Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

“The chat room?” Her eyes ticked right.

“Cutter’s Way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t do this, Nicole. Please don’t.”

“Do what, Jay? What exactly am I doing?”

“We need to get you help. We’re going to. I promise.”

“You promise? Really? Oh, that makes me feel so much better. He promises. You know what you promised, Jay? You promised you would never hack me.”

“I had to.”

“No, you really didn’t. Nobody asked you to. Nobody wanted you to, either.” She pulled up her sleeves to reveal the bandages. “This is mine, okay? This is the one thing I can own. Just me. This has nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me. You’re my friend.”

“Then honor our friendship. Honor your word. Please don’t tell my mom. Please. ”

“I’m not judging you, okay?”

“Judge me or don’t, it doesn’t matter. Shit, you broke it. How do I trust you after this? I can’t. God, I feel your fingers under my skin. You know what? Go.”

“The username,” I said. “GBAM.”

“Get out of my house. Now.”

“Just tell me how you came up with the chat handle, and I’ll leave.”

“It’s an acronym for a painting, my mother’s favorite, my destiny.” She pushed past me, upstairs.

I followed. “The Picasso? Guernica ?” I stopped cold in the main vestibule where I’d left my backpack. I heard the bathroom door shut, the one just ahead of the kitchen. I fished in my backpack for the book I’d had my father sign for Mrs. Castro. The one I had been dragging around with me for how many days now, forever forgetting to give it to her. I flipped to the page Mrs. Castro had flagged “his best.” But she hadn’t been referring to Picasso’s Guernica. She’d meant the picture on the opposing page, another Picasso, a vision of a woman standing in front of a mirror. This was the original, the basis for the artist’s print that used to be on my living room wall. I checked the caption and the title: Girl Before a Mirror.

GBAM.

Mrs. Castro’s favorite painting.

The inspiration for the sketch I’d found in Angela’s bedroom. The one where Nicole reaches out to her reflection, exactly as the girl does in Picasso’s original. In the mirror, half of her face is perfect beauty, and the other half is horrific, rearranged, red.

My eyes ticked to the corner of the vestibule, the wall space next to the grandfather clock, above the umbrella stand. There it was again, the same image, locked in a small frame. I hadn’t given it but a half a glance the other day when I dropped Nicole’s umbrella into the stand, a black-and-white sketch copy of Girl Before a Mirror. I studied the sketch, the artist’s initials: E.C.

Elaine Castro and Angela Sammick were in love with the same work of art. Obsessed by it.

I had taken my anti-seizure meds that day, and they generally softened things, but at that moment I felt as if an intense and rough-edged heat was trying to squeeze between the hemispheres of my brain. I had to slump into the chair next to the grandfather clock to take it in. How the two women had come together was a mystery, but this much was definite: Mrs. Castro had hired Angela to burn Nicole. Angela had come up with the Arachnomorph ID that inspired the news sites to the spider-themed nickname, but Elaine Castro was the real Recluse.

It made no sense and perfect sense. Nicole told me that her mother wanted her to find the good in the burn, the fact that Nicole and Mrs. Castro could spend more time together now that Nicole didn’t have to run off to this match or that meeting, off to college, marriage, a life away from her mother, one that would leave Mrs. Castro even more isolated than she was after her husband left. Burned, Nicole would never leave her, would need her mother forever, would give the woman purpose. Elaine Castro had no one and nothing else. Her dreams of living life as an artist had been ripped from her that night of her debut when the doubt stared her in the face: Was she truly meant to paint? She wanted to, yes, but maybe she didn’t have that thing that makes it all worthwhile, whether you hit it big like Picasso or not: the need to.

I needed to get Nicole. Book in hand I rounded the corner to the bathroom off the kitchen. I tried the knob, locked. “Nicole, we have to get you out of here. Now.”

The bathroom door swung open. Mrs. Castro was drying her hands on a bright blue towel. She looked as I’d never seen her before, ugly somehow, her brows arched. She eyed the book in my hand, my fingers tucked into it at the page she’d flagged. “What’s wrong, Jay?” she said.

“I thought you were Nicole.”

“I gathered that. What’s the rush?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said, ‘We have to get you out of here.’”

“My father texted he got us tickets to the St. John’s game. It’s at the Garden, courtside. We have to get out of here now if we want to make the opening jump-”

“No, Jay, you said, ‘We have to get you out of here.’ Meaning Nicole.”

Nicole’s sobbing echoed from down the hallway.

I was terrified. Not of Mrs. Castro. At that moment she seemed smaller to me. Shrinking. I was terrified of myself. Of what I might do to this trembling, cornered thief in front of me. I felt she was a guest in my home, an uninvited guest who’d charmed her way into my heart and then pocketed my treasure, my trust, while my eyes were turned. I glared at Elaine Castro. “How could you?” I said.

“Ex cuse me?”

“Why?”

Her eyes reddened. “Let’s just sit down for a second and talk about this. We, I have no idea what’s going on here, except that you’re upset. You need to calm down.”

I pushed past her, nearly knocking her over when she tried to block me.

“Jay, wait,” she begged.

I strode through the kitchen, into the studio. Nicole was on the couch with Sylvia, crying on Sylvia’s shoulder. Sylvia held her, rubbing her back. A tabloid magazine played quietly through the TV. Sylvia glared at me. Over her shoulder, in the backyard, a pair of deer looked in on us. They scattered into the dusk. Sylvia’s eyes widened on something behind me. “No, Elaine,” Sylvia said.

Nicole looked up and followed Sylvia’s eyes. “Mom?” she said.

I turned around slowly. Mrs. Castro was standing right in front of me, holding the pot of dumplings. The oil smoked. “You’ve ruined it,” she said to me. “You ruined us. I warned you, Jay. I warned you to let the police do their job.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?” Nicole said.

“Nicole?” Mrs. Castro said. “My baby, I’m so sorry.”

I tried to grab the pot from her, but she was too quick. She poured the oil onto herself.

Five weeks later, Thursday, December 16, Nicole, her father, and I were in a joint therapy session in Dr. Schmidt’s office. Nicole had just come back from a month’s stay at an in-treatment center for teens coping with self-injury impulses. The particular program she was in required her to stay off the phone and offline, but she was encouraged to write, and we’d exchanged a dozen or so letters. But now we sat facing each other, staring at each other as Mr. Castro said, “I can’t do that. How do you not see that it’s my fault?”

“What does holding on to your fault, Elaine’s fault, anybody’s fault do for Nicole?” Schmidt said.

“But you don’t just let it go, Doctor. It won’t. It can’t. It’s its own thing, and it lives in you until it dies, if it ever does decide to die. If you try to cut it out too soon, you risk all this collateral damage.”