Love and First Sight

by Josh Sundquist

  I hear quick footsteps as someone walks in late.

  “Do you have a note for being tardy, Xander?”

  “No.”

  I recognize the sound of his voice from the morning announcements that played on the television in English during first period.

  “Then don’t let it happen again.” She continues to the class, “As I was saying. In my English classes, you all are always asking me how diagramming sentences will help you in the real world. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: It probably won’t. But everything we do in this class is real world. We’re running a real business funded by the real money from the ads we sell. Our end product is a real print publication. Plus, as the school’s most esteemed group of student journalists from each grade, some of you will play a role in producing the morning announcements show at the start of every day. You can even audition to be one of the hosts if you want to try to end the three-year streak of our tardy friend Xander and his cohost, Victoria.”

  I hear her get up from her desk and step in front of it.

  “This is your staff handbook and our publishing schedule for the year. Take one and pass it on.”

  Something heavy thuds onto a desk several arm lengths in front of me. Sheets slide off, and I hear another thud, this time a little closer, on the desk in front of me. Paper is removed, and the pile hits my desk. It’s not like I can do much with a printed handbook, but I don’t want to stand out for not taking one, so I tug at the top sheet, and it pulls with it a stapled packet about ten pages thick. I pick up the remainder of the stack, which is big and heavy enough to require both hands, rotate in my seat, and drop it on the desk behind mine.

  Only, there’s no thud. I suppose if you calculated the acceleration due to gravity, you’d find that the time the stack traveled to reach the floor was inconsequentially longer than it would have had to travel to reach a desk, but in that millisecond, I live a thousand lives and die a thousand social deaths. The thump when the pages finally hit the ground—since apparently I am at the end of a row—is followed by the racket of pages bouncing and sliding off the pile.

  The class erupts in laughter. After all, they don’t yet know that I can’t see. If they did, they probably wouldn’t find it funny.

  “Calm down, everyone, all right, that’s enough,” says Mrs. Everbrook. She’s coming toward me, and she squats to rake up the pages. “That could happen to anyone on his first day at a new school. This is Will. He’s… well… as you can tell, he’s… a transfer student. So be nice to him.”

  She sets a soft hand on my shoulder as she walks by and returns to her drill sergeant voice.

  “Now, some of you”—she pauses and repeats herself, projecting to various sections of the room—“some of you took this class because you thought it sounded easy… or maybe even fun. Well, it’s only fun if you like hard work, because it certainly ain’t easy. And yes, I know ain’t isn’t proper grammar, but we ain’t in English class anymore. This here’s journalism. So if you’re looking for an easy A, go to your guidance counselor today and switch to one of those ‘fun’ electives”—she makes fun sound downright offensive—“like finger painting or basket weaving or yearbook or whatever they are offering these days.”

  There are some snickers, but they are interrupted by a shriek from directly across the room.

  “Stop staring!” shouts a female voice.

  I hear a chair push back with a screech before someone runs by me and out into the hall, crying.

  “All right, boys and girls, I guess I should have told you this earlier, but I was trying to respect Will’s privacy. Seems I made a mistake. Anyway, Will, our new transfer student, is blind.”

  There are several loud gasps. It’s a stronger reaction than I’m used to.

  “Don’t worry, people, it’s not contagious,” I say.

  But no one laughs.

  “All righty, then, big first day,” says Mrs. Everbrook. “I guess this is as good a time as any to let you all know that Victoria is going to be our editor in chief this year. Her duties will include, among other things, chasing down crying staff members. Victoria, would you please see to it that Cecily is all right?”

  “No problem,” says a voice I assume belongs to Victoria. She marches efficiently out of the room.

  Mrs. Everbrook approaches my desk and says quietly, “Will, you were staring at Cecily.”

  “I thought we just established—”

  “Yes, I know that, but she didn’t. So she thought you were staring.”

  “And that made her cry?” I ask.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard before that some people are sensitive about being stared at,” says Mrs. Everbrook. “Cecily is… she’s just one of those people. Do you understand?”

  “I guess.”

  But I don’t, not really. I feel my face getting hot, and I wonder if the other students can see the temperature change on my skin. Are they all staring at me right now?

  Mom hates it when people stare at me. Especially when I was little, before the Incident and thus before I went to the school for the blind. She would take me grocery shopping or whatever, and I’d be walking down the aisle with my little tiny white cane in one hand, the other holding her by the wrist—she always insisted I grip her like that instead of holding hands so that I would grow up comfortable with being guided—and some other kid would look at me funny, and Mom would go all Mama Bear, roaring, “If you stare, you’ll go blind, too!” And the kid would run off crying.

  She’s always been that way. Overprotective. Not for my sake as much as for hers. I think she wants my life to be easy because it will make her life easy. She can’t let me fail because then everyone would think she failed as a mother.

  So that’s why she yells at people for staring. And why she tries to make me “fit in” so they don’t stare in the first place. She’s actually always wanted me to wear sunglasses in public.

