While we burned all the skin off the roofs of our mouths on pizza, Nicole chattered about her private Catholic school in the city. “It’s a total celibacy prison,” she said. “We’re the inmates.” Only Deirdre laughed. I wondered if they were like Logan and me.
“Can Nicole come to the Mayburg place tomorrow afternoon?” Deirdre asked, and I said, “Sure, of course.” Then Nicole said, “Cool, thanks. I’ll check my schedule,” and Logan snickered.
“Yes, do that!” she said. “And have your people call my people.”
No one laughed; it was too hostile. Nicole said, “Um, did I piss you off in some way? Because if so, I’m sorry.”
“I was just kidding,” Logan said.
“I don’t think you should haul in just to sit in that creepy dungeon and listen to a bunch of whiners from Lake Main,” Blythe said. I was surprised, but didn’t say anything.
“Whiners?” Logan asked. “We were just trying to have an honest conversation.”
“Yeah, well,” Blythe said.
Deirdre was like, “Let’s have cake.”
Nicole had a mind of her own, apparently, because she said, “‘Creepy dungeon’ sounds cool. Why don’t we go over there tonight?” No one answered her.
We ate a chocolate cake that Deirdre’s parents had set out on the counter, and then she opened up the presents we’d brought. Nicole got her a locket, Logan and I brought leopard-print pajamas and slippers that matched, which Deirdre claimed to love. Logan had picked them, obviously, and I felt shy and sad giving a present I had never seen. Amanda gave Deirdre a Ouija board, which I thought was an awful and unfunny joke, and Blythe brought three bottles of wine she had stolen from her parents. I wondered how Deirdre felt about that. I mean, we were in her perfect house with her minister parents—were we really going to risk them coming down and catching us drunk? And if so, why? She also got Deirdre a set of lipsticks I would have found insulting, maybe like a hint that Deirdre wasn’t working hard enough at being pretty.
We took Blythe’s wine to the basement, where there was a dull hum of machinery, which reminded me of a hospital. It would be weird to be an only child like Deirdre, with her super-adult parents and life and immaculate house. I was thinking maybe she did homework all day long, taking breaks only to go to church. Nothing in her house was loud or broken or dirty. I had a rare stab of envy. I was never jealous of Logan’s house, because it felt terrible and lonely, but Deirdre’s felt luxurious to me. There were many ways to live.
“Let’s break these open!” Blythe said, and then there was laughter.
“What if your parents come down?” I asked.
“No chance,” Deirdre said. “They promised to leave us alone. They have no reason not to trust me, and they can’t hear us; they’re, like, a mile away upstairs.”
Suddenly they were all laughing again, but I didn’t know why. “It’s a miracle you got that out,” Amanda said, and Logan whispered in my ear, “Blythe had the wine opener in her pocket, and her jeans are so tight she had to pry it out with a crowbar.”
I was sitting on the carpet, with Logan’s sleepover voice in my left ear and my back against a couch that smelled of new car. I had a hand on Spark; he and I were both twitchy and homesick, and I was petting him, wondering if I was going to have to relearn how to relax and have fun at a slumber party now, too. Although honestly I couldn’t remember if I had ever found a slumber party much fun, even before the accident. Are slumber parties fun or just one more thing we all do because we don’t want to be the only ones not doing them, the way grown-ups have dinner parties and go to holiday “functions” at the hospitals where they work? If I could have gone home the instant we finished pizza and cake and presents, I would have, just like a four-year-old. I would have snuggled my mom and Benj and Babiest Baby Lily and Naomi and gone to sleep in my own bed, happy.
At least Spark was there, in between me and Blythe, who was on my right. We had opened all three bottles of wine and started drinking them simultaneously when Amanda brought up the Ouija board idea again. I stayed quiet. I was hoping that Amanda would drop it and we could hang out and talk and maybe put on some music. But I didn’t want to be the one to admit to being scared, of course. I can always find a reason to say nothing. Logan handed me wine; we were drinking straight from the bottles so that Deirdre wouldn’t have to hide wine-stained glasses from her parents in addition to the empty bottles, which Blythe had already said she’d take out in her sleepover bag in the morning.
