Girl, Stolen (12 page)

G
riffin couldn’t sleep. The floor was hard, and the cold seeped up through the old sleeping bag. Exhausted, Cheyenne had dozed off after dinner. Griffin had pulled the quilt over her and then hadn’t known what to do with himself. By that time, his dad had been singing along with the stereo, but Griffin knew that when Roy drank, his mood could turn on a dime. Griffin stayed in his bedroom, sitting on the far edge of the bed, alternately looking at comic books and watching Cheyenne, until finally his dad had turned off the music and staggered to bed.

Griffin hadn’t known where to sleep. He had thought about sleeping on the couch, but he didn’t want to leave Cheyenne alone. Partly he wanted to watch her; partly he wanted to watch over her. He had finally settled for the floor. Now he regretted his decision. Cheyenne’s sleep had turned restless, making it even harder for him to doze off. She kept moaning and kicking her feet.

Finally he sat up and looked at her. He could make out the dark tangle of her hair, but that was about it. She sounded like she had gotten sicker, but in the dark, it was hard to judge just how sick she really was. Then Griffin realized that the normal rules didn’t apply. Moving quietly, he got up and flicked on the light, wincing at the sudden brightness.

Cheyenne didn’t stir. She lay curled on her side. He knelt down next to the bed so he could look at her more closely. Her mouth was full and soft, the lips slightly parted. When she exhaled, her breath rattled in her chest. Black strands of damp hair clung to her flushed face. It looked like she had a fever.

Griffin’s hand hovered over her forehead, then gently pressed down. Her expression didn’t change. She seemed hot – but how hot, exactly? If your fever got too high, couldn’t it damage your brain?

Griffin put his free hand on his own forehead. That felt hot, too. He tried moving his right hand from Cheyenne’s forehead to his own, but he couldn’t really feel any difference, except that hers was clammy and his wasn’t. Obviously his palm was useless as a thermometer. Then he had an idea. If he touched his forehead to hers, he would be able to tell for sure how much warmer she was.

Griffin leaned forward and tentatively pressed his forehead against Cheyenne’s. Definitely warmer. Was her brain cooking inside her skull? While he was still wondering if he should just try to sneak her out of the house and dump her outside a hospital, Cheyenne sat up with a jerk. Their heads cracked together.

She yelped and pushed him away.

“Shh!” He didn’t want her to wake Roy. “It’s just me. Griffin.”

Cheyenne dropped her own voice to a whisper. “What are you doing?” She sounded clearer than he thought he would in similar circumstances. “Are you trying to kiss me or something?”

“No!” To his embarrassment, his voice broke. “I was just trying to figure out if you had a fever.”

“And?”

“And I think you do.”

“I know
that
.” She sat up, scooted back until her shoulders were against the wall, folded her arms, and rested them on top of her knees. She still wore her striped scarf and the puffy silver coat.

Griffin persisted. “But I think you’re sicker than you were.” He thought of what her father had said on the radio. Cheyenne couldn’t really
die
from pneumonia, could she? Although didn’t people used to die from pneumonia, back in the old days, before there were antibiotics?

They must have been thinking along the same lines, because Cheyenne said, “The doctor said that pneumonia used to be called the old man’s friend. Because that’s what a lot of people died from when they were old and frail.”

“Some friend,” Griffin said, then added, “Wait a second. I have an idea.”

He tiptoed down the hall and into the bathroom. The shower curtain still lay in the bottom of the tub.
Crap
. He had forgotten about that. Cheyenne’s escape attempt seemed like it had happened in another lifetime. He tried to hang the curtain back up, wincing as it rattled, but it had ripped away from the rings. When Roy asked, Griffin was going to have to say that he had tripped and fallen – or maybe, Griffin realized, that Cheyenne had. That was more believable.

He let the curtain fall back into the tub, then knelt and opened up the cupboard beneath the sink. Under the silver curve of pipe, a blue plastic basket held witch hazel, Anadin, a broken comb, and stray plasters. No thermometer. But mixed in were all kinds of medicines that, for one reason or another, had never been used or used up. Griffin pawed through muscle relaxants, rash creams, and cough suppressants. He scooped up the Advil and cough medicine. Then after holding up amber bottle after amber bottle to the light, he finally saw, with a surge of triumph, the word
Cipro
. He knew that Cipro was an antibiotic. The printed label read “Janie Sawyer.”

It was kind of a surprise to see his mom’s name. He had a sudden flash of memory – her dark eyes, her high cheekbones, the long reddish-brown hair that fell to her waist. She had hidden behind that hair when she was angry or sad or any of a dozen emotions that Roy didn’t want to hear about. Sometimes she had stood up to Roy, but not very often. And Roy had only gotten worse after she left.

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 –
wid a code
. It’s nearly impossible to make out what he’s saying. That’s why I like CDs and downloads so much better, you know, like Books on Tape, the same as sighted people buy. Have you ever heard the guy who reads Harry Potter?” Her face lit up. “He’s wonderful. He has a different voice for every character.”

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.”

C
heyenne 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.