Burning Blue Read online

  Burning Blue

  Paul Griffin

  Paul Griffin

  Burning Blue

  Sent the night before the attack:

  Subject: Why?

  Date: Wednesday, September 08, 11:19 PM

  To: Assistant Principal Nadine Marks

  N.Marks@brandywine_hollows_hs.nj.edu

  From: Arachnomorph@unknowable_origin.net

  Because I’ll never have it.

  Because I’ll never be it.

  Because after a little test run, I find that I like the sound.

  The hissing.

  She will burn.

  ONE

  I was at the cemetery when it happened. I didn’t even know Nicole at the time. Well, I knew of her. Everybody did. She’d won a high-profile beauty competition the year before, the under-sixteen division. She had been on the front page of a lot of newspapers. People in the pageant world were saying she was sure to win Miss New Jersey. I had seen her in the halls and hungered for her from afar like every other dude at the Hollows, but we hadn’t talked. Not yet. Still, that afternoon, that moment, when that first molecule pierced her skin, was the beginning of our connection, one that led me into a darkness that was as twisted as it was sublime.

  The water brought us together. The storm. The sky was horrific, a dark, dirty green. According to maps.google, Pinemont Cemetery and Brandywine Hollows High School are 4.11 miles apart, but Nicole and I were bound by the rain. It was something that day, so strange, too hard to be liquid, too cold for the second Thursday of September. It smashed my mother’s gravestone, a nothing-special marker the size of a high-tops shoebox. The first burst of downpour ricocheted upward at my eyes and stung my face like a sucker punch. I’d cut my last two classes to clock an extra hour on my shift card after my boss texted that a lot of people had called in sick. I often stopped by the cemetery on my way to work. I loved the quiet, but with that rain I didn’t linger. I was chasing down the bus, dodging the spray the wheels drew from a lake-like puddle the exact moment Nicole was hit.

  She was with Dave Bendix, our wrestling team captain and thought by many, me included, to be one of the nicest guys in school. He was definitely the most popular. This was just before last period. They were messing around in a cutout in the lockers past the C-wing water fountain, by the windows that overlooked the creek. They had been together maybe five months. Nicole would tell me later that up to this point Dave was a sweetheart and a total gent, but that afternoon he was jacked up on too many Red Bulls or whatever, desperate. He wouldn’t let her go. He kept saying, “One last kiss.” The first bell had rung, and the last few stragglers were moping toward their classes.

  Dave was playing safecracker, circling Nicole’s belly button with his fingertips. She had to get to AP chem. Mr. Sabbatini, chairman of our science program, was looking for a reason to ruin her. He’d dreamed of being the next big pharm sellout and ended up at the Hollows. The man reeked of bitterness and schnapps. He loved to knock down anybody who looked like she was going to one-up him. You’re late to his class, you get docked in a very big way: thirty points off the midterm. Nicole had already been late once, thanks to another impromptu make-out session with Dave.

  The second bell rang. The hallway was empty. Nicole wriggled out of Dave’s hug and ran for the circle that connects A, B, and C wings.

  Whatever your concept of gorgeous, Nicole Castro trumped it. Tall, thin but not too, round in all the right places, long chestnut hair. More than that?

  Her face.

  Her lips, full, pouty, except back then she was always smiling. High cheekbones. No need for makeup, not a blemish to cover. It was unassailable, her splendor. Almost unassailable.

  She hooked left for B-wing. She turned back briefly to airmail a kiss off the tip of her index finger to Dave, but he wasn’t there anymore. She sagged for a second and then spun away for Mr. Sabbatini’s class. She was halfway into her turn when it happened. Life as she knew it: gone. Took maybe half a second.

  The last thing she saw was the squirt bottle coming up toward her face. A squeeze machine wrapped in orange foam, the lightning bolt.

  Sent moments after the attack:

  Subject: The new Nicole

  Date: Thursday, September 9, 2:13 PM

  To: Assistant Principal Nadine Marks

  N.Marks@brandywine_hollows_hs.nj.edu

  From: Arachnomorph@unknowable_origin.net

  Now she’s beautiful.

  The first person to hear her scream was Dave Bendix. Not that Nicole could see him with her eyes clamped shut. When one gets hit, the other reflexively closes down to protect what’s left of your vision. Trying to wipe off the acid made the situation worse. She burned her hands. Interestingly, Dave had the presence of mind not to touch Nicole, even before she stopped screaming long enough to weep, “It burns!”

