I felt extremely embarrassed then, and a flash of rage went through me, at Sebastian and Briarly and everyone who had ever mentioned Lighthouse for the Blind. Why was I drawing unnecessary attention to my predicament, right as everyone was starting to forget I existed, that I read braille or had a dog? I had to follow Seb’s model and do a whole show about the Lighthouse?
I remembered the sound of Sebastian’s laugh, and how I had never seen him. The rage subsided and I fell dangerously into sorrow over the unfairness of my having to stand in front of a room of people I couldn’t see, of having no photos or video, of not being able to look at whatever images my classmates had beamed all over the walls. But I pulled myself up, took a breath, and continued. “According to the New York Times, if you lose one sense, your other senses may be heightened, especially your hearing, in order to compensate for that loss.”
Long before the Lighthouse presentation, I had heard this stupid “fact” from roughly a billion people who were trying to make me feel better about my accident. But actually, only if you’ve been blind since birth or since you were really little do you get the bat ears. I bet Dee from Briarly has them, and maybe even Seb. If you go blind after you’re ten, then you’re stuck with your original, craptastic hearing. I didn’t admit this, though, because if everyone wants to think I’m a superhero, why not let them? Anyway, when I said senses, I meant my mind. And my mind was heightened after the accident. I used to take seeing for granted, like everyone else, and now I don’t. Now I can focus my thoughts, find things, taste them, hear, understand. I might have called it magical, but I didn’t, because I know how to toe the line and not be Jason Kane talking about UFOs.
If I were brave enough to say the truth, in front of a class or to anyone at all—even Leah, my mom, or myself—it would be something like this: what’s so terrible about the accident isn’t even the me I’ve become; it’s just the endless fear of not knowing who she’ll be. Who I’ll be. Leah’s always telling me that we all contain dozens of versions of ourselves, and it’s only the lucky ones among us who get to try out being more than one. She says change, even when it feels tragic, can actually be okay, lucky, good. And she said this even before my accident. I’m trying to believe it. But sometimes I miss the other me, the one I don’t get to be—the innocent, okay one, who can still see like everyone else, who can still be young. And I don’t get to know who I would have been if the accident had never happened. Leah says someday I’ll love myself enough to be glad it happened, to be glad I get to be the person it made me. But I don’t know yet if that’s true.
The sisters who founded LFTB discovered that the blind kids were at the concert because someone had given them free tickets. And apparently they loved this idea and set up a free-tickets-for-blind-kids program in New York. Then it grew into this huge organization, with Lighthouses for the Blind everywhere, including one that taught blind people how to make brooms, which was better than nothing, because before that happened blind people couldn’t get work at all, and apparently the brooms were really good quality. This made me think of how everything in the world starts as an idea—even human beings, who are just ideas that parents had, not even as literal as “I want a baby,” but sometimes just, “I want you,” or “I want this,” and people come from those ideas, those drives. That’s why ideas are wants, desires. And tangible outcomes—I mean literally tangible, like brooms or music—can come from small thoughts. Because of my giddy feeling about the Mayburg meeting, the possibility of making a difference, I said this during my presentation: that the reason the story matters for me “memoir-wise” isn’t so much that it’s about a blind organization, but just because it shows that thoughts are the beginnings of everything, including tables and airplanes and governments and organizations “like LFTB.”
The room went silent when I said this, and that’s how I knew it had been too weird to include. Sometimes, I’ll make an observation that to me seems mundane and obvious, and some other kid will be like, “You’re a freak.” It’s one of the reasons I prefer to say nothing.
I was already twitching with misery when this girl Riley Grossman was like, “Is that why you, like, love music?”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I just thought . . . you’re really good at piano, or whatever, so is that, like, connected to your being . . . you know?”
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” I said. “Any other questions?”
“How come you decided not to stay at the blind school, if you don’t mind my asking?” this guy named Casey asked. “How come you came back to Lake Main?”
I tried not to turn toward Mr. Hawes, even though I hoped he would say that the Q&A hadn’t started yet or something. He didn’t. So I just said, “Well, my friends are here, and I realized I could do whatever I needed to, so, you know . . .”
