by Paul Griffin
“He’s traveling.”
“What’s your mother’s-”
“She’s really traveling, if you recall.”
Marks squinted and checked my file. She was midway into realizing my mother was dead when the cop said, “Okay, so I just heard from Kerns’s mother. They’re at the ER, waiting to see what they say about the hand. The family elects not to press charges at this time. You’re still good, Nazzaro? You don’t want to file an assault complaint?”
“No.”
“You sure you don’t need medical attention, Jay?” Mrs. Marks said.
My hand was stiff from cracking Kerns’s skull, but I’d made my fist really tight, so I knew I didn’t break anything. The kicks to my back didn’t break any ribs, I was positive. I’d broken one before, when I fell off my skateboard a few years before, and that felt like somebody had a blowtorch to my gut. But here in Marks’s office, I was more than fine, still throbbing with adrenaline. “Actually, Mrs. Marks, I feel great.”
“That’s terrific, Jay. Enjoy your suspension.”
My locker had been cleaned up, the outside at least. I didn’t have much in there anyway, textbooks I had PDFs of, a sweatshirt, half a box of Clif Bars. I tossed it all and went into the bathroom to wash my hands. The door banged open. By the time I turned, Dave Bendix was up in my face. He was furious, flexed in his wrestling singlet, that dark glint in his eyes. “I’m gonna kill him, Jay. Please, you have to believe me, I didn’t put him up to that. I heard they were going to hit you, but I didn’t know when or where. I was down in Coach’s office, telling him about the rumor, when they got you.”
“Not your fault,” I said.
“Feels like it is. Are you okay? Did they-”
“I’m fine. Seriously.”
“Look, I know about you and Nicole.”
“Dave, nothing happened, I swear.”
“Jay, calm down, okay? Even if something did happen-”
“It didn’t. Whatever Rick said is a lie, flat out.”
“You think I listen to him? Nic told me. She thinks you’re awesome. Look, I know you guys are just friends, okay? Relax. I’m happy you’re keeping an eye on her while she and I are. . whatever we are, taking a break, I guess. You’re like the one dude I can actually trust.” He leaned back against the sink, rubbing his eyes. He looked pretty wrecked. “This whole thing is so messed up. How is it that one minute everything is perfect, and the next it’s just not. Like, flat gone. I can’t sleep, you know? Trying to figure out who would do this to her. Why? You know?”
We locked bagged eyes for a second. I didn’t have any answers for him. His eyes ticked to the wall clock. “I gotta get back to practice. This scout dude from Harvard came down from Cambridge, unannounced, to watch me work out. My father’s out there too. I feel like I’m gonna crack, man. If I don’t get in there, my life is over.”
“You’re gonna get in.”
“Jay, I’m not kidding. It has to be Harvard. My father’ll disown me otherwise. He’s told me I’m on my own if I don’t get in. At the same time, it’s like he wants me to fail, the way he cranks up the pressure. He knew the Harvard dude was coming, and he didn’t even tell me. He-” Dave Bendix burst into tears, just for the length of a breath. “Shit.” He took a second to get himself together. He sighed and forced a smile. “I hear you met Emma. Doesn’t she just kill you?” He gently clapped my shoulder. “You coming back? To the team, I mean. We need you. I hear you rocked Rick pretty good.”
“Nah, I think I’m done.”
“I have your back either way. I already put the word out that anybody who steps to you is stepping to me, but if the guys start screwing with you, let me know, all right? Just like the old days. You’re a good dude, and I won’t stand for seeing you get hurt.”
“I don’t get it, Dave. Her face gets wrecked, and you dump her?”
“What? Jay, she broke up with me.”
When I got outside, Nicole was talking with Mr. Sager as he lined a window with weather stripping. He largely ignored her until she tried to give him a brick-size box wrapped in brown paper. He held up his hand and said, “I can’t.” I tried to thank him for cleaning up my locker, but he cut me off. “She did it. I tried to make her stop, but she insisted.” He gathered his tools and left.
I was beginning to feel sore from my fight with Kerns as I crouched to get into the shotgun seat of Nicole’s Saab. “How was your Schmidt?” I said.
