Chapter 3

Not long after, my phone rang.

"Lena, did you get a cab? Text me when you're home."

Before I could answer he'd hung up. All that came through was one line from the background.

"Forfeit is, the professor has to kiss Clara!"

A little pouting from her and he'd panicked so completely that he forgot I couldn't see well enough to flag down a car by myself.

I opened the little mirror I'd picked up off the passenger seat.

There was a photo-booth strip stuck to the glass. Julian and Clara, faces pressed together. I looked at my own face through theirs.

Plain, washed out. Nothing like bright, glowing Clara.

Julian and I used to promise each other a photo-booth strip on every birthday. It started when we were students. Later he said we were too old for something so childish. Later still he said my eyes couldn't focus for the camera, and he was afraid I wouldn't like how they came out.

Now he had a student, and it wasn't childish anymore.

I lowered the mirror and walked out of the garage one step at a time.

I'd just gotten into a taxi at the curb when Julian came running up, out of breath.

"Lena, wait."

I ignored him and kept getting in.

He blocked the door.

Something in me finally snapped.

"What do you want? First you won't let me stay, now you won't let me go."

"Lena, hold on. Clara's having an allergic reaction. She says everything she ate tonight was food she knows. Did you give her candy?"

I had given her two pieces in the auditorium.

"I gave her two peanut chews. The kind you love."

Something flickered in his eyes. "I've given her peanut candy before... never mind. Just come with me."

By the time he got me to the campus medical suite, half of Clara's face was swollen. She'd buried herself under the blanket and was sobbing like her heart was coming apart, and nothing Julian said would bring her out.

"My face is ruined. It's those candies." She wept, and he stood at the foot of the bed with nothing to do with his hands.

Everyone else turned on me.

"Who just hands a stranger food? What is wrong with you?"

"If something happens to Clara, are you going to answer for it? That's just cruel."

Even Toby, who'd been so kind to me an hour earlier, went cold. "I saw you were blind and sitting by yourself, so I invited you. Clara's the one who asked the professor to sign a book for you. And this is who you are."

"I didn't know she'd react to it. I swear I didn't."

"Don't bother explaining. Look at her face. You think a couple of words and an apology fixes that? If anything happens to her, you'll be sorry."

...

It came at me from every direction. There wasn't a shred of proof, and they'd already decided.

Julian didn't so much as look at me. Clara wouldn't go to the hospital, and he paced back and forth, frantic.

I'd only seen him that frantic once. That was the night he drove me out to watch the sunrise after going too long without sleep. A car came over the center line, and in the last second he swerved and put my side of the car into it.

On the way to the hospital his phone rang. Someone wanted him to sign books. He pulled onto the shoulder and stayed on that call for twenty minutes. In those twenty minutes the blood spread out under me across the passenger seat. I lost the baby at four months, and I lost my sight.

The dark had already taken everything before we reached the hospital. The last thing I ever saw was his face, wrecked, smeared with tears.