Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

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.”

Mom (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. .”

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.

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 reward.” 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.