“Jay, thank you,” she said.
“For?”
“Hello, you defended my honor. You did. And if you ever do it again, I’ll have to crush you. Are you crazy?”
I eyed the box she tried to give to Mr. Sager. “This mysterious box thing: It’s got to stop.”
“Perugina.”
“That’s like chocolate, right?”
“It is chocolate.” She opened the box.
“Hershey’s is chocolate. Perugina is something you save in a drawer because it’s too expensive to eat, and then you re-gift it at Christmas.”
“I’m more of a Snickers girl myself.” She snickered as she peeled me a Baci. “You hungry?” she said.
“Pretty much always. That was funny, the Snickers thing.”
“The boy likes my lame jokes. Nice. Best pizza place you know of?”
“Ray-Ray and Eddie’s. They only do takeout, though. It’s just a window.”
“Pick someplace cool to eat it.”
I’d already let my guard down when I futzed with her phone and then again when I hacked in front of her, tracing that text during the fire alarm back to Chrissie. I was scared, letting Nicole Castro in on my secrets, but at the same time the vulnerability felt good, and I wanted to let her in a little more. “You want to meet my mom?”
She tilted her head to look at me over her sunglasses. “Definitely.”
“The whole going AWOL thing: Isn’t your mom going to flip out?”
“She says as long as I’m with you, she’s not so worried.”
“But not worry-free,” I said.
“She’ll never be worry-free.” She started the car. “I’m not even sure I want her to be. Selfish as it is to say that.” She rolled down the windows. The wind blew back her hair. When she turned to talk to me, I could see the bandage where the sunglasses didn’t cover it. It spread from the bottom of her jaw up to her temple, from her eye to over her ear.
I put a slice in front of my mother’s headstone.
“Jay,” Nicole said.
“I do it all the time,” I said. “Pizza was her favorite, except she liked everything on it.”
“But the raccoons or whatever’ll eat it.”
“Exactly. What? They have to eat too. This one time, we were stuck at the train station.”
“You and the raccoons?” she said.
“Mom and me. We’d gone to the Ziegfeld to see a movie on the huge screen, I forget which flick.”
“Doesn’t matter. Any movie rocks on that screen. Love that place.”
“Yeah, and when we got back to Jersey, the snow was falling hard, and we couldn’t get a cab. My father was away for a lecture or whatever. The train platform was cold, crazy wind, you know? I’m shivering, and Mom says, ‘I got it,’ like eureka, right? She grabs my hand and we skip across the street to Ray-Ray and Eddie’s, and she orders a pie for delivery to our house, and we caught a ride home with the delivery dude.”
“No.”
“Seriously.”
“Genius.”
“Tell me about it.”
We sat back against the side of a crumbling mausoleum and ate our slices. “Did you ever do that bio lab, with the starfish?” she said.
“I said I did for the state test, but really I just read it.”
“I hated that lab.”
“I hated the idea of it.”
“Right? Cutting off the poor thing’s arm?” She pulled bits from the pizza crust and chucked them to the birds. “Everybody told me not to feel bad, because the arm grows back, right? But t
hat’s a myth. It doesn’t. Not all the way. I saw pictures in the books. While I was talking to Mrs. Cletus about getting out of the lab, you know, like requesting a substitute lab, where I wouldn’t have to maim anything, my lab partner cut off the arm. I screamed when I saw it. I took it back to the ocean.”
“The starfish?”
“After the lab. I tried to put her back in the water, but she wouldn’t go. You know Shale Beach, where it’s all smooth stones they brought in from wherever? I put her at the shoreline to let the waves take her out gently, but she dug into the rocks. I was crying as I threw her back in, because maybe she would drown.”
“Nah, starfish can’t drown. You saved her. She would have ended up drying to death and then getting chucked into the trash with the rest of the starfish that never made it out of the lab.”
“But maybe she just didn’t want to fight anymore, missing an arm like that, you know? Even if it grew back, she’d never feel like it had. She’d always feel like part of her was missing. Maybe she just sank.” She sipped from her Coke straw. “Question.”
