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 supremely 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!
I caught sight of Mrs. Tidmarsh—not such a bad lawyer after all—standing a few yards away with Jake’s dad and Dipsy.
“That’s awesome,” I breathed shakily. “Congratulations, man! I was freaking out!”
“Thanks for coming, baby,” he said sincerely. He paused. “Just you and Dipsy, huh? You didn’t hear from anybody else, right? You know—Didi?”
I didn’t even try to spare him. If anyone needed a dose of truth, straight up, it was Jake. “I begged her to come. She wouldn’t.”
He looked so devastated that I quickly added, “This is great news. You did it, Jake. You dodged the bullet.”
He hesitated. “Not exactly—” His normally unflappable features seemed to collapse, like the face of a baby about to wail.
“What happened?”
“I have to leave.” He was better, steadier, once it was out, as if, before, he had doubted his ability to say the words. “It was part of the deal. They don’t prosecute, and I don’t stay. I’ve got to go live with my mother.”
I was stricken. It wasn’t jail, but it was exile. Worse, it was Todd Buckley, winning again. But even as I felt hot anger suffusing my cheeks, I realized that this made a lot of sense. Jake couldn’t exactly show up at school on Monday morning as if nothing had ever happened. He was done at Fitz.
I swallowed hard. “It’s probably smart for you to get out of town for a while.”
“Not for a while,” he corrected. “For good. At least until I turn twenty-one, which is the same thing. By then, Didi …” His voice trailed off, the pain almost tangible.
I just stared at him, because there was nothing to say. It was a good thing he was going to Texas. Maybe from a distance, he’d be able to see that Didi wasn’t worth his mindless devotion.
“When do you leave?” I asked finally.
“Tonight.” From his pocket he produced a three-by-five index card and handed it to me. It had an address and telephone number in Houston.
“We’ll keep in touch,” I assured him. “We’ll find a way.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, right. Yeah, copy the number down for yourself before you give it to Didi.”
He must have realized how insulting that sounded, because he suddenly became flustered. “You’ve been great, baby—the best! I—” He enfolded me in an awkward bear hug. But it wasn’t an embrace of friendship. It was more like the desperate grasp of a drowning man.
I didn’t know what to say. “They’re crappy people,” I mumbled in his ear. “You’re worth more than the lot of them put together.”
Over his shoulder, I spotted a slender brunette in a trench coat hurrying down the marble steps. She caught my eye for a split second, and I recognized Jennifer. I hadn’t seen her in the courtroom. Then again, I hadn’t been in there very long before they kicked me out.
She took a tentative step in my direction. I turned away. I wasn’t in the mood for Jennifer just then, and possibly ever.
Still, I was strangely glad she’d come. Jen the Merciless had a shred of conscience. Good for her.
She looked the other way as she rushed past us.
“Jake.” Mr. Garrett’s voice was gentle but firm. “You’ve got a lot of packing to do.”
Jake stuck out his hand. “You’ve been a real friend, baby. I’ll miss you.”
We shook. “Take care, Jake.”
I watched him say good-bye to Dipsy. Then he, his father, and his lawyer got into the Beamer, which was parked at the curb.
And Jake Garrett was whisked out of my life.
That night I saw my mother carrying a FOR SALE sign from the garage. I didn’t have to ask her where it was going.