Blind Spot

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Revelation

  Epigraph

  Pieces

  Thirty-nine days before

  Thirty-seven days before

  Twenty-nine days before

  Twenty-eight days before

  Twenty-seven days before

  Eight days before

  Seven days before

  Five days before

  Four days before

  Three days before

  Hours before

  Epigraph

  Missing

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 6

  Day 9

  Day 51

  Day 86

  Day 93

  Day 140

  Day 141

  Day 157

  Day 170

  Day 171

  Day 172

  Epigraph

  Discovery

  Four days after

  Eight days after

  Nine days after

  Ten days after

  Eleven days after

  Twelve days after

  Thirteen days after

  Seventeen days after

  Nineteen days after

  Forty days after

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  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.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-547-76344-6

  eISBN 978-0-547-76380-4

  v1.1012

  For Breanna, James, and Megan,

  may they always follow their dreams,

  and for Jeff, who helped clear the

  path so that I could follow mine.

  Revelation

  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.

  —Jonathan Swift

  Pieces

  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 clos
er 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.

  After my optometrist rechecked my glasses’ prescription and found nothing wrong, everyone figured it must be some mental problem, a learning disability, whatever. They ran me through tons of tests, finding nothing. Then in the middle of eighth grade, Mom suddenly thought to mention that my dad can’t drive because of some eye disease. Something I didn’t even know. I saw an ophthalmologist and voilà! They got their diagnosis: macular degeneration. And I got my label: disabled.

  Don’t get me wrong. With Mom dating anyone who checked out her ass and Dad chasing UFOs across the country instead of hanging out with me, I’d had my share of labels before that. But “Broken Family,” “Single Mom,” “Absent Dad,” no matter what the teachers tagged me with, it didn’t matter; half the class had them too. Disabled, however, opened a whole can of labels that stripped me of my identity. I went from Roswell Hart with straight As and a permanent spot on the honor roll to Legally Blind, Visually Impaired Roswell Hart, a Disabled student with an IEP.

  “Look,” I said, fighting the urge to “sweetie” her back, “I have bad vision, but my life skills are just fine.”

  “Your parents can speak with us about it. But until then, the only change I can make is to place you in another Life Skills class.” She looked behind me. “Next!”

  The first bell rang. There was an instant swarm as I entered the hallway, and then I was left alone with only a few stragglers. A frustrated scream thrashed around inside me, clawing at my ribs. I didn’t want to go to that class, that black hole the school was shoving me toward. But what could I do? The school had made that decision for me. The class was on my schedule, a requirement now for losers with labels.

  My legs carried me back toward the Special Education hallway, but my body was rejecting the situation. Bile crawled up the sides of my stomach, and I struggled to keep my breakfast down. When I reached the hallway outside Life Skills, I flung open the bathroom door and barely made it into a stall before the vomit broke free. Chunks hit the gray linoleum with a splattering slap.

  “Classy.” Cape-girl hung over the stall wall above me. “Is this a first-day thing, or are you bulimic or something?”

  “Huh?”

  “The puke. You do it to stay skinny?”

  Before I could answer, she’d disappeared. Her high heels click-clacked on the tile outside, and then she shoved my door open, a handful of paper towels in her hand. “God, that is rancid! What did you eat for breakfast?” She covered her nose and tossed the brown paper on top of the half-digested shrimp swimming in a salmon-colored sea. Clutching her cloak with one hand, she pushed the towels around with the toe of her thigh-high black leather boot. “I puked at school once,” she said, still holding her hand over her nose. “Jimmy Benson shared his fifth of vodka with me during gym.” She turned smoothly on her toes and went back to the stall next door. “You coming? Or you gonna stay in here with your puke?”

  I should’ve washed my face, recentered myself, and mose
yed into that hellhole of a class. But something about her fascinated me. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The cloak suggested some out-of-touch lost soul, but she sure didn’t talk that way. Like an alien abductee caught in a tractor beam, I followed her.

  “I’m Tricia,” she said. Her butt rested on the railing, feet balanced on the toilet lid, hiked-up cloak revealing a red vinyl miniskirt. She slipped a thin, home-rolled cigarette from her cloak pocket and flicked her lighter until an orange flame lapped at the paper. She sucked in as she lit it, holding the smoke in her lungs before exhaling. “Want some?”

  “Is that weed?” I waved the smoke away and glanced up at the ceiling, expecting a sprinkler or smoke alarm to go off at any moment.

  Tricia smiled. “Don’t worry. No one except Rodney will come looking in here, and he and I are like this.” She crossed her fingers.

  “Rodney?” Could I get high sitting here? I tried not to breathe.

  “Mr. Dellian. Mr. D. The SPED teacher? He’s also the hockey coach. Makes for some hot teacher aides.” Tricia took another long drag. “It’s all legal anyway,” she said, holding in her breath. “I use it for medicinal purposes.” She grinned and let her breath out again. “I have a prescription and everything.”

  “You have a prescription for pot?” I breathed into my sweatshirt collar. “Why?”

  Tricia’s dark, outlined eyes bore into me as she took another drag. The end of the joint flared a bright orange. Its thin paper crackled in the silence.

  I no longer wanted an answer, just out. I reached for the stall door.

  “They stuck you in Life Skills too, huh?” Her voice startled my hand from the door. “So, what’s your poison?”

  I turned, frowning. “My what?”

  “Poison, you know, learning disabled, physically challenged, or, my personal favorite”—she gave an evil grin—“severely emotionally disturbed.”