Blind Spot

by Laura Ellen

  “What does everyone see in him?” Greg said when we were finally on our way to school. “He’s so . . . ugh! Forget him. He’s not worth it.”

  “I know. I want to. It’s just”—I shrugged—“hard.” We should’ve been at school by then, but traffic was moving at a snail’s pace. Unfortunate. I could feel a lecture coming, one he’d promised not to give.

  “Okay, I get that he hurt you, but did you really expect anything less from a guy everyone calls Zeus? Just move on.” He shrugged. “Get over it.”

  “Get over it?” I said. “I found him with someone I never in a million years thought he’d be with. Someone I thought, for some sick reason, was my friend. And now he’s moved on to yet another girl who was also once my friend. It hurts, Greg. I can’t just get over that!” I sighed. “You can’t just get over love—”

  “Love?” Greg cried. “You love him? You dated only a few weeks!”

  “No, I meant love in general. Your love life. People who break your heart. And it was a month, Greg. We dated a month.” I wanted him to understand this wasn’t about Jonathan and what I’d seen in him; it was about what I thought Jonathan had seen in me. “I thought he liked me, okay?”

  “He’s scum,” he said with disgust.

  “Yeah, he’s scum. I’m an idiot. I get it.” Whatever. I stared out at the cars in ditches that we were passing. Where was Mr. Good Samaritan now? Busy being Mr. Holier Than Thou, that’s where. “Life isn’t perfect, Greg. Sometimes we fall for the wrong person. Even you did. For someone who’ll never like you back.” It was a low blow, bringing up Missy. But he had started it—after he had promised not to. “Have you moved on? Did you just get over—”

  The sudden acceleration as he screeched into the school parking lot cut me off. He slid to a stop and slammed into “park.” “You think he loves you? He doesn’t even respect you.” He flung the door open and stepped out into the cold October day. “And yeah, I fell for the wrong person, but I have definitely moved on!”

  “Greg, wait.” I scrambled out of the truck to catch him. “I’m sorry!” Even with his long legs stuck in those bulky bunny boots, my canvas sneakers were no match. He was gone before I had reached the hallway.

  “Have you heard from Miss Farni?” Dellian asked when I walked into class.

  “I . . .” It took me a second to remember Tricia was missing. I was still thinking about Greg and how to apologize. “No, and I’m sure I won’t.” I started toward my desk.

  He stopped me. “There’s a Detective King waiting to speak with you in the counseling office.”

  “Speak to me?” I noticed then. There was a somberness hovering in my classmates’ silence. “Why? What happened?”

  “Miss Farni happened, remember? You were one of the last to see her Saturday.”

  I was? “Wait, she disappeared Saturday night?”

  Dellian nodded. “Yes, right after the . . . altercation.”

  “No. That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “She told you—I mean you talked to her—”

  “Your classmate is missing,” Mr. Dellian interrupted. “We’d all appreciate it if you’d think of someone else for a change and go speak with the detective.”

  Once again, he’d twisted everything around, made things my fault, made me look bad. The entire class was staring, judging me. It was Dellian they should’ve been judging.

  “And Miss Hart?” Dellian said as I walked to the door. “Try to look Detective King in the eye when you speak with her. You have a tendency to look elsewhere when you’re conversing. It makes you appear dishonest.”

  He was giving me advice on how to speak to the police now? “That’s the only way I can look her in the eye. If I focus on her face, I won’t see her at all!”

  “It’s not always about your comfort level, Miss Hart. Police officers are trained to read people. Eye contact is the first thing they use to sum up a person. Don’t let your eyesight be your demise.”

  “My demise?” I stared at him. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “I’m aware of that. Detective King isn’t.”

  Dellian’s words had me on edge when I entered the counseling office.

  Principal Ratner had assumed I was lying because I wasn’t looking directly at him. What if the detective did too? I had nothing to hide, though. Nothing to lie about.

  Detective King was a tiny woman, younger than my mom, with long brown hair, not at all like the buff, brutish image I had conjured up in my mind. “Roswell Hart?” She ushered me into a counselor’s office. “I understand you and Tricia Farni are friends?”

