I sniff as I feel us silently accelerating away from the school.
“It certainly smells like a new car,” I say. “But it’s electric?”
“That’s right,” confirms Dad in the same voice he’d use to describe his favorite road bike. “Zero emissions, no fuel costs, and it can run for hundreds of miles on a single charge. Cool, huh?”
It’s so weird to hear your parents describe something as “cool.”
“Well… yeah,” I say. But really, it’s not cool.
“You don’t sound happy, Will,” says Dad. “When you were little, you used to love mechanical gadgets. I thought you would be impressed.”
“Oh, no, I am,” I stammer. “I mean, zero emissions, that’s great.”
“But?” prods Dad.
I came home to prove that I could live outside the blind bubble without burdening anyone. But here I am, already being an inconvenience.
“Well, electric motors are silent.”
When I walk to an intersection, I decide whether it’s safe to cross by listening to the flow of traffic. If an electric car is coming down the street, I might as well be blind and deaf.
Mom says, “Don’t worry. I told the salesman—didn’t you hear me ask him, Henry?”
“Yes, dear,” says Dad.
“I said to him, ‘Sir, I have a son who is visually impaired. Will he be safe with this vehicle?’ And the salesman told me, ‘Ma’am, don’t worry, I don’t think his condition will affect the performance of the air bags or the seat belts. And if your son is sitting in the driveway playing’”—Jeez. Sounds like she described me as a child or something—“‘it comes with a’… Hold on, I wrote this down.” She smooths out a slip of folded paper. “The engine emits a ‘sound like a gentle breeze’ that should alert pedestrians to the car.”
I say, “I was standing at the curb just now, and I didn’t hear any gentle breeze.”
After an awkward pause, Mom asks, “So how was your first day?”
“It was okay, I guess.”
Parents ask you questions about your life the way police officers interrogate subjects on TV cop shows. No matter how much information you provide, they will always follow up a hundred times with slightly reworded questions. So you might as well give short answers and let them pry out the facts incrementally so they feel they are making conversational progress.
“Was Vice Principal Johnston helpful? He seemed so nice,” says Mom.
“Sure,” I say.
“What about journalism class? You’re such a good writer, you must’ve had a ball.”
I think about third period—the girl crying and running out of the room, my burning-hot face.
“Totally.”
“Oh, good. I knew you would love it!” says Mom.
I feel us slow down, turn right, and then slow down again to wait for the gate to rise so we can enter our neighborhood. Despite how far away my mom imagines the “other side of town” to be, Toano, Kansas, is actually quite small. It only seems large to her because when she looks at it, all she sees is the giant divide created by this gate.
“Did you make any friends?” asks Dad.
“A few,” I say.
“Nice kids?” he asks.
“Not bad.”
“Right on,” says Dad, a little too loudly.
My father is an uptight surgeon. He fools no one by using phrases he thinks are cool.
“Did your new friends like your sweater?” asks Mom. “It looks so perfect on you!”
“They failed to mention it,” I say.
“Was it tough getting around?” asks Mom. “So much new territory. I mean, after ten years at the school for the blind—”
“It was okay. Mrs. Chin trained me well.”
Mrs. Chin was the “orienteering and mobility” guide at the school for the blind, where I used to go. She taught us how to walk with an adult-size white cane, how to cross an intersection, how to orient in a new building using cardinal directions—almost everything we needed to know about living independently. I can’t say for sure since we didn’t talk about that kind of stuff, but I think Mrs. Chin was Chinese American. I assume so because I once heard a joke about a fat person having “more chins than a Chinese phone book.”
It’s amazing how jokes can teach you the things people think but are too polite to say aloud, prejudices I assume other kids absorb with the help of their eyes—racism, sexism, and the like. In the case of Mrs. Chin, I figured she was probably Chinese after I heard the phone book line. In fact, that very same joke also taught me that fat people have multiple chins. Why this is, I don’t know. I mean, why chins? Why not extra cheeks? Or foreheads?
“You didn’t meet any mean kids, did you?” Mom asks.
I know why she’s asking. It’s the same reason she and Dad sent me off to the school for the blind in the first place: the Incident.
It happened back when I was around five years old.
My best friend at the time was a boy from the neighborhood named Alexander. He always helped me when I couldn’t do something. He’d explain a playground or take my turn for me in a game. Like that day, when we were playing Candy Land at the kitchen table. Alexander offered to move my piece for me. I would flip a card, then he would say which color it was and move me down the rainbow road to that square. We played a few rounds, and he kept winning every single time. I was annoyed, but I didn’t complain, because Mom had said I had to be nice to him.
Then Mom came into the kitchen.
“Will, what color is your piece?” she asked.
“Red,” I answered, proud to be able to answer such a question.
“Why is your piece still at the starting area?”
“It’s not. Alexander moves it for me when it’s my turn.”
Her head swiveled to face Alexander so abruptly that I heard the rustle of her collar.
She didn’t speak, but something about her head swivel must have made Alexander know he should say something. “Who cares? He can’t see the pieces anyway!”
“How dare you—” blurted Mom.
