Blind

by Rachel Dewoskin

  I reached into my backpack and took out a slate and stylus Sebastian gave me last year, which I have to admit was a show-off move. I hoped Zach would find it cool, wanted him to notice something about me. I could have written the list on my fancy electronic brailler, but everyone’s already gotten bored of that. And I think the slate is beautiful—it’s metal and it fits over the paper neatly, and then I use a small stylus with a round bulb on one end and a point on the other to poke into the cells and write. I wrote the names quickly: 1. Deirdre Sharp, 2. Joshua Winterberg, 3. Elizabeth Tallentine, 4. Amanda Boughman, and 5. Blythe Keene.

  Then I flipped the page over and ran my index fingers over the names to see if I’d made any mistakes. I could tell Zach was watching by the sound of the silence. And I was right, because he asked, “You write them backward first?”

  I felt a flush of excitement, followed by acute embarrassment, and smothered both by reaching down to pat Spark. “Yes,” I said, blushing. “They’re mirrored.”

  “That’s amazing,” he said. There was a long silence. “Can I see it?”

  I handed the slate across the table, and heard Zach snap it open and inspect it. “You learned how to do this last year at your other school?” he asked, and then, “Hey, do you want to invite anyone from there?”

  “Uh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, not yet. It would be, you know, hard for them to get out and, well—” I stopped myself. I didn’t want to say anything about other blind kids that might implicate me. “But, uh, thanks for thinking of it.”

  “No worries,” he said. “Here.” He handed me the slate back. “This thing’s cool.”

  I could hardly get the words out, but I did, and they sounded sharp and clear, like the beautiful icicles we snap from our roof in the winter, no echo of the struggle I felt in speaking them: “Thanks, Zach.”

  I felt brave.

  -5-

  Ten months ago, last January, my parents sent me to Briarly like a prisoner off to labor camp. They didn’t ask what I wanted, which was to fossilize on the gold couch. Maybe Dr. Sassoman told them they had to send me to a blind school or I was going to die. Or maybe my mom was just totally out of patience and ready to throttle me, because right after Hanukkah, at the end of December, she said, “We’ve found a school for you to attend, where you can keep practicing some of the skills Mr. Otis helped you with, where you can build confidence and—” Here she paused, the hope in her voice so bottomless it embarrassed us both. “And make some friends. You’ll start in January.”

  It had been six months since my accident. And I had left the house only to walk Spark, sit with Dr. Sassoman, throw eggs at trees, and be poked by a blur of doctors chosen by my dad, every one of them “the best in the business.” But the business of what? None of them could save my eyes. Or my mind.

  And now my parents had found the Briarly School for the Blind, and I was going to start the following week. Halfway through ninth grade, blind, full stop. Now my dad called me “sweetie”; now my pregnant mom spoke orders to me like she was my dad. I didn’t even bother to put up a fight about Briarly—I didn’t have the energy, and anyway, what difference did it make? I obviously couldn’t go to real school. It would be better to start somewhere fresh, where everyone was blind. Like me. Blind like me, I thought, and lay back down against the pillows, pulling Spark over me like a blanket.

  Briarly was an hour from our house, in Silverton, a town I had never heard of until my mom took me there for my first day. She got up at five thirty, made breakfast, sent Leah and Sarah and Naomi to Lake Main and Jenna to preschool, then helped me dress in a new outfit she said was beautiful: a short black corduroy skirt, tights, a silver V-neck long-sleeve T-shirt, and a striped hoodie. I asked for every detail of every piece, feeling each to see if the truth of my fingers lined up with what my mom said. I wore the red metal sunglasses Logan had gotten me, and they were hard and cold against my face.

  My mom put Benj in pull-ups and overalls, and packed him and his endless stuff: goldfish crackers, string cheese, a slobber-marinated copy of Fox in Socks, a plastic truck, mittens and clips to hold them to his coat, and Champon the dirty turtle. I could smell Champon: mildew and Elmer’s glue, maybe, a pasty smell like papier-mâché, wet flour, melted crayons, kid paint. Benj still loves to flop Champon’s head against his cheek while he sucks his thumb at night. The turtle has had its head sewn back on five times, but Benj will perish if it gets lost or washed. And frankly, if anyone washed it, I’d probably never be able to “see” it again.

  I could also suddenly feel—hear? smell? how did I know?—a kind of smoky exhaustion emanating off my mom, and I had a moment of pleasure at my ability to tell what was happening, followed by a dropping fear that she might snap and leave us. Everything seemed possible then, every worst-case scenario.

  I was sweating in the front seat. She had six kids, and now one of them was blind. And she was pregnant again; how could she stand it? Maybe she could hear me thinking, because she suddenly reached over and touched my cheek. Her hand smelled like coffee and white soap. Spark barked from the back, where he was trapped next to Benj.

