by Paul Griffin
I checked the lot for a tail. A couple of cars could have been unmarked police vehicles, a Ford sedan, a Chevy cruiser, but they were empty. I checked the woods for telephoto lens flare and didn’t see any.
Nicole was wearing a ball cap with the bill pulled low. She adjusted her sunglasses, flipped up her collar, put her head down and marched into the building.
I hustled out of the media center and put myself out in front of the main entrance doors to sneak a peek down the corridor. Sabbatini’s office was at the end of the very long hall, but this vantage point was better than none. I didn’t want to get caught just hanging out in front of the building, staring through the door glass, so I pulled out my skateboard and knife pliers and pretended to tighten my wheel truck.
“Thought you would’ve had that fixed by now,” Mr. Sager said, leaning out from behind the school’s welcome sign. He had steel wool in his heavily gloved hand. He dipped it into that same bucket I’d kicked a few days earlier. He scrubbed a graffiti tag somebody had scribbled onto the sign with indelible marker. “I saw you,” he said. “In the library window. Scanning the lot. Do you really think he’s that stupid to attack her again, what with everybody on guard?” He slopped the acid onto the graffiti. The marker faded as Sager scrubbed it. The paint was coming off the sign too.
“Nail polish remover,” I said.
“Say again?” Sager said.
“The indelible marker. It takes it right off, no scrubbing, just a wipe, without messing up the paint underneath. In other words, you don’t need the muriatic acid.”
Sager stopped scrubbing. He stared at me. “Except I’d need a whole lot of nail polish remover now, wouldn’t I?” He gestured to the side of the building with his chin. I leaned around the corner to see it. The entire three-story brick wall was bombed with graffiti, taunts from our rivals, the Blue Devils.
I felt like a jerk, but at least I could cross Mr. Sager off my suspect list. He would need every can of muriatic acid he had in his shop to scrub that paint out of the brick. He shook his head and then got back to work.
A jacked-up Highlander rolled down the entrance ramp. One of the dudes leaning out the windows was John Kerns, kid brother of Rick, the Volta-Shock billboard I flipped freshman year. John’s locker was a few down from mine. He wasn’t pumped up like his brother. He was actually kind of wimpy. But he was happy to bully you verbally. “Need a little help with your ride there, Spaceman?”
“Now, now, let’s be nice,” this other dude said. “His name’s Sbarro.”
“Tell your mommy I’ll have my eggs over easy tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Dude, you’re like a veritable king of comedy, you know that? Hey, do you wear diapers?” The doors opened, and they started to get out of the car.
“I was having a conversation with my friend here,” Mr. Sager said, stepping toward the Highlander. “And you all interrupted.”
That got an eye roll from Kerns’s little brother. The Highlander peeled out with one of the kids throwing half a donut at my skateboard and “Sweet wheels, Spaceman.” Sager waited till they were gone. He headed into the school without looking at me.
“Sir?” I said. “Thanks.”
“What’d I tell you about calling me sir?” The rain was coming down harder. “Watch yourself, Nazzaro. You really want to find what you’re looking for?”
A few minutes later Nicole left Sabbatini’s office with a bulky plastic bag tucked under her arm. I stepped back from the glass door, hopped my skateboard and rode a curb rail in the vicinity of her car. “Hey.”
“Hey. Waiting long?” she said.
“Nah.” I kicked my board into a spin like the dude in Tony Hawk: Shred. I would have looked super-slick if I’d caught it with my hand instead of my chin. “So, that hurt.”
“Ooh. Icepack?” Nicole opened the car door and held up a stuffed CVS bag.
The Highlander was ripping up the road again, coming from the opposite direction. John Kerns and his crew slowed to a roll when they saw me talking with Nicole. Kerns had his phone out, clip in progress.
“Get in,” Nicole said, getting behind the wheel.
I’d checked the schedule, and the wrestling team was away on a meet two towns over, where Dave Bendix was likely grinding somebody through the mats into the floorboards. The meet would end in less than an hour. Dave would check his phone and find the link to the video mini-Kerns was recording. “Yeah, I better not,” I said, indicating the Highlander with a nod. “I don’t want Dave to get the wrong idea.”
“Right, so you don’t need to worry about that. David and I are over.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“I promised my mother I’d be gone for forty minutes max, and if I’m late, she’ll freak and call the cops and put out an APB for me.”
I got into Nicole Castro’s car, eyeing the Highlander. It sped out of the lot.
“Mind holding this?” She handed me the Sabbatini package. Shaped like an Amazon box a foot wide and half as thick, it weighed about as much as a gallon of battery acid packed in on all sides by bricks of C-4 explosive. “When?” I said, my eyes on the package.
“When what?”
“When did you break up with Dave?”
“He broke up with me.”
“Are you serious? Why?”
“I saw you, Jay.” She geared the car. “At the media center window before. Watching me as I drove in.”
“So?”
“You wanted to meet at four.”
“Right.”
“Why not right when school ended?”
“Nicole, relax, I wanted to bang out my homework before we hung out.” This was true, too. I honestly spent about ten minutes on my calculus work sheet.
She looked at me over her glasses. “I have to ask you something.”