“This present includes delivery and removal service,” she said, swigging from the bottle and passing it to me, and for some reason—maybe the wine taking effect and warming me up—her voice gave me a jittery feeling. I was oddly aware of it every time her arm brushed mine over Spark, or her hand grazed me when she passed me one of the wine bottles.
“You okay, Emma?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and took three quick sips from the top of the bottle, before passing it to Logan, her familiar head leaning in close to mine. The wine, I thought. Taste the wine, focus. Relax. Close your eyes and relax, Emma, focus in.
But as soon as I narrowed in on the taste of the wine, it reminded me of finding my mom drinking in the kitchen last year, and I went hurtling back toward that night, toward my own left eye and the word livid and my mom’s weird, sad laugh. I tried to hold my nose. Not smell the wine or laughter, not think of mud or rubber ducks or livid, even though the braille cells lit up in my mind: the straight, clean, logical line of the L; the 2 and 4 of the I; the V, just like L except that dot 6 is also raised; another I; and then D, which I no longer confuse with H. D is 1, 4, and 5.
Stop, I thought. Just let the heat pour down your throat. My throat. But my nose, used to working overtime, couldn’t turn off. The wine tasted like burning tires, like raised braille dots for livid, for flames, for my mom, for mud, for Claire, for dead, for rubber ducks, for chaos.
“I’m drunk.” Amanda was giggling, and there was a murmur of agreement. “Let’s do it.”
“Do what?” Blythe’s voice was close to me. I felt a drumbeat in my stomach.
“The Ouija board!” Amanda said.
“I don’t know,” Logan said, and I was glad, since I didn’t want to be the one to say no.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Amanda said. “It’s just a game.”
Deirdre said okay, maybe because she didn’t want Amanda to think she hated the present. Or maybe she actually wanted to play. So just like that, we all decided we would “try it out.” Nobody mentioned summoning Claire—we were all just like, “Well, we’ll see what happens if we open the game, and blah blah”—but raise your hand if you’re too daft to sense it’s a bad idea to play with a Ouija board in the middle of the night at a sleepover that your dead friend would also be at if she weren’t dead.
“You guys go ahead,” I said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” I waited just a beat, until Logan asked, “Want me to come?”
“Sure,” I said, and stood up and followed Spark and Logan down the hall. Spark waited outside, but once Logan and I were in the small room, which I knew somehow was peach colored, I told Logan I was freaking out.
“Why?” She hugged me. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Something about the wine, or the crowd, something.” Spark scratched the outside of the bathroom door.
“Do you want to go home?” she asked. “I’ll take you if you want. We can sleep there instead.”
Just hearing that calmed me enough that I no longer felt like I needed to leave.
“No,” I said, “that’s okay. But thank you.”
I could tell that she was relieved; that she hadn’t really wanted to leave, but had been willing to on my account. This made me both grateful and lonely, because it meant Logan was actually having fun, but I was just pretending to have fun. I secretly wished I could go home and be with my mama. Pathetic. Would the
original, not-blind Emma have felt this way? Or was this just the new, damaged me? And how would I ever know who I would have been if I had just kept growing up on my normal track? I decided I’d try to have fun. To be more like Logan, more like everyone else.
“Do you think Deirdre’ll wear lipstick now that Blythe got her some?” I asked Logan in a fake bubblegum voice. “I mean, I took Blythe’s present as a kind of hint. Did you?”
“Maybe,” Logan said, and she popped something plastic back in place, maybe the top of her own lipstick.
“Are you putting on lipstick?” I asked.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said, and then, “You want some?”
“No thanks,” I said. “And I don’t think she should, by the way.”
“Who should what?” Logan asked me.