  “We’re partners in class.” I tried to look her in the eye. My dots blocked out her entire face and neck. I leaned forward. The shorter distance helped a little, but the detective’s eyes and nose were still missing. “We aren’t friends.” But that was a lie, wasn’t it? I had started to consider her a friend, sort of.

  “Oh?” Detective King said. “Her sister, Abbey, said Tricia talks of you often.”

  The way she said “Oh?” worried me. Could she tell I wasn’t being truthful? Without seeing her entire face, I couldn’t read her expression. I darted my eyes to her ear for a quick look.

  She was watching me, closely.

  “Well, we are friends in class.” I flicked my eyes back to hers to make fake eye contact. “We never speak outside of school.” Except at Birch Hill. The thought of her with Jonathan in the loft made me cringe automatically—and then I grimaced because I’d cringed. Crud! I was making myself look guilty. Why did I let Dellian freak me out like this?

  My eyes darted back to her ear to see if she’d seen the face I’d made. She was staring at me. “Has she been staying with you, Roswell?”

  “No, I haven’t seen her since Saturday.” I blocked out Detective King’s face so it would look as if I were looking her in the eye again. It struck me as ironic how looking at her ear rather than her eyes—for me—meant I was making eye contact and therefore telling the truth. But to her, it meant I wasn’t making eye contact and therefore could be lying.

  Ironic and very disconcerting.

  “Let’s talk about Saturday night. You were at a party with her at Birch Hill?”

  “Not with her, no. I was with my boyfriend.” I involuntarily grimaced again. “Tricia was there too.”

  “A few students told me there was a fight of some sort? Between you and Tricia and your boyfriend?”

  “Not with fists and all. We just argued.”

  “After this argument, what happened?” Detective King looked down and began writing in a little notebook after she asked this. Thank God. It was the one question I was dreading. I had no idea what happened afterward.

  “My . . .” He was not my boyfriend anymore. “Jonathan Webb drove me home.”

  “And Tricia?” She looked up from the notebook. “Where’d she go?”

  Back with the eye contact. I hated this. “I have no idea. We left before she did.” At least I thought we did. What if we hadn’t? Was unintentionally lying a crime?

  “Okay.” Detective King nodded. “How about before Saturday night. Had she ever stayed with you, maybe crashed on your couch a few nights?”

  “No.” The thought of Tricia and I having a slumber party was mildly amusing.

  “Did she ever mention where she was living?”

  The eyes’ back-and-forth thing was making my head hurt. My stomach too. “We weren’t that close.”

  “Her sister reported her missing, but—” Detective King sighed and put her pen down on the desk. I let my eyes fall to my lap. “Her foster family admitted they kicked Tricia out over eight months ago. We need to find out where she’s been staying to proceed. She could simply be skipping school.”

  I looked up in surprise. “Mr. Dellian probably knows.” More than probably.

  “He’s got no idea.” Detective King handed me a business card. “Thank you, Roswell. Let me know if you hear from her.”

  Dellian had no idea? I stared at the card as I stood, wond
ering if I should say something. But what did I really know? And what if she was simply skipping? Or took off to get away from Dellian? She had said to give her until Monday to end whatever it was. Maybe taking off was how she’d meant to do that.

  I shoved the card in my pocket and walked out just as Jonathan came into the counseling office. I pretended not to see him.

  “Hey,” he whispered and followed me out. “You talk to that cop?”

  I nodded. How could he just waltz up and talk to me as if we were friends? I tried to will my heart out of its frenzy.

  “Where do you think Tricia is?” he asked.

  “Run off someplace?” I shrugged and stared down at my shoes. This was harder than I thought. Just the smell of him made my pulse react, whether I wanted it to or not.

  “Probably.” He nodded. “You didn’t tell the cop about that stupid fight, did you?”

  “Stupid fight? That’s what you call it?” I glared at his ear. “No. I didn’t give details about our ‘stupid fight.’ I said there was an argument, and that Tricia was still there when you took me home.”