“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?”
“Are you a truthful person?”
I frowned. “Mostly.”
“Okay, that’s the right answer.”
“Stop.”
“Hitting too close to the bone, am I?”
“No, I mean stop.” I reached between the seats and jerked up the handbrake, but it only slowed the car when we needed to have stopped dead fifty feet back.
“Oh my god-” Nicole hit the brakes and the car fishtailed as a deer flew across the road. Another half second, and we would have clipped it. It was a doe, so no antlers, but she was big, and she would have totaled the car, rolling right up the windshield and into us. Nicole pulled over. “How’d you see that?” she said.
“In my peripheral. . Yeah.”
“It’s not true, you know? What they say about the eyes. You lose one, the vision migrates to the other? At least it hasn’t happened yet.”
The sunglasses weren’t helping her either. Sky darkened by thunderclouds, hundred-foot pines close to the road, heavy evergreen. Driving in the near dark with one eye? That sucks, if it’s even legal. “I meant to ask you if you were allowed to drive.”
“I had to take a vision test. I now have special accommodations.” She showed me her temporary license. In big black letters it said VISION IMPAIRED. “The real card is supposed to come in two weeks. The woman said it’s bright green with a red stripe.”
“Christmas all year round,” I said. Total idiot.
“Of course I’m not supposed to be driving unsupervised anyway.”
I knew that much. You had to be seventeen to drive without an adult in the car, but nobody followed that rule. You couldn’t. In Brandywine, if you didn’t drive, you were stuck with me, on the bus. “I’d offer to drive, but my only experience is Grand Theft: San Andreas.”
“And the forklift.”
“Tops out at five miles an hour. It’s a good ride, though. Come on down to work one day, we’ll take her out for a spin in the appliances aisle, blades high, ram a few refrigerators, get the adrenaline going before start of shift.”
She scanned the woods. “The doe.”
I checked the woods,
following Nicole’s line of sight. The doe was grazing with her fawn. “She’s fine,” I said. “Not even close.”
Nicole broke down. She grabbed my hand. We sat there like that. A truck whipped past. The Subaru shook. She took her hand back. “Sorry.” She put the car into drive.
The package had been thrown to the floor when she stopped short. I picked it up, pretending to accidentally spill it. No wonder I’d thought it was shaped like an Amazon box: It was an Amazon box. It definitely weighed between twenty-five and thirty pounds.
“Death by chemistry,” Nicole said. “Check it out.”
I opened the box-slowly. Advanced Placement Chemistry, a Teacher’s Guide, last year’s.
I could scratch Sabbatini and Schmidt off my list. Add them to the Sager scratch-out and I’d knocked off three suspects in one day. Not bad. I was feeling relieved until I remembered I still had no idea who was after Nicole. The only specific people left on my list were Kerns and Dave, and both continued to be nowhere in terms of motive.
Nicole tapped the teacher’s guide. “How do you print a book twenty-eight hundred pages long? Murderers. How many trees did it take to make that?”
“Um, like, not even one. Just a guess.”
“At least break it up into chunks. No book should be longer than two hundred and fifty pages, ever. I’m supposed to lug that thing around?”
“Beats going to the gym,” I said. “They tell you to wipe the sweat off the machines with your towel, but all that does is spread the bacteria around. Even those sani-wipe things are only marginally effective. And then if you forget your flip-flops, you have to wear plastic bags on your feet. You have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“I can only assume you mean for the showers.”
“You assume correctly.”
“Do we have a little OCD working there?”
“A tinge.” I checked out the book. The student version had the answers in the back, but this one had them written out step-by-step. “Firing your chem tutor?”
“Total perv. Dude was always looking down my shirt. Besides, he quit.”
“You bummed him out because you’re smarter than he is. Hate when that happens.”
“He’s post-doc at Columbia. Nobody’s smarter than he is. I used to like chemistry. This is good, being in the car with you. Moving. Windows down. I don’t even mind the rain. I can breathe. Before, in the hall, I was heading for the doors, somebody taps my shoulder, and I did a face plant with my backpack covering my head.”
“Why do people find that shit funny?”
“No, she just wanted to tell me she was sorry about what happened. That girl in Dr. Schmidt’s the other day, with the cat’s ears hairdo? I forget her name.”
“Angela Sammick.”
“She wanted to apologize. For staring at me, you know?”
“More like gawking.”
“She wasn’t the first, believe me.”
“Hey, you and Dave, what were you guys fighting about that day?”
She frowned.
My phone vibrated. Starbucks Cherry, text: Congratulations, you’ve won our deal of the week. Just for YOU, Jay Nazzaro, we’re holding a leftover day-old pistachio muffin. Please stop by to claim your prize.
Now I frowned.
“Girlfriend trouble?” Nicole said.
“Just plain old trouble trouble. Where are we headed, by the way?”
“To awesomeness. Trust me. She’ll knock you out.”
“Emma?” I said.
“Emma.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The elevator doors opened. She flinched and checked to be sure the car was empty. We got in. “This was the best thing to come out of the pageant deal,” she said. “Getting hooked up with volunteering here. My mom came with me that first day, just to check it out, and now she’s here every afternoon. She comes to laugh.”