  I don’t know that I would have been that smart. I probably would have been like most everybody else in that situation. You find somebody writhing on the floor, covering her face and screaming, you instinctively try to peel her hands away to see what the problem is. Not Dave, though. He told Nicole to stop rubbing her eye, that she was only going to spread the burn.

  From what I heard, the classrooms emptied into the halls. Everybody had to see what all the screaming was about. Nicole managed to get out that someone had squirted something into her face. Everybody was asking “Who?” Only Mr. Sager, one of our custodians, realized that right now the primary question was “What? What did he squirt?”

  Nicole didn’t know, but whatever it was, it was still burning. She begged, “Please, get it off, I can’t see.”

  Mr. Sager wrapped his hand in a rag towel and pried away Nicole’s hands. He told a girl with a water bottle to douse the burn. Everybody with a water bottle did the same. Nicole couldn’t breathe. The water filled her mouth and throat. She was choking on it when Mr. Sager told them to stop. In his statement to the police, Mr. Sager reported that Dave Bendix slid down the wall and said, “I’m sorry, Nic. I’m so sorry.”

  TWO

  The following is from Nicole’s journal:

  The prep room is cold green curtains. A window tinted violet, the color of my eyes, what’s left of them.

  “Multiple grafts,” the surgeon says. “A degree of paralysis is certain, Nicole. But you were fortunate.”

  “Fortunate?” Mom says.

  “The rule of nines. We use it to describe burn coverage. The front of each leg is nine percent of your skin’s total surface area. Same with the back. The front of your torso: eighteen percent, the back too. Each arm is nine percent. And then your head is nine percent. You’ve burned somewhere between a quarter and a third of the left side of your face.”

  Mom: “She didn’t burn anything, Doctor.”

  Doc: “I’m just saying that if you break it down, the burn covers less than one percent of her body.”

  Mom: “It was her face. It was Nicole.”

  Doc: “It could have been much worse.”

  Mom: “Her face. Can you get her back to-”

  Doc cuts her off: “No. You can’t think that way. This is a life-altering event.”

  Me: “The other one percent?”

  Doc: “Excuse me?”

  Me: “The rule of nines. If you add up all those numbers, the body parts, you get ninety-nine percent. What’s the other one percent?”

  Doc: “That’s what we use to describe the males’ private parts.”

  Me: “One percent, huh? I’m sure they’d be thrilled.”

  Doc: “A sense of humor is important, Nicole. You’re doing great.”

  Me: “The girls get nothing. The boys get the extra point. They’re complete at one hundred percent. That’s why women are stronger: We live with omission.”

  Mo
m (sobbing): “Can’t you give her more morphine?”

  Doc: “The left side of your face. I’m hopeful you’ll still be able to blink. If you can’t, we’ll give you drops to keep your eye lubricated. If you can’t cry, you’ll go blind.”

  Me: “I’m sure I can cry, Doctor.” I’m crying all right. “I can’t see out of that eye anyway. I can’t see. I can’t see.” It’s blinding my rage!

  Mom: “Don’t touch it, Nicole. Oh my god. Oh my baby.”

  Me: “What does it look like, Mom? How bad is it? Please. Tell me.”

  The doctor rolls me onto my side. With two tugs on the strings he unties my hospital gown to expose my left leg, and then he draws lines into the back of my hip with something.

  Me: “Is that your fingernail? What are you doing?”

  Doc: “I’m surveying the donor site, Nicole.”

  Me: “Please. No.”

  Doc: “I know this is horrible for you. Don’t try to look, Nicole. If you have to, look at your mother. That’s right, close your eye and hold Mom’s hand. Hold it tight.”

  Close your eye, as in one.

  “My other eye,” I say. “Is it-”

  Mom cuts me off: “Hush now, sweetie. It’ll be all right.” Worst liar ever.

  The surgeon’s hands are cold and way too soft on my hip. I feel tapping and tugging and a vague sense my skin is being stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity. A minute later they’re wheeling me down the hall for the surgery, the first of several, I’m told. The doors to the OR swing in. I see through a slit eyelid a nurse is checking the equipment. The scalpel flash reflects in the glass of one of the implement cabinets. Mom gasps. She nearly collapses as the OR doors swing shut on her.

