Blind (11 page)

“We have a new student joining us today,” Ms. Raymond said then. “Everyone, meet Emma Silver. Please make her feel welcome.”

When I heard my name, the colors drained away, and whatever she said next went so dull I could barely make it out. I detached from my body enough to think what an unlucky girl that new blind kid Emma must be, even to wonder who she was. She had, I felt sure, nothing to do with me.

But Sebastian’s hand was back on my arm, and then on my hand. His was warm, and I realized how cold I was. He leaned in close to me and whispered, “It gets a lot better, by the way.”

I felt shy, afraid to speak lest we get in trouble, but I swallowed and whispered back, “How do you know?”

He kept his hand on mine, and I felt fluttery about it. “Because,” he said, like he’d known me forever, “you’re sending out total sonic misery, like a radar. But everyone has a story. I mean, not to be mean or anything, but we’ve all had stuff happen, you know? Briarly will wring the PBK bullshit right out of you.”

“What’s PBK?”

“Poor blind kid.”

He took his hand off me then, and Ms. Raymond started talking about the 1960s, as if any of us could have cared less. How was I ever going to get a job? Or live in the world again? And why could I still feel where Sebastian had touched me, as if his hand was actually still there?

It was in my braille classes those first weeks at Briarly that I started getting a feeling I now have a lot of the time: like I’ve died and come back too many times to keep a record. I’m another me, and then another, always versions of myself I never knew before. A switch flipped in me last year at Briarly; my mind and my fingers started working together, making patterns, textures, shades. That’s when A became red, B blue, C orange, D brown. Monday went white, Tuesday blue, Wednesday yellow, Thursday brown, Friday red. The weekends were a forest I saw for the first time only once I couldn’t see: green Saturday, gray Sunday, the color of the sky right before there’s no more light left. At first, braille was confining and confusing—the cells too close together, the figuring out exhausting. Was this an R, with dots 2, 4, 5, and 6 raised, or a W, with 1, 2, 3, and 5? Why was the W in the wrong place in my alphabet sheet? Because Louis Braille was French and so originally there was no W. R and W were mirrors of each other, which made me think of mirrors, which I would never see again.

The first time I realized I’d memorized the braille alphabet, after Briarly one night, I was lying on the gold couch with Naomi, listening to
Alice in Wonderland
. I loved Alice last year, because she fell down a dark hole and was lost. She made me feel like no matter how weird the world got, or even how much you changed, you might still stay yourself. And I loved Naomi, because she was willing to sit with me, even when I was just listening to the same story over and over. I realized that night that my fingers were typing braille along to the story. Dot 6 (capital) and dot 1: A; dots 1, 2, and 3: l; dots 2 and 4: i; dots 1 and 4: c; dots 1 and 5: e. I saw the dots in my mind, the cells, the lovely 1, 2, 3, and 5 of the R for
rabbit
. The W, a mirror image of the braille R: 2, 4, 5 and 6. I had been confusing R and W constantly in my braille class, but when I was listening to the story and thinking of the White Rabbit, I saw the letters as braille dots, rather than letters. I felt both thrilled and miserable. Would I actually manage to get braille? And if I did, did that mean I’d forget what letters had looked like?

On good days like that one, I thought,
I can live like this. I can live in my colorful mind
, and hoped that slowly, the way they do, things would keep coming together, the dots in each cell forming A’s, 1’s, B’s, 2’s, C’s, 3’s; that everything would someday make sense, the way braille does if you have no choice but to learn it.

Then I started grade-two braille and realized that everything I’d learned in grade-one braille barely mattered, because spelling words out letter by letter was absurd, and there were endless symbols I still had to learn: one symbol for
with
, another for
for
, still others for
because
,
before
,
behind
,
below
,
between
,
beyond
. Even the word
braille
itself was just b (dots 1 and 2), r (dots 1, 2, 3, and 5), and l (dots 1, 2, and 3). So I cried.

And for months, I couldn’t figure out words until I got to their final syllables or letters, like a five-year-old; like Jenna, who was learning to read faster and with more accuracy than I was. Only Benj and Baby Lily were behind me. And on those bad days—and there were a lot of them—nothing made sense at all, braille was impossible, the world was dark and loud and utterly inaccessible and oppressive, and my fingers and ears and I had no choice but to tune the world out. We needed a break.

• • •

I can still feel Seb’s hand now, even after four months of not talking to him. I can feel his face, too. Because once, somewhere in that early tangle of days repeating themselves mercilessly, while I was trying to make braille take shape in my mind, trying to figure out how I was going to survive, Seb asked me to go outside with him during lunch and I shrugged yes. I often thought last year that I had nothing to lose. Which wasn’t true, but I didn’t realize it, maybe because Claire hadn’t died yet.

