Burning Blue (18 page)

A little after noon the next day, Friday, I met up with Angela at the
Clarion
.

“And why should I do this for you?” Pete said.

“Because you owe me,” I said.

“For telling your father you were about to get yourself tossed into jail?”

“You set me up with Detective Barrone in the first place.”

“For educational purposes. I figured you were looking to do a school report about detective work. How was I supposed to know you were involving yourself in an open police case, not to mention falling in love with the target of an acid thrower.”

“I’m not falling in love with—”

“Right. Somebody mentions the girl’s name, and you get this look in your eyes. Watch: Nicole. See? You’re toast.” He turned to Angela. “Am I right?”

Angela cracked her gum. “Bread crumbs.”

“Pete, I need this favor. Think of my mother.”

“Don’t do that, kid. Don’t try to make me feel sorry for you.”

“I’m not. I don’t mean it like that, and I don’t want your pity. I mean that she would have done what I’m trying to do.”

“And what’s that?”

“Sticking up for somebody who’s having a hard time sticking up for herself.”

Pete shook his head and picked up the phone.

Angela, Cherry and I met at Cherry’s Starbucks a little before three p.m., when Cherry relieved the person behind the counter. I was back there too, setting up Angela’s phone camera inside the pastry case. Angela was sipping a latte and surfing on what appeared to be a brand-new, just-released special-edition MacBook Pro with a seventeen-inch screen that would have retailed for $3900 if its guts weren’t absolute garbage I had pieced together for around $40. The nice shiny case itself was from BJ’s. The forklift king actually showed up for work the previous weekend and had sailed the blades through a stack of Apple boxes. They were tested, found to be broken beyond repair, written up as damaged freight and tossed, and then I went Dumpster diving.

Starbucks was, per usual at this hour, empty, until Puglisi showed up around 3:45, just as Pete’s friend in the
Clarion
’s feature department, aka the gossip room, suggested he should. By now I was hiding out in the parking lot, in Cherry’s yellow Honda. I watched Puglisi hurry into the shop. He’d gotten a tip Nicole Castro was meeting her new beau there at about four p.m. If Puglisi got there a little early and put himself near the front door, Nicole and her man would be sitting ducks. Puglisi could get a perfectly clear shot, front-page worthy.

Puglisi barked a coffee order at Cherry and situated himself in the corner, setting up his lens. Four o’clock came and went, and neither Nicole nor the beau or whoever he was showed up. Ten after four came and went. At about twenty after four Puglisi’s phone rang. He answered angrily and then hung up even more angrily, having been told that the tip turned out to be bad information. Just as he was about to pack up his stuff, Angela, seated two stools down the window counter from Puglisi, yawned and stretched and said, “Can you watch my laptop for a couple of minutes while I go to the bathroom? Thanks.” And off she went.

Puglisi sized up the situation. The bathroom door was closing behind Angela. Behind the counter Cherry was cleaning the espresso machine, her back to Puglisi. He shrugged, tucked the laptop under his arm and headed out to his car. He stopped when he noticed a thick glass Coke bottle on the hood of his Honda. It had been placed there as a paperweight to keep the smiley face Angela had drawn from flying away in the considerable wind. The smiley face also had hands, and both of them were flipping off Puglisi. He turned around to find me walking toward him. I was holding out Angela’s phone, playing the video of Puglisi’s robbery. He took a swing at the phone, but I saw it coming and held it high over his head. Being much taller than the dude, I had no problem keeping the phone away from him. “Besides,” I said, “she got you too.”

Cherry was out with us now, looking at her phone camera screen. “So weird. From
this
angle, it looks like you’re stealing a four-thousand-dollar computer.”

“I believe that’s grand larceny,” I said.

“It’s entrapment,” Puglisi said.

“Wanna gamble on a six-year minimum sentence?” I said.

Puglisi smirked and looked around the parking lot. “I’m guessing Nicole isn’t coming?”

“I’m happy to relay any message you have for her. Maybe a final good-bye?”

“Okay, champ, I’m off her tail. Be about a day before the
Enquirer
has a new team on her.” He got into his car. “Happy now?”

I reached through the window and casually took back the laptop. “I need you to do one more thing for me.”

