Burning Blue

“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 that’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?”