Then Savannah Clark, who just moved to Sauberg this year, asked, “What exactly happened to your eyes?”
I shivered. Obviously that wasn’t related to my LFTB talk, and she had just arrived anyway, so she kind of had no business asking me private questions. And did she really not know? Had no one told her?
I said, “I had an accident, but it’s kind of a long story, so maybe some other—”
I wondered then for a brief but terrible moment who had put the skateboard in front of my locker—whether it was someone in the room, someone like Savannah. Or someone I’d known forever. What if it was Zach Haze?
Mr. Hawes said quickly, “We are actually out of time today, guys. Great job, Emma. If you could stick around for one minute, I’d like to chat. Everyone else, have a great weekend and don’t forget to read from pages 377 to 397 in A People’s History.”
People started to close their books and grab their bags, and I stayed in the front of the room, feeling cheated because everyone forgot to clap for my presentation but grateful to Mr. Hawes for cutting off the class early to save me from Savannah’s rubbernecking, even though we still had seven minutes left before the bell rang. I walked over to his desk, and he said, “That was an excellent and brave presentation. I want to apologize for not chatting with you beforehand about what the parameters of the questions should be.”
“It’s totally okay,” I said. “Please don’t worry. That was fine.” Was I no longer able to speak in sentences that weren’t three words long?
I heard his planner clap shut. Then he opened and closed a drawer.
“Here,” he said, and I realized he wanted to give me something, so I put my hand out, palm up. Immediately, I felt embarrassed by this gesture, by the way I thought my hand might look, empty, waiting, so I closed it, just as he tried to hand me something, so the thing dropped. I knew it was a pen from the way it bounced off my knuckles and hit the desk. I started apologizing, but he picked it back up and handed it to me while I tried not to feel so frantic. Who cares if the pen dropped? Stop apologizing, I thought. I rolled it in my hand, feeling the weight. It was smooth and heavy.
“This was my pen in high school,” he said in an unsentimental way. “I want you to have it.” Then he stood up, pushed his chair toward the desk. “I think you’re an amazing student, and I wanted you to know that,” he said. “I don’t know if you still take notes with . . . but I thought—”
“Thank you,” I said, hoping to save him from the awkwardness of remembering out loud that I was blind and might not want a regular pen. Because I did want it. And what was he going to give me, his braille stylus from high school?
“It’s really nice. Thank you,” I said. I thought I might combust with embarrassment. “So yeah, um, thanks again,” I managed, willing my blood to calm down, my brain to quiet. I put the pen in the back pocket of my jeans and walked out with my white cane and Spark. Logan was waiting just outside the door. She had definitely been peering into the window the entire time, and was practically panting.
“What did he give you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I
said. “So, what are—”
“No fucking way, Emma—you’re not going to try to change the subject. What just happened in there? Was he like—” She cut herself off, because the door opened and Mr. Hawes came out and walked by.
“Whatever,” I said, and started to walk, but Logan put her hand on my arm. “Oh my god,” she said. “Did Mr. Hawes ask you out?”
“Are you insane?” I said. “Of course not! He just wanted to tell me I did a good job on my presentation, and make sure I wasn’t unhappy about Savannah’s question.”
“What did he give you? I saw him hand you something, Emma.”
“You’re crazy. He just handed my stylus back. Jesus.” I felt the full force of lying to her as a kind of awful power and weight. I wasn’t even sure why I didn’t want to tell her that Mr. Hawes had given me his high school pen. But I knew I didn’t want to, rule book or not. I felt bad instantly, but not bad enough. I was selfish. I wanted the pen for myself, the whole heavy, lovely secret of it. Like Seb’s face and hands, my own secrets, the best ones no one else could touch or feel or see. I also didn’t want Logan to be jealous, because if people are jealous of you, then they hate you. That’s why I try so hard not to be jealous of her, especially about Zach, who’s definitely flirting with her. When I was little, whenever anyone was mean to me, my mom always said, “They’re just jealous,” totally missing the point, which was that they still hated me. Who cared why?
