Blind Spot

by Laura Ellen

  But there’d been no tracks, no needle marks.

  What if Jonathan had given her something, just not pot? Something that would make her insanely high in the cafeteria? Something that would leave no tracks? Something like . . . crack?

  I’d never seen her smoke it until after that day. Was he selling crack to her? When I saw her get in his car that time at lunch—he made me think I’d been mistaken, but what if I hadn’t? Could he have been giving her crack? In the loft, Tricia had said she “just needed.” Had she “just needed” the crack he could supply? Was she “paying” him that night in the loft? I shivered in disgust.

  If he was supplying her with crack, there was a good chance he’d have a crack pipe with her prints on it—one he’d need to plant in my locker to keep the police from finding it on him.

  “Roz?” Detective King said.

  Then again, as Detective King said, it could’ve been Ethan who called in the tip. Maybe Jonathan did give him the money and he was the one who got her crack instead. He could’ve planted the pipe . . . or Jonathan could have been lying, saying he gave Ethan the money, saying Ethan started the fire. Was Ethan another scapegoat like me? Dellian too? Had the fire been about getting proof? Or something else entirely? The whole thing made my head hurt.

  “Roz!” Mom yelled. “She asked you a question!”

  “Sorry.” I shifted my eyes to Detective King’s face to fake eye contact. “What?”

  “Who else knows your locker combination? Who else has access to it?”

  “Nobody.” I sighed. That wasn’t true. “And everybody.”

  “Rozzy, don’t play games!” Mom snapped.

  “I’m not! Nobody knows my combo; everyone has access to it. I leave it unlocked.” Jonathan knew that. He had to have planted the pipe. It was the only thing that truly made sense. And he knew that by calling in the tip, I’d take the fall for everything. Just as I had for the fire. Because he knew drugs had killed Tricia. His drugs.

  “I think Jonathan is behind everything,” I said, and laid out my suspicions.

  “Sounds plausible,” Detective King said when I’d finished. “Unfortunately, it’s speculation. We need something concrete. I’ll keep digging.” She stood up. “I have to send you to the detention center now.”

  “Detention center?” What was she talking about? “But I just told you—”

  “You’re sending her to jail?” Mom turned to me, her head shaking back and forth. “You’ve really screwed things up this time.”

  For the first time in my life, I agreed with her.

  A police officer took me to the detention center in handcuffs and handed me over to a female guard. After my clothes and shoes were replaced with an orange jumpsuit and slippers, the guard escorted me to a windowless room with ice-blue brick walls and a steel-framed cot nailed to the cement floor.

  The thick metal door bounced shut.

  The lock clanked into place.

  I was alone.

  I picked my way across the itchy wool blanket on the cot and sat with my back against the cold concrete. Knees hugged to my chest, I stared up at the gray, UFO-less ceiling.

  It was quiet. Too quiet. So absent of sound, it suffocated me, like being underwater. At first I thought I’d lost my hearing. But there simply was nothing to hear. No hissing radiator; no thumping bass from a distant car; no squeaking shoes from a passing guard. Nothing. Just a thick, deafening silence.

  “They could at least get some made-for-the-elevator canned Madonna music in here.” My voice echoed off the walls and disappeared.

  What the hell? How did I end up in a juvenile detention center? At what point did I take that wrong turn and land here?

  “Wrong turn? Please,” I told myself. “You mean which wrong turn. You’ve made so many.” Trusting Jonathan. Not listening to Greg. Using my friends. Not being a friend. Being so wrapped up with my selfish self, I was blind to everything around me. “Guess when they said I was legally blind, they meant more than my eyesight.”

  What seemed like an eternity later, the door of my cell began groaning and then rumbled open. A guard nodded at me. “Visitor.”

  My spirits lifted when I saw Detective King. “Can I go home?”

  She gave me a sad look. “Your mom and the public defender are working on it, but the process sometimes takes a while. They give you dinner yet?”

  My shoulders slumped back against the cement wall as I nodded. “Yes.”

  “You know you can use the phone to call your mom. They allow a phone call each day.” She handed me Ruth’s yearbook. “You left this in my office. Thought you might want it.”