  “I was just showing him,” Benj said, and I didn’t even ask what. I was in the front, because putting me in the backseat with Benj would have meant admitting I had fully, formally lost my position in the family, something my mom denied. Last May, when Baby Lily was born, Benj was thrilled not to have to be the runt anymore, and he told everyone that Lily was “the babiest baby” and he was “the biggest big boy.” That’s how we all started calling Lily “Babiest Baby Lily.” I still feel like I might as well be Babiest Teenager Emma.

  Spark kept barking, maybe because Benj was annoying him, or maybe because he realized he wasn’t going to be allowed to come into school with me. We had been over and over it with Briarly; Spark wasn’t a registered assistance dog, and Briarly wouldn’t budge. I hated them, wanted to turn around and go home, wanted to open my eyes. By the time we arrived, I was welded to my seat. I couldn’t move, because I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t imagine what this day would mean, couldn’t believe that this was my life, that this was the school I went to.

  Now that I can stack that first day at Briarly underneath my first day back at Lake Main, I have to admit that things are getting better. If I had closed off the future part of my brain and focused on what was actually happening in the moment, I might have been able to manage better. But maybe it’s precisely because I was forced to get through those months at Briarly that I now know how to shut parts of my brain down and forbid the fear from melting me.

  My mom helped me out of the car, and then we walked up a rocky path and a staircase. I kicked my feet forward to feel where the stairs were, sliding my white cane until it hit the edge of each step so I could judge its depth. My mom was describing everything to me: “The building is brick, the lawn is green, there’s a baseball diamond, oak trees, maple. Holly. Mums. It’s late for mums. Purple, Emma, purple mums. It’s a beautiful place, Em,” my mom said, interrupting her own frantic monologue only to yell, “Benj, don’t do that on the stairs, you’ll fall!”

  “Why bother making a school for the blind beautiful? It’s lost on everyone anyway,” I said, and my mom kept holding my hand.

  “Stop, honey,” she said, and I didn’t know whether she was talking to me about being negative about the beautiful school I couldn’t see, or talking to Benj about whatever he was doing, probably standing on his head on the cement staircase. But then she said, “Stop a sec,” and held on to me, and I realized she meant that I should stop walking, so I jolted to a stop and put my hand out, in case I was too late and about to hit something. I felt suddenly like I might fall down the stairs, like all the walking and hearing and smelling and finding I’d been doing at home was being stripped away by this new place. I caught my breath, listened, and heard a door opening, a giant metal door. It sounded prison-heavy. It struck me as odd that they wouldn’
t have an automatic door at a school for the blind, or that they would have stairs, but Briarly’s idea wasn’t to build a separate world for blind kids but to teach us how to be blind in the regular world. We’d have to open doors and climb stairs, so why not start now?

  We went in and everywhere was a different dark, the smell of school, but off somehow—not Lake Main. A different kind of Lysol, meatloaf, unfamiliar kids, dryer sheets? Why did it smell like laundry? There were blind kids everywhere, and I kept thinking, I’m one of them. Am I one of them? It’s impossible to know yourself when you’re not around the things and people who made you you. The Logans and Zach Hazes. I felt confused, upside down, dizzy. I could feel the heat of the other kids’ bodies, hear snippets of their excited chatter: what they had done over Christmas, this party, that movie, what homework, Teacher X, Teacher Y, none of the names meaning anything to me. I was the new kid, new kid, new kid, the new blind kid, all the dimensions of my outsiderness and newness washing over me like waves, trying to suck me under while I struggled to float or swim toward some familiar land. Lake Main suddenly seemed like shore.

  My mom held my hand down the hallway to the office of the principal, Mrs. Antoine. She welcomed me and said how sorry they were to hear of my accident but how glad they were to have me. How she hoped starting in January, midyear, wouldn’t prove too difficult. The word difficult turned bruise colors in my mind, and I rocked back and forth. My mom put a hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off.

  “We will do everything we can to make the Briarly School a place for you to thrive and learn, Emma,” Mrs. Antoine said, and her voice was an expensive, soothing alto. I realized suddenly that Briarly was a private school. My parents had never spoken about it, neither to nor in front of me. But sending me there must have been both costly and painful, because my mom is a big believer in public schools. She thinks “parents like them” should stay with the public schools, because that ostensibly makes the schools better. Although how my parents have made Lake Main better is anyone’s guess.

  “Your classes here will be regular academics,” Mrs. Antoine was saying. I was thinking about Spark in the car, about how unfair it was that I couldn’t have him at school with me.

  “. . . blind-friendly ways. This way, if you choose to be re-mainstreamed, we can keep you caught up.”

  I tuned back in momentarily. “Re-mainstreamed?” I asked, turning my voice toward my mom.

  “Going back to Lake Main someday,” said my mom. Her voice had coal in it.

  But a small figure eight of hope took shape in my heart.

