Blindsided (23 page)

“I haven’t done that since I was, like, in third grade,” Serena said.

Natalie sat silently.

 

In American government, Mr. Joe had a new assignment. “On June 26, 2008,” he said, “the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handgun possession and decided for the first time in our nation’s history that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun for self-defense.

“This decision,” he went on, “wiped away years of lower court decisions that held that the intent of the amendment, ratified more than two hundred years ago, was to tie the right of gun possession to militia service. How do you feel about this? Sheldon, go ahead.”

“I don’t think anybody should have a gun,” he said. “There is too much violence in this country—in this city! Baltimore has one of the highest homicide rates in the country. And Washington, D.C., is not much better. They need to keep guns off the street!”

“I agree,” Murph added. “Guns are bad.”

“My uncle got shot last year and he wasn’t doing anything,” JJ jumped in to say. “He was just standing outside on the street is all. Somebody drove by and shot him.”

“Hands, people. Remember to raise your hand and let me call on you before speaking out,” Mr. Joe reminded them. “Serena, go ahead.”

“I think the government should take away all the guns,” she said, “and throw them in the ocean.”

“
All
the guns? Okay. Does anybody here have a different opinion?” Mr. Joe asked.

Natalie, who didn’t feel like participating in any discussions that morning, nevertheless raised her hand.

“Natalie, go ahead.”

“I just want to point out that farmers like my dad need guns to protect their animals and their land. We have a gun safe in my house with several rifles and shotguns in it.”

She heard a couple gasps in the room.

“I’ve fired a gun myself,” she said, unashamed. “I learned how to use a shotgun when I was eight years old. But you’ve got to understand that back where I live, hunting is a big deal. Wild turkey, deer—there’s even a black bear season—”

“Oh, my gosh!” Murph interrupted. “Bears are so cute! How can anyone kill a cute little bear?”

Murph was behind her somewhere. Natalie turned around in her seat. “My father would shoot a black bear in a heartbeat if it was coming after our goats,” she said.

Just then, the door to the classroom opened and Mark, the student with tattoos up and down his arms, rolled his wheelchair out of the room, letting the door slam behind him.

“Mark!” Mr. Joe hollered after him. “Just a minute there, young man, you can’t—”

“Mr. Joe!” Sheldon called out, stopping the teacher in mid-sentence. Sheldon lowered his voice. “Mr. Joe, you’re new, so maybe you don’t know. But Mark is in that chair because of a bullet. It went in his head. Paralyzed and blinded him both. His own cousin did it. They were foolin’ around with somebody’s gun.”

For a long moment, Mr. Joe remained silent. Natalie heard him pull out his chair and sit down. “Thank you for explaining,” he said quietly. He moved some papers on his desk while the class waited.

“Well,” he finally said to the class, “life’s journey can be full of unexpected turns. I would like you all to reflect and examine your thoughts on this issue. Two pages due the first week of January after the holiday break. Decide which way you would have voted if you were one of the Supreme Court judges.”

 

In gym, the girls shot baskets at a hoop equipped with a buzzer that sounded when the ball hit the rim. Mr. Lee was sick, so self-defense class had been canceled. Just as well, Natalie thought. They would probably be rehashing the incident of last week.

Eager for news of Bree, Natalie rushed from the gym to Miss Audra’s office.

“Hey there,” Miss Audra said. She gave Natalie a small hug. “Your face looks better already. The swelling has really gone down, Natalie.”

“How’s Bree?” Natalie asked. She put her backpack on the floor and, feeling for a chair, sat down, still holding her cane. “Can we go to the hospital?”

She heard Miss Audra close the door. It seemed to take forever for her to return and sit opposite Natalie. Why wasn’t Miss Audra saying anything? Was she gearing up to tell Natalie that they were revoking her Forestville pass because of the trouble? Or was she about to break the news that they were suspending—or expelling—them both from school?

Instead, Miss Audra, in a calm voice, asked Natalie a weird question. “Do you know what an aneurysm is?”

“An aneurysm?” Natalie asked.

“Yes.”

“Some kind of a disease?”

“Not exactly,” Miss Audra replied. “An aneurysm is a weak or thin spot on a blood vessel that balloons out and fills with blood.”

Natalie frowned and sat up. “Does this have something to do with Bree?”

“Yes,” Miss Audra confirmed. “It does.”

“She has one of these, Miss Audra? An aneurysm? Where?”

“In her neck,” Miss Audra said.

“Is she going to be all right?”

She heard Miss Audra sigh. “This is going to be so hard,” she began, “because I know that Bree was your roommate and your friend—”

Natalie’s cane fell to the floor as she gripped the armrests on the chair. “Miss Audra, wait—”

But Miss Audra continued. “The aneurysm burst, Natalie. There were
huge
efforts to save her—”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Stop!” Natalie implored, even putting her hands up to her ears.

But Miss Audra would not be stopped. Gently, she pulled Natalie’s hands from her ears. “Bree has passed on,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Natalie. There was nothing anyone could do.”

P
assed on? What? Did she mean dead?

A chill ran through Natalie. It felt as thought someone had tapped an icicle through the top of her head and driven it straight down through her core.

“Bree is
dead
, Miss Audra?” Natalie couldn’t quite grasp it. It was like a bad dream, or a nightmare. Surely, she misunderstood.

Miss Audra moved beside Natalie and put an arm around her shoulders. “She died early Sunday morning, Nat. No one told me until last night.”

“Bree is gone?” Natalie asked again, still in disbelief.

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

Natalie’s eyes began to fill with tears, and yet she didn’t cry, not really, because it still seemed so unreal. Shock. Maybe that’s what shock was like.

Miss Audra plucked Kleenex from a container behind her and pressed the tissues into Natalie’s hands.

