged Carter … except for our shortstop, a tall, lanky beast with a shock of bright blond hair named Clint McWilliams. Kid was good at two things: baseball and being a douchebag to anyone not wearing the uniform.

  “What’s up, LoScuda?” he said.

  It kind of startled me, to tell you the truth, because McWilliams was one of those goons who rarely noticed the little guys. I mean, we were already eight, nine games into the season and this was the first time he’d thrown a single word my way.

  “Hey,” I said trying to sound all casual and unfazed. Carter turned around and pretended to root around in his locker.

  “Good play yesterday at practice,” he said, and suddenly I found it a lot harder to hide my excitement. I mean, the captain of the team had taken notice. This was a big step. Sure, I’d made a sweet, diving grab on a line in the hole between first and second—probably the best damn grab of my life—but I was a third-string nobody and, worse than that, a seventh grade nobody. But now it was starting to look like Gabe “Freaking” LoScuda was about to rise to the top like so much cream.

  “Thanks,” I said all nonchalantly, still doing my best to maintain composure.

  “Keep making plays like that and old Sparky will be picking splinters by season’s end.”

  Old Sparky was our starter at second, Stevie Sparkleson. Pretty obvious—and very fortunate for him—why his nickname was what it was.

  “Of course,” McWilliams continued, “you keep hanging around with losers and darkies.” He paused to nod in Carter’s direction, and he made a big show of it, winking with both of his eyes in tandem and holding out the pause long enough to attract a few chuckles from my teammates. “You’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with, LoScuda. And Nelson Mandela over here ain’t doing you any favors.”

  I stared at McWilliams and his stupid, pie-eating grin for a second. Then I stole a glance at Carter, whose lips were quivering a little. He looked like he wanted to cry but he didn’t want to give McWilliams the satisfaction. He also looked scared, like he wanted to stand his ground but had to use every last bit of strength to will himself to the spot. I could tell he wanted to run.

  It was obvious what I needed to do. And I wish I can say that I grabbed McWilliams by his collar and jacked him up against the bay of lockers, and that I punched and punched and punched until I could feel the blood streaming against my knuckles. But I can’t say that. Because, as I stood there between my lifelong friend—who’d just been wronged and dejected and mentally abused—and a collection of my teammates—a crew to which I desperately sought acceptance—the clear and obvious choice of how to proceed somehow wasn’t so clear and obvious.

  “You still hang around with this turd?” McWilliams finally asked with a sneer on his face that told me I better choose carefully.

  And then the words—words that I continue to regret to this very day—slipped out past my tongue before my brain could reel them back in.

  “Me?” I said. “You think … you think …”

  For passion tempts and troubles me

  A wayward will misleads.

  “… you think I’d be seen with this scrub?”

  And selfishness its shadow casts

  On all my words and deeds.

  I’d said it. And I’d said it like I meant it. Like I was mountains and clouds above my friend who’d trained by my side for the better part of ten years; who gave me (I now know) a position on the team simply by being born with a different color of skin. And worst of all, I said it as if being a third-string second baseman on a last place middle school team gave me that right.

  They were the last words that ever existed between Carter and I.

  I’m ashamed they’d been “cast behind the shadow of my selfishness.”

  What a crummy kingdom I had built.

  19

  TATER TOTS AND KIDNEY SHOTS

  I take a bite of my cafeteria pizza with my free hand and squeeze Marlie’s hand under the round table. She squeezes back. It startles me for a second. Not because I don’t expect her to respond, but because there’d been a point in my life when I never thought I’d gather the courage to talk to the girl. Now, here I am her, uh, boyfriend—though I wouldn’t dare say that word in front of her. Don’t want her to think I’m all into defining stuff like that.

  Of course, I’m a badass now. Signed and certified. I’m the kid who spent half his childhood locked away at Alcatraz and then, against all odds, sprang the joint. I sacheted my way past the gunfire of prison guards on fifty-foot garrets, and swam the shark-infested waters of San Francisco Bay to safety. Probably p
addled right past Al Capone taking a dip in the frigid drink; maybe even used his fat gut as a freaking flotation device to guide me to shore.

  At least, that’s what you’d think if you believed any of the rumors circulating through the halls of Schuylkill High. And I tend to believe them—because the formula seemed to be: convert to badass-ism, get with Marlie. It wasn’t brain surgery.

