The night of our school’s fall dance came, and I had no date.

  It wasn’t that I was unpopular or too shy to ask anyone. It was that Lindy Everly, the only girl I wanted to take, wasn’t allowed to go.

  “I’m sorry,” she’d said. “My parents have already decided that I can’t go to the dance. They say I’m too young.”

  I didn’t see why Lindy and I couldn’t go together. We’d eaten lunch together and walked home after school every day that semester. Granted the school year had only just begun, but Lindy was the greatest girl I knew, and I had my heart set on taking her. 

  When the night of the dance came, I grudgingly went with a group of friends. They all went with dates of their own except for my best friend, Noah. 

  “You’re not just gonna sit around all evening moping because Lindy Everly couldn’t come to the dance with you?” he scoffed.

  I ignored him and took my plateful of brownies outside.

  He followed me, and we walked along the sidewalk together, the sun sinking beneath the trees. The air was unusually cold for September, but it smelled pleasantly of concord grapes. Noah had smuggled a grape pie from the party, but it was sadly filled with a lilac colored whipped filling.

  “I can’t believe they call this trash grape pie,” Noah said through a mouthful. “Skins and all, nothing can compare with Mrs. Bianco’s pies.”

  I agreed but took another piece all the same.

  We walked all the way to Pete’s Diner. Beside the restaurant was a dilapidated cemetery, and we kids liked to eat our ice cream from Pete’s on its cobblestone wall. Noah and I sat on the wall together in the twilight, resting our feet on a crumbling headstone.

  “C’mon,” Noah said, setting aside the empty pie box. “Let’s do something fun like toilet paper Mr. Hugh’s lawn. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Naw, Noah, I don’t want to get in trouble. I mean – all I wanted to do this evening was take Lindy to the dance. She’s the best and I swear I’ll never get to date her.”

  “Yeah, I bet your top of her dad’s blacklist.”

  I fell onto the grass and looked up at the sky, the stars beginning to twinkle. “I’ve got to do something.” I looked over at the pie box. “Grape pie… Lindy loves grape pies! I just have to get her one, climb up the trellis onto the porch roof, and knock on her window.”

  “It’s past eight o’clock, Romeo – no one’s selling pies.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “The grape festival was last weekend – no one has pies left. And even if they did, they’d be locked up for the tourists who want to miss the noisy festival, just like Mrs. Bianco’s pies.”

  “Let’s go to Mrs. Bianco’s house, then.”

  “That’s what you want to do instead of toilet paper Mr. Hugh’s lawn?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with the dance or toilet paper. I just want to get Lindy a pie.”

  As we walked down the dark sideroad opposite the cemetery, there was an unusual feeling of waywardness that felt both exciting and worrisome. Like everyone else, Mrs. Bianco would not be selling grape pies at eight in the evening on a Thursday. Our plan sounded easy in theory, but when we stood in front of the old house with the screened porch jutting prominently out, it felt like facing down a ghost.

  “Well,” Noah whispered, “You go first.”

  Fortunately, the porch door was unlocked. It swung open on squeaking hinges, revealing the dark interior of the room. I turned on my cellphone’s flashlight and stepped inside. It was cool and airy inside the porch, smelling strongly of grapes and dust. We moved quickly, tiptoeing over the floorboards and opening the refrigerator.

  Nothing was inside. Not a single pie.

  While I looked on in dismay, Noah shrugged, saying, “Welp, let’s go.” He turned around and the next thing I knew, my cellphone landed on the floor with a thud, and Noah swore in the pitch of a six-year-old girl. The light switch was pulled, and old Mrs. Bianco glared at us, her late husband’s antique shotgun in her hands.

  “M-Mrs. Bianco,” I stammered.

  “We were gonna pay,” Noah gasped, his hand automatically going into his pocket for the money.

  She pursed her lips. “What kind of children prank an old woman by breaking in to take and pay for a pie?”

  “It wasn’t a prank,” I said. “I wanted to go our school’s dance with this girl, but her parents wouldn’t let her, so I wanted to bring her a pie, but everything was closed and –”

  Mrs. Bianco held up her hand. “Not another word, young man. I hope you realize that you might very well have wrung the doorbell or, better yet, bought your girlfriend a box of sugar cookies at the grocery store down the road?”

  I swallowed hard. Something in my twisting gut told me that Mrs. Bianco intended on telling our parents… and Lindy.

  “You know, when my husband was boy, he liked playing practical jokes on people,” she announced suddenly. “So much so, one day it got the better of him. He was out in a field picking me a bundle of blue asters when the property owner caught sight of him and went out there and walloped him. Thought it was another one of his pranks. He ran back to my house and gave me those asters, though.”

  A feeling of uncertainty weighed down my stomach. Mrs. Bianco seemed to know this and relished it a little too fondly.

  “What do you say to me making a pie for your girl, and in return, neither of you dare any of your friends to repeat this?”

  What else was there to do but agree?

  Mrs. Bianco had a tiny kitchen, and it smelled strongly of the garlics hanging above her oven. Once the supplies for the pie were laid out, Mrs. Bianco had us measuring out the flour and skinning the grapes in no time. She oversaw us like a hawk, pointing out whenever we licked our fingers or rolled out the crust too thinly.

  It was a relief when the pie was finally baked and cooled.

  “I hope you boys have learned something,” Mrs. Bianco said when the pie had been packaged in a box. “And not the piemaking part.”

  We thanked her and assured her that we had.

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing what that girl thinks of my pie!” she called from the porch as we hurried down the driveway.

  “I hope she realizes I’m never speaking to her or buying another pie from her again,” Noah whispered into my ear, but I wasn’t so sure. I glanced back over my shoulder when we reached the road and saw that Mrs. Bianco was gone from the stoop. The house looked as lonely as it had been when we’d first arrived.

***

  I went directly to the Everly’s Victorian house. Since all was quiet, there were no difficulties climbing up the trellis and onto the roof of the porch. Lindy’s bedroom glowed with warm lamplight, and as I approached, I could see her snuggled in a pink robe with a novel in her hands. I rapped on the sill, and with surprise and joy in her eyes, she flew to the window.

  “I thought you’d be at the dance!” she cried, the dimples on her cheeks more prominent than usual from her enormous smile. “I thought you’d be with Noah.”

  “I did go but – it wasn’t any fun without you.” Her joyful smile melted a little as she blushed, and she took the box I offered her a little shyly. She flipped open the lid and the aroma of freshly baked grape pie filled the air. Out of the box she lifted something I hadn’t realized was inside. A single sky-blue aster.

  “Oh,” Lindy breathed, twirling the flower in front of her smile. “I love it.”