Chapter Six
Chapter
Six
There’s no better alarm clock than a nightmare that you’ve slept through one, which meant Danny had been staring at his for hours before it finally squawked to life.
In the shower, he used a cupcake-sized glob of his mom’s Vidal Sassoon, which smelled like honey and almonds, or at least what a robot thought honey and almonds smelled like.
He dried off and crept through the darkness, grabbing a pair of jeans from the dresser instead of the hamper.
“White or blue?” he said to himself, holding up two Sunday church polos.
The single bulb in the ceiling lamp flickered twice.
“Blue it is. Thanks, Uncle Richie.”
Just as Danny was about to push through the front door, he heard the soft tread of slippered feet behind him.
“Too big to say goodbye?”
His mother leaned against the doorway of her bedroom.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Danny said, embarrassed by how much he’d wanted to wake her.
“I’ve been up since five,” she said sleepily.
“Ma, go back to sleep. I’ll be fine.”
“It’s not every day a mother watches her son go off to war.”
“It’s the Upper West Side, Ma, not Yugoslavia.”
Danny’s mother folded her arms, raising her eyebrow with a smile as if to say, Look at us—making jokes, pretending this is normal.
“You got your lunch money?”
“Yes,” Danny said. “And the twenty you gave me in case I get held up at knifepoint and need to make a ransom payment.”
“You watch your smart mouth.” She pointed a pink nail at him. “Just promise me you’ll be safe.”
“I promise.”
Danny waited at the bus stop, stepping into the role of a new character, a character who was important, a character who had business in the big city, a character who commuted. Once on board the S44, he looked around at the other passengers, wondering if they’d clocked his big transformation.
“That nice young man must be heading to Manhattan. You can tell just by his confident disposition and clean shirt.”
Danny didn’t dawdle through the ferry terminal like some day-tripper, or meander like a tourist. He charged.
Everyone in Manhattan had a job and everyone in Manhattan was in a hurry.
Even if they were early. Even if there were plenty of empty seats and the ferry wasn’t leaving for another ten minutes.
Danny caught a look at himself in the reflection of the ship window and was proud of what he saw.
He looked like someone who had done this a lot, someone for whom this was normal and maybe even a little boring, someone who was not even a tiny bit awed by the sun rising over the Brooklyn Bridge.
On the subway, Danny didn’t stoop his shoulders.
He didn’t try to make himself as tiny as possible, or dodge the trench coat arms and Day-Glo wristwatches grabbing for subway poles.
He didn’t assume that every bum was a murderer in between stabbings.
And as the train jerked to a stop at Sixty-Sixth Street, he stepped confidently onto the platform, didn’t hop like a sixteen-year-old kid scared that the closing doors would seize his shoelaces and drag him screaming to Seventy-Second Street.
Danny marched up the subway stairs, confidently turning left on West Sixty-Fifth, his ears perking up at the sound of a familiar voice.
“Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger.”
Danny didn’t need to see to know whose lilting baritone this belonged to. No-Eyes crooned the familiar song, rattling a change-filled coffee cup in his calloused hand.
“Spare some change, young man?”
Danny thought of the dollar he’d brought along for lunch.
“Sorry, not today, man,” Danny mumbled, his legs quickening to a double-time pace.
We both gotta eat.
Father Andrews once told Danny’s science class that if you ever want to feel small, just look through a telescope.
But Danny had never felt smaller than standing in the lobby of the Fiorello H.
LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.
The ceilings rose higher than the dome at St. Clare’s, and the red marble tile stretched wider and slicker than the South Shore winter skate pavilion.
Danny remembered back to his first day of ninth grade, foolishly thinking that St. Pete’s was the biggest school in the world.
Before he’d seen a school with escalators.
More dizzying than the size was the sheer noise.
Three thousand voices howling and cheering and shouting hellos and waving and yelling like the Mets had won the pennant.
At St. Pete’s you’d get detention for talking, even whispering, in the halls.
You could probably pull a fire alarm here and no one would even notice.
Danny stood—well, slouched—in the center of it all. Backpacks and bomber jackets and ripped jeans and plaid flannels and not a polo in sight, all of them circling him like a whirlpool—white kids and black kids and brown kids and kids from who knew where.
And girls.
It always felt wrong to see a girl at St. Pete’s, like watching old people kissing or standing behind one of the nuns at the ShopRite checkout.
