Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

Shane Puglisi’s LinkedIn profile said he was a freelance photojournalist. His Twitter profile picture was a shot of a rat sitting atop a cube of cheese, its legs crossed. I could have stopped there, reasonably sure that Puglisi, while a low-life sleaze, wasn’t after Nicole Castro, not to throw acid at her anyway. But I didn’t stop there. My fingers seemed to hammer the keyboard of their own will. I dipped into Puglisi’s bank account.

He’d wired money to one Brian Meyers, whose Facebook profile picture was a direct match to the guy I’d seen hitting on Nicole in CVS. All of this made me feel, if not better, then somewhat relieved, at least about Puglisi and Meyers. They had run a scam to get a shot of Nicole and auction it off to the highest bidder, splitting the take, end of story. Then again, not quite. One of the wire transfers in Puglisi’s account traced back to The New Jersey Clarion .

I found this more disturbing than surprising. Like every other newspaper desperate to stay in business, the Clarion had a “soft news” section, and Brandywine was almost exclusively the Clarion ’s beat. But the paper paid my father’s salary and our rent. We were getting by and in a sense getting over by taking money from a company that chased down people who were dealing with any number of miseries, including losing half your face to an acid attack. I can’t say that it was this sense of guilt, though, that had my fingers itching to hammer my keyboard for some more digging-not exclusively.

How would my mother have reacted to my stepping away from this girl who was clearly in pain when I had a skill set that might be of help in catching the psychopath who had ruined her life? Would she think I was crazy for wanting to help Nicole, or would she be proud of me? What would Mom have done if I had been attacked instead of Nicole? That one was easy: exactly what Mrs. Castro was doing, putting her life on hold to help her child.

I’d lost her almost six years earlier. The loss was at times, particularly in reminiscences that for some reason came strongest at twilight, as stunning as it was the day she died. She was smiling at me by way of the visor shade mirror. She’d flipped it down to block out the high beams of the oncoming truck. The last thing she said to me was, “Jay-Jay, do you know what we’re going to do tomorrow?” And that was it.

At the very least, she would want me to make sure the police were trying to catch Nicole’s attacker. After that, I would stop my prying-I swore this to myself. I tapped into an e-string that linked Brandywine Hollows High School to the police. Sneaking into Mrs. Marks’s computer was a joke. Her password was marksy123. Why bother? I found the two emails the acid thrower sent her, the first coming the night before the attack, the second moments after. Marks had forwarded the emails to the Division of Detectives, nobody specific, just info@. So now I knew where the emails ended up, but where had they come from?

I backtracked them to what we hacktivists call a zero-map, a changing series of relay servers that were part of the Conficker bot net. The emails had ricocheted off of a thousand drives before they landed in Marks’s in-box. They were perfectly untraceable. I studied the first email: “after a little test run, I find that I like the sound.”

Had the acid thrower burned an animal? I’d read that serial killers often started out with rodents, then cats, dogs, moving their way up to humans. Was there such a thing as a serial acid thrower? Schmidt said no, but I wasn’t so sure. The bigger question for me at the moment was: Now that I have these emails, what should I do with them?

From Nicole’s journal:

Thurs, 21 Oct-

Emma tried so hard to make me laugh when I visited her today, but underneath the cheerfulness she seemed so weary of it all, the pretending that everything is going to be all right. The bags under her eyes. The bruises on her arms from all the IVs. I don’t know how she knows not to do it, but she never asks me who I think burned me.

After that little bit of peacefulness with Emma: another horrendous Nye session. I told him I didn’t want to take the Xanax, that the stuff is too strong. He might as well have rolled his eyes as he said, “What do you think: Is it okay to be happy?”

He means numb. Dr. Schmidt tells me it’s okay to feel the pain. To face it.

After Nye left, David came over.

We whisper-fought in the living room while Mom made hot chocolate for us.

David: “I was driving all over Brandywine looking for you.”

Me: “You ditched me.”

D: “I did not.”

Me: “You said, ‘Well, that’s just messed up, Nic. Seriously. I can’t believe you. You know what? Forget it.’”

D: “That doesn’t mean I wasn’t driving you home. How did you get home, by the way?”

Me: “Walked.”

D: “Alone?”

Me: “Save it. Mom already gave me hell about it.”

D: “Okay. Look, I’m sorry. I am.” And then he asked me about it again.

I’m not lying for him.

I told him to leave. He tried to kiss me, and I gave him my cheek, the wrong one, by mistake. He went into the kitchen and said good-bye to Mom. He was teary as he left. I was too. Mom plunked next to me on the couch. We sipped hot chocolate, and then she held out her hand, the pills in her palm. I took the antibiotic but passed on the Xanax. I needed to be able to think clearly. Jay Nazzaro. What was it about him that made me act like a complete idiot, practically begging him to walk me home even after he lied about following me into CVS?

I headed upstairs to my bathroom.

They’re all lined up so neatly on the bathroom counter: the vacuum-packed dressings coated with topical pain reliever, the latex-free surgical tape, the hydrogen peroxide, the prescription-grade antibiotic gel.

The bandage change. The horror movie I’m too terrified to watch. The freak show I can’t turn away from. Who is that girl sitting in front of my bathroom mirror? The FedEx delivery guy used to come right up to the door with that warm smile, and now he backs away. Not in his movement, not in his smile, but in his eyes. He’s afraid to look at me. At the same time he’s afraid not to look at me, and he just ignores the fact that half my face is bandaged and stares really, really hard into my good eye. Not asking what happened is conceding that what happened is cataclysmic.

How will I do college interviews now, job interviews? For the rest of my life, do I just not acknowledge what happened? They’ll ask me to tell them about some of the formative experiences in my life. If I acknowledge It, will they think I’m asking for pity? If I don’t acknowledge It, will they think I’m just not able to confront difficulty, challenge, hurdles, this absolute nightmare?

This is the worst part of the bandage change: too much time to think. No, it’s the quiet. Nine months to the day after Dad left, and I still hear it. The yelling, the nastiness, the echoes trapped in the walls. Mom begs him to tell her how long it has been since he stopped loving her. The accusations. His denials. His growing exasperation with her cutting him off. Then, “To hell with it.” The stairs groan as he stomps toward the master suite. The suitcase clumps to the floor. I’m listening to all this from the tub, the water hotter than I can stand it, to waylay the cramps snaking into my calves after two brutal tennis matches that day. I believed him. He’s not the type to cheat. Too classy, too proper to have a girlfriend on the side. To betray his wife, his daughter. To lie.

The lie.

The stranger in the bathroom mirror.

Or is she the truth? The real me, hiding just beneath the gauze?

“Mom? Mom, please.”