Gasp (Visions) - Lisa McMann Page 0,32
“No hospital gown.”
“Finally,” Tori says. She smiles for, like, the first time ever. “I’m so glad to be out of the hospital.”
“I’ll bet.” I tell her about my recent time in the hospital after the crash.
“So, wait—you got hurt doing your vision thing?” Her face is troubled.
“Totally,” I say. “And obviously you know Trey got shot in the arm during the one at UC, and he was helping. He knew about the vision. He was lucky, though. He’s doing physical therapy stuff now.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Tori says. “I didn’t realize that you guys could get hurt while doing this. That’s not fair.”
I glance at Sawyer, who is looking at me. “Invincible,” he says decisively, and I give a reluctant half grin. I turn back to Tori. “We try not to think about that.”
I officially introduce Trey and Rowan to Tori, and then I make sure Tori knows Ben since I don’t know if she was at the meeting from the Gay-Straight Alliance side or the choir group side of things. Ben assures me they are well acquainted.
“Great,” I say. “Let’s get moving, then.”
I pull out my smartphone while Ben and Sawyer set up their laptops. Tori gives us the Wi-Fi password, and within a minute we’re online.
“It’s like Command Central in here,” Rowan says, looking around the room.
Sawyer props his computer on a small table next to Tori’s chair and directs his browser to a video page. I pull out some tracing paper and a pencil that I bought from a craft store a few days ago for this purpose and set it on the floor next to Sawyer for later. We’re starting to get good at this.
“Everybody ready?” Sawyer asks, looking around. We’re all poised to take notes and research anything that is researchable. Sawyer starts the video. “Do you see your vision?” he asks Tori.
“Oh, yeah,” Tori says. “Question is, when do I not see it these days?”
“Okay, good,” he says. “So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to start this video from the beginning and pause immediately, which should pause your vision. Then I’m going to need you to talk us through what you’re seeing little by little, scene by scene, and tell us everything. Don’t leave any detail out, even if it seems unimportant. Got it?”
“Got it,” Tori says.
“And then after we talk through each frozen screenshot, I’ll have you do a little tracing of the scenes, if that’s okay.”
“Yeah, totally,” Tori says. She seems very eager to redeem herself, and I’m glad. I’m actually starting to like her. She walks us through the vision.
“The first thing I see is the ship. It’s all white where I’m standing, but later from a different angle I can see it’s blue on the bottom.”
“What’s your point of view in this scene?” I ask. “Are you, you know, standing on the ship, or looking at it from a different spot?”
“For the first scene, I’m on the ship. Like I’m standing on a deck,” Tori says. “The ship is rocking and there’s a lot of spray and big swells like you’d find in the ocean. There are benches out here, and then there’s a door that leads to . . . like a giant glass room, and I can see a bunch of empty seats in there. Rows of them, like in an airport terminal. Some tables, too. There’s stuff strewn all around.”
Ben looks up. He tilts his head, eyes narrowed, but says nothing.
“Can you see any land in this frame?” Sawyer asks.
“Not this one. Just sky. Cloudy, possibly raining, windy. Slight bit of yellow behind low clouds, like it’s morning.”
“Anything else? Any writing on the ship that you can see?”
“The benches have words indicating there are life vests inside. That’s all I notice.”
“Any people in this shot?”
“Only blurry images far inside that glass room. Nobody’s sitting—if they’re not on the floor, they’re all in one place, crowding around.”
Sawyer hands her a piece of tracing paper and the pencil, and she holds it up to the screen and quickly traces what she sees.
Tori slides the video play bar slightly to the right, narrowing her eyes and trying to get it in just the right spot. “Okay,” she says. “The next scene is from farther away, like I’m not on the boat, because I can see the whole thing and a vast expanse of water behind it. There are words on the side, but I can’t read them—I’m really far away, like maybe my view is from land. When