“He doesn’t even know what red is. Do you, Will? Huh? What does red look like?”
He was right, of course. I didn’t know.
Mom snapped, “You’ve just been moving your own piece? On both your and Will’s turns?”
“Yeah. So? He can’t see the board!” Alexander said defiantly. “It doesn’t matter where his piece is.”
Mom sent him home. I never saw him again.
That day, two things happened: First, I learned it was dangerous to rely on anyone other than myself. And second, my parents decided it would be better for me to enroll in the school for the blind rather than the neighborhood elementary school. I didn’t particularly want to leave home. But Mom and Dad said I would have more fun at a place where everyone was more like me.
They were right, I guess. And yet…
Attending the school for the blind, day after day, year after year, it felt like I was trapped in the starting area of real life. Sure, I was safe there. But I was also bored. I wanted to break free and move forward on the winding rainbow road of life. I might not be able to experience those colors the way some people did, but I believed I could still make it. Make it, you know, to the Candy Castle. Or whatever. But for that to happen, I had to at least start playing the game.
CHAPTER 4
By my second day at my new school, I know all my routes. No more of Mr. Johnston moving me from class to class. I’m free to go as I please.
Before Honors English, Mrs. Everbrook asks me to come over to her desk. Usually, people assume it’s rude to make the blind kid walk across the room, but blindness is an eye problem, not a leg problem. Mrs. Everbrook clearly gets this, which I appreciate.
“Listen, Will, the librarians have everything on my syllabus ordered for you, but it will be about a week before the small forest of literature gets here.”
Braille books, I know, are pretty large. A single braille dictionary is composed of
fifteen to twenty volumes.
Braille was a great invention for the world’s blind population, but not so great for its tree population.
“All right,” I say.
“In the meantime, I’ve arranged for you to have a digital audiobook of our first short story, ‘The Gift of the Magi.’”
“You paid for that out of your own pocket?”
She’s silent, which I take for a yes.
“You really didn’t have to do that, Mrs. Everbrook.”
“Now, don’t get all mushy on me, Will. I wasn’t trying to be nice. I just didn’t want you to have any excuses if you turned in your first paper late.”
• • •
After English is biology, and then journalism. There’s a restroom right outside Mrs. Everbrook’s classroom that Mr. Johnston showed me yesterday, and I stop to use it. I slip into my desk about ten seconds after the bell rings. At the school for the blind, our teachers didn’t mind if we arrived a little late. But that’s not the case with Mrs. Everbrook.
She stops midsentence and addresses me. “Will, do you have a note for being late?”
“No,” I say. “I was, uh, using the restroom.”
“For today, I’ll just give you a verbal warning. Next time, make it come out faster, or I will have to mark you as tardy.”
Mrs. Everbrook returns to discussing story assignments.
“We’ve got two events that need a photographer this week. The first is the touring Vincent van Gogh exhibit that just came to PU.”
PU is the unfortunate, but widely used, abbreviation for Plains University, the institution of higher learning that keeps the economy afloat in our little city. The marketing people at the school are always trying to “rebrand” it as PSU, as in PlainS University, but it never sticks. Everyone keeps calling it PU. It doesn’t help that the school has an agriculture department that does something with fertilizer and stinks up the whole town a few times per semester.
“I know none of you probably give a hoot about art, but Toano’s a pretty small place, and van Gogh’s a pretty big deal, so I think it’s worth covering. Cecily, you know more about art than the rest of your philistine classmates put together, so you’ll be shooting that.”
Cecily—the girl from yesterday. Who thought I was staring. The one I made cry.
“All right,” says Cecily. “Thanks.”
“We need a staff writer to accompany Cecily and cover the event. Volunteers?”
No one speaks. No volunteers. Why not? Then I wonder: Is it because of me? Is it because I stared at her yesterday and made her cry, and now everyone thinks she’s weird? I start to feel sorry for her.
The seconds stretch like minutes, each sharp tick… tick… tick of the wall clock ringing painfully in my ears. I consider how she must feel.
She probably hates me for what I did to her, for embarrassing her like that. And I can’t stand the thought of someone hating me. The art museum visit would be a chance to win her over, to prove that I’m a nice guy, a guy people like if they get to know me.
“I’ll go,” I say.
“Great, thanks, Will,” says Mrs. Everbrook. “This will be for the news section.”
A few minutes later, I hear someone approach and sit down at the desk beside me. I wait. Nothing happens. And then I feel a single finger brush the outside of my hand, requesting my attention.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she says. “It’s Cecily, by the way.”
“I know. I know your voice,” I mean. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.” I say.
“You mean because you’re wearing sunglasses today?” she asks.
So she noticed. I absently push them up the bridge of my nose.
They feel clunky and awkward on my face. They are as tall as my thumb on the front and the sides, only tapering at the part that sit on my ears. It’s like a megaphone calling attention to my blindness. But yesterday I realized that what Mom has always told me was correct: I should always wear my sunglasses. My eyes do make people uncomfortable. People like this girl Cecily.
“Yes, that’s why I’m wearing them.”
