Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

“Until the next time he remembers what made him mad in the first place.”

“How do you know it’s a man?”

“Excuse me?”

“Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe the attacker is a woman? For instance, somebody insanely jealous of Nicole?”

I’d never really looked into Schmidt’s eyes before that. They were this stunning gray, so light the irises almost blended in with the sclera. My eyes went to the windowsill just behind her, one of those picture frame digital clocks. An old black-and-white snapshot, a baby in a swing, wide angle, nobody else in the picture. The readout went from 4:59 to 5:00. Without looking at the clock, never letting her eyes drift from mine, Schmidt said, “I guess that’s all the time we have today.”

Somebody jealous of Nicole, huh? Way to narrow it down, Doctor .

The rain was too heavy for me to skateboard. I waited under the side door awning for the storm to let up. Somebody called out, “Been looking for you, Spaceman.”

I turned to find a huge dude rolling up to me fast and flexed. His orange Volta-Shock hoodie shadowed his face. “You don’t remember me?” he said. “I’m hurt.” He pulled back his hood. It was Kerns, the dude I’d pinned two years before. His hair wasn’t dyed bloodred anymore but silver. He’d gone a little different with the Mohawk too, buzzing it close to his scalp and jagging it so it looked like a thunderbolt.

“You’re taking this Volta-Shock promotion very seriously, Rick,” I said. Everybody called him Dick behind his back, but maybe not so much lately. He’d logged much weight-banging time since I last saw him, that first semester of freshman year, when I got lucky and pasted him. No way that would happen now. He was well over two hundred pounds.

“Heard you were back,” he said with a sly smile. I had been ducking him, and he knew it. He shook my hand way too hard. “You’re still pretty tight. What are you, buck eighty? Eighty-five?”

I shrugged, wasn’t into weighing myself every two minutes. “Seventy-five or so.”

“Rick, what’s the holdup?” some other dude called from the locker room door. I recognized him as one of the meatheads who held my head under the sink water before Dave Bendix stood up for me.

The hall monitor said, “Problem, gentlemen?”

“No problem here,” Kerns said. “Right, Jay?” Kerns punched my shoulder somewhere between See ya bud and I remember when you pinned me your first time on the mats and made me look like an idiot in front of my boys. I’d have a bruise by tonight. “Good to have you back, Spaceman,” he said as he jogged toward the entrance to the indoor track.

I pressed my face to the door glass and studied the sky. It was dark except for a fast-moving band of light gray that would be overhead in a few minutes. I checked my phone for the list I’d keyed into it on my way back from Starbucks:

Mr. Sabbatini-weak maybe, teaching science to snotty kids for 30+ yrs, would he risk his pension to burn student out of jealousy?

Jealous classmate(s)-which? Basically everybody

Mr. Sager-weak maybe, same as Sabbatini, mopping up after rich kids for too many years, pension for custodial services too good to lose.

Bendix-why, though? Why?

I added Schmidt’s name. The way she leaned in close to me at the end of our session bothered me. That glimmer in her eyes as she said, “How do you know it’s not a woman?” Schmidt didn’t wear a wedding band. And that fading snapshot on her sill, the kid in the swing, the clock in the frame ticking away. The girl didn’t resemble Schmidt. Maybe a friend’s kid? Childless, single, getting on in years? Her knowledge of psychology, of what people fear, losing their beauty? I had her down as a long shot.

I rounded the corner, toward the custodian’s office. Mr. Sager’s back was to me. He was at his computer.

“Sir?” I said.

He slapped down his laptop. “You don’t have to call me sir. Mr. Sager will be just fine. You new here?”

I started to explain about home school, but then he remembered me. “The boy at the pep rally, sure. I didn’t recognize you with that hair.”

“I borrow some pliers?” I pulled my skateboard from my backpack straps and explained that my rear wheel truck was loose, a lie.

He drew a pair of pliers from his hip holster. He was in his fifties, lean, clean cut. I pegged him ex-military.

“Heard you were there when that thing went down with Nicole Castro,” I said. “Heard you saved her life.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Telling everybody to pour water on her. What did it look-”

“It was a bad burn.”

“Do you have an Allen wrench?”

“You don’t need one for that wheel truck.”

“The wheel itself. The spindle. I think it’s a five-eighths fit.”

He headed for the back. I flipped up his laptop screen. Somebody named Isabella1801 had emailed what she wanted to do with him that night. No whips or chains, but it was borderline hard-core. Sager was coming back. I closed the laptop and backed away from the desk into a bucket of water, accidentally kicking it. The bucket tipped but didn’t turn over. Some of the water sloshed onto the floor. I grabbed a rag to wipe up the puddle.

“Stop,” Mr. Sager said. “Leave it to me.” He grabbed the rag and backed me away from the puddle. “Five-eighths,” he said, holding out the Allen wrench.

“I’ll fix it when I get home. Thanks.” I headed out.

That was good of him, not letting me mop up the mess with bare hands. I hadn’t spilled water. The label on the jug next to the bucket said MURIATIC ACID.

The rain was unrelenting. I headed for the bus stop a quarter mile up the road.

I’d buzzed through chemistry quickly in my home schooling, but I remembered muriatic acid. It was used in heavy industry to render other compounds like refined gasoline or polyvinyl chloride for plastic pipe production. Mostly it’s a purifier, especially for water. You use muriatic acid to control PH, or the acid content of a compound. You might use it for cleaning, but only in extreme circumstances, like to strip rust from steel. For general cleaning, the kind a custodian would do in a high school, you’d go with a much gentler, cheaper agent, diluted bleach.

The rain fell harder. I jogged around the corner for the upscale strip mall just down the boulevard. I figured I’d wait out the storm under CVS’s awning. Nicole’d had the same idea. She was huddled into herself, rubbing her shoulders. She looked down the boulevard. I thought she was looking at me, but when I waved she looked in the opposite direction. Why would she ignore me after reaching out to me in Schmidt’s office? She simply hadn’t seen me, I thought. How much of her vision had she lost in the attack? She hesitated at the CVS entrance and peeked through the glass, left, right, then she hurried in. I hurried in after her.

I grabbed from the top of the mix-and-match bin on my way into the store and ended up with a vent brush, a lame item for a guy to be carrying, especially when it’s powder blue, but I didn’t want Nicole to catch me empty-handed, checking up and down the aisles for her. I found her in a side aisle, her back to me.

This dude was following her. Okay, so I was following her too, but I was worried about her. The other dude was leering. He said to Nicole, “Last year’s Sports Illustrated ?”

“Excuse me?” Nicole said.

“The swimsuit issue? You’re a model, right? If you aren’t, you should be. I know some people in the industry.” He’d approached her from her right side.

Nicole turned to show him the left side of her face. She pulled back her hair.