Burning Blue

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Because I’ll never have it.

Because I’ll never be it.

Because after a little test run, I find that I like the sound.

The hissing.

She will burn.

I was at the cemetery when it happened. I didn’t even know Nicole at the time. Well, I knew of her. Everybody did. She’d won a high-profile beauty competition the year before, the under-sixteen division. She had been on the front page of a lot of newspapers. People in the pageant world were saying she was sure to win Miss New Jersey. I had seen her in the halls and hungered for her from afar like every other dude at the Hollows, but we hadn’t talked. Not yet. Still, that afternoon, that moment, when that first molecule pierced her skin, was the beginning of our connection, one that led me into a darkness that was as twisted as it was sublime.

The water brought us together. The storm. The sky was horrific, a dark, dirty green. According to maps.google, Pinemont Cemetery and Brandywine Hollows High School are 4.11 miles apart, but Nicole and I were bound by the rain. It was something that day, so strange, too hard to be liquid, too cold for the second Thursday of September. It smashed my mother’s gravestone, a nothing-special marker the size of a high-tops shoebox. The first burst of downpour ricocheted upward at my eyes and stung my face like a sucker punch. I’d cut my last two classes to clock an extra hour on my shift card after my boss texted that a lot of people had called in sick. I often stopped by the cemetery on my way to work. I loved the quiet, but with that rain I didn’t linger. I was chasing down the bus, dodging the spray the wheels drew from a lake-like puddle the exact moment Nicole was hit.

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