“I’m not sure how much you know, Natalie, about Bree’s situation. As teachers we’re not supposed to share this information with other students.”

Natalie wiped off some of the tears that began trickling down her cheek. “She was in an accident. That’s about all I know. I think her boyfriend was driving the car.”

Miss Audra didn’t respond right away. “Well, she wasn’t exactly in an accident so much as she caused one.”

Natalie turned her head slightly. “What do you mean?”

She could hear Miss Audra take in another breath and let it out. “I don’t know how much I should say, but it was in the newspapers some months ago. Last spring, Natalie, Bree hanged herself.”

“What?! She tried to kill herself?”

“No. This is why it was an accident. She was trying to get high by cutting off her own air supply. You may have heard of this. It’s called the choking game, the fainting game, the something dreaming game—”

“Space Monkey?” Natalie cut in.

“Yes. I think that’s one of the names, too.”

Natalie bit her bottom lip and held her face in her hands. This is what Bree had started to tell her.

“Bree was doing this—this
thing
—to herself to get high. She had a scarf and had tied it to the bed. . . . From what I understand, she passed out and her own body weight strangled her. Her boyfriend found her. He untied the scarf and saved her life, no question about it. But her brain had already been deprived of oxygen and there was some damage.”

Natalie brought her hands down. “To her eyes?”

“Actually, no. Her eyes weren’t damaged. It was her brain. The lack of oxygen damaged parts of her brain.”

“But she went blind!”

“Yes. But remember, Natalie, the eyes are our camera, the brain is our TV. If something happens to that place in our brain where the messages are received, the image can’t be seen.”

Natalie stared into the void that seemed so much darker now.

“It’s also why she had seizures,” Miss Audra added.

“Is that what killed her then? A seizure?”

“No,” Miss Audra replied. “It’s pretty complicated. . . . When Bree tied that scarf around her neck, she compressed the carotid artery in her neck and created the conditions for an aneurysm, that little bulge I talked about. Her aunt says she had been complaining of headaches recently. It was probably a clue that something wasn’t right.”

“Yes. She did have headaches.”

“The fall she took the other night disturbed that aneurysm and caused it to burst. That’s what killed her, Natalie.”

“I never should have gone to get her—”

“Don’t you dare start blaming yourself !” Miss Audra demanded as Natalie covered her face with her hands. “Don’t go there!”

But Natalie knew it was her fault. She had summoned the courage to go get Bree, but the effort had backfired. Everything was worse because of it. Worse in a way that could never be undone.

 

The next three days were surreal. It seemed when Natalie took another full breath, she was already in her own room back in western Maryland, driven there by her parents. “I just want to go home,” she had told them after visiting the funeral parlor to say good-bye to Bree. “Please come and get me.” So they did. But Natalie had barely spoken on the long ride home. She sat in the backseat with her head on a pillow propped against the side window. Her hands were in her lap, holding the teddy bear Meredith had given her and an uneaten sandwich in a Ziploc bag.

It wasn’t that Bree was such a great friend, Natalie thought. They barely knew each other, after all. But there was so much they had in common, so many challenges they could have faced and overcome together, and they were becoming closer. It was, Natalie realized, the potential friendship that she mourned as well as the horror of what had happened. Bree’s death was the culmination of many bad things. It was difficult for Natalie to sift through the fragments of recent memory and isolate what bothered her most.

Scenes from the previous day’s events replayed in her head as well: Miss Audra, escorting her to the funeral home . . . Natalie, sitting numbly in the car, still trying to understand. “Why? Why would Bree do that?”

“Only Bree could tell you that, Natalie, and she’s not here now,” Miss Audra had said. “But this
thing
she did—passing out for fun—was a way of getting high, of temporarily escaping from the world. Friends at school did it and wanted her to do it, too. So there was some peer pressure. Even her boyfriend pushed her.”

“But
why
, Miss Audra? Why would Bree want to choke herself and risk doing all that damage?” Natalie opened her hands and leaned forward in the car seat, pushing against the seat belt.

“She probably didn’t ever consider the consequences if something went wrong, Natalie. It’s like teenagers binge drinking or driving too fast. They don’t think anything bad is ever going to happen—not to
them.
”

Natalie leaned back in her seat and sighed. “I still don’t get it.”

“No,” Miss Audra agreed. “No. A lot of us don’t understand. That’s what makes it so hard.”

 

At the funeral parlor, organ music, soft voices, and the smell of flowers had surrounded Natalie like a dream. Miss Audra led her to a table and described the photographs displayed. “Gabriella’s first recital,” she read from a note. “Miss Peggy’s Dance Studio.”

“What does she look like in the picture, Miss Audra?”

“She’s cute. About four years old. Wearing a pink leotard, pink tights—and not ballet slippers, but tap shoes, I think. Her hair is short, with bangs. She’s smiling. Big smile.”

When they approached Bree’s casket, a woman introduced herself as Gabriella’s aunt and said, “You must be Natalie from school.”

“Yes,” Natalie replied.

The woman took Natalie’s hand and pressed it. “I want you to know, Natalie, that Bree was very fond of you. You made a difference in her life, a big difference in a short period of time. I think she wanted to be like you. She was finally turning a huge corner in her life.”

Natalie swallowed hard. She did not want to cry in front of Bree’s aunt.

“Take care of yourself,” the aunt had told her. “I hope you live out the dreams that you and Bree shared.”

Natalie was glad she couldn’t see Bree in her casket, laid out, Natalie heard, in a pretty blue dress, with pairs of tap and ballet shoes tucked in at her feet. Nodding her head to say a prayer, and good-bye, Natalie hoped that somehow, somewhere, Bree was in a better place, and that in this better place, Bree could dance—and, perhaps, even see again.