  I embraced it like a lost treasure. “Can I get my music and earphones from my stuff too? It’s so quiet.”

  “Sorry, hon, not allowed. The earphones are considered a weapon.”

  “Right,” I said with a laugh.

  She made a choking motion with her hands.

  “Oh,” I said. “People really do that?”

  “Roswell.” She sat on the corner of my cot. “We searched Jonathan’s house, car, and locker. No drugs.”

  “So he stashed them someplace.” Her sigh made me feel hopeless. I sighed too. “Check my locker again. All the evidence you need is probably in there now.”

  “His prints weren’t on your locker or the pipe, Roswell, and we tested the pipe in case your hunch about him and Tricia smoking crack together was true. The only DNA in that pipe was Tricia’s.”

  “So?” I rested my head on the wall and looked up at the ceiling. “My prints and DNA weren’t on that pipe either, were they? I’m still in here.”

  “Roswell, I’m sorry. But the pipe was found in your locker. Unless we can prove it was planted, it’s hard to argue that charge—you were in possession and you admitted to purchasing drugs—”

  “I didn’t purchase them! I just took the money out. For all I know, Jonathan went and bought a pizza with that money.”

  “And I hope your lawyer argues that—”

  Lawyer? My heart sank. “I’m going to jail for the pipe and the fire, aren’t I?”

  “You’re still innocent until proven guilty.” She shook her head. “Roz, I want to believe you’re innocent, but nothing you tell me checks out. Mr. Dellian let us search his apartment. Nothing incriminating. No photos, no cloak.”

  “So, he’s hiding them!”

  “Or he never had them.” Detective King sighed. “Roz—”

  The exhaustion in her tone made me want to scream. “Look, obviously that pipe was Tricia’s. Your fancy tests proved that, right?” I didn’t wait for confirmation. “Well, Tricia kept her pipe in a pocket of her cape, which she was wearing that night in the loft. And when she was found, there was no cape. So, whether it was Jonathan or Ethan or Dellian or the boogyman—whoever put that pipe in my locker has her cape and is probably the person who killed her.”

  It’s not that I thought I was handing her the smoking gun or anything, but I did expect some sense of urgency or excitement over this revelation. Instead, she just gave me a sad, sympathetic look. “We closed her case, Roz. With Tricia’s past substance abuse, we think the lethal mixture was her doing—whether suicide or accident, we aren’t sure—but we’ve ruled out foul play.”

  “What?” How could they abandon Tricia like that? “But the pipe . . . the cape . . .”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, hon. Tricia could’ve taken the cape off and left it someplace that night. And you two were friends. She could’ve left the pipe in your locker.”

  “But she didn’t!” They couldn’t do this! They couldn’t just close her case. “What about the GHB? You said yourself it’s used as a date-rape drug! Why would she give herself that?”

  “I said sometimes used. People use it as a recreational drug too.”

  “But what about the other girls who think they were slipped GHB? They weren’t taking it recreationally. Doesn’t that prove a pattern or something? That maybe Tricia didn’t take it on purpose? And even if she did ta
ke it on purpose, if Jonathan was supplying her with drugs, isn’t that like killing her?”

  “Yes, and we’re—”

  But I wasn’t finished. “And how about Dellian? He lied about seeing her that night; I know he did! What if he drowned her and she was too messed up to fight back? Or what if Dellian or Jonathan or someone else forced her to take the drugs and then drowned her? There’re so many things that could’ve happened!” My voice had reached a hysterical pitch and I knew I was about to lose it. I lowered my voice, but it still came out in a whine. “You don’t know anything yet! You can’t just give up on finding the truth!”

  “Roz, ruling her death accidental doesn’t mean we’ve given up. We’re interviewing girls about the GHB, and if we can use her death to nail Jonathan or someone else for the drugs, we will. We can also reopen the case if we feel her death wasn’t accidental. But right now, you need to worry about you because”—she paused—“the only person we have any real evidence against, for any crime, is you.”