“Okay, and then I have one for you.”
“Deal. What happened? Your mom, I mean.”
Word had gotten out about the pizza crust, and the sparrows were hopping up to us. One perched on the toe of my worn thin Chuck T. I tried to feed it from my hand, but it looked doubtful. When another bird helped itself to my palm, the first bird got over not trusting me and got in there too. “You want to know about my mom?”
“Please.”
“She came to all my baseball games. She never missed. She wore this bright pink Windbreaker no matter the weather. I mean, this thing was blinding.”
“Fluorescent, you’re saying.”
“Plugged into some serious wattage, yes. She called it her cheering jacket, had a hat to match too. This, like, crazy winter cap. You ever see those hats with the ears, like this cat or monkey or whatever is clinging to your head, the arms are way too long and hang down, you knot them under your chin to keep the hat on, they sell them in the city by Rockefeller Center from the tourist trap tables at Christmas?”
“I have one, Tony the Tiger.”
“Exactly. My mother’s was the Pink Panther. Imagine her wearing that to every one of my summer league games. She looked like a lunatic. Here’s the thing: No matter who was up to bat, me, one of my teammates, one of the kids from the other team, she screamed for him, like ‘You can do it, Johnny-boy!’ Or ‘Great swing, Pablito!’ even if the kid sucked and missed by a mile. She knew every kid’s name.” I nodded. “That’s it,” I said. “End of story.”
“That’s it?” Nicole said. “Are you kidding? That’s everything. First the pizza cab and now the Pink Panther. That’s so fricking awesome.” She nodded with me. “Your turn. What’d you want to ask me?”
“Nah. I’ll ask you some other time.”
“Nope, now or never. Anything. Go ahead.”
I hesitated. I couldn’t look at her as I asked. “Who do you think did it?”
“Everybody always asks me that. That’s all they ask me.
“Don’t you ever wonder, though?”
“All. The. Time. Jay? I. Don’t. Know. Okay? I can’t think about it anymore. The idea that somebody out there despises me enough to do this? It’s. .” She shivered, and then she cried. “This is so crazy. I don’t want to know, you know? I don’t want to know who did it. How could I ever face him, you know? In court, I mean. They would make me testify, and he would be sitting there, staring at me. I almost hope they don’t catch him. That he just fades away. He. . I can’t talk about this.”
“Nicole, I’m sorry.”
She stopped crying, almost too quickly, I thought, wiped her eyes and steeled herself.
“I’m sorry.”
She kissed my cheek, just a quick peck, and then she stood up. “Seriously, let’s go. Someplace where we can laugh.”
“You golf?”
“Never.”
“Then it’s Hackers, Hitters and Hoops. I’ll laugh anyway.”
“Your house.”
I hedged.
“What?” she said.
“No, nothing. Let’s go, I guess.”
Somebody left half-eaten takeout just outside the lobby. The rats were congregating. They didn’t move, either, when we walked by. Waddling up to the party, one of them looked more like a possum. He eyed me like, No, you move. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“About what?” Nicole said. “We had a mouse once. He was cute.”
“Stuart Little versus Bubonic Plague.”
We played Skyrim, and then she went to the piano. She was great, of course, even with Band-Aids on two of her fingertips.
“You know that song ‘How Soon Is Now?’” I said.
She played it. “Sit with me,” she said. She showed me the very simple top part of a four hands version of the song. “The squeeze bottle,” she said. “When it came up to your face. What were you thinking when the splash hit you?”
“It happened too fast. Start to finish in less than a second. I was like, okay, this psycho just squirted acid in my face. It was weird. I wasn’t thinking about me. I was thinking about him. How screwed up he must be to do that. Even after he told me it was water.”
She stopped playing. She looked at me.
I wanted to brush the hair away from the left side of her face. I didn’t. Instead I did something I didn’t want to do. Something I had to do. I said, “Dave.”
“What about him?”
“He said you broke up with him.”
She looked away, tapped the low end key. “I did.”
“You told me he broke it off.”
“I said the words, after he gave me an ultimatum.”