  Without John or Sofia acting as freaking shackles to drag me back into the dungeons of my high school invisibility, I’d spent nine lunch periods eating crappy food, listening to crappy conversation from the likes of Mandy-So-and-So and her troop of bleach-blond idiots, and enduring some craptacular looks from the guys at Schuylkill who’d rather be sitting in my chair—which was basically all of them. It was glorious.

  I take another bite of the French bread frozen junk. I don’t know why they serve this crap like twenty times a month. Perdomo would never forgive me if he found out I was cheating on him with such a cheap, floozy piece of pizza, but only dweebs pack their lunch. Marlie made a point to tell me that little nugget of wisdom on our very first lunch “date” early last week. Even though the pizza tastes like dishwater and oregano, I’m still thankful for it because it fills my mouth and excuses me from the predictable conversations of the day.

  “Did you hear about Susan Cafferty?” Mandy asks Marlie at warp speed.

  “Oh, I couldn’t care less about that drama queen,” Marlie says with a trademark eye roll. I swear she rolls those baby blues more than she freaking blinks. But whatever. I’m not complaining because she’s got my hand locked in the softest and smoothest vice grip in human history.

  “What about her?” she says after taking a tiny mouse sip of chocolate milk.

  “She’s all ‘Gabe LoScuda this’ and ‘Gabe LoScuda that.’ I think she has eyes for your man, Marlie.”

  I feel my face go all flush when Mandy calls me “Marlie’s Man.” Am I her man or am I just some goober sitting next to her who’s trying his hardest not to spit little pieces of mozzarella on her when he talks? I really don’t know the answer to that because I’m kind of drawing the map as I explore.

  Marlie makes a little coughing noise in the back of her throat and says, “Pleeeease, Mandy. You think I’d ever lose aneeeeething to Sue Cafferty? I mean, aneeeeeeeeething?” Marlie loves to drag out those long ‘e’ sounds when she wants to be really descriptive in her arguments. It’s like the girl never heard of adjectives. “I mean, did you seeeee what she was wearing yesterday?”

  “Those shoes?” Mandy asks, as if Sue’s shoes had been molded from raw sewage. “Ugh.”

  “I know,” Marlie says, and I can feel the conversation turning a corner like a race car leaving the pit and speeding out into an open lane at two hundred miles per hour—and, I have to say, it’s entirely possible that race car has no chance of catching up with the rapidity of these girls when they spoke. I knew my quasi-involvement in this particular race was about to take a back seat. For real. “Oh my Gawd,” she says, “and-those-tights-she-wears-under-that-plaid-skirt-OHMYGAWD-I-can’t-believe-aneeeeone-would-wear-blah-blah-blah—”

  “I know! I-can’t-stand-how-she-thinks-she-can-blah-blah-blah—”

  “And-she-thinks-she-can-take-my-man-and-blah-blah-blah—”

  “Don’t-worry-there’s-no-way-blah-blah-blah—”

  That’s about the point where the conversation, the actual words, fall to the background like the incessant buzzing of engines at Talledega Motor Speedway, or if your head happened to be trapped inside a beehive like Yogi freaking bear.

  I scan the cafeteria as Marlie and Mandy continue their clucking, and I make eye contact with John. He has his dorky lunch bag in hand and he smooths out a dollar bill for use in the soda machine beside the round table—the Land of Babes, as some of my male classmates liked to call it. Kind of lame, I know, which is why I never repeat it in front of Marlie or her friends.

  John sees me, it’s clear. How the hell could he not? I mean, I fit in at this table like a toddler at a saloon in the Old West. But he avoids acknowledging me and instead pretends to gaze at a spot well beyond me, presumably over at the janitor’s closet at the back end of the cafeteria. Whatever. Kid’s a freaking traitor anyway. If not for him and that other do-gooder, Sofia—man, and I really thought that girl was a rebel—Gramps would still be at home instead of locked away in some facility across town where they only allow visitors on weekends and holidays.

  John passes the table at a near cantor and I tune my ears back into Marlie and Mandy’s high-speed word race. I think they’re approaching lap five hundred and I’m half-expecting Mandy to whip a giant, checkered flag out of her purse and start waving it across the cafeteria.

  “No, I saw him at Miller’s party last week,” Marlie is saying. “He looked pretty drunk.”

  “He was,” Mandy says. “Tried to kiss me out on the driveway.”

  “No way! Oh … my … Gawd!”

  “I know. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but he smelled like a brewery and kept slobbering all over me.”

