Burning Blue (10 page)

“Is that good or bad?”

“Could be either, depending on whether or not you know how to play tennis.”

“As in Wii?” I said.

“As in meet me at the East Gate Tennis Club in half an hour. And Jay? Tell me you don’t have Wii.”

“PS3, thank you very much.”

“Thank
you
very much, nobody plays Wii tennis anymore, or at least they don’t admit to it. Not unless they’re six years old and wear pigtails. Actually, you would look cute in pigtails.”

“I want to see if I can still see the ball.” She was wearing this knockout tennis suit, and here I was in my black jeans and army jacket. I was getting nasty eyes from many elderly, almost uniformly svelte model types who had gotten lost on their way to the L.L.Bean catalog shoot.

“Feed me,” Nicole said.

I eyed her hands. She was wearing golf gloves. “You sure?”

“You ever swung a racquet?”

The lady at the counter had given me one that had never been picked up from lost and found. I hadn’t held one since before my mother died. Mom was terrible at tennis, but she liked to take me up to the public courts and swing and miss and laugh at herself. We’d end up playing stickball. I pitched the ball to Nicole instead.

Her forehand was off. She kept grounding the ball into the net. She didn’t get down on herself. She made adjustments until the ball cleared the tape. She kept checking her long bill cap, pulling it low to hide as much of the bandage as she could. Her backhand was better than her forehand. A couple of times she really drove the ball. I threw it right to her, so she wouldn’t have to run to get to it, but she didn’t last long anyway. She took a break every three hits or so, then every two, then after every ball.

“Your hands?” I said.

“My wind.” She peeled off her gloves. Her hands weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be, four or five blisters on her left, a couple on her right. All had healed or were close to skinning over. We went to get a drink from the vending machines. She was pale. “Amazing how much you lose in a month. Can’t wait to get back to running. Not as dizzy today, though. Skipped my meds.”

“Not good,” I said.

“You take yours?”

“Course not.”

She put up her fist for a pound. We bumped knuckles. Her phone buzzed. It had been buzzing every few minutes. She checked it and frowned.

“Dave?” I said.

“No,” she said. “You can take a deep breath now.”

“Dave benches three hundred eighty-five pounds. Would you like to be caught sneaking around with his girlfriend, even if you and I are just friends, if we are in fact.”

“You doubt that?”

“Maybe you just needed somebody to throw you a few balls.”

“Right, because they don’t have machines for that, ones that can’t judge me as I’m making an idiot of myself, trying to play tennis with one eye open.”

“I’m not judging you. I think you’re awesome.”

“Shut up. Anyway, I’m not sneaking around. I have nothing to—” Her phone buzzed again. “I’m AWOL. She won’t stop calling till I pick up.”

“Then pick up.”

She turned off her phone and tucked it into her little tennis skirt.

“Did the doctor clear you?” I said. “Like for strenuous physical activity?”

“He said as soon as I felt up to it, I should get moving.”

“Moving
isn’t
tennis.”

“Would be pretty boring if it weren’t.”

“But what if the ball hit you?” I said.

“So? It happens.”

“In the face, I meant.”

“What am I supposed to do, be a statue for the rest of my life? Never sweat again? Hungry?”

I grunted.

“This means ‘Man want food,’ one grunt yes, two grunt no?”

“You speak Cro-Magnon?” I said.

“To imply the Cro-Magnon were lug heads is wrong. They exhibited a cranial capacity approximately sixteen hundred cubic centimeters larger than modern-day humans.”

“So I’m not a Cro-Magnon, you’re saying, but merely a lug head.”

“Grunt once for Taco Bell, twice for Domino’s.”

“At least you didn’t say Sbarro’s.”

“Crap.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No, I mean Monday is roadwork,” Nicole said, going tiptoe to look over my shoulder. “They weren’t supposed to be here.”

“Nic!” This girl from the tennis team, Samantha Rees, practically tackled Nicole into the Coke machine. “Did you get the Care Bears package?”

“Thank you, Sam. It was adorable. I meant to text you back.”

“But you never do. How are we supposed to get in touch with you?”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better.”

“The gate guard wouldn’t let us visit you the other day. Seriously nasty dude.”

“It wasn’t him. I think my mom was trying to keep the house quiet.”

“Nic, we love you. We want to be here for you. When are you coming back?”

“This is Jay,” Nicole said.

“Oh yeah,” Sam said. “I remember you.” She shook my hand a little too eagerly, and I knew that she was replaying it: my pep rally swim. “I mean, from the other day,” she said. “The caf? I was at the table two behind you and one to the right?”

“Oh right,” I said, pretending I remembered the exact location of all five hundred students in the cafeteria.

“He was eating alone,” she said to Nicole. “For the record? I totally respect that.”

More of the team rolled up in their running gear, a fog of wet red rain suits. They were all over Nicole with hugs. Nicole put up a happy front for a second or so, until her hand went to her hip to grab her phone. “Mom, can you hang on a sec?” She apologized that she had to take the call. The other girls headed off to the locker room with promises they would keep calling her until she called them back. “Welcome back, Jay,” that girl Sam said. “Eat with us next time.”

“Definitely,” I said, knowing I never would.

This one girl, Marisol Wood, a sophomore who was by Facebook consensus the prettiest girl in her class, hung back. She was trying not to cry. “Nic, when you’re done with the phone, could I talk to you for a sec?”

Seeing the girl was upset, Nicole became upset. She led the girl to the far side of the vending machines. Without bothering to tell her mother she would call her back, Nicole handed me her phone. She’d done it absentmindedly, her focus on Marisol.

