who is sarah byrnes and where is she when eric sees her

Sarah Byrnes is a seventeen-year-old high school senior who was burned and disfigured when she was only three years old. Sarah Byrnes insists that everyone call her by her full name and will not answer to just Sarah because of the play on words between her last name and her condition. Sarah Byrnes has stopped talking just before the beginning of the novel, becoming so catatonic in class one day that the men in white coats must remove her. Sarah Byrnes is placed in the psych ward at the local hospital with hopes she will eventually come out of her catatonic state. Sarah Byrnes' father believes she is faking, but no one is able to prove it.