Paul Griffin: Burning Blue

Like I said, I was on my way to work when it happened. My boss made us leave our phones in the lockers, and this was the first I was hearing about the attack. I felt bad for Nicole, but not as terrible as I would have felt if it had happened to somebody nice or at least not a rich gorgeous snob. I was definitely freaked, though, that it happened to somebody I knew. Not knew. People like Nicole Castro didn’t know loners like me. But somebody who went to my school. Somebody I had seen around. Would see around.

Except I didn’t see her. She didn’t come back to school, not at first, and not for classes. Her mother got clearance to home-school, something I knew a bit about. She hired a team of high-priced private tutors, something I did not. Not only was the one-time golden girl working with three PhD candidates, she was seeing two shrinks. The primary therapist had been hired by Nicole’s mother and paid for by Nicole’s father at nine hundred dollars an hour, which is what it costs to have a psychiatrist make house calls. Julian Nye was a strange dude. That was Nicole’s perception. Mine too. While I never met him, I had the opportunity to see him in action-see him by proxy rather, but I’ll get to that, to him, later.

The secondary therapist was the school psychologist, Mrs. Schmidt. She had been charged with ensuring Nicole Castro’s eventual return to the Hollows and her transition back to normalcy-whatever that could be with half your face burned away-went smoothly. I was seeing Schmidt too, about this messed-up thing that happened not quite two years earlier.

My seizures have no pattern. Once I went two years without an attack. And then there was the time I had three in a week, and the third one almost killed me. Status epilepticus. The seizure won’t stop until you’re injected with benzodiazepines. I’ve gotten used to it, walking around as if I have a time bomb glued to my back, except the bomb maker forgot to tell me when the thing is supposed to go off. The vast majority of my attacks are called absence seizures. Everything fades. I’m sleeping with my eyes open. People tell me I look like I’m spacing out. Sometimes I twitch the slightest bit or shiver. Absence seizures are embarrassing when the teacher calls you to the board to do a trig proof, and you’re just sitting there because you don’t hear her saying “Jay? Jay? Jay, are you all right?” or your classmates’ whispering, “Guess Sbarro’s is closed.” This is why I don’t go out of my way to let anybody know my last name. People have a habit of getting goofy with me: “Naz zar o? As in rhymes with S bar ro?” “Ex act ly, as in that’s about as funny as me kicking your ass.” Not that I would. I just act tough. You have to; otherwise you get your ass kicked. Anyway, the absence seizures aren’t always noticeable. Then there’s the other kind of seizure, the really bad one, where I fall down and convulse. They don’t come along very often, but when they do, they wipe me out.

Maybe twenty seconds or so before the seizure I slip into this thing called an aura. Everything radiates a very peculiar light. It’s either soft or smoldering, I’m never sure which. The world slows down and stretches out as if I’m looking through a fish-eye lens or sometimes a kaleidoscope, everything hyper-colorful. Lightning arcs. Sometimes it’s scary, but other times it’s intoxicating. I forget I’m about to crash until this dark hole appears and starts sucking everything into it, and then I’m into the nothingness, a painless mini-death.

I wake up not remembering how long I was gone or what happened while I was out, part of my life erased. Every once in a while, when I come back, I’m not where I was when the aura started. Back when I was twelve, I was in bed reading, and the lights flickered, except they didn’t. Pink lightning wiggled across the ceiling, and everything faded. When I came back I was on the fire escape with a saltshaker in my hand. I might have tripled down on my meds that day. When I forget the last time I popped the tablet, everything gets messed up, which is why it’s easier not to take the medication at all sometimes. My prescription is one of the newer anticonvulsants out there, still in the experimental stage-read: free, the only reason I’m on it. My father and I have the worst health insurance. The meds might have worked if I dosed them the way I was supposed to, but they made me feel like I was packed in cotton.

I get a little panicky when people are looking at me. Like in front of a crowd. At least that’s what provoked the attack I was seeing Schmidt about. It happened December of freshman year, in the middle of a pep rally. We were going to the state championships, and the whole school was in the gym to cheer us on. The coach called us out to center court individually. This was my first year wrestling. I knew three moves and would have sucked except for the fact that I’m naturally wiry. My father was a strong dude before he decided to throw in the towel and become obese, three manicottis shy of a life-ending coronary. Basically my strategy was don’t get my neck broken, don’t try to kill anybody either. Just get by. About midway through my jog out to center court, lightning flashed. The rest is a blank, or would have been if not for the fact that everyone with an iPhone clipped me. I was a Hollows Facebook phenomenon for a week until Mrs. Marks, our assistant principal, said anybody caught circulating the video would be suspended.

I still have it on my laptop. I look like I’m doing the backstroke in the middle of the gym floor and a widening puddle of urine. I get really thirsty when I’m nervous, and I’d drunk the bulk of a two-liter Coke before the run-out. I hadn’t been taking my meds, because as I said they just make me feel a little whack sometimes. More than that, when I go long stretches without a seizure, I get to thinking maybe I’m cured.

It flipped me out, knowing I lost control of myself with the entire school watching. Most people were cool about it, but more than a couple were not, and I begged my father to let me home-school for the rest of the year and then the year after. He relented on the condition I see the good Mrs. Schmidt once a week. She was free too, and the old man couldn’t pass that up. And then this past summer, Schmidt decided-I’m sorry, we decided-it was time for me to go back to the Hollows for junior year, college prep, whatever. So the third Thursday of October, the 21st, six weeks after the acid attack on Nicole Castro, I was in the school psychologist’s waiting room, a little early for my 3:30 with Schmidt, and in walked, yes, Nicole Castro.

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.