Girl, Stolen(31)
“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.”