Before Logan could press me further about the pen, or ask what Mr. Hawes had been doing with my stylus, or talk about the Mayburg place meeting we were cooking up for right after Thanksgiving, someone screamed “Boo!” and I was so startled that my teeth chattered.
“You’re an asshole, Chad,” Logan said, and I heard her hand fly out and smack somebody. Chad Andrews, I assumed. Logan has a beautiful life. When guys make fun of me, or threaten me, she sees it first and beats the shit out of them. She gets to throw the skateboards down the trash chute and smack Chad Andrews. What would it feel like to be the one protecting her? And how could I have thought Logan would ever be jealous of me? What did I have? A pen?
• • •
I had to tell my mom about Mrs. Fincter’s project over Thanksgiving, because I haven’t started and the class has met roughly two million times since we got the assignment. My mom was wearing Baby Lily and roasting a turkey. The smell of the cooking bird was like noise for me, hot and complicated. As soon as I told my mom about the assignment, she asked Leah to watch the oven and took me to her studio in the backyard.
It was sharp and cold and quiet in there, a giant relief from the house. It smelled good, like glue and turpentine. My mom was so thrilled she could hardly contain herself. She set Baby Lily in this swing she has, with plush seafood rotating over her head. The thing clicks and rocks and plays tinfoil lullabies. Benj once identified the creatures for me, because after squeezing them myself, the only one I guessed correctly was the octopus.
“You knew because of the tenstacles!” Benj said.
“Exactly,” I told him.
My mother put two giant lumps of unformed clay in my hands, and then fabric and buttons and wires and all manner of junk I had no idea what to do with. I was going to make a “representative art memoir” out of some clay and wires and recyclables?
“Let your mind guide you,” my mom said. “Just listen to your thoughts and your hands will do the work.” My mind rolled its eyes. Then I listened to my thoughts, but all I heard was the clicking of Lily’s swing.
I snorted. But for the rest of Thanksgiving break, whenever my mom was busy, which was basically every second, I sneaked into her studio by myself, feeling the walls, the concrete floor under my bare, cold feet. I left Spark in the doorway, and found the clay, which she took out of a huge wet bucket. I listened to and smelled it: it was off-red to me, and prehistoric, like my mom had dug it up from the core of the earth. I smushed it around for a bit, thinking about my face, wondering if human beings would be extinct soon anyway, and if so, whether that made my problems any less real. It kind of did, I decided, and I made a mental note to think about the apocalypse anytime I started feeling sorry for myself. Then I thought, as I always do, no matter what train leads me there, of Claire, under the ground. Is it worse to be dead if everyone else is still alive? Yes. Just like it’s worse to be blind if everyone else can see. Even though being different is the only way we can define ourselves against each other, it still sucks. If everyone were blind, it wouldn’t be a big deal that I can’t see. And if everyone were dead, then Claire wouldn’t be at a disadvantage anymore.
I made a ball out of the clay, and picked up a twig of wire my mom had also given me. I twisted the wire into a spiral, and then picked up another one, and made a spiral out of that, too. My mind was quiet while I was doing this, a rare relief until it became like a creepy, empty room. Then I gave up and, in an odd move, carried the lump of clay with its spirals out of my mom’s studio. For a week I kept it on my nightstand, until it was dry and crumbling, but the wires stayed in.
Then I wrapped it up and brought it to Deirdre Sharp’s house the first weekend after Thanksgiving, for the second sleepover of my blind life. I guess it was like a blanky or teddy bear or something, but smaller and grosser, since it was crumbly. I was really nervous about the sleepover. It was me, Logan, Blythe, Amanda, and Nicole, a girl whom none of us had ever met before but who was apparently Deirdre’s best friend from summer Bible camp. And I don’t think Deirdre would have invited that group if it hadn’t been for the Mayburg meeting we’d already had—and the one scheduled for the day after her party.