I followed Seb outside, clicking my white cane along the way, and hating it. It was an oddly warm day, and I was thinking about the difference between piano, which I loved, and braille, which at that moment I did not love. Of course, right now I prefer braille to piano. Maybe someday I’ll be able to tolerate both. Or neither.

I kept thinking during grade-two braille with Mrs. Leonard that if only I could cheat, just use my eyes once or twice to memorize the cell patterns, then my fingers might be able to follow up. But I couldn’t remember them, couldn’t see them. Why hadn’t I learned braille when I could still see? Oh, right. D’s and H’s mixed in my mind, and under my fingers, which began, after long days at Briarly, to ache. The pads of my index fingers were tired of touching, working, looking, trying to read. Seb kept saying I needed braille; that even if I got mainstreamed, I could never finish all my work without having some way to read it. He said listening wasn’t the same as reading, and that braille would be worth it. He said, even though I never told him how hard it was, that it wasn’t always going to be this hard. He tried to tutor me, but I resisted. He tried to invite me places, but I said no, said I couldn’t go anywhere, do anything. My mom was always waiting to drive me off to Sauberg, where I never invited Seb or Dee, who was often with us.

I thought Seb wanted to be my hero, and he tried: reading me his papers in the hallway, unwrapping my sandwiches, finding things when I lost them, walking me from place to place. But maybe he just wanted to be my friend. I don’t know. I don’t know how to think of it. That one warm day I was too tired of saying no all the time, and for once it seemed easier to go along. So I let him take me outside to play his favorite cloud game.

We lay on the cold, hard grass on our backs by the track, and pretended to be looking up at the sky while he talked. Like Logan, Seb was always, always talking: “There’s an alligator and a huge shoe, maybe a group of all-white balloons.”

Making up plush, lovely clouds you can’t see, in other words. He said, “I love this game,” and I thought how gutting and hopeless it was, but stayed silent, flying furiously around my own mind, stinger poised.

But then out of nowhere Seb quit with the fake clouds and said, “I want to see what you look like.” Maybe he’d heard me hating it, hating him, hating Briarly, hating being blind.

I said okay fast, because I was curious. I wanted to see what he would do, felt like testing him. Or myself.

He reached over and took what seemed like hours, tracing my face with his fingers, moving them through my hair and then slowly down my forehead to where my sunglasses were. He had touched my hands countless times by then, but never anything else.

“Please don’t move my glasses,” I said, and my voice was someone else’s, hot and bubbly and strange, as if it came from a fountain underneath us. I put my hands on the damp ground to steady myself while Sebastian kept his on me, skipping the band around my eyes and feeling my mouth instead, my chin, throat, collarbone, the dip in my V-neck T-shirt. I didn’t know if he was going to put his fingers inside my shirt, decided not to stop him if he did. But he didn’t—just reached down, found my hands where they were on the grass, and lifted them up to his face.

“Here’s what I look like, Em,” he said, and his voice was gruff, different, too.

And when I felt his face, I was surprised by how smooth it was, how young. He was only in tenth grade, like I am now, but I’d thought of him as way older, maybe because he was so confident. His jaw was sharp, his chin had a groove in the middle. He had a preppier face than I was expecting, and I was surprised by his lips, but it took me a minute to understand why. I kept my fingers on them, trying to feel the shape of his smile. His mouth was softer than I’d imagined a boy’s—or anyone’s, really—would be. His breathing was fast and raggedy, and I left my fingers there, on his slightly open mouth, for what felt like forever. I could hear my own heart beating, and I thought maybe he was kissing my finger. But maybe not, too. I let my hand slide away from his face and we never talked about it again.

Sometimes I wish I’d done something then. I don’t know what—kissed Sebastian, maybe. Or thanked him. Because that was the first time I knew that I could have good, melty secrets again, not just fear and a ruined heart. I even thought maybe that new, 3-D feeling could become my own kind of vision, a way of being extra alive instead of less alive.

But I said nothing. Not that day or the next or the next, and then it would have been weird. Seb never asked me to go outside with him again at school, or to play the cloud game. He invited me to ski, and to watch his beep ball games, and I said no so many times that I saw a page of no’s in my mind, raised in their braille cells: all those 1, 3, 4, and 5 N’s and 1, 3, and 5 O’s. They were round blue and white words:
No, no, no, no
. I wondered whether every time I spoke, Seb saw a girl made of round, impossible braille dots. But I never asked him anything, because asking might have made our friendship real, which would have meant last year was happening, might have made me blind.