  Doc: “Do you like this music, Nicole?”

  I didn’t notice any music was playing. It’s New Age, waves crashing, whale calls. “Got any Eminem?” I say.

  Doc: “Atta girl.”

  My attempt to make the doctor laugh surprises me as much as it does him. Where is this bravery coming from? I feel bolder now that Mom isn’t weeping over me. Or maybe I feel worse. The situation is absurd. Have I really burned my face?

  Anesthesiologist: “We’re ready to go.”

  Surgeon: “Beautiful.”

  That word.

  My first memories, going back to when I was four years old, maybe even three.

  Beautiful.

  My identity.

  Oh Nicole, you’re simply beautiful.

  Not the real me.

  Sixth-grade yearbook: MOST BEAUTIFUL: NICOLE CASTRO.

  The fake me.

  Ridiculous, how beautiful you are-just beautiful.

  Just? Nothing else?

  Isn’t she just the most beautiful thing?

  A thing.

  What will it be like, not being the word anymore?

  The mask goes over my mouth. Dad, where are you? I’m afraid of the dark.

  Anesthesiologist: “Count backward from one hundred, Nicole.”

  “One hundred, ninety-nuh. .”

  THREE

  The police brought Dave Bendix in for questioning. His father was an engineer with claims to numerous patents, and he refused to let Dave be interviewed without lawyers present. They rolled up to the precinct in a chauffeured town car. The detectives didn’t have any evidence, or any that pointed to Dave.

  They found the squirt bottle in the stairwell with traces of latex glove dust, no fingerprints. The bottle was new technology, coated on the inside with a flexible glass weave that was resistant to extreme heat, cold and in this case battery acid. This sports drink company that was trying to compete with Gatorade had developed the bottle. Volta-Shock was their name. They made a big deal about the bottle back in my freshman year, giving one to every athlete in school. The top athletes got hoodies too, Day-Glo orange with double helix lightning bolts on the sleeves. Dave was given one of those.

  The vast majority of Hollows students respected Dave Bendix not just because he was a remarkable competitor but also because he had founded an anti-bullying support group. A few cynics said Dave was doing ZERO TOLERANCE FOR DOMINANCE to look great to the Harvard admissions officers, but he was a shoo-in anyway. His father and grandfather were Crimson, and even if they hadn’t gone there, Dave was top ten of our class academically. More than that, I had proof that he was sincere in his efforts to quash bullying.

  I knew Dave from before I quit wrestling freshman year. I was definitely an outsider, not a geek but a loner by choice. When you’re a freshman, it doesn’t matter how you see yourself. The upperclassmen on the team are going to give you hell either way, especially when you beat one of them in a scrimmage the first day of practice. His name was Richard Kerns. He wore his hair in a Mohawk dyed bloodred. The way he was looking at me, licking his lips like I was puff pastry, I was pretty sure he was going to honor his word when he promised he was going to break both my arms. My fear must have provoked a serious self-defense adrenaline surge, because I ended up pinning him. Just headlocked him, flipped him pretty hard, knocked the wind out of him. After practice the guys stuffed up the sink and held my head under water, until Dave came in. He shoved everybody back, said anybody who touched me would have to deal with him.

  Dave was All-State since freshman year, 195 lb. weight class, and he benched 385. Those same few who doubted his sincerity about his anti-bullying efforts said he was shooting anabolic steroids. Back two years ago, when I was still on the team, I was 152 lb. class and three inches taller than Dave. Figure if I was just over six one back then, that made Dave a five foot ten killing machine who was, if the rumors were true, willing to do anything to win, including possibly giving himself steroid-induced testicular cancer, while I was pretty much a tall skinny newbie who was only going all fours in the goofy suit because his old man forced him to do an after-school activity. Wrestling was what my dad had done, so you bet it was good enough for me too. Those mats stank of anger. A desperate fear of letting your parents down, of not getting recruited by some overpriced country club that passed for college, Dartmouth or wherever.

  As grateful as I was for Dave’s protection, he scared me. When he was wrestling, he had this look, the intense stare of somebody who wants to beat you, sure, but more than that he wants to eat you, caveman style.

