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.
I was at the end of the aisle, pretending to look at bunion pads to hide myself behind the corner shelf unit, but I saw that the bandage on her cheek was not small. How bad was it under there? How deep was the burn?
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” Nicole said. “What did you say?”
The dude backed away with his hands up, staring at the bandage. Just before he stepped out of the aisle, he said, “I’m sorry.”
By the time my line of sight was clear, Nicole had swept her hair to cover up the bandage. She headed for the exit, stopping briefly to check if the coast was clear. How do you live like that? Afraid to turn every corner?
I went to where she’d been in the aisle. Bandages. All different kinds, each promising it was the gentlest on your skin.