And now Danny was surrounded by more girls than he could count.
And none of them were wearing boxy dresses, cardigans, or habits.
There were bare shoulders and bare knees and ponytails and eye shadow and silver hoop earrings as big as Frisbees.
All of them talking, all of them knowing exactly where to go.
Danny gripped his schedule like it was a broken compass.
The numbers scribbled next to his classes might as well have been written in Chinese—sixes and eights. Those couldn’t be floors. Could they?
Danny’s first period was in a classroom crammed tight with desks and haphazardly piled with bodies, all laughing and snapping gum and slinging arms across shoulders and pointing toes and stretching legs across chairs, and singing, actually singing unfamiliar phrases in harmony.
Danny stood like a rusty Tin Man in the doorway, clutching his crumpled class schedule, checking the numbers on the page against the numbers above the door.
He checked a thousand times and would have kept checking forever if it hadn’t been for that voice—that voice that could slice through noise like a record player scratch.
“No. Freaking. Way,” the voice said.
Danny looked up.
“Tough guy?!” Christian belted out.
Up until that moment, Danny still wasn’t sure he hadn’t made Christian Geronimo up in his head.
Wasn’t sure if their awkward half afternoon of french fries and near-fisticuffs had even happened.
But hearing that familiar (still somewhat grating) voice felt like stepping out of the late-summer heat into movie theater air-conditioning.
All at once, the impossible jigsaw of Christian seemed to come together.
To the outside world, Christian was ketchup on a sundae, a swan in the East River, but in here, he almost made sense.
“I swear to gawd, I thought I’d made you up in my head!” Christian practically shouted as Danny crossed the threshold, the entire room’s eyes following the dweeb in the polo shirt. “You disappeared so quick, I thought I’d fully lost. My. Damn. Mind.” He emphasized each word with a clap.
“Oh, I’m real,” Danny said, affecting his best approximation of a knowing smirk and taking an empty seat behind Christian.
“Well, shit,” Christian said, wrinkling his nose and narrowing his eyes, as if they had an ages-old friendship or rivalry or something. “Welcome to the big house, tough guy. Glad you decided to show up.”
Danny had a million questions. What to expect? Did they have any other classes together? Which kids to steer clear of and which kids were cool? And did anyone try to sell him drugs that day in Central Park?
A woman with a battered shoulder bag and a face with more wrinkles than a pastrami sandwich marched through the door. As rowdy as the classroom had been just a few seconds before, the sight of this woman made every kid snap their mouth shut and swallow their gum.
Well, almost everyone.
“Good morning, young adults,” the woman said, lifting her bifocals off her nose and tucking them into hair the shape and texture of a giant ball of yarn.
“Good morning, Missus P!” Christian sang out.
“Oh Christ, not you,” the woman stage-whispered, which elicited a gurgle of laughter from the room. “Didn’t you graduate?”
“No, ma’am,” Christian exclaimed. “You had me for English just two years ago.”
“I hope you’ve grown an Off switch since then,” she said, dumping her bag on her desk to another chorus of giggles.
Christian’s chipped-tooth smile faded slightly, and he sank down in his desk as the woman began introductions.
“Most of you know me. I’m Ms. Papastathopoulos, but you can call me Ms. P because we don’t have all day.
It’s first period, which means I’m your homeroom teacher for the year.
” She sounded surprisingly tired for the first day of class.
“If you couldn’t figure that out, the New York public school system has failed us both.
All right, let’s get the boring stuff out of the way,” Ms. P said, plopping down in an aging swivel chair that squealed from exertion and pulling out a handful of Xeroxed pages from her shoulder bag.
“Here are your seat and locker assignments. Take one and pass it down. Oh, and let’s welcome our new students,” Ms. P said, clearly just remembering that this was a thing she was expected to a) remember and b) do.
“Who’s new this year?” she said, licking her finger before turning to a page in her green leather notebook. “Only one,” she said, frowning. “Who’s Daniel Victorio?”
Everyone in the room turned toward Danny.
“That’s me,” Danny said, raising his hand meekly. “But you can call me Danny.”
“Well, come on with it,” Ms. P said impatiently, like Danny was holding up the line at the ice cream truck, trying to pay with pennies.
“…Come on with what?” Danny gulped, which sparked a chorus of giggles.