According to the label on the bottle, the prescription had expired six and a half years ago; one year to the day after his mom had filled it. But what were the chances that a medicine suddenly gave up the ghost exactly 365 days later? They probably had to put that date on for legal reasons. Or to give them an excuse to sell you some more. Griffin opened the bottle. The white capsules looked okay. He sniffed. They didn’t smell like anything in particular.
The directions said you were supposed to take one pill three times a day for seven days. There weren’t that many pills left — maybe eight or nine — but it would be enough to give Cheyenne a start.
In the kitchen, he filled one of the glasses he had washed earlier. Back in his bedroom, he softly closed the door behind him and then said in a half whisper, “Since you can’t go pick up your prescription, I thought the prescription should come to you.”
Cheyenne looked confused. “What?”
“Cipro.” Griffin rattled the bottle. When she still looked blank, he added, “It’s an antibiotic.”
“But don’t they use different kinds of antibiotics depending on what you’re sick with? What if this one doesn’t work for pneumonia?”
“I don’t see how you would be any worse off.” Why didn’t she appreciate the effort he was making? “Look, it probably can’t hurt and it might help.”
“But what if it only half kills the pneumonia bacteria and the rest of them come back stronger? We’ve been learning about antibiotic resistance in biology.”
Griffin sighed and sat down on the bed. “What is it with you? Does everything have to be an argument or a discussion?”
She answered him seriously. “Yes. Yes, it does.” Her roughened voice made her sound older.
“Well, take one anyway. Plus, I’ve got Advil for your fever and medicine for your cough.” He pressed the pills into one hand and the glass into the other. Would it help if she doubled up the number of antibiotics? He realized he could tell her the package said whatever he wanted — that she was to take them ten times a day with wine, or once every two weeks, even that they were some different drug entirely.
Instead he said, “Where are you taking biology? Are you going to a special school for blind people?”
Cheyenne shook her head. “I’m mainstreamed. I go to Catlin Gabel.”
Griffin snorted. “Mainstreamed! Even I know that’s a fancy-pants private school.”
Cheyenne flushed. “Well, it’s not some special school for the disabled, anyway. I’m the only blind person there, which can be kind of hard. Sometimes teachers forget and point at things or write stuff on the board and don’t say what they’ve written. It doesn’t happen so much now that I’ve got Phantom. It’s like he’s a visual cue. ‘Oh, right, Cheyenne’s blind.’” She put the pills in her mouth, took a sip of water, and tipped her head back. He watched her throat move up and down.
“What other classes are you taking besides biology?”
She set the glass on the dresser and rubbed her face. “Advanced placement history, German, junior-level English, and trig.”
“Oh,” Griffin said. He felt stupid, the way he used to feel when he still went to school.
She didn’t seem to notice. “Since I’m blind, I have to take extra classes. I have a computer class in a special room they set up for me. The computers at school and at home have a program that can read to me, although sometimes it pronounces things wrong and the voice is really flat.” Cheyenne said the next few words like a robot. “And it reads every word I type so I know right away if I make a mistake.”
“What about the reading assignments? Do you have a machine that reads books to you?”
“Reading.” Cheyenne let out a long sigh. “I miss reading, you know, just picking up a book. There’s a million ways to read if you’re blind, but none of them are as good. Sometimes Danielle pays someone to read to me. And volunteers read my textbooks. With one of them, it’s some guy who always sounds like he has a cold —
Griffin smiled back at her. Cheyenne was smiling, too, but of course it wasn’t a shared smile. It must be weird not to be able to have a nonverbal conversation just by rolling your eyes at someone, or grinning, or stifling a yawn.
“But when I read on my own,” Cheyenne continued, “I’m not a very good reader.”
Griffin was surprised. “Really? But you’re smart.”
“I mean, I’m not that good at Braille.”
“Braille’s like those little dots on the elevator buttons, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah. You feel the different dots in each Braille cell. You have to memorize what each of them means. I have friends who were born blind, and they’re a lot faster than me. They can even use both hands to read. I can’t do that. I have to go really slow, and even then I get confused. If I get one dot wrong, then it could mean an entirely different word. Big words scare me.”
Cheyenne had no idea how well Griffin understood her. “But you would know big words if someone said them to you, right?”
“Of course. I just can’t read them.”
“I have a hard time reading, too,” he admitted. “Last year, I had to read aloud in class. And there was this word, and I kept saying it ‘Brie. Fly. Brie-fly.’ It was supposed to be an article about flowers, but all I could think about was a piece of cheese with a fly on it.”
“Brie-fly,” Cheyenne said, echoing the way he had said it, before she got it right. “Oh. Briefly. It makes sense. Have you ever been tested for dyslexia?”
“I’m not retarded,” Griffin said quickly, wishing that he hadn’t opened up to her.
“No, that’s not what being dyslexic means. Dyslexia is having trouble with the physical part of reading, not the comprehension part. Like me having trouble with Braille.” She straightened up. “You could get tapes from the same place I do. They’re not only for blind people. You just order them through the school district.”
“What makes you think I’m still going to school?” Griffin said, feeling deflated. He had been hoping she thought he was about thirty. Thirty seemed like a good age.
“You live with your dad, for one thing.” Cheyenne shrugged. “I don’t know. The more I listened to you, the more I figured you were about my age. Blind people are good at sizing other people up.” She leaned forward. “That’s why I know you’re not like the other guys here.”
NOTHING BUT IFS
Cheyenne could do the math. These men thought they could get five million dollars from her dad. And they probably could, if he had enough time. And after that they would have two choices.
Choice one: Free the girl who could help the police find them.
Choice two: Kill the girl and find a good place to hide her body.
And the longer she was here, the more they might start thinking that it wasn’t in their best interests to pick the first choice. Because, blind or not, she would know too much.
Forcing herself to take a deep breath, Cheyenne tried to calm down. These guys were criminals, yes, but they were car thieves, not killers. And that was a pretty big difference. Griffin had kidnapped her only by accident. And while it was true that he could go to jail for that, maybe his sentence wouldn’t be too bad because he hadn’t meant to do it. But murder — she forced herself to think of what she really meant — actually killing her, for that they could be put to death themselves. That had to serve as a deterrent. Didn’t it?
But then Cheyenne thought of how empty the roads had been on the way here, and the impression of stillness and space that had surrounded them as they walked to the house. Even though the punishment for murder was much worse than it was for kidnapping, that still assumed someone would find her body.
Her head felt muddled and thick, but she forced herself to think straight. Just by the way the three older men treated her, she could tell that they saw her as a thing, not a person. They probably saw everyone as things, but her blindness just made it easier for them to write her off.
