The page was crowded with thousands of comments and videos of Nicole, her pageant appearances, student council speeches, tennis matches, mash-up tributes cut to saccharin music. Angela found one video particularly interesting, a YouTube clip posted Friday night. It played through Mr. Sabbatini’s AP chem page. The post was untitled, but the poster was cryforhelp669, an amateur’s attempt at anonymity: 669 spelled out NOW on a phone keypad. Angela had backtracked the ID to Marisol Wood, the sophomore who confided to Nicole at the tennis club that her parents were splitting up.
Sabbatini, like a lot of teachers at the Hollows, recorded his lectures. He was in front of about two hundred kids in stadium-style seats. This was how they did the lab preps, the AP and regular-track students lumped together before they broke up into smaller groups for the actual experiments. I had placed out of chem during home school. Now I was wishing I hadn’t. I would have been in that lecture hall.
Sabbatini: “The question was, ‘Why does battery acid burn your finger and not the inside of the battery case, which is largely polyvinylchloride?’ Nobody? Fabulous. You’re all destined to succeed brilliantly. People, what is the pH of water? One hand up.
Nicole: “Seven?”
Sabbatini: “Question or statement? And at what temperature? Care to gamble five points on the midterm?”
Nicole: “Seven at seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit.”
Sabbatini sighed, “Correct.” Then, to the class: “What compound makes up most of the human body?”
“Bone,” some dude yelled.
That got a lot of muttered “Oh my god,” and “Idiot.”
Sabbatini: “Genius. Genius.” He slapped his hand on his desk with each word: “What, is, the, body, made of? Go ahead, Ms. Castro.”
Nicole: “Water. About sixty percent of the body’s weight.”
Sabbatini: “So then why does one’s finger burn when one, if one is
Nicole: “The pH scale goes from zero to fourteen. Liquids closer to zero are strongly acidic. Liquids closer to fourteen are bases. Water, the liquid in our skin, is effectively neutral. The battery acid has a really low pH, less than one-”
“Point eight, in fact, Ms. Castro,” Sabbatini barked.
Nicole: “Point eight. Thank you, Dr. Sabbatini. When you combine two liquids, they try to even out their acidity. The farther apart they are in pH, the more heat is given off in the balancing reaction. The result is that it melts. Your skin just fries.”
Sabbatini bent over his SmartDraw pad and sketched out a molecular structure that described the chemical reaction Nicole had just verbalized. The projected diagram was stunningly spiderweb-like, but I’d already ruled out Sabbatini, along with Dr. Schmidt. They had conspired to do no more than get that chem teacher’s guide to Nicole.
Sabbatini believed a lot of questions went unasked because students were afraid of looking dumb in front of their peers. He kept a question box outside his office door. If you didn’t understand something in class, just drop an anonymous note into the box anytime afterward, and Sabbatini would get to it at the beginning of the next class.
Who had asked the question about the battery acid? The camera’s POV was from the back of the lecture hall. I could see little more than the backs of the students’ heads.
I had Angela on my screen in an IM box. I typed: Do we really think this is Marisol Wood or Marisol framed? Let’s put Chrissie Vratos back on the list.
Aye-aye, Captain.
Cryforhelp669. It was almost as if she wanted to be caught. My phone had started vibrating while Angela and I were IM-ing. I checked the text:
from Arachnomorph@unknowable_origin.net:
Hello Jameson and Angela,
The itsy-bitsy spider
climbed up the waterspout.
Down came the rain,
and washed the spider out.
Up came the sun,
and dried up all the rain.
The itsy-bitsy spider
crawled up the spout again.
I have six eyes. They’re all on you.
Angela IM-ed: Did you just get that?
I typed back: Full-court press on Vratos.
All we had to do was connect her to that black Honda Civic, and she was done.
I looked out my window to the fire escape. Manhattan was deep in the distance. The midtown skyscrapers were black fangs. The sun had just cleared the horizon. The heat rising from the oil burner chimneys across the highway distorted and magnified it. It swelled like a tumor jacked up on steroids, burning through a haze so white it glared. The clock said 7:31 a.m. I’d been awake sixty-four of the last seventy-two hours.
My father peeked into my room. “You want a ride?”
“I’m suspended, remember?”
“Can you go food shopping, then?” He shook his head and left for work.
I checked his room for anything that might give me a hint of what he was doing while he was AWOL those two times in Marathon, New Jersey. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.
Nicole called. She wanted to hang out but wasn’t allowed out of the house.
This old lady was having a hard time getting onto the bus. I helped her. She said, “Thank you, miss,” told me I had lovely hair and my, wasn’t I quite tall for a girl.
The security guard was parked in front of Nicole’s house. Mrs. Castro met me at the door. “Nicole’s in the shower. I was worried about you.” She took me back to her studio and showed me her paintings. Abstract art isn’t exactly my thing, but as far as it went, I thought she was awesome. You kind of had to stare at it for a while, though, to figure out what she was painting; looked like a doe in autumn woods. I wasn’t sure I was right about that until she said, “They come right up to the back door at sunset. Did you get your father to sign my book?”
“I forgot to bring it,” I said.
Nicole came in. “You look horrible,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. She looked a little pale herself.
“You do look a little peaked, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said. She had fixed us some tea and handed me a cup. She closed the door behind her to leave Nicole and me alone.
The tea tasted great, then suddenly bitter, metallic. “Perugina or Hershey’s?” I said. “On your sleeve.” Nicole had a dot of dried chocolate stain on her sweatshirt. A squiggle of pink lightning arced across the studio, and that’s the last thing I remember.
She was brushing my hair back when I woke. I was on the studio couch. I sat up fast.
“Did I-”
“Relax. You just dropped into a daze, it seemed.”
I brushed my hand over my crotch. I was wet. I looked down. The one day I had to wear non-dark jeans. They were dark now all right, just in one spot. I grabbed my backpack and board and made for the front door. Nicole begged me to stay. “At least until you’re not bumping into walls, Jay. Please? You’re practically staggering.”
Her mother came at me with a folded wet towel. I slipped past her, out the side door, into the Castros’ yard. Sylvia blocked Nicole, yelling at her in Spanish that she wasn’t allowed to leave the house.
I was too dizzy to ride my board, and it had started drizzling again. I half jogged, half stumbled into the