  And I guess she was right about that one, because here I am now, making some girl cry because she thought I was staring at her. Wouldn’t have happened if I had been wearing the glasses.

  • • •

  After journalism is lunch. Mr. Johnston invites me to eat with him in the staff lounge, but I decline. He deposits me in the cafeteria, where I stand holding my cane in one hand and a bag lunch in the other. Is the entire room staring at me? Or am I invisible to them? I don’t know. All I have to go on is the sound of hundreds of people talking at once, the voices blending together so that I can’t pick out individual conversations.

  The noise of the cafeteria is not unlike the smell of the cafeteria. It combines the long list of foods that are being consumed today, or have been consumed in this room at some point in the past, into one overpowering yet nondescript odor that welcomes you like a smack across the face.

  I walk forward until my cane clinks against the metal legs of a chair. Further cane taps determine that the chair is already pulled out from a circular lunch table.

  “Excuse me, is anyone sitting at this table?” I ask the void.

  In return, I get nothing but the chattering voices of the room.

  “No one?”

  No response.

  So I sit. But instead of a chair, my butt makes contact with another animate life-form. A pair of legs, I think. I jump.

  “What the—” I holler, completely startled.

  “AHHHH!” comes from the owner of the legs.

  I drop my cane.

  Mrs. Chin always said that a blind person losing a cane is like a sighted person dropping a flashlight and having it turn off after it hits the ground in a dark room. Not only will I have to find the cane, I will have to do so on hands and knees because I’ve lost the very thing that normally helps me detect lost objects.

  “Dude, let me get that for you,” says the owner of the legs. With enviable quickness, he retrieves the cane and places it in my hand. “There you go. Sorry, bro. So sorry. That was majorly awkward and totally my fault.”

  “It’s all r
ight. But, I mean, did you hear me ask if anyone—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard you. Like I said, I’m sorry, it was totally messed up not to answer you. I just… I don’t know, I saw you walking over here and froze. Look, you wanna sit down? The chair next to me is empty.”

  I hesitate.

  He says, “I swear, no surprise occupants.”

  I sit down. “Okay, sure, thanks.”

  “I’m Nick, by the way.”

  “Will.”

  I reach my hand toward his voice, and he shakes it. (Side note, Mr. Johnston: I am perfectly capable of shaking hands.)

  I hear more people sit down at the table.

  “So, Will, before we have any more awkward butt contact, I should introduce you to my friends,” says Nick. He’s loud. Loud enough that I assume much of the cafeteria is forced to listen to his nasally proclamations.

  “Friend. Singular,” says a female voice to my right. “I’m retracting my friendship with you, so you’ve only got one left.”

  “That’s Ion. We’ve been feuding recently,” Nick says to me. “Argument about time travel. Won’t bore you with the details. She’s just pissed because she knows I’m right.”

  “Please. Another dimension is the only explanation that—” says Ion.

  “If you had the technology to travel in time, you could obviously figure out how to remain—” interrupts Nick.

  “WHOA, WHOA,” I say, overpowering their voices. “Too much talking at once. You are welcome to bore me with the details, but at least take turns, please.”

  “Okay,” says Nick. “SparkNotes version: A while ago some geeks made a permanent monument out of stone or whatever that was inscribed with an invitation to a party that would be thrown in honor of time travelers from the future. The idea was that millions of years from now, when time travel exists, the stone invitation thingy would still be around, and humans of the future would see it and travel back in time to attend the party. The only problem was—”

  “No one showed up,” interrupts Ion. She continues at what I assume is the maximum words per minute a human is capable of pronouncing without compromising diction or dropping syllables. “From the future, I mean. But that doesn’t mean that time travel will never be invented. Because anyone who has consumed any science fiction knows that there are paradoxes created when you travel back in time and meddle with the past. So it stands to reason that if humans did travel back in time, they would be entering a time line of a parallel dimension. The first dimension would be the way things are now, without time travel. That’s where we are living, obviously. The next dimension would be the version of reality that was created when they traveled back in time. So maybe a bunch of time travelers attended the party; it just happened in a different dimension.”

  “Which obviously makes no sense,” says Nick. “Because—”

  “It is the only explanation that makes—”

  “Wow. So, Ion? Is that your given name?” I ask, trying to change the subject to something less volatile.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “No!” says Nick. “Tell him the truth!”

  “Why do you always have to tell people this story?” she asks.

  “It’s endearing!” says Nick.

  “It’s embarrassing. That’s why my parents started calling me Ion in the first place.”

  “So your given name is…” I prompt.

  “It’s Hermione, all right?” says Ion, eliciting peals of laughter from Nick. “Yes, like in Harry Potter. Only my parents were living under a rock and had never even heard of the books. It was, like, my great-aunt’s name or something. Anyway, after the first movie came out, it didn’t take long for my parents to get tired of hearing jokes about how my baby talk was probably a spell I was casting.”

  “I can see how that would get old,” I say.

  “Right, so my parents decided to make a nickname out of Hermione. They couldn’t use Her or Nee, obviously, so they used the middle sound: Ion.”

  “I like it,” I say. “It’s unique.”