  Eleven days after

  Time stopped in my windowless tomb of a cell. With no clock or light from the outside, I had no idea if a minute or an hour had passed. If not for the guard’s “lights out” command and then the plate of cold scrambled eggs and burnt toast hours later, I wouldn’t have known night had turned to day. It was as if the world outside no longer existed.

  Was this how Tricia’s body felt all winter? Trapped in an icy coffin, unable to hear or see anything, with no chance of reaching out for help? I may as well have been at the bottom of the Birch River too. With everything stacked against me, did I have any hope of breaking free to the surface?

  But I had to. I’d never figure out what really happened stuck in here.

  Everything was so confusing, though, so contradictory. How could I ever sort it all out and find the truth? I wished more than anything that Greg were talking to me. He was the one person who I knew could look at everything objectively. The one person I trusted with absolute conviction to help me. He was also the one person I knew never would. He hated me.

  More than heights.

  My body ached at the memory. God, how I’d screwed everything up with him! With Heather. With Fritz. And Missy. The end of our lifelong friendship this past summer hadn’t been her fault. It had been mine.

  I had lashed out at her during a softball game. She’d just hit a home run, winning the game for us, everyone ecstatic at their golden girl. I’d always been jealous of her a little. She had a dad who was there every day, while I was lucky if I heard from mine once a year. And her mom was always taking Missy to the movies or to get their nails done, making her breakfast, packing her lunch, doing “mom” things, while mine seemed too busy with work or boyfriends or whatever to even bother. But that school year, my jealousy had really become intense. I’d been diagnosed with my eye disease only months before, and it made everything in my life worse. Mom seemed annoyed at me all the time; I had all these teachers and specialists telling me what I needed; I had people looking at me differently; heck, I had me looking at me differently—and yet, there was Missy. Her life still perfection—looks, sports, popularity, boys—everything just getting easier for her.

  So, I guess watching everyone go crazy that day over her made me snap. Right after the home run, the coach’s son asked if I thought Missy’d go out with him. I knew she would, she’d been crushing on him all summer, but the envy in me took over. I told him she was gay and dating Rona. I said it within earshot of Rona on purpose. She and Missy had been hanging out a lot, and I guess I was jealous of that too. Rona ran straight to Missy, and in a blink of an eye, I’d lost my best friend.

  She got back at me. She told the coach I was legally blind. But I deserved that. Whether she did it because I didn’t want anyone to know, or because she knew how he would react, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The coach started treating me like a glass vase, afraid I’d break. So I quit. Greg thinks I got kicked off. One more lie he’ll hate me for when he learns the truth.

  I flipped through Ruth’s yearbook to distract myself. Memories frozen in time. Most of them probably weren’t memories at all, simply moments staged by the yearbook staff to tell the story they wanted to tell.

  She’d marked Renny’s picture with a blue sticky note. His official name was Ronaldo Peter Jensen. His goofy grin made him stand out on the senior page—so infectious, I couldn’t help but smile back at it. How could someone who looked so happy kill himself? If I had to guess who was capable of suicide, I’d choose Tricia hands down over this goofy, grinning boy in the picture. Yet, Renny did commit suicide. It was Tricia I doubted.

  There was a page dedicated to deceased students. Renny wasn’t one of them. But his death had been close to graduation. Maybe they’d added a supplement? I darted my dots around the pages while straining to read the small print of the index in the back, but I found only one other listing for him—RRSH, or Resource Room Study Hall—a class I quickly told Mr. Villanari I didn’t need when he recommended it to me last year.

  Ruth was right. No one cared. Dellian was yearbook advisor and he’d done nothing to honor Renny. Why would anyone else?

  The RRSH photo was toward the back. There was JJ in the front row, with two boys kneeling on either side of him; Tricia, in her cloak, stood in the back row between Jeffrey and Dellian; Renny and Ruth, in the back next to Dellian, wore matching yellow smiley-face T-shirts. Renny wore an unbuttoned plaid shirt over his. He and Ruth smiled at each other instead of the photographer, lost in their own world, just the two of them.