Twenty minutes later, the picture I got of the black Civic swerving out of the parking lot in front of my building the previous night was up on the tabloid sites with the headline BREAK IN BURNED BEAUTY CASE IMMINENT, RECLUSE ON THE RUN.

I’d tried to leak the picture myself, but no media organization would take my anonymous submission seriously. Only the likes of Shane Puglisi and his Scorpion Imageworks had the credibility to get such a shot picked up. He actually sold the picture for five grand, over the phone, from right there in the Starbucks parking lot.

Basically I was trying to buy us some time. The Recluse would see the story. She wouldn’t be able move around so easily, not with that picture in hot circulation. She would have no choice but to lie low. At the same time, I knew that if she’d been crazy enough to follow Nicole and me to my building, she wouldn’t be backing off for good. We’d get an extra couple of days to do some digging before the
Recluse on the Run
storyline faded from the front page and the psycho couldn’t fight the itch to burn again. Maybe that would be enough time to hack the breakthrough piece of information that would help us find her before she found another chance to hit Nicole. I’d given up on the idea that Detective Barrone was capable of stopping the Recluse. If she was stoppable, then Angela, Cherry, and I were going to have to stop her.

Angela and I took the bus west. She fell asleep, her face on the window. Her left hand was closed tightly but her right was open. Her fingernails were chewed bloody. A razor wire tattoo circled her wrist. She caught me looking at it. “Cool, right?” she said.

“Cool,” I said.

We got to the Route 22 stop, and from there I walked her home. We stopped at this bodega a block from her house. “I heard you have rock-solid fake ID. Any chance I can get you to man up and buy me some beer?”

“How about a Snapple Green Tea?”

“I believe you’ve already had the pleasure of seeing me hurl all over the street?”

I was suspended, but she’d cut that day. “Thanks for taking off from school for this,” I said.

“Oh, it was a sacrifice. If you were really thankful, you’d get me the Budweiser.”

“I feel bad saying this, but as your friend, I have to.”

“We’re not friends, but go ahead.”

“Can I help you get yourself to a rehab program?”

“Many have tried, all have failed, but I’ll tell you what. Help me get that fifty-thousand-dollar reward, and I’ll check myself into a luxury spa to dry out. Maybe in South America. Maybe I’ll never come back. Yeah, that sounds good. Hey, I’m wondering what it would be like to suck your tongue really, really hard.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“Saving yourself for Nicole?”

Nicole or not, it wasn’t going down, not with all that lip metal. “Thought you weren’t into me like that anyway.”

“Spaceman, that was like two days ago. The way I feel today, anybody’s fair game. When you’re hungry, meat’s meat.”

“I’m truly flattered.”

She headed into the bodega and I went home.

From Nicole’s journal:

Friday, 29 October—

Nye: “We’re in this together, Nicole.”

“Really, Dr. Nye, we’re not. I feel like I don’t have enough skin on my face. That the skin that
is
there isn’t mine. That even if it is, it should be on my hip, not my cheek. Is that how you feel?”

Later, I pull up the pictures from my Facebook, the Before, the comments, so many of them, all wishing me a speedy recovery.
Recovery?

Ctrl + click gets you the Mac Word dictionary and “Recovery, n., 1. the return to normal health . . . 2. The return to a normal state . . . 3. The regaining of something lost or taken away.” The definition neglects to mention the maps, the ones that delineate the return trip to normal or the site of the sunken treasure.

A touch to my shoulder. Mom. “Honey, take a nap.” She tucks me in and strokes my hair. When I wake, she’s asleep next to me. Her eyelids are puffy. They will be puffier soon. Tomorrow, going away with Dad to lake house for weekend. Don’t really want to go. Yesterday, Jay rested his head on mine.

The Recluse was quiet all that weekend. I pulled half a shift at BJ’s but mostly I faked like I was fighting a cold and slept during the day. When my father went to bed, my laptops came out. Angela and I had split the list of female students at the Hollows. Basically, we were on Facebook all the time, looking for Nicole-hate, not finding any. Late Sunday night/early Monday morning Angela buzzed me with a red alert text, a link somebody had posted to the fan page set up by Nicole’s well-wishers.

