Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

DAVE:You really think you can play me like this?

ANGELA:This isn’t playing. This is a promise: I’ll throw you to them.

DAVE:You have no proof I so much as held as your hand. And as for the attack? Yeah, I saw you burn her, you sick bitch. But you can’t prove that either.

ANGELA:I’m recording this, Dave.

DAVE:Are you serious? Turn it off, Angela.

ANGELA:If you don’t take your hand out of my pocket, I’ll stab it!

DAVE:Turn it off!

ANGELA:I’m relaying it real time to my cloud account anyway!

Untitled.aiff, from the day Angela was arrested:

ANGELA:I’m being followed.

DAVE:Shit.

ANGELA:I’m not going to make it. The plane doesn’t leave for another half hour.

DAVE:Are you recording this?

ANGELA:No, I swear.

DAVE:Just keep quiet. Do the sentence. It’ll probably be like three years max. After, I’ll move you up to Cambridge. Stick to the plan, Angela, and we’ll be able to be together. We’ll wait a few years and then we’ll-

ANGELA:I have to nuke this phone. They’re like a couple hundred yards away. I love you. . Say it back, Dave.

DAVE:I love you.

ANGELA:So convincing. You have three years to make yourself mean that. You better be there when I get out.

Barrone had told my father that Dave was under house arrest. The DA initially threatened an attempted murder charge for what went down in the SUV with Kerns and me, but Dave’s lawyers were too good to let that stick. They were negotiating final terms for a plea to assault. Dave probably wouldn’t do more than eighteen months home confinement with probation after. Same with Rick Kerns. But Harvard wasn’t about to let either one of them trash its rep, and Kerns would never wrestle again, not with that shattered shoulder. Angela would pay the biggest price: No way Dave would be there for her when she got out. Not that I thought he’d have been there anyway.

I clicked BurningBlue.doc, desperate for anything that would point to the person who hired Angela to do the hit. It began with a journal entry: What day is it? What night? I’m burning, burning, burning blue. -NC, 10/28

That was when I knew for sure. Just to be even more certain, I wormed a line into GBAM’s profile on Cutter’s Way. The registration tracked back not to Angela’s email but to Nicole’s.

The supposed cat scratch on her arm. The long-sleeved hoodies. Nicole really was mutilating herself after all. Could Chrissie Vratos have been right? Did Nicole hire Angela to burn her? Whether she in effect burned herself or not, Nicole Castro was definitely cutting. She needed help. Her therapists needed to know. Did they?

I scanned BurningBlue.doc. Angela had compiled a series of Nicole’s journal entries with lines highlighted here and there. If you could, would you read the diary of the person you were in love with? Or do you love them enough to trust them?

I couldn’t find anything in the document that suggested anybody but Nicole and her Cutter’s Way friends knew about her cutting. Angela had hacked audio files too, of Nicole’s sessions with Dr. Julian Nye. I had to listen to them. I had to.

Nicole and Nye Oct19.aiff:

NYE:I’d like to offer you as a case study at my next Princeton lecture.

NICOLE:“Offer me”? No thanks, really.

NYE:You’re doing remarkably well, considering the circumstances. My students would have many questions for you. You could help them a great deal-help them help others.

NICOLE:You’re saying you want me live? As in you want me to be online with them?

NYE:I want you to come to the lecture.

NICOLE:Are you insane?

NYE:I don’t think so. You would be in shadow. They would know who you are, of course, but they wouldn’t see your face, if that would make you feel more comfortable.”

NICOLE:Comfortable? Seriously, Julian? I can’t be up in front of people, even in shadow. Let me have that much at least.

NYE:Have what?

NICOLE:The dark. Total dark.

Nothing. They didn’t know-Nye, Schmidt, Mrs. Castro. I had to get Nicole help. Before I did that, I had to confront her about it. She would never forgive me if I went behind her back and ratted her out to her mother. She might never forgive me anyway. She’d wonder for all of two seconds how I’d found out about the cutting, and then she’d think I was hacking her. I’d promised her I never would. Technically I wasn’t. Technically I was merely checking out Angela’s hack. Technically Nicole wouldn’t give a damn how I’d gotten the information. Either way, I was invading her privacy. She would never speak to me again. But I had to out her, even if that meant losing her.

I called her, inviting myself over for dinner. “Mom’s making dumplings,” she said. She sounded better. Actually, she sounded good, maybe even great. I’d spent a lot of time with her the last three weeks, and this was the happiest I’d ever heard her. She sounded playful. “Get on over here, boy.” I could only think she was on a new prescription, and that made me even sadder. I grabbed my backpack and board and tapped my father’s foot.

“Uh?” he said, his eyes still closed.

“Heading over to Nicole’s for dinner.”

No response.

“Dad?”

He snored. I taped a note to the TV. I was about to go when the blank spot on the living room wall caught my eye. The place where the painting used to hang, the one my father hocked for my bail. My memory of it sharpened. It was almost the exact picture I found when I broke into Angela’s house, the half-photo/half-sketch of Nicole sitting in front of a mirror, half her face covered with red ink. The one Angela had noted with sparkly glow pen in the corner of the sketch with that GBAM matrix or chat room name or whatever it was.

My father had a lot of artist’s prints, limited edition copies approved and signed by the artist of the masterwork they emulated. Which meant the original was likely hanging in a museum someplace. I had seen the original painting, the inspiration for my father’s print and Angela’s sketch, and I was pretty sure I’d seen it recently-very recently-but I couldn’t remember where. Somehow that painting connected Angela, Nicole and my father.

Sylvia got the door. She was in her pajamas.

“Hi,” I said.

“Mr. Castro’s here,” she said. “I’m just kidding.”

“Why do you hate me?”

“I don’t. I just don’t like you. Go. They’re in the kitchen.”

The kitchen smelled great. Mrs. Castro had the dumplings going. She was massaging Nicole’s shoulders. They were in their pajamas too. “It’s a pajama party,” Mrs. Castro said.

“I’m betting he sees that, Mom.”

“Go downstairs and get him some of your father’s PJs from storage.”

“Nah, I’m okay,” I said.

“He doesn’t want to wear Daddy’s clothes, Mom. Daddy terrifies him.”

“He terrifies everybody,” Mrs. Castro said. “Go. No pajamas, no dumplings.”

Nicole took my hand and led me downstairs. The basement was immaculate, and that made it creepier for some reason. Lots of storage racks. Nicole led me to the back. She sat on a wicker chest and patted the spot next to her for me to sit. I had the feeling she was going to kiss me. If she did, I wouldn’t be able to say what I had to say. So I just said it. “I know about it. The chat room.”