Free The Domino Effect by Andrew Cotto Page B

Terence said, bouncing the ball to Rice, who returned it and crouched into what he must have considered a serious defensive pose. Terence snapped a pass over to me on the side of the key, and I waited as he trotted down to the baseline. I had about a foot on Santos, and held the ball over his head until Terence had pushed his back up against Rice. He called for the ball. “Give it up. Give it up.” No problem. Terence caught it with a clap, sending a smacking sound through the gym. After a head and shoulders fake, Terence wheeled around the bean pole, bounced the ball once on his way to the rim, and rolled it in like he was playing by himself.
    I laughed. “This ain’t gonna take long.”
    An hour later we were at The Can, sitting in a booth with four Early Birds, four Cokes, and a basket of fries. We’d killed those guys, mostly because of Terence’s face-job on Rice, but I’d helped, too. And let me say, for the record, that there ain’t a short, fat, potsmoking Puerto Rican on the planet that can guard me one-on-one. If the league was full of guys like Santos, I might have gone out for the team again, but as it was, I was happy just to do my part in having some fun and earning a free meal.
    “You know,” I said, slowly separating two halves of the sandwich, allowing a string of orange cheese to dangle like a telephone wire, “these things taste even better when they’re free.”
    “Damn, dog,” Rice moaned, crossing his arms and slumping into his side of the booth. “That’s cold.”
    You could tell Rice was soft and spoiled by what a sore loser he was.
    “You know what else?” I started again. “Based on that score, you should probably buy us another.”
    “What I should do,” he spat, “is buy you some new shorts and shit.”
    “Hey, these things are lucky,” I said, rubbing my short-shorts.
    Terence and Santos laughed at the back and forth between me and Rice.
    “I’m sorry you ever brought this fool out,” Rice sulked to me about Terence. “How’d you change his mind anyway?”
    “I told him I knew how to get the only good meal around,” I answered, elbowing Terence. “On the biggest fool around.”
    “That’s cold, man,” Rice whimpered. “That’s cold.”
    “Yeah, you said that already, dawg.”
    I nudged Terence again, then looked over at Santos. He had a sweet smile on his fat brown face. I shot him a wink and he nodded. Poor Rice seemed to be the only one not having a good time. “Hey,” I said to him. “What’s with the funji face? So you had to buy some Birds. But now you know that scholarship wasn’t wasted on a stiff.”
    “Yeah, you right,” Rice said, correcting his posture. “Solid!” He slapped Terence five across the table.
    We polished off the food while Terence checked out the hokey decorations and the wooden tabletops left empty by those (somehow) not interested in wrecking their appetite for dinner. The upstairs game room had a few students watching the giant screen TV in their dress clothes. A young couple played Foosball. Ouch.
    On the way out, I got stuck holding the door for a group of girls I didn’t know, except for Brenda Divine, who was bringing up the rear. She had on this swinging skirt that kind of danced above her knees as she walked. Her sunshiny hair rested on the shoulders of a button-up sweater. My normal blast of adrenalin upon seeing her was cranked even more by the flowers I could smell when she stopped in front of me.
    I’d been trying to make eye contact with Brenda for weeks, after I figured the smoke had cleared from our little exchange. She hadn’t looked my way, not even once, and I’d all but given up on Brenda Divine… or at least I’d begun the process of trying to get started on thinking about giving up on Brenda Divine. But now she stood in The Can, right in front of my face, reaching out with the same silence and sad eyes she’d had that lousy day in the classroom. Even in my state of constant delusion, I sensed she