  I wiped at a hair in the corner several times before realizing it was part of the photo. The photograph above had one too. Heather had complained about the same thing with her and Greg’s homecoming pictures. For the hell of it, I surveyed every photo in the yearbook. Two-thirds of the pictures had that stupid hair.

  If Dellian used the yearbook camera to take that photo of him and Tricia, there’d be a hair on it too. Was there one in that photo?

  I curled up, closed my eyes, and recalled the photo, examining my visual memory. Dellian’s eyes had been closed. Tricia was kissing his neck. Both were wearing the same clothes from the dance . . . ugh. I opened my eyes. Trying to remember was pointless. I wasn’t even sure if Dellian’s shirt had flowers or palm trees. How would I know if there was a hair in the corner? I certainly hadn’t been looking for one. Besides, the photo had been kind of blurry. Out of focus.

  No. Not blurry or out of focus. Grainy.

  My eyes flew open. Grainy, like a UFO photo taken by a cell phone. The yearbook camera hadn’t taken that photo. A cell phone had. And nobody takes a cell phone picture with a tripod.

  Dellian hadn’t taken that photo. Someone else had. A third party.

  “Jonathan.”

  Dellian’s eyes hadn’t been closed because he was into the moment. He’d been asleep! Or passed out. With so many people thinking they’d been slipped something at parties, could Dellian have been slipped something that night to make him sick? Sick enough to sleep or pass out?

  Asleep or passed out, either way, the photo had been staged. Just as Dellian told Detective King. Only it wasn’t me who had staged it with Jonathan; it was Tricia. She was kissing Dellian; she would’ve known Jonathan was there. They must’ve done it to blackmail Dellian.

  It all made sense. Dellian had been about to kick Jonathan off the team. Then suddenly he kicked Jonathan out of class, but not off the hockey team. That was the day I found the photo. Maybe Jonathan had just used it? It explained why Dellian was so angry with Jonathan—the photo, even if it was staged, was incriminating.

  But if Dellian was telling the truth about his relationship with Tricia, why did he lie and say he never found Tricia that night? Even with the photo out there somewhere and the threat of blackmail, it made no sense to lie about seeing her.

  Unless he hadn’t lied.

  “Guard! Guard!” I screamed into the intercom. “I need to make a phone call!”

  Once the guard led
me to the telephone, however, I stared at the receiver, unsure who to call. Telling the truth to Detective King had landed me in juvenile detention. I couldn’t tell her Jonathan said the four of us had fought, without explaining I had no memory of it. And all she’d hear was that I’d lied. Again.

  Innocent or not, I’d look guilty. And besides, I really didn’t know the truth. All my suspicions were just that—suspicions based on a memory I’d been given by Jonathan. Maybe there was no fight. Jonathan could’ve made that up too so I’d help him get back at Dellian.

  No, calling Detective King would be a mistake. I needed to talk to the only other person with answers—Dellian.

  But how? I couldn’t call him. He had a restraining order against me. Someone would have to persuade him to speak with me. Difficult, considering no one was speaking to me.

  I glanced at the digital clock next to the phone: 6:30 p.m. School was out. Greg would be home. Would he take the call? I had only one phone call.

  Maybe Heather?

  Even if I could get Heather to listen to me, Dellian wouldn’t listen to her. He wouldn’t trust anyone he knew had a relationship with me—which left Fritz, Ruth, and the rest of Life Skills out too. No, it had to be someone he knew and respected, a student who never gave him problems; someone he’d never suspect would call him on my behalf. I lifted the receiver and dialed the one number I knew better than my own.

  Missy’s cell.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Roz.” I glanced at the guard. “Please don’t hang up.”

  “Why are you calling me? Are you in jail? The caller ID says Juv Detention.”

  “Yeah, I am.” I took a deep breath. Why was this so hard? Once upon a time I could tell her anything. “I need your help.”

  Missy snorted. “Why would I help you?”

  “Because before I screwed everything up, we used to help each other. We used to be there for one another.” There was silence on the other end. “I know I don’t deserve your help. I haven’t been there for you lately. Like with your mom. I should’ve been there when you found out.”