Burning Blue (15 page)

I fell to the floor and clawed my eyes. “Please,” I said. “No more.”

“It’s water, idiot,” Rick Kerns said. He sucked the squirt bottle and spit the water at me. “That’s for snaking Dave’s girl, bitch. What’s it like, getting blown by Half Face?”

I drove him into a wall of lockers. I headlocked him and didn’t let go. I picked him up and swung him feet-over-head, over my shoulder, and I body slammed him to the polished stone floor, and even then I didn’t let him out of the headlock. He tried to poke my eyes, but I had seen him do that in matches back in freshman year, and I grabbed his hand and bent it back. I heard a pop and a crack. He would have screamed, except he had no air in him. All he could do was grunt. He clawed my arm, gasping. His head was bright red. His boys drop-kicked me. “Dude, let
go,
man!”

“You’re crushing his throat, Jay!
Stop!
”

A voice cut through all the screaming. She didn’t even yell. “Mr. Nazzaro,” Mrs. Marks said. “Let go.”

I got in one last shot, a right cross to Rick Kerns’s thick-boned head.

“Brush your hair back,” Marks said. “So I can see your eyes.”

“He squirted—”

“I know what he did.” She looked to the cop texting in the corner of her office. Back to me: “I called your father. He’s not picking up, work, cell, home—”

“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 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.”