Blind (25 page)

“Hi, Christian. These are my friends, Sebastian and Dee,” I said, and felt them reach their hands out and shake.

“Nice to meet you,” Christian said, and I thought I could hear a lacy edge of envy in his voice. Maybe he thought Seb was my boyfriend. I didn’t mind if he did, although maybe Dee minded.

“These are my friends, Sebastian and Dee,” I said over and over then, interested in how easy it was, how everyone said “hey,” how no one, not even David Sarabande, who amazed everyone by showing up, made a blind-leading-the-blind joke. No one seemed to think I was made doubly or triply blind by having blind friends. When Logan arrived, she came straight over and introduced herself. Her voice made my stomach pitch and flip, as it always did these days.

“You must be Sebastian and Dee,” she said maturely. “I’ve heard so much about you guys. It’s great to finally meet you.” I thought of her jealousy when I was at Briarly. Now she either didn’t feel it anymore or knew she wasn’t entitled. I felt sad, in spite of myself. And unhappy that Logan knew more about what Seb and Dee looked like than I did. She could probably see that Dee was half Korean and half black. But I consoled myself with the chilly comfort that she didn’t know what their hands or faces felt like.

“You’re like the prom queen of your school,” Seb said.

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“She totally could be,” Logan said. “But she’s always been super shy because she has no idea how great she is.”

Lo meant that as a compliment, obviously, but Dee punched Seb’s arm. “She’s a union leader, Seb, not a shallow prom queen, you sexist pig.” Logan recoiled, probably horrified that Dee felt like she knew me well enough to correct anyone about me in front of her. But Logan said nothing. What could she say?

A few people in the back of the room started laughing, and I didn’t know why, because whatever happened, I didn’t see or hear it. But the laughter and the not knowing made me start to laugh, too. Maybe I was just really nervous, because I couldn’t stop, even though nothing seemed particularly funny to me. After a minute, we were all laughing, and it was surreal because I had no idea why I was laughing, let alone why everyone else was. Except Dima, who shouted, “What is everyone laughing about?”

I stopped laughing fast, realizing if Dima was there, then Blythe must be, too.

“We’re sorry,” I heard Deirdre Sharp say.

I heard my own voice before I realized I had decided to speak. “My older sister Sarah laughed at our grandma’s funeral,” I said loudly, shocked to hear the bright, hot words come out of my mouth.

“Weak,” David Sarabande said. I wondered why he kept coming, why Blythe did, too. Maybe it’s better to be in the conversation than out of it, no matter what the conversation is.

I shrugged it off. “Yeah,” I agreed. “I thought our mom would be mad, but she said sometimes people’s bodies overwhelm their minds.”

“Whatever that means,” Carl Muscan said.

“It means that your body is trying to fix you, to heal you when your heart is broken,” Leah said, from way in the back of the room.

“I remember that,” said a voice I recognized before the word
remember
was finished. The
I
was Sarah’s, the
remember
a kind of onyx word, glinting into
that
. It took me a minute to get it: Sarah was there, with Leah; had come to my meeting, a meeting I had organized. Leah must have invited her. Sarah, peppery, mean-spirited Sarah, was in the room. She had let me tell that story, her story, and not a very nice one, without interrupting. I was amazed.

“Hey,” I said. I waved. “Hi, Sarah. I didn’t see you come in.”

A couple of people, including Sarah, Leah, Logan, and Jason the runaway, laughed at this. Jason was sitting with Leah and Sarah. I listened hard.

“I laughed when I first saw the news about Claire, actually. I know it’s horrible, but I lost my mind for a minute and it made me laugh,” Deirdre Sharp admitted. “Until I cried.”

Blythe, her voice an octave lower than it usually was, said, “Well, I didn’t. When my mom told me they found Claire, I wet my pants. And then I blacked out. When I woke up, I was in the bathtub, with my parents trying to wash me.”

No one laughed.

An image of Claire came into my mind. She was running, without shoes on. I tried to focus on it, and saw her on a road, barefoot. She looked like both a dream and an actual image. And as she ran, Claire transformed into Logan and then into me. I kept watching her on the screen in my mind. Maybe seeing Claire like that is as close as I can get to seeing at all, or to knowing what it would feel like to be somebody else, even a sighted version of myself. It was like my mind was rebelling about all the focusing in, and doing the opposite; it was projecting itself out onto other girls—and then reflecting their minds, lives, and eyes back onto me. If I had been Claire, would I have died? If Claire were me, would she kill herself? Maybe I’ve been wrong thinking that after my accident I have no choices anymore. Maybe every minute is a choice I make to be alive for that minute. And the next and the next.