The last time I talked to Seb was on the final day of Briarly, five months ago. It was June. He said he was going to take his driving test over the summer, that there was nothing his parents could do to stop him. He was as proud as anyone I’ve ever met, because in the late spring he’d gotten a job at a cemetery near the school, unloading flower arrangements off of trucks and delivering them to graves. He got hired without telling the guys who ran the place that he wasn’t sighted; I know because he had confided in me and Dee the week before that he wanted the job—his friend worked there and said they had an opening—but Seb was worried he wouldn’t be able to fill out the application. So he showed up one night right before closing time, wearing sunglasses and not carrying a cane, and asked all casually if he could grab an application and bring it back the next day. They said sure. And he spent the whole night filling it out and then dropped it off the next day. He didn’t mention he was blind, or that the application had taken him six hours to finish, with help from his sighted brother. They hired him. And they were right to, because he immediately memorized every shoreline and landmark in the yard, which he said was simple; it was just a grid of paths and graves. And either they never found out he was blind or by the time they did, he was already doing such a good job that no one minded. That’s Sebastian. His hands on me—the way he felt, and made me feel—are the best things I’ve felt since my accident. And they’re still pure secrets. I don’t know if it’s because I want to remember or forget, but I’ve never told anyone, including him, what he showed me that day.

The first person
I invited to our Mayburg meeting was Blythe Keene. I went straight to her voice in English, and I could smell her mint-flower hair. Something clicked in her mouth, against her teeth—strawberry hard candy, maybe. It smelled pink. No wonder boys love her so much; Blythe is a bouquet of delicious things.

“Um, Blythe?” I said, the
um
turning bright like a blush in my mind. “Logan and Zach Haze and I are having a kind of small meeting Saturday night, and we’d like to invite you.”

This was just how I’d planned to say it, with Logan’s name first, then the big, cool surprise of Zach Haze being involved, and then
small
because it sounded exclusive, and who could resist that? Only the
um
had been wrong and clashing.

Blythe answered in a voice that sounded lower than her usual one, maybe because she was surprised that I had invited her to something. I felt nervous, but she just said, “Thanks, Emma. Um, so, when and where?”

So I said, “The Mayburg place, at ten p.m.”

She laughed a little. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I know it’s kind of weird, so, um . . . If you come, just please bring a flashlight and a notebook. And, well, it’s kind of not public, so if you wouldn’t mind not telling other people?”

Then she said, in her normal musical voice, “Okay if I bring someone?” And I didn’t know what to say, so I said yes. I wondered who the lucky guy might be, felt glad it couldn’t be Zach.

At the end of English, Ms. Spencer called on me to ask about Atticus’s glasses in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Even though I hadn’t raised my hand and was kind of mad that she’d made me talk, I said they were symbolic of his perspective; that losing them meant he would see the world differently. I didn’t actually think that was exactly true, but I knew what she wanted to hear, and that my saying it would make it especially meaningful, since I was even blinder than Atticus. Sometimes I can’t help saying what I think people want to hear, instead of what I actually want to say. I wish I could do that less. Ms. Spencer gasped and clasped her hands together the way she does; said, “That’s fabulous, Emma. Let’s end there,” and dismissed us.

I managed to invite Amanda Boughman, Joshua Winterberg, and Deirdre Sharp, in that order. If Amanda was surprised, she didn’t really show it; just said in her crackly voice, “I’m not sure, because I have to go to this Pendleton party, but maybe I’ll come.” Pendleton is the private high school in our town, and unless you’re dating someone who goes there, it’s very hard to get into Pendleton parties. I shrugged and walked over to Josh, trying to be like Logan.

Josh said he’d try to make it, and I floated up above my own life for a second. I saw me, Emma, with light blue sunglasses and Spark, asking people to come to a meeting at the Mayburg place on Saturday night—and having them say yes. I felt a little brave again, like I had when I managed to thank Zach for complimenting my slate and stylus.

A whole day of tiptoeing on that thin limb way above my comfort zone, and Deirdre Sharp was the only one who asked an actual question. Deirdre, with what Logan calls her billboard glasses, because apparently they’re so big and square that they “advertise nerd,” said, “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the meeting about?” I said we were hoping to have a kind of no-bullshit conversation about how we could take care of each other and ourselves, since it seemed like the people in charge weren’t doing such a fabulous job.

She was quiet for a moment, but then she said, “Wow. I like that idea. I’d really like to come, Emma. Thanks for inviting me.” I was impressed, because her parents are the most religious and conservative people in town, so going out late at night to the Mayburg Place might be a big risk for her.