The page was crowded with thousands of comments and videos of Nicole, her pageant appearances, student council speeches, tennis matches, mash-up tributes cut to saccharin music. Angela found one video particularly interesting, a YouTube clip posted Friday night. It played through Mr. Sabbatini’s AP chem page. The post was untitled, but the poster was cryforhelp669, an amateur’s attempt at anonymity: 669 spelled out NOW on a phone keypad. Angela had backtracked the ID to Marisol Wood, the sophomore who confided to Nicole at the tennis club that her parents were splitting up.

Sabbatini, like a lot of teachers at the Hollows, recorded his lectures. He was in front of about two hundred kids in stadium-style seats. This was how they did the lab preps, the AP and regular-track students lumped together before they broke up into smaller groups for the actual experiments. I had placed out of chem during home school. Now I was wishing I hadn’t. I would have been in that lecture hall.

Sabbatini: “The question was, ‘Why does battery acid burn your finger and not the inside of the battery case, which is largely polyvinylchloride?’ Nobody? Fabulous. You’re all destined to succeed brilliantly. People, what is the pH of water? One hand up.
The
hand. Yes, well then, of course Ms.
Castro
would know. Go ahead.”

Nicole: “Seven?”

Sabbatini: “Question or statement? And at what temperature? Care to gamble five points on the midterm?”

Nicole: “Seven at seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit.”

Sabbatini sighed, “Correct.” Then, to the class: “What compound makes up most of the human body?”

“Bone,” some dude yelled.

That got a lot of muttered “Oh my god,” and “Idiot.”

Sabbatini: “Genius. Genius.” He slapped his hand on his desk with each word: “What, is, the, body, made of? Go ahead, Ms. Castro.”

Nicole: “Water. About sixty percent of the body’s weight.”

Sabbatini: “So then why does one’s finger burn when one, if one is
stupid
enough, changes his car battery without proper protective gear on his hands?”

Nicole: “The pH scale goes from zero to fourteen. Liquids closer to zero are strongly acidic. Liquids closer to fourteen are bases. Water, the liquid in our skin, is effectively neutral. The battery acid has a really low pH, less than one—”

“Point eight, in fact, Ms. Castro,” Sabbatini barked.

Nicole: “Point eight. Thank you, Dr. Sabbatini. When you combine two liquids, they try to even out their acidity. The farther apart they are in pH, the more heat is given off in the balancing reaction. The result is that it melts. Your skin just fries.”

Sabbatini bent over his SmartDraw pad and sketched out a molecular structure that described the chemical reaction Nicole had just verbalized. The projected diagram was stunningly spiderweb-like, but I’d already ruled out Sabbatini, along with Dr. Schmidt. They had conspired to do no more than get that chem teacher’s guide to Nicole.

Sabbatini believed a lot of questions went unasked because students were afraid of looking dumb in front of their peers. He kept a question box outside his office door. If you didn’t understand something in class, just drop an anonymous note into the box anytime afterward, and Sabbatini would get to it at the beginning of the next class.

Who had asked the question about the battery acid? The camera’s POV was from the back of the lecture hall. I could see little more than the backs of the students’ heads.

I had Angela on my screen in an IM box. I typed:
Do we really think this is Marisol Wood or Marisol framed? Let’s put Chrissie Vratos back on the list.

Aye-aye, Captain.

Cryforhelp669. It was almost as if she wanted to be caught. My phone had started vibrating while Angela and I were IM-ing. I checked the text:

from Arachnomorph@unknowable_origin.net:

Hello Jameson and Angela,

The itsy-bitsy spider

climbed up the waterspout.

Down came the rain,

and washed the spider out.

Up came the sun,

and dried up all the rain.

The itsy-bitsy spider

crawled up the spout again.

I have six eyes. They’re all on you.

Angela IM-ed:
Did you just get that?

I typed back:
Full-court press on Vratos.

All we had to do was connect her to that black Honda Civic, and she was done.

I looked out my window to the fire escape. Manhattan was deep in the distance. The midtown skyscrapers were black fangs. The sun had just cleared the horizon. The heat rising from the oil burner chimneys across the highway distorted and magnified it. It swelled like a tumor jacked up on steroids, burning through a haze so white it glared. The clock said 7:31 a.m. I’d been awake sixty-four of the last seventy-two hours.

