Burning Blue

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