“Emma, are you okay?” I turned toward the orange voice, which belonged to Josh.

“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks,” I said quietly.

“Oh, okay,” he said, embarrassed. “You just . . . I thought you might be—”

“I’m fine,” I said again, quickly, because I didn’t want to let him say
crying
. I didn’t want to hear him imagine what that might mean for someone with eyes like mine. Josh is nice; he sounds like morning, like juice pouring into a clear glass.

Then I realized someone else was crying, maybe Blythe. I didn’t ask. Monica Dancat was talking, and her words sounded familiar, like I’d said or heard or thought them before. “. . . or because people would have been totally cruel about it if they’d known,” she was saying. I thought of Logan making fun of Monica for dressing like a lesbian soldier. I thought of her making fun of Elizabeth Tallentine. Would Logan have been cruel to Claire if she’d had ammunition? Would I have? I wondered who talked about Logan, about me; who might joke about Seb and Dee after today. It suddenly seemed like none of it mattered much.

“Whatever,” Carl said. “There are plenty of gay people in this town who don’t kill themselves. You have to be mentally ill to . . .”

Then Blythe spoke. “Obviously,” she said. “And plenty of people who kill themselves aren’t gay or young, or whatever, aren’t Claire.” Her voice was different, deflated, edgeless.

“I’m just saying, I think she felt like she had a lot to hide, right?” Monica asked, and I thought how she probably did, too. How we all did.

“Everyone feels that way, don’t you think?” Dee said. She knew no one except Seb and me, and yet she felt like she could say what she wanted, which happened to be what I had been thinking but been way too chicken to say. And interestingly, no one was like, “What is that blind stranger doing, talking at our meeting?”

Logan responded to Dee. “Yeah, I think so. No matter where they live. We’re all hiding shit. Maybe Claire was just more of a pressure cooker than the rest of us.”

I expected Blythe to contradict this, or at least to be annoyed that Logan had said anything about Claire. But she didn’t. She let it go. I wanted to be like Dee. Why was it so difficult for me to be brave and so easy for everyone else?

So I said to Blythe, “Do you think Claire meant to die?”

There was a long silence. But finally she just said, “I don’t think everyone’s hiding some kind of amazing truth, Emma. I know that’s how you see it, but maybe it wasn’t simple. And we don’t get to know what she was thinking. She didn’t leave a note. So who knows what the hell she wanted? Maybe she was waiting for me. I was supposed to meet her that night, so maybe you’ll think that’s like another huge secret the world’s keeping from you.”

I ignored the rude part. “Why didn’t you meet her?”

“Because my parents caught me sneaking out. So what?”

“Doesn’t that make it seem more like an accident? I mean, if she was planning to hang out that night, maybe she just—”

“What I’m saying is, stop it,” Blythe said. “It doesn’t matter and the guessing and keeping on about it just make it worse.”

“So what
should
we do?” Logan asked.

“I don’t know,” Blythe said. “Why don’t we do something she would have liked? Like shut up and go swimming. At night.”

Coltrane Winslow said, “I love that idea,” which surprised me.

My heart flipped a bit. “What if we each brought her something?” I said quietly. “And left it somewhere? Maybe where she’s . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say either
buried
, that horrible blue-gray word, or
grave
, which was so bleak and airless it made my dark seem like sunlight and glitter. “I mean, what if we each left some object or photo or thing that’s meaningful to us, so we can all . . . would that be okay?” I was thinking of Benj, of Champon sitting on the rabbit’s grave, keeping her company.

A few people said sure, and Blythe was like, “Yeah, okay, why not?” And then we kind of drifted off and talked about school and when the outdoor movie screenings were going to start and how stupid it is that they only show musicals from the dark ages, and then someone from Pendelton took out a box of wine. Zach Haze suggested a drinking game and Logan was laughing and I didn’t really want to stay or play or drink. So Sarah and Leah and Seb and Dee and I decided we’d take off, and started walking back through the woods.

