“Subway, I guess.”
“Let’s go!” Tom stands up and wriggles his shoulders like he’s Superman ready to take off.
“O.K. Wait a minute. I’ll go tell Mom. Should I get some sandwiches?”
Tom looks surprised. “Sure, fine, if she doesn’t mind.”
I’m not worried about getting Mom to make sandwiches because she always likes to fix a little food for me. The thing is, ever since my fight with Nick, she’s been clucking around me like the mother hen. Maybe she figures I got in some gang fight, so she keeps asking me where I’m going and who with. Also, I guess she noticed I don’t go to Nick’s after school anymore. I come right home. So she asks me do I feel all right. You can’t win. Right now, I can see she’s going to begin asking who is Tom and where did I meet him. It occurs to me there’s an easy way to take care of this.
I turn around to Tom again. “Say, how about you come up and I’ll introduce you to Mom? Then she won’t start asking me a lot of questions.”
“You mean I look respectable, at least?”
“Sure.”
We go up to the apartment, and Mom asks if we’d like some cold drinks or something. I tell her I ran into Tom when he helped me hunt for Cat around Gramercy Park, which is almost true, and that he sometimes plays stickball with us, which isn’t really true but it could be. Mom gets us some orangeade. She usually keeps something like that in the icebox in summer, because she thinks cokes are bad for you.
“Do you live around here?” she asks Tom.