“Laugh?” I could think of few things sadder than kids with cancer.
“You’ll see.”
The elevator made a bouncy stop on the second floor. The doors opened. Nicole held her breath. Nobody got on the elevator. The doors closed. The elevator rumbled upward.
“Hey, the pageant thing?” I said. “I don’t know. You don’t seem the type.”
“My mother asked me to try out. She was freaked that Dad would play hardball in the divorce settlement. She had me apply for every scholarship out there. My grandmother made my mom do it, and that was the way she got the money to go to Sarah Lawrence. Everybody loves to hate the girls because they’re pretty, but they’re also really smart and motivated to do great things, teach, go into politics, philanthropy. They’re big-hearted. We were sisters.”
“He’s being a dick about money, your father?”
She shook her head. “He’s the best. He never said anything about the pageant stuff, but I could tell he was bummed about it. He’s the quiet type. Low-key, conservative, don’t draw attention to yourself. He definitely has an eye for the ladies, though. Wait’ll you meet my mom.”
“Seriously?”
“Calm down, boy.”
“I saw her on the ’net, but only partially. That news clip. The reward money offer.”
We stopped at the sixth floor. The doors opened. A tall dude in a mechanic’s jumper was fixing a light. He did a double take on Nicole. She tensed and turned to hide her face. The doors closed. “Bet your dad has an eye for the ladies too,” she said.
Six years after my mother’s death, and my father was nowhere near getting over her. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re gorgeous. Therefore your mother must be gorgeous.”
“You’re insane.”
“You don’t like to talk about them, your parents. No response?”
I shrugged. “How many more floors?” I said.
“This one.” The elevator doors opened, and Nicole was a new person, totally relaxed. She knew all the nurses’ names as she led me down the hall. Anthropomorphized animals danced on the walls. A party clown with a therapy dog headed into a room. A boy, maybe six, hugged Nicole. His head was bandaged. “Mom was worried,” he said. “She kept saying she hoped you weren’t in a car accident.”
“We hit a little traffic,” Nicole said.
“And you couldn’t call to tell her that?”
“You sound like Mom.”
The kid grabbed my hands and used me as a swing. “We all call Nic’s mom Mom,” he said. Then, “Dude, wait!” He ditched us for the therapy dog. His sneakers lit up each time his heels hit the floor.
We turned into a room where a woman was sitting with a bunch of kids around a short table, teaching them to finger paint. Nicole would look almost exactly like her in twenty-five years. “I thought you were in an accident,” she said.
“Traffic.”
“And you couldn’t call to tell me that?” Nicole wasn’t kidding. Mrs. Castro may even have been as pretty as her daughter, but not as beautiful. She smiled warmly. “So this is Jay, bearer of broken umbrellas.” She balled her hands so she wouldn’t get paint on my back as she hugged me tightly. I was a little startled. She said to Nicole, “She’s waiting for you.”
Emma was in bed, asleep. She was maybe ten or so. A vaporizer puffed white smoke.
“Em?” Nicole tickled the girl’s foot.
An oxygen cannula tied into her nose. She was pale with dark circles under her eyes. I didn’t see any signs that she was breathing.
“Oh my god,” Nicole said. She shook the girl. “Em? Em!”
The girl grabbed Nicole and tickled her.
“Not funny, miss,” Nicole said. “This is my friend Jay. Jay, this is my totally obnoxious friend Emma.”
“Yo,” Emma said. She gave me a high pound with a shaky fist. Then to Nicole: “He is a hottie.” Back to me: “So how does that make you feel, that my ridiculously beautiful girl here thinks you’re hot?”
“My experience is that girls often confuse hot with tall.”
Emma grabbed my hand. Hers was tiny in mine
and trembling and a little blue. “I like him, Nic. Like the vampire in the movie, the good one. I love vampires.”
“We all do,” I said.
“I like to scare myself stupid.”
“Me too.”
“Mom’s gonna use the umbrella in one of her sculptures.” She winked at me.
“How old are you?” I said.
She made her voice deep with a British accent: “Veddy, veddy old.”
“Stop flirting for five seconds and tell us what trouble you were up to today,” Nicole said.
“Wrote a poem for you. The assignment was: Find a small treasure and offer a gratitude for living in a free country. I wrote it this morning, before the rain.” Emma flipped up her laptop screen. “‘I look out my perfectly crooked window blinds and see freedom of an immaculate sort. The tops of the pines tickle into a wilderness of blue and white, and all I need now is red. And what do you know, I have it here, this heart-shaped Valentine’s box Kevin Connelly gave me but last year. Sweet candy is this America.’”
Nicole kissed the girl’s forehead and turned to me. “See?” she said. Then to Emma: “You were eating raspberry sherbet.”
“That mind-reading thing? Annoying.”
“It’s all over your face.” Nicole took Emma to the bathroom.
“I have your father’s book,” Mrs. Castro said.
“You and like three other people,” I said.
“It was a best seller, at least in art history circles.”
“Must’ve been before I was born.”
“It was, actually. It’s a definitive text, you know? I met him once.”