Elizabeth Tallentine said yes fast, like she wasn’t even considering not coming, and I felt totally comfortable. Maybe because I’d already asked a bunch of people scarier than her, or maybe because she’s like me, also a weirdo. I like her.

Then I skipped gym, because we’re swimming for the next two weeks, in the dank, cavernous Lake Main basement pool. And even though I’m brave enough to invite five people to the Mayburg place, and probably will be brave enough to show up there at night myself, I can’t get near the school pool. Water sends me into a spasm of fear. Which is too bad, because so does fire. Next I’ll have to medicate myself against the breeze. And dirt. Gym was the first class I’ve ever skipped intentionally, by the way. It’s formally the end of the A+ me. And the beginning of someone I don’t really know yet, but who’s also apparently me.

• • •

The Friday before our Mayburg meeting, I was leaning into my locker, feeling around for my sunglasses with the band on them, when Christian Aramond materialized from a blank void and said, loud, “Hey, Emma!”

I jumped out from the locker, almost whacking my head. “Oh, hey,” I said, trying to recover.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” There was something in his voice I didn’t like, a taste, almost like sulfur in tap water.

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said, kind of embarrassed, but less embarrassed than I might have been with anyone else, because Christian is so awkward himself that it’s hard to be embarrassed in front of him. Leah once pointed out that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who get embarrassed and those who embarrass other people.

Christian’s dad is the French teacher at school, and he’s always rubbing girls’ backs in a creepy way. So I bet Monsieur Aramond being the butt of countless jokes probably hasn’t helped Christian feel great about himself. We both waited, and it was like when someone calls you but then doesn’t talk. Like you called me, so it’s your fault and I’m not going to bail you out. I tried to outlast Christian, but he was quiet for so long that I eventually thought maybe he wasn’t even standing there anymore, so I said, “Christian? What’s up?”

“Um, so, I just wanted to see if, maybe, you wanted, well . . .” We stood there, aging.

“Wanted what?” I tried to say this gently, before the human race ended, but it came out impatient anyway. Now that I can’t read people’s faces, I feel like they can’t read mine, either. So I work hard to get the intonation right. But sometimes I can’t control it.

He spoke very fast then: “To go to the Mayburg thing together tomorrow night?”

My heart popped a bit in my chest at this. Christian had been on Zach’s list, so had Zach told him I was going? Was Christian Aramond asking me on a date? Was he afraid to walk over there alone? Or did he think I might be scared? Because I definitely was, but not scared enough to want to go with him. Christian seemed scary in some vague way, too, suddenly. But why? Spark gave a little jerk of his head, like he was looking around to see what had made my blood move faster. I moved my leg over so that it was touching him.

I said, “Uh, I think Logan and I might meet at the, uh, you know, statue and then head over. Do you want to come with?”

“Oh, okay,” he said, and his voice had a blurry lining of disappointment around it, fuzzing his words. Which made me think maybe it had been a date he was after. But why?

“I could pick you up at your place and maybe go to Logan’s and get her, too?”

“I’ll already be at Logan’s, so we’ll probably just come from there, but—”

“No problem!” he said, embarrassingly loud. “I’ll just see you guys at the statue,” he shouted. Then he turned and ran away.

“What was that all about?” Logan asked. I hadn’t heard her come up. I felt frustrated.

“I have no idea,” I told her. “He wants to go with us on Saturday night.”

“With
you
, Em.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“He’s only been in love with you since second grade.”

“Yeah, but,” I said.

“But what?”

“Oh, come on, Logan,” I said.

“You’re the only one who has no idea how hot you are.”

“What are you, my mother?” I said.

“Love is blind!” she said.

“Ha-ha,” I said. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

Then we both waited a minute. I wanted to ask her something—about Halloween without me, maybe—but I couldn’t think of what it was, and she didn’t help.

• • •

After school that Friday, while Logan was driving, I told Dr. Sassoman that I was full of dread. I did not tell her about the Mayburg plan.

She said, “Dread? Can you unpack it?”

Dr. Sassoman likes the word unpack way more than I do. It reminds me of a suitcase, of arriving somewhere and staying, and I don’t want to stay anywhere near who I am. I said, “No.”

She waited.

“It’s probably just anxiety about school or whatever,” I said, and
whatever
sounded tinny, fake, like a wrong note in a piano song I’m pretending to have learned for Mr. Bender.

But Dr. Sassoman is irritatingly patient, so then we just sat quietly for a long time until she said, “We never expected that going back to Lake Main would be painless, Emma. You’re making steady progress, and there were bound to be bumps. How is Logan?”

