Girl, Stolen by April Henry

reminder. Usually painful. She sighed. “At first, it feels like someone has thrown a blanket over your head. Some days you just want to scream, ‘I’m inside here! Doesn’t anybody out there see that? Doesn’t anybody remember me? I’m still the same person!’” Cheyenne fell silent. She knew the last sentence wasn’t true, even if she wanted it to be. She wasn’t the same person. “Being blind gave me a whole new life. I didn’t ask for it.” She licked the grease from her fingers. “That’s why I’d rather talk to someone on the phone or computer. Because then we’re the same. We’re equals.”
    “What do you mean, equals?”
    Cheyenne tried to put into words what she had never before said out loud. “Think about how much of talking has to do with what you see and not what you hear. When you meet new people, you can tell a lot about them even before they’ve opened their mouth. Just by their clothes, how they stand, the expression on their face. But I don’t see any of that stuff anymore. Plus, in real life I’m always talking to people who have already walked away, or I answer people who aren’t really talking to me. But when I talk to someone on the computer or the phone, we’re at the same level. We know exactly the same amount of information.”
    While she spoke, Cheyenne slipped her hand into her coat pocket and felt the piece of glass nestled in the kibble. It reassured her a bit. The glass was like a secret weapon. She ran her finger lightly along one edge, even as she spoke without a pause. She knew Griffin had no idea what she was doing. Sighted people always had to look, even at things their fingers were already telling them about. They couldn’t find what was in their pockets without looking down, couldn’t hunt through a purse without sticking their head inside. She knew because she had once been one of them.
    But blind people knew how to do things without giving themselves away. Their hands could work in the dark, like moles, blindly tunneling but always getting where they needed to go. Blind people could look like they were paying attention to you when they were really paying attention to something else.
    “What happened, anyway? Your dad said you were in an accident.”
    The silence stretched out before Cheyenne finally found herself answering him. “It was the summer I was thirteen. My mom grew up in Medford, and we were down there visiting my grandmother. Just the two of us. My dad was on a business trip. Because of Nike, he travels a lot.” She took a deep breath. “We had gone for a long walk, and the sun had just set. It was me, my mom, and my dog, Spencer. We were facing traffic, walking down this long, straight road without any sidewalks, just gravel on the side of the road. Each car that came up behind us would throw our shadows way ahead of us, so they were as long as the block and really thin.” As she spoke, she saw it with her mind’s eye. “Then as each car got closer, our shadows got closer and closer and shorter and shorter. I told my mom it looked like our shadows were walking backward. That was the last thing I ever said to her.”
    She remembered how her mom had smiled in the half light, her curls wild as they often were by the end of the day. Her mom had been beautiful, at least that’s how Cheyenne remembered it. Her mom didn’t spend nearly as much time at the hair stylist or the gym as Danielle did. But she did have plenty of time for Cheyenne. They had laughed at the same jokes, jokes her dad never thought were all that funny. Every Saturday, her mom had taken her to the library and they had each come home with a big stack of books.
    When anybody asked Cheyenne what had happened to her, she always just said “car accident” in a tone that made it clear she didn’t want to say one more word about it. She never talked about it. Never.
    Now she took a shuddery breath. “One minute we were walking, watching our shadows come back to us. The next