Burning Blue (3 page)

Nicole had always been talked about, but after the attack she was a rock star. And she was
here,
ten feet away from me.

She wore oversized sunglasses that blacked out her eyes and a fair portion of her cheekbones. Her hair hung long over her shoulder, swept to cover the left side of her face. Black turtleneck, black jacket with the collar flipped up. She could have been on the cover of a fashion magazine, except that parts of her fingers were bandaged.

She sat as far away from me as she could. I pretended to be lost in my grimy library copy paperback,
Maximum Ride
, I forget which number in the series. I love sci fi, Daniel X, anything by James Patterson, anything that lets me escape. I had my earbuds in too. I wore them pretty much every time I was outside my apartment. They didn’t connect to anything. The wire just ran into my pocket. But people don’t talk to you so much when you appear to be listening to music. In my peripheral vision, Nicole was faking too. She seemed to be into her phone, except her fingers weren’t moving. Even if she was reading an ebook, she would’ve had to flip her thumb to turn the page. Nothing. And that’s when I saw it, the tear hanging off her chin. She was afraid to let me see her wipe it away, because then I could only conclude she was crying. I went to the watercooler and kept my back to her as I sipped. I took my time drinking to give her what I hoped was enough time to get herself together. Sure enough, when I turned back to my seat, the tear was gone.

About a minute later, Dave Bendix came in. He did a double take on me and said, “Heya Jay, glad you’re back, man.” He grabbed my hand for a palm grip, pulled me up out of my chair and did the bud hug thing. “How come you never called me back? I must’ve reached out to you ten times.”

“I know. I appreciated it.”

“Jay, if you need anything, let me know. I’m serious.”

“Thanks.”

He spun back for Nicole. They whisper-fought for half a minute or so. Nicole kept saying, “I can’t. I can’t do that, David.” Dave exploded with, “Well, that’s just messed up, Nic. Seriously. You know what? Forget it.” His lips were quivering, and his eyes were wet. “I can’t believe you,” he said, and then stormed out.

“So I’m taking the bus home, then?” Nicole said. “Dave, c’mon, it’s pouring.” But he was gone. Nicole dropped her head into her hands.

I didn’t know what to do: Pretend not to see her crying? Get her a cup of water? She’d probably be like, what are you doing, I don’t know you, get away from me.

Schmidt’s door opened and slammed with this girl hustling out, Angela Sammick. She often wore her hair in cat’s ears, lots of piercings, lips, nose, eyebrows, tongue, her speech thick. I knew her, sort of. I nodded hey.

She looked at me like she kind of remembered me, and then remembered
how
she remembered me, from this weird thing we got into together two years before, shortly before I started home-schooling. She hurried away. When she saw Nicole she stopped like she’d stumbled onto a rape in progress. She gulped and said, “Hey, Nicole.”

“Hey,” Nicole said, trying to cover a sob.

After maybe five seconds that felt like five minutes, Angela stopped gawking and headed out.

“Later,” I said.

At the sound of my voice, she looked vaguely embarrassed. The history of our night together had come back to her full force, I’m guessing. “What’d you say?” she said, absently.

“Later. As in, good-bye?”

“Sorry about that, Spaceman,” she said, “I was . . .” She turned for the door and said “Welcome back” as she slipped out.

Before I left the Hollows for home school, pretty much everybody called me Spaceman. I’d gotten used to it back then, like whatever. What freshman doesn’t have a derogatory nickname pinned to him? But now that I was two years older, I don’t know. It stung. I felt even more humiliated since Angela had alluded to my spacing out—my seizures—in front of Nicole Castro. I know that was dumb, the idea that Angela was revealing something new to Nicole, as if Nicole hadn’t heard about my attack at the pep rally. But being trapped in that waiting room with her, and her being reminded that I was the Spaceman who’d pissed himself in front of three thousand people? Not cool.

I really wasn’t ready for this, being back at school, starting over, pretending that everything was great, that I was this happy-go-lucky junior at one of the top five public high schools in the country, my ticket to an Ivy practically punched—until the next time I seized in front of everybody. I was meant to be a hermit. I was cool with this, a life of self-imposed isolation. I really was. I was deciding this was going to be my last day at school when she spoke to me. “Sad or mad?” Nicole whispered. Her hair was swept back a bit more now, and I saw the edge of what must have been a pretty big bandage covering her cheek.

“Huh?” I said. Brilliant comeback. I remembered to take my earbuds out. I put my hand in my jacket pocket and pretended to turn down my nonexistent iPod.