“Logan’s fine,” I said. “She went to a Halloween party without me and won’t tell me anything about it.”

“I see. Did you want to go?”

“No.”

“But you’d like to hear about what it was like?”

Hearing Dr. Sassoman describe the way I felt made me sound stupid. I said nothing.

“Is Logan still helpful at school?”

“Yeah.”

“What about Ms. Mabel?”

“She’s okay.”

“And other than piano and gym, have you been skipping classes?”

“Not yet.”

“Why ‘yet’?”

I shrugged. “There are things I can’t do anymore.”

“What things?”

“See.”

“Indeed. But you managed perfect attendance at Briarly nonetheless.”

“Well, that place was designed for me, right?”

“I don’t know. I think there were some things about Briarly that were better for you than Lake Main and some that worked less well. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I shrugged and then outlasted her through the long, dry pause that followed. I felt thirsty. Finally, she asked, “What about at home? How are things with your parents and your sisters and Benj?”

“The same.”

“As what?”

“As they have been since.”

“I see. Are you feeling more independent?”

“No.”

“Have you gone out alone yet, like we discussed?”

“No.”

“Okay. Are you sleeping well?”

“Not really.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s see each other twice next week, okay, Emma? I want to unpack that ‘yet,’ and make sure you’re feeling less anxious. Or if that doesn’t work, will you give me a call on Wednesday, just to check in?”

I knew she was worried, because Dr. Sassoman never asks to see or talk to me extra times unless she’s freaked out I’m going to die.

I rode home silently with my mom, pressing my face against the cold passenger-seat window, thinking of Logan, when my phone rang. Logan.

“Where are you?” I asked. “Did you hear me thinking about you?”

“I skipped my class,” she said, and I knew her mom hadn’t shown up to take her to driver’s ed and she had missed it, because Lo’s voice was cool blue and even, the way it gets when she turns her heart off. “Can I come over?”

I was thrilled. “Of course,” I said. “I’m in the car with my mom—we’ll be there in two minutes. Come now.” And she was at the door when we pulled up, which meant she had already begun the sprint to my house when she called.

At dinner, Benj recited the story of how they had “bernied” Bigs, and now she was a garden, just like she used to eat gardens. We had all heard it more than a hundred times. “Soon Bigs will be another rabbit,” he concluded, as usual.

“She’s not going to be another rabbit,” Naomi said.

“It’s okay, Naomi,” Leah said. “You don’t have to be so literal all the time—it’s just a way of understanding, okay?”

“If Bigs will be another rabbit, why can’t we just keep her until she’s that rabbit and then that rabbit can be Bigs?” Benj asked.

“I’m with Naomi,” Sarah said. “If we let him believe things like that, then he’ll want to keep the dead rabbit around until it happens.” I agreed, although I stayed quiet.

“It doesn’t happen as fast as that, Benj,” Leah said.

“Mom!” Benj yelled. “When will Bigs be another rabbit?”

“I don’t know when she will, Benj,” my mom said. “Maybe she’ll be something else, like flowers, or a tree.”

“How can a rabbit be a tree?” Jenna asked.

“She’s not really a rabbit anymore, guys,” my mom said. “She’s more like . . . I don’t know, rabbit energy.” Then she sighed, the universal sigh for people who are in impossible conversations with toddlers, who, it turns out, are totally irrational and also, I’ve noticed, weirdly rational. That’s why they’re hard to talk to.

Last year, when she was four, Jenna asked how Baby Lily had “gotten in mama’s tummy,” and my mom launched into a shudder-worthy description of “falling in love” and “putting this in that” and yadda yadda, and then Jenna asked, “Do sperms have eyes?”

“Um, I don’t think so, no,” my mom said.

“But they see eggs?”

“I don’t know if they really ‘see’ eggs, honey,” she said.

“But they’re alive?”

I was parked on the couch, as usual, fingering a page of illegible braille, but I perked up, interested to hear whether Jenna thought you could be alive or not if you couldn’t see.

“They’re alive, yes,” Mom said.

“If they’re alive and they find the egg, then they have eyes!” Jenna insisted.

“Maybe they feel their way, Jenna,” I told her. “Just like I do.”

“When you get eggs?” she asked.

“What?”

“When you get eggs from the ’fridgerator, you feel for them, like a sperm,” Jenna said.

At the table, things were melting in my mind in a way I don’t like: the eggs in my mom’s description, the eggs I had thrown with Dr. Sassoman, the eggs in tonight’s challah. I told myself to focus in, and tried to listen to what was happening at the table, but it was difficult and chaotic. My dad was there, because he eats with us on Friday and Sunday nights.