She shifts in her seat.
“If you want, I can drive us,” she offers. “To the museum.”
“You have a car?”
“My mom does. How about maybe we go tomorrow?”
“It’s a date,” I say, immediately cringing at my word choice.
As I head from journalism to lunch, I wonder if I will be able to sit with everyone from yesterday. I mean, if they decide they don’t want the blind kid joining their table on an ongoing basis, it would be oh so easy for them to just happen to sit at a different one. I’d have no way of ever knowing where. Or why.
At the school for the blind, the loners moved silently, rarely giving away their voiceprint and remaining mostly unknown to all but their roommates. The opposite, having everyone recognize your voice, meant you were either notorious or popular. I happened to be popular.
At this school, though, I have no idea how many people have even noticed me so far. And if they have, it’s probably only because I’m an anomaly.
I notice how much less obstructed my path is now that I’m walking alone, as opposed to when Mr. Johnston was guiding me through the hall yesterday and my cane was folded and hidden in my back pocket. Then I was merely a new student. Now I’m obviously a blind new student.
I walk to the same table as yesterday and set down my lunch bag.
“Hey, guys,” I say, pretending I’m confident, that I’m not worried I might be speaking to an empty table.
“Yo,” says Whitford.
“What’s up?” says Ion.
“You’re back!” says Nick.
They’re still here, I think with a great sigh of relief.
“How’s your second day of mainstreaming going?” asks Nick.
“I like how that can be a verb or an adjective,” says Ion. “You are mainstreaming at a mainstream school.”
“Or a noun,” adds Whitford. “The mainstream school will funnel you into the mainstream.”
“Exactly why this place sucks,” says Nick. “Mainstream always equals suckitude.”
There’s a gap in the conversation, but I sense that it has continued in a wordless exchange of facial expressions. I read the braille label on a Tupperware container from my lunch bag. Carrots. Mom always packs carrots. I think she secretly believes my eyesight can be salvaged if I just consume enough beta-carotene.
Eventually Ion says, “So what do your parents do, Will?”
“My mom is a professional helicopter parent and country clubber. And my dad’s a doctor.”
“What kind of doctor?” asks Nick.
I was afraid he’d ask this. I try to avoid answering directly. I don’t know Nick all that well yet, but I already know that if he finds out, he’ll have a field day.
“Like, you know, sick people come to his place of business, and he makes them feel good,” I say.
“A statement that could also describe a prostitute,” says Nick. “I mean, what kind of medicine does he practice?”
I’m cornered. “He’s a urologist,” I admit.
“No!” says Nick in a tone of gleeful mock disbelief.
“Oh, grow up!” says Ion.
“A urologist? Like he—” says Nick.
“Yes,” I say.
“So he’s gay?” Nick asks.
“Seriously?” scolds Ion. “Just because you’re a complete dick doesn’t mean you have to be a homophobe.”
I say, “He did create me with my mom, so I don’t think—”
But Nick’s on a roll now. “I don’t get why any medical student would choose urology, you know? Like, why not plastic surgery? Now there’s a job for you. Play with boobs all day and get paid big bucks for it.”
“What are we? Schoolchildren?” says Ion.
But Nick’s still going: “I just wonder about any straight male who says to himself, ‘You know what I’d like to do for the rest of my life? Examine pen
ises.’”
By way of changing the conversation, I tell them about the museum visit I have scheduled for tomorrow with the girl from journalism.
“What’s her name?” asks Nick.
“Cecily.”
“Wait. Cecily Hoder?” asks Whitford, surprised.
“Yeah.”
No one says anything.
“What?” I ask.
“If she didn’t have a different lunch period than us,” Ion says, “Cecily Hoder would be sitting here. She’s the fourth member of our academic quiz team.”
CHAPTER 5
In the art museum the next afternoon, each click of my cane on the hard, smooth floor reverberates like a shotgun blast. It’s so quiet I can hear a faint buzz overhead, presumably from the ceiling lights. That’s a funny thing about artificial light: You can hear it. But I’ve never heard the sun, moon, or stars. Natural light, it seems, travels in silence. Like a Tesla.
Cecily and I stand in front of a painting, silent. No snaps of her camera yet. She’s just looking at it, I guess.
Remembering that I’m here to make things up to her after our disastrous first encounter, I try to break the ice by asking her how she got into photography.
“Through painting, actually,” she says.
“So why not…” I say. I speak carefully, lest I induce another tearful breakdown.
“Paint?” she suggests.
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh, I can’t paint.”
“No?”
“Definitely not.”
“I’ve never painted, but how hard can it be? You hold the brush and then you rub paint on the paper until it looks like what you see. Right?” I ask.
“Yeah, but it’s not like that. You are re-creating the image. That takes talent.”
“To paint what’s right there in front of you?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Um, let me think of an example.” She pauses. “Okay, it’s like how you can be looking at something, a person or a beautiful landscape like, I don’t know, the Grand Canyon, but then you take a photo with a cell phone camera and it doesn’t look the same. It takes skill even to create photos that represent what the eye sees.”
Love and First Sight Page 3