“I don’t think Deirdre should wear lipstick just because Blythe got her some. I mean, unless it’s something she wanted to do anyway.” I pulled my skirt up and my tights down, sat down to pee, thinking this hadn’t come out as fun as I had hoped. Why was I such a downer?
“The colors Blythe got her are insane,” Logan said cheerfully, zipping her purse. Then I could feel her leaning over the sink, maybe peering at herself in the mirror. I put my hands to my face, felt my same familiar skin, my hair, longer than it had been in a while, wavy and probably still super dark like all my sisters’, but who knew? I smoothed my former bangs down and tucked them behind my ears. They’ve gotten longer and I’ve started kind of using them as a curtain over my face. Maybe if my eyes still worked, I wouldn’t be able to see anyway. Dr. Walker and my parents like to talk about how lucky I am that the rest of my face was “unaffected” by the accident, but we all know that’s utter bullshit. How much better would it have been if that rocket blaze had burned my forehead? I could have worn bangs and seen for the rest of my life. The band of my eyes seems to me to be the worst-case scenario, the word unaffected outrageous, insulting.
“She got the absolute slut pack—all dark blood reds and blacks and a hot-pink iridescent one. I think it’s kind of funny, actually. Isn’t it the rule about a good present—that it has to be something you’d never buy for yourself?”
“I guess,” I said. “But not if the reason you’d never buy it is that it makes you feel like shit or is totally out of the realm of anything you’d ever want.”
“I dunno,” Lo said. “Deirdre should have more fun, and she could be really pretty if she tried.”
“Maybe she doesn’t care as much about being pretty as Blythe does,” I said bitterly, and we both knew that I meant Logan, not Blythe. And that she’d meant me.
“You don’t have to worry about it, so you don’t understand.”
I stood up and pulled my tights and miniskirt back up. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Sebastian’s friend Dee from Briarly wore makeup. She’s a total, too, and she once told me she kept one rubber band around her blue eyeliner and two around her black. She had her own systems and never seemed to forget what was what. I didn’t ask her what the point of wearing makeup was, even though when I told Logan about Dee once, that’s what she asked. I didn’t have to ask, because I got it right away: it’s not like because you’re blind you don’t care what you look, or feel, like. You can still feel fat or ugly or sweaty or whatever, all the ways you can feel when you’re not blind. Maybe Dee thought wearing makeup was fun, or that being beautiful was something you should be allowed to do even if you weren’t sighted. However she thought of it, I don’t agree with Logan that blind girls have to worry less.
But apparently she meant something else anyway, because she said, “It means you’re prettier than me, which is why you get to be above worrying about prettiness.”
I almost spit. “I’m disfigured,” I said. “In case no one mentioned that. I can’t even take my sunglasses off, because if everyone saw my face they’d run like it was a zombie movie. And I can’t see. So how about we all just agree to talk about what’s pretty less often?”
“Why are you so mad at me all the time?”
I didn’t answer her, not because I wasn’t mad at her, I realized, but because I wasn’t sure why.
Once, Dee asked me what I looked like, and I said, “I don’t know.” Because I was mad at her, too, and tired. She asked how I could not know, so I gave in and said, “I have long, dark hair. And I wear sunglasses.”
“Why?” She came up to me then and touched the edge of the plastic frame of my cat glasses. Her hands smelled bright pink, like the soap that came out of the dispensers in the Briarly bathrooms.
“Because my best friend gets them for me,” I told her, and then, after a beat, I added, “And I don’t want anyone to see my eyes.”
“No one here can see.”
“Not true. The teachers can.”
“Only some of them.”
“Well, I don’t want the air to see my eyes.”