  “Thanks,” says Ion.

  Nick says, “Will, I still feel bad about earlier, and I want to make it up to you by serving as your eyes at this table. Cool?”

  “I guess.”

  “So here’s something you should know about Ion: She’s like the nerd chick in teen movies who, if she brushed her hair and put on girl clothes, would suddenly be transformed into, like, a smoking-hot babe.”

  References to visual components of cinema are meaningless to me, of course, but I appreciate Nick’s effort.

  Ion says, “You realize I’m sitting right here, right?”

  “I get that a lot, too,” I say to Ion.

  “About being transformed into a smoking-hot babe?” asks Nick.

  “No, people talking about me like I’m not here,” I say.

  A new voice says, “Speaking of people who are actually sitting right here, Ion’s boyfriend is sitting right here, too, and he’s about to beat the crap out of you, Nick.” It’s male, positioned opposite me, in between Ion and Nick. The voice is deep and resonant, almost musical.

  “My bad,” says Nick. “Will, I would like to introduce Whitford.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” says Whitford.

  “You too,” I say.

  “Now, based on his name and the sound of his voice,” continues Nick, “you’re probably thinking Whitford is a white dude, right?”

  “Well, I… I mean…” I stammer.

  “It’s cool. I always say what everyone is thinking but knows isn’t appropriate to share out loud,” says Nick. “Obviously Whitford sounds white. I mean, jeez, it’s right there in his name. Whitford. WHITE-ford. But no, good sir, our friend Whitford is a genuine African American.”

  “This is uncomfortable for everyone and amusing for no one,” says Whitford dryly.

  “Think of him as a young Tiger Woods,” adds Nick.

  “So uncomfortable…” says Whitford.

  “Except without the girl addiction. And dressed even more preppy,” concludes Nick.

  Sighted people are always doing this: Imagining they are translating vision into words for me, but they’re really just describing one image by comparing it to another image, neither of which I have a point of reference for.

  “And finally, I’m your host, Nick, a clever lad with mild premature baldness and the potential to either graduate valedictorian or drop out of high school. I haven’t decided which yet.”

  “Nice to meet you all,” I say.

  “So how does a wacky gang like us end up as friends?” continues Nick. “I mean, this lunch table packs the sort of uncanny diversity you normally only see in TV commercials, am I right?”

  “I don’t watch commercials,” I say.

  “I don’t, either,” says Nick. “Thank God for DVR.”

  “No, I meant because—”

  “I know what you meant, Will. Jeez, I thought we were at a point in our relationship where we could joke about things like that. I mean, after the intimacy of our initial physical contact—”

  “Okay, whatever,” I say. “I’ll bite: How did all of you become friends?”

  “Will, I don’t want to make you nervous or anything,” says Nick. “But you are currently seated with the Toano High School varsity academic quiz team, defending district champions and regional runner-ups!”

  “Varsity?” I ask.

  “No,” says Whitford. “We’re just a club. Nick always tries to make us sound like a sport because he’s bitter about being born white, which means he lacks the natural athletic prowess stereotypically associated with a black man such as myself.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Whitford,” says Nick. “You’re a nerd, too.”

  “I’m a geek,” says Whitford. “There’s a difference.”

  “Well, thanks for letting me eat with you guys,” I say, realizing I have forgotten all about the lunch Mom carefully packed into braille-labeled Tupperware containers. “I’m new here, and I don’t
know anyone, so—”

  “Hey, it’s the least we could do,” says Nick. “I shouldn’t have been silent like that when you asked if there was anyone here. I mean, we’re the academic quiz team. Answering questions is what we do.”

  But even the defending district champion academic quiz team would have trouble answering the number of questions I get from my parents after school.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’m waiting at the edge of the curb.

  “Right here, William!”

  It’s Mom’s voice, startlingly close. Maybe two arm lengths. Yet I’m unable to hear the familiar hum of our family station wagon.

  My hand reaches for the door handle, but my fingers jam into hard metal. I press my palm against the car, searching for the lever.

  This goes on for a second or two, and I still can’t seem to find it.

  Mom says, “Surprise, honey! New car!”

  She claps a few times, as if I need additional auditory cues that she is excited. She’s been doing that since I was a baby, going out of her way to signal excitement to me when it just ends up making me feel like a toddler. And I think she still sees me that way: the same little boy who went off to boarding school in kindergarten. She doesn’t realize I’m grown up now.

  “We got a Teslaaaaaaaaaa!” Mom says in a talk-show-announcer voice.

  Apparently I’m supposed to be excited about this, but mostly I just feel dumb because, like, where’s the door handle? I grope around for a while, and finally she notices my struggle.

  “Just a little to the left, honey,” she says, returning to her normal voice.

  I locate it and climb in.

  “Your father finished early in the operating room today, so we just went out and bought it!” exclaims Mom.

  “It was the new less-expensive model, and it will reduce our carbon footprint and save on gas,” says Dad. “And we can install a bike rack on the roof.”

  “What do you think? You like it?” asks Mom.