My father peeked into my room. “You want a ride?”

“I’m suspended, remember?”

“Can you go food shopping, then?” He shook his head and left for work.

I checked his room for anything that might give me a hint of what he was doing while he was AWOL those two times in Marathon, New Jersey. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.

Nicole called. She wanted to hang out but wasn’t allowed out of the house.

This old lady was having a hard time getting onto the bus. I helped her. She said, “Thank you, miss,” told me I had lovely hair and my, wasn’t I quite tall for a girl.

The security guard was parked in front of Nicole’s house. Mrs. Castro met me at the door. “Nicole’s in the shower. I was worried about you.” She took me back to her studio and showed me her paintings. Abstract art isn’t exactly my thing, but as far as it went, I thought she was awesome. You kind of had to stare at it for a while, though, to figure out what she was painting; looked like a doe in autumn woods. I wasn’t sure I was right about that until she said, “They come right up to the back door at sunset. Did you get your father to sign my book?”

“I forgot to bring it,” I said.

Nicole came in. “You look horrible,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. She looked a little pale herself.

“You do look a little peaked, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said. She had fixed us some tea and handed me a cup. She closed the door behind her to leave Nicole and me alone.

The tea tasted great, then suddenly bitter, metallic. “Perugina or Hershey’s?” I said. “On your sleeve.” Nicole had a dot of dried chocolate stain on her sweatshirt. A squiggle of pink lightning arced across the studio, and that’s the last thing I remember.

She was brushing my hair back when I woke. I was on the studio couch. I sat up fast.

“Did I—”

“Relax. You just dropped into a daze, it seemed.”

I brushed my hand over my crotch. I was wet. I looked down. The one day I had to wear non-dark jeans. They were dark now all right, just in one spot. I grabbed my backpack and board and made for the front door. Nicole begged me to stay. “At least until you’re not bumping into walls, Jay. Please? You’re practically staggering.”

Her mother came at me with a folded wet towel. I slipped past her, out the side door, into the Castros’ yard. Sylvia blocked Nicole, yelling at her in Spanish that she wasn’t allowed to leave the house.

I was too dizzy to ride my board, and it had started drizzling again. I half jogged, half stumbled into the nature preserve that bordered Nicole’s house. The path was a shortcut to the road, where I could catch the bus.

I made my way through the preserve and walked along the side of the highway. I stopped to catch my breath. The day was gray, but there was a glare to the sky, bright enough that I could see the stain in my pants wasn’t really in my crotch but on my thigh, and it was too dark to be urine, more the color of blood. I couldn’t figure out how I’d cut myself or where. A car revved up to me. As I looked over my shoulder, the car blinded me, flashing its brights. It swung in front of me, cutting me off. It was the black Civic. No, the Saab, Nicole’s. She leaned over the shotgun seat and pushed open the door, and that’s when I realized the stain in my pants wasn’t blood. “It was the tea,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“I must have spilled the tea on myself when I faded out.”

“Jay, get into the car.”

The road was one muddy puddle after another. Trucks whipped up gray spray. I was cold and beat. I sank into the shotgun seat. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I’m not supposed to be driving. My mother made me take a Xanax just before you showed up.”

She drove fast into the empty rest area, the rain darkening the sky. The brakes whimpered as she stopped short to park. She turned to face me.

“No more chocolate stain,” I said. “Wait, you changed your hoodie.” This one was pink too, but baggier. I touched her sleeve where the stain had been. She winced and drew back her arm. “Was that blood before, on your sleeve?” I said.

“Cat scratched up my arm.”

“You have a cat?”

“The neighbor’s. She’s always in the yard. I was cuddling her, and all of a sudden she flipped out.”

A person who has serious allergies cuddles a cat? Nicole Castro was lying to me. She leaned across the seat and rested her head on my chest. I put my arms around her. The rain fell hard on the roof. “Tell me what happened to her,” she said. “Your mom.”

“Some time,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

I don’t know how long we were like that, just holding each other. Not long enough. Somebody tapped on the side window. The security guard. He drove Nicole home in the security company SUV. A second guard drove me home in Nicole’s Saab.