Paul Griffin: Burning Blue

Again. Like she’d ever known it in the first place. Why do people act fake? Like I don’t know you’re lying? For some reason I said what was on my birth certificate, “Jameson.” My mother was a Masterpiece Theatre junkie back in the day, total anglophile. Did I actually believe an aristocratic-sounding name would impress somebody who lived in a neighborhood where the power lines were underground? “Jay, I mean.” I held back my last name, of course.

She didn’t bother to say her name, first or last, because you would’ve had to be from another high school or maybe even from out of state not to know who she was. After that beauty pageant win and then the acid attack, her face had been all over the news. I was thinking, What kind of girl does the beauty competition circuit? It’s not like she was poor, humiliating herself for a chance at college scholarship money like the rest of the girls strutting their bikinis past those ogling judges. She was from Brandywine Heights, the wealthiest part of a very wealthy school district. The real estate taxes her father was paying would have been double the amount of money required to ensconce her in the most expensive boarding school. He’d gone to St. Paul’s and wanted Nicole to do the same, but Mrs. Castro insisted that Nicole stay home. Whatever, if a rich girl does the pageant circuit, she’s doing it for attention. Pathetic. I had it in my mind that she’d grown up spending four hours a day in front of the mirror, narcissism to the point of solipsism. Then again, the mirror thing was kind of understandable. If I looked as good as she did-or as good as she looked before the attack anyway-I would’ve been staring at myself all the time too, not to mention playing with my perfect breasts.

On top of being a pageant princess, she was VP of the National Honor Society. The tools in NHS wanted her to run the show, but you weren’t allowed to be the leader of more than two things, and she was already tennis captain and junior class president. All these wannabes killing themselves, running around hanging the lamest posters and FB-ing everybody with Like me requests, and Castro wins without even being on the ballot, as a write-in. She was the queen of the Hollows, and here she was deigning to waste a few of her precious words on me, a kid from Valedale?

Valedale was also known as The Pit. It was the one not fabulous section in Brandywine, a narrow valley of older apartment houses between the dumps and the highway that bordered the next school district. If I lived on the other side of my street, I would’ve gone to McKinley, average SAT score 1190, as opposed to the Hollows’ 2030.

“You’re a sophomore, right?” Nicole said.

“Junior,” I said. “Sixteen, not fifteen.”

“Or seventeen,” she said.

“Right.”

“Or eleven or nineteen or a hundred and forty-six.” She nodded slowly and for a little too long. “Yeah, I know you.”

The way she said it, I felt she really did. That she knew me better than I knew me. She was reeling me in, even back then. Behind those dark shades she had the lasers working, cutting through my front, that I was too cool to give a damn about anything. She was peeling back my skin and bones and looking into my heart, splitting it wide for me to see, and what I would soon find there terrified me.

The door opened. Schmidt leaned out. “Ready, Nicole?” Then to me, “My friend, sorry, I clearly forgot to tell you, I had to move you to four o’clock.”

Nicole rushed into Schmidt’s office with her face in her bandaged hands.

“Better make it more like four thirty, Jay,” Schmidt said.

I should have figured it out right there. Nicole’s secret. Looking back, maybe I knew. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it. That she could, that she would. That she did.

From Nicole’s journal:

Thurs, 21 October-

This was my first face-to-face talk with Dr. Schmidt. She suggested I start logging my thoughts to chart the progress of my recovery, as if recovering from this is possible or even necessary.

Me: “You want me to blog about this?”

Dr. Schmidt: “No, a diary, just for you.”

Me: “As in Anne Frank.”

DS: “Exactly.”

Me: “Or Sylvia Plath.”

DS: “Let’s shoot for a nicer ending.”

Me: “Virginia Woolf.”

DS: “Just think about it.”

Still, I like Dr. Schmidt. Dr. Nye on the other hand scares me. He’s motionless. That red microphone icon blinking on his iPhone. The angle of his head, looking over his rimless glasses at me. The top edges of the lenses cut his eyes in half, and they look like blue suns on a warped horizon. “Did your father ever hit you?” “Do you think you’re still beautiful?” As if I ever thought I was in the first place. What kind of person asks that?

My face was on fire the whole day. My mind is on fire. My heart. The rage feels good. I only pretended to take my pain meds.

Mom: “You’re sure you took them? Promise?”

Me: “Swear.” Worse liar than she is, and she knows it. Magically the meds appear on the bathroom counter with a glass of cranberry juice. I wonder if she suspects I’m flushing more than pee. I’m sick of feeling numb. I want to be awake again. I was today, this afternoon, for about five minutes. In the waiting room, with Jay. The way he went to get a cup of water, pretending not to see the tear rolling down my cheek. He wanted nothing from me. He only wanted to give me the time I needed to wipe the tear away. To get myself together. He made me smile. It hurt more than crying, wrinkling my mouth up like that. But it was the good hurt, the one that makes me feel alive. Real. Remarkable, that his simple act of kindness triggered a relief from the numbness. It was a forgetting and an awakening at the same time, transitory but deep. Then there’s David.

He keeps telling me this doesn’t change anything, but how can it not? How can anybody look at me without pity, the last thing I need? He keeps saying it. The word. Rests his hand on my heart as he says it. “You’re still beautiful.” He knows he’s lying. What must people see when they look at me? No symmetry. No balance. Only Emma sees the old me. She’s incapable of lying, but for how long? Em, what will I do when you’re gone?

I won’t feel sorry for myself. I don’t. I can keep pretending.

While Nicole was getting her brain tweaked by Schmidt, I was off to grab coffee. I dropped my long board and slalomed fast-forming puddles to the Starbucks next to the tire center. When the hydraulic lifts let the cars down, the air escaping from the pistons sounded like screams of people being crushed. This kept the Starbucks nice and empty. Sometimes I asked the girl behind the counter for help with my phone. I holstered what was to all appearances flip-style junk. In public, I pretended I didn’t know how to use it. Nobody suspects you for a hacker when you can’t figure out how to send a text from your eight-year-old Nokia. “How do I get to menu again?”

“Oh my god, if you weren’t almost cute I would totally smack you.” She grabbed my phone and started pressing buttons. “No rejoinder to my ‘almost cute,’ huh? You look like a vampire.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“I like long hair on guys. What kind of product are you using?”

“Grease.”

“Brand?”

“The kind that comes from washing your hair only every other shower.”

“That’s gross but also slightly hot.” She was ready to key a message into my phone. “Who’s the target?”

“Father. Message is whatever.”

“Whatever comes to my mind?”

“Just ‘whatever.’” He’d left me a voicemail to tell me he might not be home until late, unusually considerate of him.