Blind Spot
Authors: Laura Ellen
Copyright © 2012 by Laura Ellen
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reprint selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Harcourt is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-547-76344-6
eISBN 978-0-547-76380-4
v1.1012
RevelationFor Breanna, James, and Megan,
may they always follow their dreams,
and for Jeff, who helped clear the
path so that I could follow mine.
Winter stopped hiding Tricia Farni on Good Friday.
A truck driver, anxious to shave forty minutes off his commute, ventured across the shallow section of the Birch River used as an ice bridge all winter. His truck plunged into the frigid water, and as rescuers worked to save him and his semi, Tricia’s body floated to the surface.
She’d been missing since the incident in the loft six months ago. But honestly, she didn’t come to mind when I heard that a girl’s body had been found. I was that sure she was alive somewhere, making someone else’s life miserable. Maybe she was shacking up with some drug dealer, or hooking her way across the state, or whatever. But she was definitely alive.
On Easter morning, that changed.
The body of seventeen-year-old Tricia Farni was pulled from the Birch River Friday night. A junior at Chance High School, Tricia disappeared October 6 after leaving a homecoming party at Birch Hill. Police believe her body has been in the water since the night she disappeared.
I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. Tricia was a lot of things, a drug addict, a bitch, a freak. But dead? No. She was a survivor. Something—the only thing—I admired about her. I stared at my clock radio, disbelieving the news reporter. Ninety percent talk, AM 760 was supposed to provide refuge from my own wrecked life that weekend. I thought all those old songs with their
sha-la-la-las
and
da-doo-run-runs
couldn’t possibly trigger any painful memories. I guess when a dead girl is found in Birch, Alaska, and you were the last one to see her alive, even AM 760 can’t save you from bad memories.
While the rest of Chance High spent Easter Sunday shopping for bargains on prom dresses and making meals of pink marshmallow chicks, I lay on my bed, images of Tricia flooding my brain. I tried to cling to the macabre ones—the way I imagined her when she was found: her body stiff and lifeless, her brown cloak spread like wings, her black, kohl-rimmed eyes staring up through the cracks in the ice that had been her coffin all winter. These images made me feel sad and sympathetic, how one should feel about a dead girl.
Another image kept shoving its way in, though. It was the last time I’d seen Tricia. The last thing I remembered clearly from that night, minutes before she disappeared. She and Jonathan in the loft. It made me despise her all over again. And I didn’t want to despise her anymore. She was dead.
What happened to her that night? And why couldn’t I remember anything after the loft, not even going home? All I had were quick snapshots, like traces of a dream: Jonathan’s body against mine; arms, way too many arms; and Mr. Dellian’s face. Puzzle pieces that wouldn’t fit together.
I’m used to piecing things together. My central vision is blocked by dots that hide things from me, leaving my brain to fill in the blanks. My brain doesn’t always get it right. I misinterpret, make mistakes. But my memory? It’s always been the one thing I could count on, saving me time after time from major humiliation. I can see something once and remember it exactly—the layout of a room, the contents of a page, anything. My visual memory makes it less necessary to see, and I rely on it to pick up where my vision fails.
How could my memory be failing me now?
I went over that night again, much as I would with my vision, putting the pieces together to make something sensible and concrete. But the more I focused on those tiny snippets, the farther they slipped from my grasp.
Then “Copacabana” started playing on the radio.
I slammed my fingers down on the power button to stop the lyrics, but my mind went there anyway. A replay of the day Tricia did a striptease during lunch. The day I helped her buy drugs . . .
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Pieces—Jonathan Swift
Forty Days Before
It should’ve been a breeze, a no-brainer. I was returning to the same halls I’d occupied last year. A seasoned vet, not some scared, insecure freshman. But still. I passed through the black doors of Chance High that first day of sophomore year and found myself in Hell.
Okay, I exaggerate. Hell didn’t reveal itself until minutes later, when I met Tricia and realized I’d been placed in a special ed class. But the sensory overload that hit me when I first entered the building certainly began my journey. Nauseating combinations of musk, coconut, cherry blossom, and industrial cleaner assaulted me. Out-of-focus faces in globs of color swirled around me like the psychedelic covers on my dad’s old acid rock albums. A cacophony of squeals stabbed at my ears. I went from zero to panic in less than sixty seconds, and the fact that I had to get through it on my own only made it worse.
Before, Missy Cervano had been my compass, my shelter, my shield. Last year we’d attacked the first day of school together, scurrying down the halls, mice in a maze, trying to find our lockers, ducking into corners, and flattening ourselves against walls to avoid the intimidating seniors. We’d survived because we had the perfect social weapons: each other. Best Friends Forever. Forever ended a few months ago when she suddenly stopped talking to me. Music was my only safe haven now. Lyrics never change like people do.
