Burning Blue

the car, in the middle of the lot, checking out the flat tire. Puglisi laughed and waved to me, his hand going from five fingers to one.

I turned to Nicole with a smile. She was shaking.

“You can just drop me here,” I said.

“Absolutely not,” Mrs. Castro said. “What’s the address?”

I didn’t want them seeing where I lived. Once in a while people hung out in the lot and smoked weed and drank and yelled and fought. It wasn’t that bad really, but coming from Brandywine Heights, they would have thought it was pretty low-life. “I have to get milk anyway.” We’d come to a red light. I opened the door and got out.

“Call me,” Nicole said.

“Jay?” her mom said. “Thank you.”

Somebody honked. The light had turned green. I nodded bye and headed into the 7-Eleven. My phone buzzed with a text. The caller ID stopped me mid-stride: Angela Sammick. The text said: We need to talk.

TWENTY-NINE

I called her. “How’d you get my number?”

“Are you serious?” Angela said.

“Amazing. I truly believed you were a newb in comp sci.”

“I didn’t believe you for a second with that corny, ‘Duh, how do you send a text message?’”

“What’s up?”

“Not over the phone.”

“Where are you right now?”

“Home, but we can’t meet here. My father’s an idiot. We’ll meet in the middle.”

“Where’s home?”

“Classon and Route 22.”

“Okay, I’m like a mile away-”

“I know where you live. Meet me at the McDonald’s on 22. You know what this is about, right?”

“Nicole, obviously.”

“Obviously.” Click.

On the way there, I ran a search on her address. It checked out: Michael Sammick, 1714 Classon Boulevard, not a great area.

She was waiting for me at the order counter. “You have any money?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She said to the woman behind the counter, “Two vanilla shakes, two fries.” She turned to me. “What are you getting?”

We grabbed a booth in the back. Angela drew her phone and clicked up an email from Arachnomorph: I know you’re looking for me. It’s over on my end, unless you start me up again. If you keep stirring the nest, I’ll bite you too.

“Untraceable?” I said.

“Would I be here if it was traceable?” She was slamming the fries and shake. For somebody who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, she could put it down.

“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Trying to help Nicole. What’s in it for you?”

“Hello, moron, the reward money? That and she was nice to me.”

“Nice doesn’t mean you risk your life for her.”

“She was very nice, okay? Last year, while you were gone. Things sucked and I’d had a few too many drinks.” She saw I wasn’t too surprised. “In school, Spaceman. I went to the bathroom to throw up. I’d been suspended once already for cutting too many classes. One more suspension, and I was done for the semester. I purged and was feeling better, or at least well enough to fake my way through the rest of the day. I’m walking out of the bathroom, feeling like I just might get away with it when I run into Nicole in the hall. She pushes me back inside the bathroom. At first I’m like, are you seriously looking for me to dig your eyes out of your head with my thumbnails? But then she pointed to my pants. I had missed the bowl and splattered vomit all over my jeans. Lucky me, I happened to be wearing white that day. Nicole gave me hers.”

“Her pants? And she wore yours?”

“Dude, I’m like size zero. You think Nicole Castro would fit into my jeans? She told me to wait in the stall, and then she went to the music room and came back with band pants and we made the switch.”

“Band pants? Those goofy things that go up to your chest?”

“Baggy as eighties disco, exactly. She wore those and gave me her jeans.”

“Why didn’t she just stay in her jeans and give you the, like-”

“Band pants? I wondered the same thing. She said she didn’t want me to risk drawing attention to myself.”

“So then she’s walking around like the goof, and everybody’s looking at her?”

“Everybody was looking at her anyway, and she wasn’t drunk. Look,” she said between long pulls on her milkshake, “I don’t know why people do these things, screwing themselves for other people, but they do. It’s annoyingly inexplicable. They’re just freaks, what can I tell you? Are you gonna eat those fries?”

I pushed them her way. My stomach was weak. I was suddenly panicked. If Angela had traced the leaking of the Arachnomorph emails back to me, then Detective Barrone and the NJPD cyber crime team easily could have too. “How’d you know I leaked the emails?”

“I didn’t, till now. Not for sure, anyway. I mean, I suspected it, of course. Jay, c’mon, the way you were looking at Nicole in Schmidt’s office? In love with her even after the burn, huh? I don’t know if that’s super-sweet or super-weird.”

“I’m not in love with-”

“Right, okay, whatever, here’s my proposal: We team up and split the reward.”

“I’m not doing this for the money.”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, more for me. Look, whatever your reasoning, you know by now this is too big a job for one person. Even if the Recluse is somebody from school, if you include staff, that’s almost thirty-eight hundred suspects to check out. Then you throw in people outside of school who could be jealous of her, and you’re dealing with like half the population of New Jersey. What are you riding for taps?”

“Conficker88.”

“Please tell me you’re not serious.”

“What?”

“Freeware punched holes in that thing ages ago.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You’re kidding. Riding 88 and expecting to stay anonymous? Maybe teaming up with you is a bad idea.”

“When was it blown?”

“At least yesterday. Maybe even the day before.”

Somebody who could talk my language. Very cool. “What’s your horse?”

“The Sleeze321 worm.”