THE GARRETT HOUSE didn’t burn down that night. According to the papers, when the fire had worked through all the gas, there was too much water around for the flames to spread to anything else. Jake’s wading pools had saved the day. It’s a good thing we don’t drink warm beer in this country.
In the end, the cops turned a blind eye to several hundred cases of disturbing the peace and underage drinking. They made only one arrest. Jake was led away in handcuffs. The charge: Assault with a dangerous instrument, with intent to cause serious physical injury.
I couldn’t escape the feeling that, if I’d said something a little more quickly, I could have created enough doubt for them to leave him alone. On the other hand, at least the county lockup gave him a place to sleep that wasn’t full of smoke.
The Garrett house was sealed off with police-line tape. It was the one thing that brought a trace of a smile to my lips in the terrible days that followed—the thought that Mrs. Appleford, self-appointed guardian of the neighborhood property values, now lived next door to a crime scene.
I could only imagine the phone call that had taken place between Jake in custody and Mr. Garrett in his hotel in Pocatello, Idaho. At that point, it would have been too late to get on a plane. So the father, I’m sure, passed a night not much more comfortable than the one endured by his son.
Mr. Garrett finally hit town at about the same time as Nelson Jaworski’s eyes fluttered open at Mercy Hospital. The news was not great. Nelson had sustained a depression skull fracture. He would recover, but there might be permanent side effects. For one thing, he had no memory of the entire evening. This meant even he couldn’t tell who had hit him or, more to the point, who hadn’t.
But short-term memory loss, the doctors said, could be a sign of brain damage. Personally, I’d always felt that Nelson was pretty much brain-damaged long before he got hit. If that sounds callous, then tough. I would have had a lot more sympathy for Nelson if my last sight of him hadn’t been with his hands around Jake’s neck, trying to squeeze the life out of the guy.
I was never a fan of Didi’s nonphysical attributes, but the fact was she had probably saved Jake’s life—that was the most frustrating part. There was no crime here, unless you count the one that Nelson had been trying to commit. All Didi would have had to do was own up, explain the circumstances, and the whole thing would have been over. But at this point, coming forward would have seemed too convenient, inviting questions such as: Why the silence up till now? Had it taken her this long to cook up an excuse to get her friend off the hook? The stupid girl had converted a win-win into a lose-lose. And the big loser was going to be Jake, not her.
Air fresheners sat on every available surface in the Garrett house, but the smell of smoke was plainly evident. It mingled sickeningly with the heavy floral scent.
Jake was in deep trouble. He’d even been kicked out of school, pending his court hearing, since his crime involved an attack on a student. I didn’t know what the future held for him, but I couldn’t see it being anything good.
And what were his first words to me?
“Thanks for coming, baby. What do you hear from Didi? How’s she holding up under all this?”
“To be honest, Jake, I haven’t talked to her. She’s got Todd running interference.”
He nodded slowly. “I keep calling, but her folks won’t put her on. I guess suspicion would fall on her if she talked to me.”
I was burning. “Suspicion should fall on her! She did it! It’s probably the only thing she did in her life that was for somebody else, but she did it!”
He just sighed. “Poor Didi.”
“Poor Didi?” I repeated. “You’d better start thinking about poor Jake! That girl’s going to let you take the rap for this! Think about it—what kind of person are you protecting? You’ve got to tell the truth and save yourself!”
“I couldn’t do that to her.”
“Why not?” I ranted. “She has no problem doing it to you!”
He acted as if he hadn’t heard. “I just wish there was some way I could make sure she’s all right.”
“She’s fine!” I exploded. “She’s with Todd! She was always with Todd, and she’s always going to be with Todd! And if she breaks up with Todd, she’s going to find somebody exactly like Todd and be with him! She may have a fling every now and then, but the Didis of this world stay with their own kind!”
I’d never seen him look so wounded. The guy was practically under house arrest, a few days away from being charged with a felony, but that barely even registered in his thick skull. All that mattered was Didi.
I wouldn’t leave. I was determined to stay until I could convince Jake to come clean. Even when he was called to the phone to talk with his lawyer, I stayed in his room, pacing like a caged tiger, wracking my brain for some new strategy that would make him see reason.
The closet door was partially open, and a large carton, loaded with stuff, sat on the floor. Curious, I peered inside. Science fair trophies and prize ribbons were piled on top of each other. A certificate signed by the mayor proclaimed Jacob Garrett to be the “2001 Mathlete of the Year.” There were books about chess and Dungeons and Dragons, and pennants from Quiz Bowl and Odyssey of the Mind.
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.