Seb hadn’t said anything the whole time at the Mayburg place, but as soon as we left with Leah and Sarah, he was showing off. “Let’s go swimming in the lake right now,” he suggested. “Come on. Seriously. It’s warm enough. Let’s do it.”

Fortunately, Dee said, “No thank you,” so I wouldn’t have to. But as soon as I felt all relieved about not having to say no, I decided to be a decent friend for the first time in my life, so I admitted that swimming, especially at night, especially in the lake, sounded horrible to me, too. “I second the no-thank-you. Lake Brainch sounds like a horror movie,” I said.

“Don’t be so chicken, Emma,” Seb said. “I thought you were all into doing brave shit lately, holding big town hall meetings and whatnot. And you got over your skiing phobia on the bunny hill.”

“And your thing about fire,” Dee said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

They were quiet.

“Uh, your sister said you made a bonfire out of your homework in the backyard, so we figured . . .” Seb started.

“Really? Which sister?”

“Come on, Emma, lighten up,” Sarah said. “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“How’d you even know about that?”

“You think there’s anything that happens in our house that everyone doesn’t know about?”

To my annoyance, Leah laughed at this.

“Yeah. I know. I just thought . . . I don’t know,” I said.

“What? You thought what?” Sarah asked.

“Whatever, Sarah. Since when have you been interested enough to know what I’m doing?”

“Maybe since longer ago than you know.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“You know, it’s possible that even you can be wrong occasionally, Emma,” Sarah said.

“Apparently I can be wrong pretty often,” I said. “But at least I’m willing to admit it.”

“That’s true,” Dee said. “You’re good like that. Now that you talk.”

We were turning onto Oak when a fat drop of rain fell on my head. Two seconds later, it started to pour.

“Let’s run!” Seb yelled, and took off.

“Show-off,” Dee said.

“Can you run?” Leah asked me and Dee, and we said, “Yeah, okay,” and she grabbed the hand I wasn’t using to hold Spark’s leash and started off at a slow trot. Then I heard Sarah ask Dee if it was okay to take her hand, and Dee said yes, too. Then we picked up speed until we were bolting through the rain, getting totally soaked and laughing. Dee shouted ahead to Seb, “You got your swim!” and for some reason this seemed really funny to me. I tried to imagine what we looked like, three blind mice and a dog, running with my sisters on either side of us like parentheses. I started singing, “She cut off their tails with a carving knife,” and by the time we got home, I was bent over laughing at my own joke, even though no one else seemed to find it that funny.

Then suddenly we heard the roar of an engine so loud I wanted to cover my ears, but I couldn’t because I was using my hands to feel the front gate of my yard and to hold Spark’s leash and Leah’s hand. But Leah dropped my hand as the engine slowed. “That’s Jason,” she said. “I’ll see you guys later. Will you tell Mom I went out for a bit?”

Sarah said, “Sure,” before I had time to say anything, and Leah sprinted off. Sarah took my hand then.

“Jason?” I asked. “The runaway from the Mayburg place?”

“He’s not a runaway,” Sarah said.

“What was that noise?”

“His motorcycle.”

“Really? Is Leah going out with him?”

“I guess so.”

“On his motorcycle?”

“Apparently.”

“In the rain?”

“Jesus, Emma. What are you, Mom? Jason’s a nice guy. And they’re just friends. So far.”

I tried to press down the envy rising in my throat. Did Leah confide in Sarah instead of me? Was it like Logan not telling me about her life last summer, because she thought I’d be jealous or feel left out? Or was it something worse: had I never asked Leah a single question about herself?

In my room, Seb and Dee and I listened to weird music by this band Logan had introduced me to, called Pearl and the Beard, and I took total credit and didn’t mention Logan. I think they were impressed. Seb said he’d been practicing biking, because his new plan was to teach himself how to bike to and from school, and Dee told me she was going to Korea in the summer to visit her grandma. Hanging out with them was easy: we didn’t have to talk about anything intense or crazy, no one we knew in common had died, and we’d all been blind since we’d met and it was just normal. They didn’t seem to think the Mayburg meeting had been that weird, and being in my room with them felt like exhaling after all the drama at Lake Main.

After they left, I was in a good mood, and I went to Sarah’s room. Leah wasn’t back yet. “Um, so, I’m sorry,” I said, hanging in the doorway.