I took a steadying breath and popped in my ear buds. My
F.U. World
playlist cut through the chaos surrounding me and urged me forward. Clutching my class schedule, I skirted the boundaries of clique after clique arranged like planets along the hallways. Posers and wannabes orbiting around them, like satellites waiting to crash through the atmosphere. At least they could pretend to belong. Without Missy, I couldn’t even do that anymore.
I passed the office and the cafeteria and turned left down a nearly empty hallway in a section of the school where I’d never been. The lack of people allowed me to move closer to the wall, and I squinted at the room numbers. I was looking for room 22, Life Skills.
Life Skills wasn’t on my original schedule. Auto Maintenance was. A total waste for someone who’d never drive, I know. And in my defense, I’d totally planned on signing up for Art. Except Missy gave me that “oops, my bad” look when we were coordinating our schedules last spring. Then she started babbling about how she’d understand if I didn’t want to take Auto, and how Rona would be in there to keep her company if I didn’t, and how maybe they’d take driver’s ed together too . . . Whatever, it didn’t matter now anyway. I’d been switched to Life Skills, which according to Mom was some new school policy. A required class.
The farther I walked, the more deserted the hallway became, and a nagging suspicion about Life Skills began to take over, twisting my stomach, disrupting the leftover shrimp lo mein I’d had for breakfast. For a new, required class, shouldn’t there be more people on this route?
I consulted my map. My fingers followed the thick black lines that I’d drawn the night before. This was the way. A right at the next hallway and I’d be there.
At that last turn, I stopped. Someone in a brown, hooded cloak twirled, twirled, twirled in the middle of the hallway, like a little girl in a frilly Easter dress. A garment like that meant immediate social suicide, but in a deserted hallway, I knew it meant something else too.
Special Ed.
I maneuvered around the twirling girl and approached the classroom. As I brought my eyes up from the floor to look inside, I spotted the spokes of a wheelchair.
No,
I thought, my stomach tightening. I slid the dots blocking my central vision to the side so I could see the chair’s occupant. He was talking to someone out of sight range, but I could hear his voice; he sounded normal. Simply a guy in a wheelchair.
I relaxed, took a few steps closer—and noticed the slumped body to the left. He was humming and rocking, hands twitching uncontrollably. My eyes flitted to the girl facing me. Short and plump, a permanent smile plastered on her face—the perfect model for a Special Olympics poster.
There had to have been a mistake. This was not my room. I hurried past, hoping the next room was mine. But there wasn’t one. Only a pair of bathrooms with blue
HANDICAPPED
signs.
Welcome to Hell.
I turned around. The girl in the cloak stopped spinning and stared at me. The thick layer of eyeliner against her white-blond hair and ghostly pale skin made her eyes hang in midair, faceless. I moved past her, rounded the corner, and once the hall was clear, yanked my magnifying glass from the side pocket of my backpack. The enlarged numbers on my schedule told me what I already knew. That was my classroom.
Why? I didn’t belong in there. I wasn’t a freak.
“There’s been a mistake,” I said, handing my schedule to the counselor. “I don’t belong in Life Skills.”
She typed something into the computer and then peered over the top of her wire-framed glasses. “You
are
Roswell Hart, aren’t you?”
“Roz.” I tried to make eye contact with her by directing my blind spot to her ear and using my peripheral vision to see her face. But she thought I was looking behind her. She looked over her shoulder and then turned back to me, a puzzled frown on her face.
I hate it when that happens. I tried to save face by pretending I
was
looking behind her, and at the ceiling, and down at the ground. “Eyelash on my contact,” I muttered, pulling at my eyelid. “Yes, I’m Roswell Hart.”
“There’s no mistake, sweetie.” She handed the schedule back to me. “Life Skills is in your IEP.”
“What? No. It isn’t.” My Individualized Education Program—a list of adaptations some school officials came up with to help me “succeed” in the classroom: extra time for tests, oral instead of written tests, prewritten class notes, class materials in large print, books on tape, and so on.
I didn’t need any of it. As long as I sit in the front, I get along just fine. Yes, it takes a while for me to read the board—I have to move my dots from spot to spot until I have pieced together a sentence—but it’s better than being singled out for “special” treatment. I had told this to Mr. Villanari, my IEP advisor, when we discussed my IEP last spring. He told me if I didn’t think I needed any special help, I didn’t have to use it. That’s how I knew. “There’s no Life Skills in my IEP—ask Mr. Villanari.”
“Oh, Mr. Villanari is no longer your IEP advisor. Mr. Dellian is.” She gave me a sappy sympathetic look. “And he’s decided that after that unfortunate event last year, everyone with a disability must take Life Skills. It’s for your own good, sweetie.”
“Disability.” How I loved to hate that word. I used to think I had “ability,” that I was normal. That’s because I thought everyone saw like me—disjointed and fragmented, every object in visual range like pieces of a puzzle in need of constant reconstruction. When it’s the only way you know, your way is normal. Until told otherwise. For me that happened in fifth grade, when Ms. Freemont thought I was dyslexic because I’d read words wrong out loud.