  The detectives interviewed him for half an hour, and then they let him go. Dave was a weak pick on motive. They were looking for somebody who hated Nicole, not somebody who was trying to bone her.

  FOUR

  While Nicole was in surgery and Dave Bendix at the police station, I was home in my dumpy little bedroom, doing my thing, remotely scanning cruel people’s phones and computers, looking for nastiness to leak. I considered this my community service. And there must have been some other reason. Oh yeah, it was fun.

  I had just hacked Chrissie Vratos’s iPhone and landed on a trove of hate gossip, a long string of texts that began with Is it just me or is diana a bitch? and ended with Somebody should blow her boyfriend and post the video on her fb. I anonymously posted the plot not just on Diana’s page but also her boyfriend’s and then Chrissie’s and her co-conspirators’ too. For the kill shot, I posted it and Crew Chrissie with a blinking red alert on the Brandywine Hollows HS community page, which the teachers and administrators checked all the time. That was when I saw the news about Nicole Castro.

  Someone had set up a well-wishers page. Not quite nine hours after the attack, the page was filled with more than a thousand comments, and not just from the BHHS community. Somebody posted a link to a news clip. I clicked to a video of Mr. and Mrs. Castro outside the hospital. Mr. Castro had to be president of some company or other, a young general in a Wall Street suit, conservative haircut, ramrod posture. He glared out at the gathering crowd with fierce blue eyes. Mrs. Castro I couldn’t see so well. The reporters were sticking microphones in her face. Her head was down. Her shoulders shook. “If anybody has any information about this, please, please come forward. We’re offering a fifty-thousand-dollar re
ward.” When Mr. Castro tried to comfort her with an arm over her shoulder, she leaned away and wove through the crowd, back into the hospital.

  Like I said, I was on my way to work when it happened. My boss made us leave our phones in the lockers, and this was the first I was hearing about the attack. I felt bad for Nicole, but not as terrible as I would have felt if it had happened to somebody nice or at least not a rich gorgeous snob. I was definitely freaked, though, that it happened to somebody I knew. Not knew. People like Nicole Castro didn’t know loners like me. But somebody who went to my school. Somebody I had seen around. Would see around.

  Except I didn’t see her. She didn’t come back to school, not at first, and not for classes. Her mother got clearance to home-school, something I knew a bit about. She hired a team of high-priced private tutors, something I did not. Not only was the one-time golden girl working with three PhD candidates, she was seeing two shrinks. The primary therapist had been hired by Nicole’s mother and paid for by Nicole’s father at nine hundred dollars an hour, which is what it costs to have a psychiatrist make house calls. Julian Nye was a strange dude. That was Nicole’s perception. Mine too. While I never met him, I had the opportunity to see him in action-see him by proxy rather, but I’ll get to that, to him, later.

  The secondary therapist was the school psychologist, Mrs. Schmidt. She had been charged with ensuring Nicole Castro’s eventual return to the Hollows and her transition back to normalcy-whatever that could be with half your face burned away-went smoothly. I was seeing Schmidt too, about this messed-up thing that happened not quite two years earlier.

  My seizures have no pattern. Once I went two years without an attack. And then there was the time I had three in a week, and the third one almost killed me. Status epilepticus. The seizure won’t stop until you’re injected with benzodiazepines. I’ve gotten used to it, walking around as if I have a time bomb glued to my back, except the bomb maker forgot to tell me when the thing is supposed to go off. The vast majority of my attacks are called absence seizures. Everything fades. I’m sleeping with my eyes open. People tell me I look like I’m spacing out. Sometimes I twitch the slightest bit or shiver. Absence seizures are embarrassing when the teacher calls you to the board to do a trig proof, and you’re just sitting there because you don’t hear her saying “Jay? Jay? Jay, are you all right?” or your classmates’ whispering, “Guess Sbarro’s is closed.” This is why I don’t go out of my way to let anybody know my last name. People have a habit of getting goofy with me: “Nazzaro? As in rhymes with Sbarro?” “Exactly, as in that’s about as funny as me kicking your ass.” Not that I would. I just act tough. You have to; otherwise you get your ass kicked. Anyway, the absence seizures aren’t always noticeable. Then there’s the other kind of seizure, the really bad one, where I fall down and convulse. They don’t come along very often, but when they do, they wipe me out.