My mom had insisted on calling Minister Sharp and Mrs. Sharp to make sure they were okay with having a dog at the house for the sleepover. They said yes, likely because my mom made it clear that it was a deal-breaker for me if Spark couldn’t come, because of my “situation.” And even if she hadn’t called ahead and made a huge thing of it, no parents really want to be the ones who don’t let their child befriend the blind kid. Having a blind friend might widen your kid’s small, homogeneous life experience, especially if you’re raising her in Sauberg. I didn’t come up with that by myself, by the way. It’s something I heard someone say to my mother after I got out of the hospital and everyone came to our house with lasagnas so we wouldn’t first get blinded and then also starve to death that month. That’s what we do in this town: we make lasagna. No matter what. When my eyes caught fire? Lasagna. When Claire drowned in the lake? Lasagna. When our second-grade teacher, Mrs. Jacobson, had to stay in the hospital for two weeks after her baby was born? More lasagna. The only death or emergency that ever went uncelebrated by a two-ton brick of pasta was Bigs the rabbit’s. So maybe it’s a species thing. Maybe you have to be a human being to warrant a snaking lasagna parade arriving at your clan’s dwelling in the wake of a maiming or death.
Deirdre’s dad is a minister, and her mom is a mom, but for some reason (one that interested Logan intensely), their house was fancier than either of ours. Deirdre also wasn’t interested in stuff or popularity or clothes. Logan asked if Deirdre would take us on a tour of the house. The walls felt beige, like Dr. Sassoman’s. There was no smell of cooking, or chaos, or art supplies, or animals, or even people, really. Logan held my arm and whispered in my ear, “I had no idea her house would be so posh. And she never shows off, you know?”
Deirdre’s parents were hugely conservative, and maybe they preferred a modest, quiet daughter. I wondered why they’d been successful in making one, while Claire’s parents would definitely have loved a Deirdre-like daughter but had gotten Claire. Blythe’s parents, too. I thought of my own mom, who has so many daughters that she gets to have it every way possible, maybe another reason for wildly overpopulating the earth with your offspring.
Mrs. Sharp ordered pizzas for us and then vanished upstairs. Minister Sharp came down and said that he and Mrs. Sharp would be on the fourth floor.
“Enjoy
yourselves, girls,” he said. “And if you need anything at all, don’t be shy. Just come up to the fourth floor and tell us right away. Or text me, Deirdre.”
“Okay, Dad,” Deirdre said, clearly impatient for him to leave and not embarrass her any further, although he didn’t seem to me to be more or less embarrassing than any of our dads.
“We are at your service,” he joked. Okay, so that was embarrassing.
“Thank you, Minister Sharp,” Logan said in her pink-flower-and-glitter voice.
“Bye, Dad,” Deirdre said.
“I’m going, I’m going!” he said, and then his footsteps bounced up the carpeted stairs. He was wearing socks. I wondered what they looked like—whether they were sporty and white tube socks like Benj wears, or sleek man-tights like Logan’s dad’s, or argyle socks like my dad wears under his loafers. You can tell a lot about people from what socks they wear. If they’re unmatched, or have holes, or are pristine or whatever. But before I could ask Logan about Deirdre’s dad’s socks, a question only she would have understood and forgiven, she leaned into my ear. “Minister Sharp is hot,” she said. “He’s super young and looks like Mr. Hawes.”
“I gathered,” I told her.
“How’d you gather? From his beautiful voice?”
“From yours, actually.”
She giggled again. “He was wearing jeans,” she said. “And blue socks, in case you were wondering.”
“I was, actually.”
“I know, you weirdo. Can you believe they have a four-story house?”
We all gathered in the kitchen and ate pizza and drank Coke. I poured my own, dangling my pinky slightly into the Styrofoam cup like Mr. Otis had taught me, so I could feel when the soda reached the top. Nicole, Deirdre’s summer camp friend, lived in the city, and you could tell she thought she was a super-cool urbanite among a bunch of hayseed-chewing bumpkins, because she was like, “Oh, your accents are so cute! No one in the city talks like that.”
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