“Yeah, and it’s just the first volume. But it’s good. So far.”
“So where are you going to college?” Some place near Boston, he hoped.
“Rutgers. I got a full scholarship.” She shrugged as if getting a full scholarship to a state school was no big deal. “It’s all we could afford.”
Frank felt bad that she felt she had to explain. “Yeah, I got in there,” he said.
“Is that where you’re going?”
He tried to read her face. Did she want him to be going the same school as her? “I’m going to BU. Boston University.”
“Yeah, I got in there, too.”
Wow, Frank thought. That would have been great. Her and him in Boston. But as horny as he was for her, the thought of him and her in New Brunswick, New Jersey, didn’t have the same appeal. Freedom trumped love. He had to get away from home.
But there was still the summer, he thought. If Vaseline Boy was out of the picture, that is. God, how could that slug ever have been in the picture in the first place?
“I have to—“ she said.
“I was wondering—“ Frank said, both of them speaking at the same time. He motioned for her go first.
“I have to ask you something,” she said.
She opened the newspaper, the Newark Herald, and pointed to an article on the bottom half of the front page. Frank read the headline. “Landfill Fire Rages On—After 13 Years of Toxic Pollution Owners Still Unresponsive” The byline was Arthur Brown.
“Did you see this?” she said.
“No.” Frank took the newspaper from her and scanned the first few paragraphs. It was a recap of the landfill situation, but to his amazement, in the third paragraph it cited the “local Roman Catholic diocese” and “associates with organized crime ties” as the owners of the two tracts of land that made up the landfill.
“Holy shit!” he said.
“Why are you smiling?”
“’Cause I talked to this guy.” Frank pointed at the reporter’s name. “I told him he should write a story about the landfill because people were dying down there.”
“In my neighborhood.”
“Yeah.”
“I heard that was the real reason you got into trouble. Because of that picture in the yearbook.”
“You know about that?”
“That’s what I heard at school.”
“How?”
“There’s a girl who knows a guy named Molloy—“
Frank held his hand for her to stop. Molloy. Enough said.
“This girl said this guy Molloy told her he took some kind of incriminating pictures and that you decided you were going to expose the people who owned the landfill, and that it all started when you heard that my grandfather had died. Is that true?”
“Well… yeah… kind of.”
She looked him in the eye. “Why?”
Because I wanted to get in your pants.
Because I like you.
Because I wanted to impress you.
Because I wanted to be your knight in shining armor.
Because I’m an asshole.
Frank didn’t know what to say.
He shrugged. “I dunno.”
She grinned at him. “That’s not what I heard.”
“What did you hear?”
“Nothing.”
He wanted to know why she was grinning like that. Because she knew that he liked her? That was no secret. Maybe she was grinning because she knew he liked her and she liked that.
“You still going out with the Vaz?”
“Who?”
“Michael Vasily.”
She made a sour face. “We were never dating. I just went to the prom with him.”
“Oh.”
“Our mothers are friends. I’ve know him since we were little.”
“Oh, okay.” He nodded, his brain whirring. They were playpen pals. She doesn’t really like him. Her mother made her do it.
“I gotta go,” she said, turning to walk away.
He panicked. “Wait. Hang on.”
She turned around and looked at him, her eyes sparkling sapphires in the sun.
“I was thinking maybe we could—you know—do something sometime.”
“Like what?” She was grinning again.
“I dunno. A movie. Maybe a concert. Maybe just hang out.”
“Okay.” No hesitation. She didn’t even have to think about it.
His heart was slamming.
“Call me,” she said.
“I don’t have your number.”
“201-332—“
“Do you have a pen?” he said. Desperate.
“No.”
Shit! Then he thought of something. He knelt down on the grass and opened the newspaper to the want ads. He picked up one of the grass turds the mower had spit out. “Go ahead,” he said.
“332-5505”
He smeared the turd on the newspaper, writing large thick numbers that took up the whole sheet. It looked like something a chimp would create, but the numbers were clear enough.
He got back to his feet and wiped his grass-stained fingers on his jeans. “Do you want the rest of the paper?”
“You can have it.” She started walking away, walking backwards, looking at him, her eyes sparkling with her smile. “Will you call me?” she said.
I will, he thought.
“I will,” he said.
She turned around, and he watched her walk back toward the parking lot, watched till she disappeared behind Mulvaney Hall. He looked at the lawn mower and all the grass he still had to mow, and he laughed. He was throbbing all over.
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The Temptations of St. Frank Page 36