  “I am pleased to see that you’ve decided to take braille for beginners in the afternoons with Mrs. Leonard. I commend you on that choice. At Briarly we believe that braille is an essential tool for full literacy and independence, and Mrs. Leonard’s course will be an excellent complement to technology with Mr. Crane.”

  I didn’t know if this meant she didn’t think I would ever go back to Lake Main, because if I would, did I really need Braille? And who had decided to sign me up for that? My mom? My dad? Both? They hadn’t consulted me.

  I didn’t want to get into it. So I said, “Spark is going to freeze to death in the car,” to my mom, who stood there for another full minute, as if unable to move. “Mom? Are you going to stay?” I asked, and Mrs. Antoine said, in a voice so gentle it would have made me angry if she’d been talking to me instead of my mom, “I’ll walk Emma to class, Mrs. Silver. She’ll be fine. Why don’t you come back and meet me at two forty-five and we’ll go and collect her together?”

  I thought, Collect? But it worked. My mom tore her body and Benj away, stumbling back to the door we’d come in, calling, “You’ll do great, Emma, sweetie. See you at three,” over her shoulder.

  And then Mrs. Antoine walked me to what would be my first class every morning for the next six months, American history. It was a split-level class, she said, with ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-graders. I could hardly hear her, because my blood was pounding in my ears and I was trying to walk in a straight line, with my white cane along the shoreline where the wall met the floor. Several times I touched the wall with my hand; it was scratchy plaster. I wondered where the lockers were. Mrs. Antoine told me what we were passing: the gym, the library. “Here’s the life skills center, where students can hone their abilities, from cooking to laundry to typing,” she said. The detergent smell made me think of Leah, who was at Lake Main, in eleventh grade, still in the life I had left. Where was Logan at this moment? It seemed impossible to me that we were all still in the same world, that they were alive in this minute, miles away at Lake Main. I couldn’t focus. Or I couldn’t choose what to focus on, anyway.

  In the doorway to history, I heard and felt the whole room come at me like heat; a puff of chatter and chairs and books and bags unzipping and bodies moving. Mrs. Antoine put her hand on my arm and delivered me to a desk. Almost immediately, a boy’s voice said, “Hey, welcome,” and I shuddered, because I couldn’t be sure if the boy—whoever he was—had said it to me. How did he even know I was there? And even if he had meant me, how was I supposed to respond? I didn’t want to be at Briarly, didn’t want anyone to know me or know anything about me, didn’t want to be welcomed.

  But the boy said it again, louder. Was I supposed to turn my body toward the source of the voice? Was he blind? Of course he’s blind, I thought. Everyone here is blind. Although some people are blinder than others, and how much sight you have matters at Briarly. Some people can still see a little, and seeing is a kind of currency. In the normal world, once you’re even a little blind, everyone just assumes you’re a total, and therefore an absolute lost cause of an invalid. But at Briarly, kids want to know exactly how much vision you have left. If any. I’m a total, meaning I can’t see anything, which qualified me for some cred with people like the boy who welcomed me that morning, Sebastian. When he was a kid, he had a tiny slip of vision in his right eye, and a pair of glasses with a giant magnifying glass built into the lens on the right eye. He had learned to read through that magnifying glass, by holding pages up close to his right eye, and taking half an hour a page, but his sight was deteriorating still and his parents finally insisted that he admit he was blind and go to Briarly. But unlike me, Seb was good at passing—he told me once that he looked like he could see. He never used his cane at school or anywhere familiar.

  When I still didn’t answer in history that first day, he put his hand on my arm, to my surprise. “Hey,” he said a third time. “What’s your name?”

  I felt a fleeting moment of relief. Here was a question clearly directed at me, one I could answer.

  “Emma,” I said, but as soon as the word was out, my relief was replaced again by panic. I didn’t ask what his name was. I felt exhausted, wrung out by jitters, like my bones were giving up on me. I needed all my bravery and energy just to get through the next four hours; I couldn’t waste breath on small talk.

  But Sebastian wasn’t daunted, even if he assumed I was such a savage that I couldn’t manage to say “what’s yours?” after someone asked my name. Maybe because he’s a kind person who assumes the best about other people, even if we don’t deserve it.

  He waited a beat and said, “Hi, Emma, I’m Sebastian. I’m in tenth grade.” I felt my sunglasses start sliding dangerously down my nose and reached up to push them back as our teacher, Ms. Raymond, came clomping in. It sounded like she had stilts strapped to her shoes, which made me think of my sister Sarah. The door closed, her throat cleared, the voices in the room turned off. I pivoted away from Sebastian, tried to face the front of the room, to be polite, correct, unremarkable.

  “Greetings, guys,” Ms. Raymond said. Her voice was a hot copper color. I thought about the formality of greetings against the casualness of guys, both words turning 3-D in my mind in a way they never had before. Greetings was a penny of a word, jingling and written in metallic ink, and guys was like a little light reflecting off it.
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  “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.”