  “You told the cop we argued, and”—he paused—“I took you home?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked. I didn’t do it for you.” What had I ever seen in him? “I’d rather not relive that moment if I can help it.”

  “So,” he said. “That’s what you want me to say too?”

  “I don’t care what you say. Just stay away from me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Heather had finally heard about the Incident. “And now Copacabana is MIA? You can’t even hate on her in class? How lame is that?”

  “I had to talk to a detective. Are you sure it’s Tricia you see at Dellian’s?”

  “Not too many freaks wearing brown capes in this town.”

  “Maybe you should tell the police. They’re trying to find out where she’s been staying.” I looked around for Greg’s familiar outline. I needed to apologize for this morning. “You see Greg anywhere?”

  She shook her head, mouth full of fries. “At some study thing. Oh!” She looked around now too. “I need to tell Ricky, Greg can take us to see Fritz after school.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You talked to Greg today?”

  “At my locker after class.” She grinned. “He didn’t want me to worry about him during lunch, I guess. Isn’t that cute? Speaking of cute.” She pulled an envelope from her binder and slid it to me. “FYI? Never have yearbook take your homecoming pictures. There’s a hair in every photo. Mr. Dellian is yearbook advisor, isn’t he? Tell him to clean the lens.”

  I pulled each glossy sheet out, but barely looked. There was a lump in my throat I couldn’t quite defuse. Greg was seeking Heather out now? Instead of me?

  Desperate to apologize to Greg, I almost sat in that front desk again. But as I approached, Dellian looked up. “Miss Hart? Everything go well this morning?”

  So, I muttered, “Fine,” and went to the back. I stared at Greg’s head the entire period, willing him to turn around, look my way. But he didn’t.

  After class, he tore out ahead of me.

  “Greg!” I screamed as I ran after him. “Greg Martin!” I found him waiting a few yards from my locker, arms folded against his chest.

  “What do you want? I need to go. I’m taking Ricky and Heather—”

  “To the hospital, I know. I wanted to talk before we went, though.”

  “We? No. You aren’t going.” He looked at the wall instead of me.

  “Greg, I’m sorry about this morning. You promised no lectures, so I got defensive.” A blue smudge lined his chin. “You and your ink.” I reached up to rub it off.

  He slapped my hand away. “Is that what matters to you? Looks?”

  “What? No!” I reached for his arm. “Greg—”

  “Don’t.” He brought his hands up. “Just don’t. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what anymore?”

  He looked away. “You’d better go. You’ll miss your bus.”

  “I don’t care about my bus,” I said as he walked away. “Greg, wait!” But he just waved his hand and kept walking.

  Day 6

  No one talked about Tricia much. Her disappearance was a mere afterthought, an “oh, by the way”— more intriguing than disconcerting. Like a UFO spotting or a ghost story, her whereabouts fueled speculative conversations around lunch tables or on Saturday nights while people passed around a bottle of Schnapps and a bong in a borrowed SUV.

  It was the mystery, the unknown, that everyone found exciting and newsworthy, not Tricia herself. After all, Tricia had been a freak, an alien among them. No one cared where she was when there was more pressing gossip, like how Gina Preston was slipped something at a party, or how Zeus and Missy were now dating “exclusively.” And I was just as guilty as anyone. I was more concerned about the love life she’d wrecked and the one blooming between Heather and Greg than I was about Tricia.

  Except in Life Skills. Although none of us there talked about her either—not directly—she became the invisible string that connected us. Her absence was something we shared, her empty desk a solemn reminder that all was not right in our world. And sad as it sounds, that mutual element made me regard my classmates differently. They seemed more real now; not just people in a class, but individuals, like me.

  Every morning Ruth brought in whipped cream–filled pastries and served the first one to Tricia’s empty desk. It was always gone the next day, eaten perhaps by some clueless sap in another Life Skills class or by Bart, who was sentenced to that room all day, or maybe it was just the janitor, simply doing his job. Wherever the pastry was ending up each day didn’t matter. It was a symbol, an unspoken reverie in her honor, our collective prayer for her safe return.