I already knew her phone was off. She hadn’t turned it back on after shutting it down a few minutes earlier. Nicole Castro had faked an incoming call to ditch the girls that were crowding around her. I never would have pegged her the type to be sneaky like that. She hugged Marisol, rubbing her back, smiling as she whispered into Marisol’s ear. Marisol went from sobbing to laughing.

I went to the pro shop and marveled at how much money a person could blow on tennis crap. This was a long way from the hand-me-down Slazenger and a dented three-can of half-bald Penns. A limited edition faux snakeskin racquet cover for $600? Really? And why does sticking an alligator on a shirt raise the price eighty-five bucks? Tennis and reptiles: I see the connection. Nicole found me pricing out energy bars. “What exactly is partially hydrolyzed caseinate, and why would you put it in food?” I said.

“I actually know what that is, for some ridiculous reason,” she said.

“The reason is you have a ridiculously high IQ. What world-ending problem did our friend back there drop on you? Her date to the dance stood her up?”

“Her parents are splitting up. They’d been trying to reconcile, but her dad left for good the other day, she’s pretty sure. She wanted some advice.”

“On what?”

“How not to hate her father.” Then Nicole told me about
her
parents’ nasty breakup. “I’m not taking sides. My father and I are staying close. Trying to. He lives downtown now, a block from his office. He wants to be around for me, but Mom gets weird when he’s in the house, just really sad for the old days, I think, so we try to minimize when he comes over and meet elsewhere instead. Mostly we Skype, two sometimes three hours a week.”

“Way more face time than most parents give their kids,” I said. “At least that’s how it shakes out in my house.”

“You can tell me, you know? Your story. I can keep a secret better than anybody,” she said.

“Not sure I can trust you.”

“Really
now?”

“Pretty sly there, pretending your mother called to avoid Sam and them.”

“You should talk, with your iPod earbuds that lead to nowhere.” She looked back over her shoulder, to where Marisol was punching a text into her phone. “We’re all acting, right? Faking our way through.” Her mood darkened, and suddenly. “Part of me wanted to shake her, hard, and say, ‘Hey, I know things suck for you right now, but can you find somebody else’s shoulder to cry on? My plate is kind of full at the moment,’ as in, ‘Do you not see this bandage on my face?’” Her face flushed, and then she gulped, and the red faded from her skin. Now she seemed exhausted. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, I get it,” I said.

“Do you really, though?”

“Yeah. I do. Really.” I was actually relieved to see her angry. Before that, her seeming acceptance of her fate wasn’t natural.

We were rounding a corner toward the parking lot when Chrissie Vratos bounced up to Nicole with a bump that was almost hard enough to be a shove. “You think it’s funny, Nic?”

“What is your problem?”

“Like you didn’t sic them on me?”

“Who?”

“Give me a break. The detectives? Yeah, they called me in for questioning. They told me they asked you who you thought might have done it, and that you gave them a list, and I was right there, on top.”

“I didn’t even mention you. I never even gave them a list.”

“Right.
They had that video, you and me scrimmaging, when you made that ridiculously shallow lob and I caught you at the net.”

“You mean the one where you drove the ball at my head?” Nicole said.

“You told them about that thing with the squirt bottle. How could you do this to me? I was just joking around.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. What squirt bottle?”

Sam pushed between Chrissie and Nicole. Sam said, “The time Diana Poisson beat her and she squirted her water bottle into Diana’s face.” She grabbed Chrissie’s sweatshirt hood and tugged her toward the locker room. “Nic wasn’t even there that day, idiot,” Sam said to Chrissie. Marisol and some of the other girls pushed Chrissie toward the door.

“I told the detectives I had a hunch about who might have burned you,” Chrissie said. “I told them I thought you might have done it to yourself.”

I said what I’m sure everybody was thinking: “Why would she ruin herself?”

Chrissie smiled. “Because, Spaceman, as you’ll soon find out, chica is a psycho.”

Sam jerked on Chrissie’s hood and practically dragged her down the hall.

Nicole called out, “What did the detectives say when you said that I, you know.”

“Burned yourself?” Chrissie said. “Nothing. They didn’t look surprised at all. As if they’d been thinking it all along.”

By the time we got out of the club it was almost 6:30, an hour past sunset, not that you could have seen it that day with the rain. The sky was gunmetal gray and swirling.

“I think Sam was crushing on you,” Nicole said.

“Sure she was.”

“You could have your pick of those girls.”

“Do you think Chrissie could have done it? Attacked you, I mean. Maybe she was just sick and tired of being number two to you all the time?”

“No,” Nicole said. “It wasn’t Chrissie. I’m sure.”

“How?” I said.

Her phone buzzed. She checked it. “David.”

Something flashed from the corner of the parking lot, then another flash, stinging white light. I recognized the car: Shane Puglisi’s battered old Honda. I headed for it, but he peeled out before I even got close.

No way I wasn’t in that shot. Dave Bendix was about to see me hanging with Nicole. Puglisi would make me seem to be doing more than walking Nicole to her car.

Nicole was sullen. “I wasn’t followed. I’m positive. How do they find me?”

“Seriously, you’re good with secrets?”

“Promise.”

I grabbed her phone and popped the back off of it with my Swiss Army knife.

“Okay, what are you doing?” she said.

“Tweaking your bandwidth, governor.”

“You’re
clipping
him.”

“Now I’m disabling your GPS.”

“I have it turned off.”

“You
think
you have it turned off. It’s only off when the phone is off, and even then the CIA is rumored to have a satellite that scans quiet drives for machine numbers. I don’t think this will keep the tabloids off you entirely, but it’ll be harder for them. Now you’re like me: invisible.”

“I wish. The boy reconfigures my phone in a parking lot. Scary.”