“As in?” I said.
She squinted at me, and I realized I was squinting at her. It hit me: She didn’t trust me either. Not fully. Not yet. She turned back to the keys, tapped out a very sad, slow version of “How Soon Is Now?” “He made Emma a bouquet once,” she said.
“What, he bought her mixed deli flowers or whatever?”
“No, he made them. From paper.”
“Like origami?”
“Exactly origami. He Kindled a how-to book. She loves sweetheart roses, the tiny ones, but they die after a day. He wanted to give her something that would last. Paper fades too, though. It curls in the sun. I wonder if she knows she has six months to live.” She leaned her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her. I was supposed to kiss her now, and I wanted to, but I didn’t, I’m not sure why. So we just stayed like that for a while, until it was clear I’d let the moment go, and she got up to get her coat.
“Stay,” I said. “PS3. Bootleg tennis. I’ll let you kick my ass.”
“Gotta get home. My dad. We have a Skype thing scheduled.”
I walked her to her car. She checked the backseat before she opened the door.
“Look,” I said, “I-”
She cut me off with a hug that was as tight as it was short. She slipped into her Saab and drove out of there a little too fast.
I watched her car disappear into the sharp red sunset. As I was heading back into the building, an engine revved, and a battered old-model Civic, black, eased out of the lot and swerved into the empty avenue. I was about to call Nicole to warn her, but the car turned west, away from where Nicole’s Saab had gone. I grabbed the tag off the rear bumper with my phone camera. Pete had advised me to take pictures every time Puglisi or one of his guys showed up. That maybe the police would get on him for stalking if we gathered enough evidence. I realized that the tag numbers weren’t Puglisi’s. And the car’s color was different. I remembered Puglisi’s Honda as less black, more gray. The windows were up, but I could make out that the driver was a woman, short with long hair. She was wearing dark sunglasses, almost as if she were copying Nicole.
Battered Civic, short girl with long hair: Starbucks Cherry?
I scrolled to the last text she sent and replied: We need to talk.
It
didn’t take long for her to get back, of course, fifteen seconds, about as much time as she would need to pull over and grab her phone. We most definitely do. When?
Now.
Come to my house.
Someplace pubic. My JKL key was lame half the time. I’d already hit SEND.
Took her a while to reply to that one. Mall?
Apple pkng lot 20 min
Glad you figured out how to text.:o)
I called Angela.
“What’s up?” She sounded a little out of it.
“You drinking?”
“Just straight vodka.”
“You at your computer?
“Where else would I be?”
“Need you to run some plates.”
“You can’t tap the lousy DMV yourself?”
“I have to check on something else right now.”
“As in?”
“Why after two years of knowing me a certain girl is all of a sudden crushing on me.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Took me fifteen minutes to skateboard to the mall. I scanned the parking lot entrances for Cherry’s Civic. Somebody tapped my shoulder. I spun with my hand up to cover my face. I almost didn’t recognize her out of her Starbucks getup. She wore a tight pink hoodie, tight jeans. Her hair was lighter than I remembered. She always had it in a ponytail, and I’d never seen it loose. She’d gone heavy with the lip gloss. “Hey,” she said, big smile.
“Why are you stalking me?” I said.
“Okay, wait, stalking? I texted you like three times. You didn’t get back to me, so I let it go.”
“Cherry, coming to my building? C’mon.”
“Dude, I don’t even know where you live.”
“I saw you, okay? You almost got T-boned, swerving out of the lot.”
She put up her hands like I had a knife out. “This is messed up. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She backed away toward a row of parked cars.
“Unless you come clean, right now, I’m calling the cops. I’m serious.”
“I know you are. I’m definitely sensing seriousness.” She backpedaled to the driver’s-side door of a Honda Civic that was at least ten years older than the one that had pulled out of the lot in front of my building, not to mention that this one wasn’t black but yellow. “Take it easy, Jay. I don’t know what I did, but I’m leaving now, okay? I don’t want to hurt you.” She opened the door and barked, “Step away from the vehicle,” as if she’d Hulu’d one too many episodes of The Shield.