  Her disappearance had the opposite effect on Dellian and Jonathan, severing the string once attaching them. Her absence polarized the two of them, and it all came to a head the Friday after she went missing.

  “You are skating on some mighty thin ice, Mr. Webb!” Dellian snapped when Jonathan wandered into class long after the tardy bell had rung.

  “You sure about that?” Jonathan flopped into his chair. “I think you’re the one on thin ice.”

  He may as well have pulled a gun. Mr. Dellian went ballistic. He flew over the desk and snatched Jonathan out of his chair by the collar.

  “Miss Hart!” He yanked Jonathan out the door. “You’re in charge!”

  I sat stunned. The two had been fighting all week, but physical aggression? That was new. I considered following them. Despite my own dislike for Jonathan, I was concerned he wouldn’t make it to Principal Ratner’s office uninjured. I looked at my classmates to see if they had the same thoughts.

  They were all looking at me.

  “Wow,” I said. “That was scary.”

  “Why are you in charge?” Jeffrey said. “Ruth’s older.”

  He had a point. I was the newbie and the youngest.

  “Well?” Jeffrey challenged. “You’re in charge. What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” Since Tricia had disappeared, we really hadn’t been doing much of anything in class. “Study?”

  “No!” Jeffrey said. “You have to look in his book to see what to do.”

  “He said I’m in charge; he didn’t say teach the class.”

  “Look in the book,” Jeffrey insisted.

  “Fine!” I made my way to the front.

  Why did everything always have to be so exact with Jeffrey? I thought as I shuffled things around on Dellian’s desk. Always by the book. A slight deviation from the norm and he got so testy. “Where would it be?” I asked after a few frustrated seconds of searching.

  “Try his drawer,” Ruth said.

  The first drawer was locked. The others weren’t. I rifled through miscellaneous office supplies, files, and papers before finding his brown planning book. “Okay . . .” I flipped it open. Taped to the back inner flap was a small brown envelope. I peeked inside.

 
A tiny key.

  Interesting. Only one drawer was locked. The items I’d expected to be locked up—the files with personal info, grades, and so on—were sitting in the unlocked drawers. What could he possibly have locked away in that skinny little top drawer?

  I carefully fingered the key out of the envelope.

  “Well?” Jeffrey said. “What does it say? Do you need your magnifying glass?”

  “No!” He could be so annoying when he was focused on something. Like a pit bull, once he latched on, he wouldn’t let it go. I scanned today’s date. Blank. “Nothing. Guess we’re studying again.” I turned the key between my fingers. I really wanted to sneak a peek.

  Jeffrey slumped in his chair. “When do we apply for jobs?”

  “I’ll look.” I flipped through the pages, still distracted by the locked drawer. What would it hurt? One quick look? I glanced out at the class. They’d all slipped back into their catatonic states—except Jeffrey. He was still waiting for my reply.

  I kept my blind spot on the book, pretending to read, while I pushed the key forward until it was between my thumb and finger. Feeling for the keyhole with my middle finger, I slid the key into the lock—a trick I’d mastered long ago. It’s amazing how much you can “see” with your fingers.

  The lock turned easily. I slid the drawer open and peeked over. It was empty except for a blank yellow notepad.

  Lame.

  “Sorry, Jeffrey, it doesn’t say.” We both sat back, disappointed. Why would Dellian lock up an unused pad of paper? Unless . . . the pad wasn’t empty?

  Jeffrey had gone back to staring at his desk. I took the pad out, fanning the pages in search of writing. Nothing. Totally clean.

  I reached forward to put it back, then stopped. An eight-by-ten piece of photo paper was face-down on the bottom of the drawer.

  I flipped it over. Although the images were slightly blurry and out of focus, I knew what I was looking at: Mr. Dellian on a couch in his jeans, eyes closed, shirt unbuttoned, with Tricia next to him in her bikini top and grass skirt, kissing his neck.