by Keary Taylor
I turned in my seat, catching the eye of all six of my siblings, both my parents, and my Hayes grandparents. My family filled half the stands in that tiny gym of ours. Mom and Jenny waved at me, flashing bright and proud smiles. I waved back and turned back to the front of the gym.
“And now I’d like to present to you our senior class Valedictorian, Samantha Shay,” Principal Hill said, clapping his hands as he stepped away from the podium. The entire gym erupted in cheers and clapping, its volume deafening.
Sam rose from her seat in the front row of students. She was already blushing but she was beaming.
The cap and gown may have looked stupid on me, but Sam looked perfect in anything.
“Thank you,” she said, a small laugh bubbling up from her throat. Her face flushed even more red when the cheers only got louder. I clapped so hard my hands hurt. Catching my eyes, Sam laughed again, covering her face with her hands. Finally, almost a full minute later, the crowd started calming down.
“Wow,” Sam said, her voice breathy. Her eyes looked like there might be tears pooling in them. “Thank you, so much. You’re support means everything to me, especially after the year we have all had.”
Sam shifted from one foot to the other, pushing her hair over her shoulder. She was uncomfortable and nervous, but she looked adorable. I had never been so proud of her.
“This year has been one of change, for all of us,” she started. “We started it out, feeling like normal teenagers, doing things normal teenagers do, screwing things up and making poor choices. No one blamed us. It was expected if nothing else.
“But sometimes hard lessons have to be learned. Sometimes we need a loud wake up call for us to make changes for the better. I don’t even have to state what that wakeup call was, we all know. While this year could have turned to one of tragedy and sorrow, a year of regrets for our actions, we all decided to make a change. We made a commitment to do better, to be better.
“We learned we didn’t have to have alcohol or drugs to have a good time. We learned that our families extended beyond blood. We learned to let others help and uplift us.”
Sam lifted her eyes from her speech, and suddenly met mine. “We learned to love this year, in ways we never knew we could.” Her voice cracked just the tiniest bit on love. I gave her a smile, feeling a sting behind my own eyes.
“So we fell this year, we rose, and now here we are, triumphant and ready to take on the rest of our lives. Let us never forget the lessons we learned this year. Let us never forget how to grow, how to live, how to love. Let us never forget each other.”
Sam gave a little bow of her head, letting everyone know she was done. The gym erupted into cheers again. As I looked around to the thirty-six other students who were graduating with me, I wasn’t surprised to see tears in many eyes. Rain clapped his hand on my shoulder from behind, giving it a hard squeeze. I patted his hand, and smiled. Carter, who stood right next to me, wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
“Congratulations, Orcas High School senior class,” Principal Hill said as he stood next to Sam, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Welcome to your future.”
As the chaos started, all the families mixing with the newly freed students, Sam worked her way toward me in the crowd. She was glowing, a brilliant smile on her face. I thought I was going to pop from all the pride and joy I felt then.
“How’d I do?” she asked as she stepped into me, our arms wrapping around each other.
Perfect, I signed, pressing my lips to her cheek.
“We wouldn’t have had the year we did without you,” she said. “Things would have been a lot different.”
I just smiled and pressed my lips to hers once more.
“Congratulations you two,” Mom’s voice said from behind. Suddenly Sam and I were wrapped in a giant Mom hug. She pressed kisses to both me and Sam’s foreheads. “I’m so proud of you two. Neither of you had an easy year, but you both came out on top.”
And it was true. It would have been really easy to spiral down into drugs or alcohol that year, for both of us. But instead we were there, together. We’d taken all the bad things that had happened to us and turned them around into something good and bigger than the two of us.
I smiled as I looked back at Sam.
What I didn’t say before no longer mattered.
We had the entire future before us to say everything else.
Author’s Note
I’ve debated with myself (a lot) about putting this note in here. In a way I almost feel like I have to have a reason why I’m allowed to write this type of story. It’s one that has to be handled very carefully, and it’s touchy, and was quite a scary one for me to write.
But this story is very personal to me.