  I see John swivel his head over his shoulder. His eyebrows slant downward like darts.

  “What a pig.”

  “I know, right? Like I’d ever be seen kissing some drunken idiot on a random driveway.”

  I take another bite of the rock hard French bread and keep my eyes trained on John. He slides the wrinkled currency in the bill receptacle and it promptly spits it back out. He grabs it, smooths the bill, and then slides it back in the receptacle again. The machine hurls the bill out again and John snatches it with hatred in his eyes. He tries to smooth it out by stretching it around the square corner of the machine. Marlie and Mandy keep ranting about slobbery kisses and all sorts of assorted crap—the kind of conversation to which I could never hope (or even desire) to contribute.

  “Oh my Gawd, I hate that,” Marlie says about something—don’t ask me what.

  “Me too,” Mandy says. “It’s the worst.”

  And then John coils up like a cobra and, man, he looks pissed—like the soda machine and Mandy-So-and-So had taken his entire family hostage and he was the Rambo-like force destined to set them free.

  “No it’s not,” John says out of the blue, “YOU are the worst!”

  I’m stunned. I didn’t think the kid could hear us through the insane rufflings of his dollar bill, and here he is more involved in Marlie’s conversation than me.

  “Do you honestly think you’re so far above everyone here that you have the right to complain about every little thing they do?”

  His eyes are wide with anger when he says it and there are little beads of sweat forming on his upper lip.

  “And you—” He points a shaky finger at Marlie. “Can you even hear yourself? I mean, I’ve met parrots with more original things to say!”

  Marlie’s face turns about a million shades of red and pink, and she may have actually looked like a parrot (a very good-looking one) if someone flicked a few stripes of green or yellow paint on her at that precise moment.

  But John doesn’t relent. “Are you a parrot, Marlie? Is that what you are?” The wrinkled dollar bill extends from his hand like one of those pointer sticks teachers use to, well, point at stuff. Each time he extends it, I see Marlie shudder and rock back in her chair a little. She’s speechless, probably because no one has ever had the guts to talk to her this way. She keeps looking to me with these swirling, little eyes that say, “HELP!” But John doesn’t notice. He keeps firing shots.

  “That’s the problem with girls like you! Everything’s on the outside. How about, I don’t know, you choose one day—just one freaking day—where you don’t act like an immature, judgment-dispensing robot? Just one day, Marlie. Then at least—”

  “Hey! Leave her alone,” I say, and it sounds like the words come trumpeting out of some hollow speaker behind me instead of through my own lips.

  John stops his speech mid rant and the entire cafeteria falls into a hush over the course of a second.

 
“What?” John exclaims. And he sounds like he means business. Like he’s a tough guy or something instead of being this frail, Asian kid who’s allergic to athletics and grass and a million other things.

  “You heard me. I said leave her the hell alone, you chump!”

  John’s eyes flash. I can tell he can’t believe his best friend—his ex-best friend—would call him out like this in front of the whole school. He’s angry and hurt and insulted all at once.

  “What did you say to me?”

  I’m up out of my chair before I’m aware of what I’m doing, and I walk slowly, casually—but also menacingly—over toward him. My nose is about two inches away from his and I stare at him with eyes like freaking Clint Eastwood’s.

  “I said you’re a freakin’ chump, Chen. Are you deaf or something?”

  Then I push him—not enough to move him off his spot, but enough to let him know, “Hey, I’m right here, pal.”

  John returns the favor with a slightly harder push that forces me to take one tiny step back. But then I’m right back in his face and I realize I have a handful of John’s shirt balled up in each of my extracted claws. He tries to pull some kind of crazy self-defense move on me—probably some crap he saw in a safety pamphlet for the elderly—where he slides his forearms inside mine and attempts to snap them free. It doesn’t come close to working, so he grabs my arms in desperation and, suddenly, we’re hanging all over each other like a couple of dog-tired heavyweights in an undercard prize fight. It’s kind of awkward, to tell you the truth. If either John or I were even a tad bit more graceful, everyone in the cafeteria might think we’re engaged in some bizarre form of the waltz.

  We struggle for a few seconds before I get super pissed and go into total badass mode. Like blind fury or something. I twist and push and pull and gouge like a deranged bull in a red room. I’m not sure how it happens, but before I know it we’re on the floor and I’m kneeling over John looking at his stupid, inconsiderate, insulting face. I want one good shot. Just one. For Gramps and for Marlie, but most of all for me.