My father was out when I got home, no message as to his whereabouts. He had probably covered an opening and was grabbing a late dinner with the gallery owners at some fancy place on their dime.
I forced myself to take my meds. I had grabbed a can of soup on my way home and a loaf advertised as “Health Bread” that was suspiciously spongy. After I got that stuff into me, I took a hot shower. I was still mad. I’d spent an hour with Nicole the day before, walking her home. I’d spent two hours with her this afternoon. In those three hours, she was happy to tell me her problems, but she hadn’t asked me much about mine. Did it occur to her I might be as messed up as she was? Then again, I still had my face.
To torture myself, I logged into my YouTube channel, searched “epileptic seizure in public.” Sure enough, somebody had clipped me at the stables. There I was, flailing in the dust. Just like before, most of the kids watching me seize were at least concerned, but others were out there with their phones. One girl was snickering. I was on my side, riding an invisible bicycle. Then there was Nicole.
She pushed them back. One kid stuffed a bunched lunch bag into my mouth. Nicole pulled the paper out. The kid protested, “So he doesn’t bite his tongue.”
“No,” Nicole said. She knew exactly what to do, the only thing you’re supposed to do when somebody seizes: Just keep him clear of anything he might smash his hands, legs, head on and let him get through it. But Nicole Castro did more than that for me. She smacked the phones from the hands of the kids who were clipping me. “How dare you?” she kept saying. “How dare you? What’s wrong with you? How can you do that to him?” She knelt over me and shielded me from the kids’ phone cameras. When I had for the most part stopped shivering, she cradled my head and brushed the hair from my eyes and called my name.
I paused the video there and reached for my phone. I had to thank her, to apologize for being an idiot, jilting her at the stables. I hesitated. It was two in the morning. I had doubled down on my anticonvulsant meds. I had enough trouble not saying anything stupid when I wasn’t looped. I put the phone down.
I didn’t have to think about it for very long before I decided to commit to it, no matter what. I was going to catch the son of a bitch who burned Nicole Castro. I pulled up the two emails I’d ripped from Mrs. Marks’s hard drive, the ones Arachnomorph sent her from an unknowable origin, and I got to work.