I thought about the Briarly soap as I washed my hands in Deirdre’s bathroom, where the soaps were little shells in a dish; I could smell the pastel colors. While I was picking each one up, turning it over in my wet hands and then returning it to the dish, Logan said quietly, “I’m sorry if I said something wrong, Em. I just meant you still look like yourself, that’s all. And I still think if you just were more yourself around other people—just, like, let go a little bit, talked more the way you do when you’re with me—then anyone who didn’t already get how awesome you are would know—”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Even though I didn’t think I liked her when I was at Briarly, I suddenly missed Dee. How could I explain to Logan that I hadn’t even cared that much about what I looked like before the accident? And what could how I look to other people possibly mean now? Any conversation about it infuriated me. The way we talked about looks at Briarly was way better than this; looks were a feeling. I couldn’t see myself, and as far as I was concerned, no one else was allowed to have an opinion about what I looked like. Not even Logan. This was something Dee would have understood, even if she didn’t feel the same way.
“What do you mean by ‘like myself’?” I asked Logan.
“Like this,” she said, and she took both of my hands and put them on my face. I felt the familiar skin, the bones of my cheeks and jaw. She ran my hands, under hers, down to my shoulders, over my breasts, down to my stomach.
“Just like you always did, except even better with your big boobs,” she said, and I could hear her grinning, feel the dimples in her cheeks deepening. I put my hands up to her smile, felt her cheeks. I thought of Seb then, almost the way I think of Dr. Sassoman: like Seb was a part of me. Maybe I’ll remember him for the rest of my life whenever I touch anyone’s face.
I can feel my body more and more lately, maybe because I’m blind but maybe just because I’m older. It feels good sometimes, and strong. But since I can’t see anyone else’s body, what do I have to compare it to? I can hardly ask the other girls if I can feel their bodies to get a sense of where mine fits in.
As if she had read my mind, Lo said, “Now, if you want something to compare that to, I’ll ask Elizabeth Tallentine if you can feel her up. But trust me, everyone talks about your body all day long at school.”
“That’s mean,” I said.
“I didn’t mean instead of your face. I just—”
“I meant about Elizabeth.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. I take it back, okay?” Logan opened the bathroom door and headed out into the hallway back toward the game room as a way to end the conversation, which I found annoying and manipulative. But I followed her out anyway. What choice did I have? I grabbed Spark’s leash as we went back toward our friends. It was oddly quiet.
“Hi, guys,” Logan said.
“Hey, have a seat here,” Deirdre said, standing up and putting her hand on my arm. She led me to an open spot on the carpet and I sat. Sp
ark sat behind me, and when he realized I was going to be awhile, he curled up and rested his head against my back so I’d know he was still there. I petted him gently.
“We did one round while you guys were in the bathroom, just to get started,” Deirdre said, and her voice sounded unhappy, far away.
“It was crazy,” Amanda said giddily. “We think maybe she’s trying to talk to us. Here.” She moved something on the board; I heard it click and slide, and tried to turn my fear into focus. Someone had lit candles. I could smell the lingering sulfur of the match, the waxy, burning crayon of the candles. I leaned over to Logan and whispered, “Where are the candles?”
“They’re on the table,” she whispered back. “They’re fine—no dripping or anything.”
“What’s the clicking noise?” I asked Logan, slightly louder but still whispering.
“That’s the planchette,” Amanda said, to my annoyance.
“The what?” Logan asked her, in a loud, rude way.
“It’s the piece that slides along the board and spells out what Claire is trying to tell us.”
Logan sucked in her breath. “This is a horrible idea,” she said.
“Lighten up, Logan,” Amanda said, and Nicole was like, “Yeah, Jesus Christ!” and I could feel Logan straighten up like she’d been shocked with a cattle prod. I knew Amanda’s insult would be echoing in Logan’s ears for a while, especially since city-Nicole had put a big exclamation point after it. I should have stuck up for her, but I felt too swirly and blurred.
“Fine,” Logan said, giving up, giving in. “Whatever you want, Amanda.” And she scooted forward to join in whatever they were doing with the board.
“We need two more people to put their fingers on the planchette,” Amanda said. I hated the way she said planchette, like she was a big expert on spiritual communication tools, or speaking a foreign language we all had yet to learn. Or wanted to learn, for that matter.
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