“That look in her eyes?” Nicole said, sniffling. “Was she mad, or sad? I’m gonna go with sad.”

She had Angela Sammick figured out. Angela was definitely lost. Face jewelry looks very cool on some people, but Angela’s piercings looked like they were meant to hurt. This scythe-like thing hooked one of her eyebrows. I don’t know how she didn’t cut her eyelid every time she blinked.

For those few months I was in school, back in freshman fall, Angela and I were in the same comp sci class. I was pretty sure she’d failed that one. She never took notes, never seemed to be listening to the teacher. She was forever biting her fingertips, chewing off bloody hangnails as she stared out the window. Meanwhile I’d be staring at her, as I had nothing else to do. I’d kind of found my calling at the age of ten with the hacking and had taught myself everything in the textbook years before. Some days Angela would come in dressed simply, khaki pants and a blouse, no jewelry. She was really pretty those days, when you could see her face. But most days she’d be in her getup, the lip metal, the jet-black hair, or sometimes it was green or red. She dyed her hair a different color every week. I had no problem with the coloring. I really wasn’t judging her. I just felt bad that she felt the need to pull her hair down to cover her eyes. She was hiding, but at the same time she seemed to need attention. Her clothes were eye-catching. She was small boned to begin with but seemed to be starving herself, and she wanted everybody to know it with her skinny jeans and tight T-shirts. She struck me as the actress who’s constantly trying out for very different parts, never sure of which role she’s supposed to play. I figured she was like me, on meds, not exactly compliant. I’d actually kissed her once a few years earlier. Or she’d kissed me.

She was always hanging around practice, sucking a Blow Pop. The guys, of course, invited her to this party with—I found out at the party—the intention of having her pull the train. I saw it coming and snuck her outside with the intention of walking her home. She was smashed, tackled me onto the hood of this Mercedes sedan, rammed her tongue down my throat. Maybe three seconds later she started to heave, literally almost regurgitated into my mouth. She fell to all fours and barfed all over the lawn, and I was rubbing her back, telling her it’s okay, get it out, whatever stupid stuff you say when somebody pukes, even though you feel like a total loser, because you were just kissing her before she puked, and you could only conclude that you were
THE PUKE TRIGGER
, the tag that would show up under your yearbook picture, right next to
SPACEMAN
. This other girl had seen the whole thing. She said she and Angela lived in the same neighborhood, and she would take her home.

We put Angela into the car, a junker that must have been getting into annual crashes since the 1970s. Angela said she loved me—“love you
so, so much,
Brett”—and kept saying it over and over, even after I told her my name was in fact
Jay.
They were halfway to the corner before I realized it might have been nice if the other girl had asked me if I needed a ride instead of stranding me at a party where all the guys hated me now because I had just screwed up their night, the purpose of which was to screw Angela Sammick. I still had the taste of metal in my mouth, Angela’s tongue stud. Better than puke, though, I guess. Only girl I ever kissed. I mean, I’d gotten hand jobs before, from this chick in my building who was a year older than I was, but when you kiss a girl on the mouth, even if it’s only for three seconds and she pukes after, that’s kind of serious in my book. I know, I’m a loser.

I got back to my
Maximum Ride
, but I could hear Nicole every time she drew breath through her tears, this kind of
slee
sound. It was after 3:30 now, and the door to Schmidt’s office couldn’t open soon enough.

“Sorry about that,” Nicole Castro said.

“About what?” I couldn’t believe this girl was talking to me again. That she actually seemed to want to initiate a conversation.

“Fighting with David like that in front of you. Really rude. I hate when people do that. What’s your name again?”

Again.
Like she’d ever known it in the first place. Why do people act fake? Like I don’t know you’re lying? For some reason I said what was on my birth certificate, “Jameson.” My mother was a
Masterpiece Theatre
junkie back in the day, total anglophile. Did I actually believe an aristocratic-sounding name would impress somebody who lived in a neighborhood where the power lines were underground? “Jay, I mean.” I held back my last name, of course.

She didn’t bother to say her name, first or last, because you would’ve had to be from another high school or maybe even from out of state not to know who she was. After that beauty pageant win and then the acid attack, her face had been all over the news. I was thinking,
What kind of girl does the beauty competition circuit?
It’s not like she was poor, humiliating herself for a chance at college scholarship money like the rest of the girls strutting their bikinis past those ogling judges. She was from Brandywine Heights, the wealthiest part of a very wealthy school district. The real estate taxes her father was paying would have been double the amount of money required to ensconce her in the most expensive boarding school.
He’d gone to St. Paul’s and wanted Nicole to do the same, but Mrs. Castro insisted that Nicole stay home. Whatever, if a rich girl does the pageant circuit, she’s doing it for attention. Pathetic. I had it in my mind that she’d grown up spending four hours a day in front of the mirror, narcissism to the point of solipsism. Then again, the mirror thing was kind of understandable. If I looked as good as she did—or as good as she looked before the attack anyway—I would’ve been staring at myself all the time too, not to mention playing with my perfect breasts.