When I was fifteen, a sophomore in high school, I suddenly got very sick. I’d been dizzy for a few days, feeling nauseous all the time. Within a day or two, I couldn’t even get out of bed, the world was spinning so bad. I couldn’t keep anything down and it felt like my right ear would never pop.
And eventually I couldn’t hear anything in that ear.
Those seven days or so were a blur. To be honest I don’t remember a lot of details, I just remembering thinking something really, really bad was happening to me.
I fought my parents for a few days about going to the doctor. But eventually I caved and they took me in. The doctor I saw said I had seasonal allergies, and that was why my ear was so “stopped up.” He gave me some pills and said it would clear up in a week or two.
Except it never did. My hearing never came back in that ear and when I went back to the doctors, they couldn’t figure out why. The closest they could figure was that I had gotten some kind of virus. But they knew one thing: my hearing wasn’t going to come back.
So I was fifteen and already half deaf.
It felt like the end of the world.
It was humiliating and terrifying.
I couldn’t have someone sit on my right side and have a conversation with them because I couldn’t hear the majority of what they said. Someone would call out behind me in the halls and I wouldn’t hear them. I had to constantly ask people “what?” or ask them to repeat what they had said. Being in a loud, crowded room made it impossible to follow a conversation.
And I was embarrassed to let people know. Telling a new boyfriend this was nerve-wracking, always wondering if he was going to think differently of me when he found out. Telling anyone was awkward and uncomfortable.
The world kind of sucked for a while.
Like Jake, I had a choice to make in my life. I could let this drown me, I could get mad at the world, and I could let this define me.
Or I could learn something from it.
It didn’t happen quickly, but loosing half my hearing taught me to appreciate a lot of things. I really, really appreciated the fact that I could still hear out of my left ear. I appreciated that I could still see, that I could still talk. You don’t think about those kind of things until something is taken away.
I learned to see that things could be so much worse.
I still struggle with being half deaf every day. I don’t like telling people about it, thus I wasn’t sure I’d be able to write this note. I frequently have a hard time following what people are saying. When I have to sit in a room with other people I plot out where I’m going to sit so that the majority of people are on my left side.
But I know that there are so many people out there who have things so much worse than me. I still have the things I need. I have a house, I have food, I have an amazing family. I may not be able to hear very well, but I have everything else.
So when life seems impossible, when it seems so bad that you can’t go on, just stop for a second to take a look at all of the things that you do have. I bet the list will grow pretty fast. And even if it doesn’t you have to power to decide if you’re going to let the bad or the good take control of your life.
If you’ve never heard it before, I encourage you to look up t
he song “Somebody wishes they were you” by Adelita’s Way. I consider it to be the theme song to What I Didn’t Say and I think it is something we should all think about.
“Nobody is trial-free, but we have a choice. We can choose to allow our experiences to hold us back, and to not allow us to become great or achieve greatness in this life.
Or we can allow our experiences to push us forward, to make us grateful for every day we have and to be all the more thankful for those who are around us.”- Elizabeth Smart
Acknowledgments
This book was an absolute work of love and it would have been almost impossible to write without a lot of help from a lot of people.
First I have to say thank you to the team at home. Thank you to Justin, as always, for his support and love, for putting up with me and all of my craziness. Thank you to my kids who inspire me every day. Thank you to my family, both immediate and extended.
Thank you to my real deal Orcas teens, who answered my questions and made sure I didn’t sound like a total idiot: Jessica, Courtney, and Taylor. And a huge thank you to Rachel. Your answers to my questions were vital and you and your family are inspiring.
Thank you to Britney and Jenni for beta reading. Huge thank you to my editor Steven.
Thank you to the blogging community. I never expected to find such amazing friends through this world. I wouldn’t be where I am today without all of you.
And most importantly, thank you to my Heavenly Father, for this precious gift.
Keary Taylor grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where she started creating imaginary worlds and daring characters who always fell in love. She now resides on a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and their two young children. She continues to have an overactive imagination that frequently keeps her up at night.
Also by Keary Taylor
FALL OF ANGELS
Branded
Forsaken
Vindicated
Afterlife: a Fall of Angels novelette
EDEN
To learn more about Keary and her writing process, please visit www.KearyTaylor.com