On top of being a pageant princess, she was VP of the National Honor Society. The tools in NHS wanted her to run the show, but you weren’t allowed to be the leader of more than two things, and she was already tennis captain and junior class president. All these wannabes killing themselves, running around hanging the lamest posters and FB-ing everybody with Like me requests, and Castro wins without even being on the ballot, as a write-in. She was the queen of the Hollows, and here she was deigning to waste a few of her precious words on me, a kid from Valedale?

Valedale was also known as The Pit. It was the one not fabulous section in Brandywine, a narrow valley of older apartment houses between the dumps and the highway that bordered the next school district. If I lived on the other side of my street, I would’ve gone to McKinley, average SAT score 1190, as opposed to the Hollows’ 2030.

“You’re a sophomore, right?” Nicole said.

“Junior,” I said. “Sixteen, not fifteen.”

“Or seventeen,” she said.

“Right.”

“Or eleven or nineteen or a hundred and forty-six.” She nodded slowly and for a little too long. “Yeah, I know you.”

The way she said it, I felt she really did. That she knew me better than I knew me. She was reeling me in, even back then. Behind those dark shades she had the lasers working, cutting through my front, that I was too cool to give a damn about anything. She was peeling back my skin and bones and looking into my heart, splitting it wide for me to see, and what I would soon find there terrified me.

The door opened. Schmidt leaned out. “Ready, Nicole?” Then to me, “My friend, sorry, I clearly forgot to tell you, I had to move you to four o’clock.”

Nicole rushed into Schmidt’s office with her face in her bandaged hands.

“Better make it more like four thirty, Jay,” Schmidt said.

I should have figured it out right there. Nicole’s secret. Looking back, maybe I knew. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it. That she could, that she would. That she did.

From Nicole’s journal:

Thurs, 21 October—

This was my first face-to-face talk with Dr. Schmidt. She suggested I start logging my thoughts to chart the progress of my recovery, as if recovering from this is possible or even necessary.

Me: “You want me to
blog
about this?”

Dr. Schmidt: “No, a diary, just for you.”

Me: “As in Anne Frank.”

DS: “Exactly.”

Me: “Or Sylvia Plath.”

DS: “Let’s shoot for a nicer ending.”

Me: “Virginia Woolf.”

DS: “Just think about it.”

Still, I like Dr. Schmidt. Dr. Nye on the other hand scares me. He’s motionless. That red microphone icon blinking on his iPhone. The angle of his head, looking over his rimless glasses at me. The top edges of the lenses cut his eyes in half, and they look like blue suns on a warped horizon. “Did your father ever hit you?” “Do you think you’re still beautiful?” As if I ever thought I was in the first place. What kind of person asks that?

My face was on fire the whole day. My mind is on fire. My heart. The rage feels good. I only pretended to take my pain meds.

Mom: “You’re sure you took them? Promise?”

Me: “Swear.” Worse liar than she is, and she knows it. Magically the meds appear on the bathroom counter with a glass of cranberry juice. I wonder if she suspects I’m flushing more than pee. I’m sick of feeling numb. I want to be awake again. I was today, this afternoon, for about five minutes. In the waiting room, with Jay. The way he went to get a cup of water, pretending not to see the tear rolling down my cheek. He wanted nothing from me. He only wanted to give me the time I needed to wipe the tear away. To get myself together. He made me smile. It hurt more than crying, wrinkling my mouth up like that. But it was the good hurt, the one that makes me feel alive. Real. Remarkable, that his simple act of kindness triggered a relief from the numbness. It was a forgetting and an awakening at the same time, transitory but deep. Then there’s David.

He keeps telling me this doesn’t change anything, but how can it not? How can anybody look at me without pity, the last thing I need? He keeps saying it. The word. Rests his hand on my heart as he says it. “You’re still beautiful.” He knows he’s lying. What must people see when they look at me? No symmetry. No balance. Only Emma sees the old me. She’s incapable of lying, but for how long? Em, what will I do when you’re gone?

I won’t feel sorry for myself. I don’t. I can keep pretending.