Love and First Sight

by Josh Sundquist

  Great. Just what I’ve always wanted.

  We go out to the garage, where I find Dad has been checking the tire pressure and lubricating the gears on the bike.

  “Guys, I’ve never even ridden a bike before,” I say.

  “It’s all right,” says Dad. “As the front rider, your mother can keep you balanced as long as you maintain speed.”

  “If you say so,” I mutter.

  “You have to pedal at the same time,” instructs Dad. “Sydney, warn Will before you turn or brake so he is prepared. Be careful.”

  We push off, and Dad gets on his bike to follow us.

  “Stop sign,” warns Mom. I feel the bike decelerate. Before we tip over, she puts a foot down on the pavement to steady us.

  We’ve gone only one block, and I already officially hate Dad’s beloved sport of cycling. I mean, yeah, the breeze feels kind of nice, but I can replicate that sensation by putting my face in front of a house fan. Riding on a tandem bike mostly makes me feel like a prisoner. The rider in the back has no brakes, no steering, no choice.

  We ride mostly in silence for a few minutes, aside from Mom’s occasional outbursts (“Isn’t this great!”).

  Then she says, “I have something else exciting to discuss.”

  Because of course she does. There had to be a reason to trap me on this bike other than the ride itself.

  She continues, “There’s an experimental operation being tested at your dad’s hospital. It has to do with retinal stem cell transplants. If you are accepted as a candidate, it could give you eyesight! Full eyesight! Can you imagine?”

  Unwittingly, my pulse quickens. “Dad, is this true?”

  His tone is far more sober. “It’s not even a stage-one clinical trial yet. Still completely experimental. Honestly, there’s a very small chance of success.”

  “But if it did work, I mean—it could give me eyesight?”

  “I would wait for them to test the procedure on other patients first. There are so many risks associated with an operation. People don’t even realize—every time a surgeon opens an incision, you are subjecting yourself to risk of infection, physician error, complications—”

  “But just think, Will,” counters Mom. “If it was successful, you could have twenty-twenty vision. Isn’t that worth at least considering? Just go in for an initial consultation. I’ve already made the appointment for you next Thursday.”

  Hold up. She already made the appointment?

  I’m tempted to say no just out of principle. I’m sixteen years old. She can’t go around making appointments for me without asking me first.

  But on the other hand, what if it worked? What if I could… see?

  “I guess it can’t hurt to talk to them,” I say. “I’ll go to the consultation. But under one condition.”

  “What?” asks Mom.

  “I go by myself. This is my decision, and I don’t want you or anyone else making it for me.”

  “Well, sweetie, of course it’s your decision, but you’ll need me in the room—”

  “No,” I say. “Not even in the building. You drop me off, I go in by myself. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

  “Fine,” says Mom. “But I’ll wait in the parking lot so you can text if you need me.”

  • • •

  That evening, I’m sitting on my bed listening to the recording of “The Gift of the Magi.” It’s actually really short, and after it’s finished I listen to some blog posts on my phone about how the invention of the iPod led to a boom in the audiobook industry when Siri interrupts to say, “Notification: Message from Cecily.” I tap my phone and listen to the text.

  “Hi.”

  I tap once more and Siri reads it again.

  “Hi.”

  Really? That’s it?

  “Hi.”

  Just one word: Hi. What does that mean? Does she want to apologize? Is she trying to initiate conversation but doesn’t know what to say? Does she pity poor blind Will and feel obligated to send condolences via text?

  How do I respond to such a vague opening statement? I run through a variety of options in my mind. I scratch a sticker and soak up its aroma of campfire. Finally I settle on a proportionate response.

  “Hi,” I reply.

  Her next text comes back almost immediately.

  Cecily: I feel really stupid.

  Me: Why?

  Cecily: About what I said at the end.

  Me: It’s OK.

  Cecily: No, it’s not. I was wrong.

  Me: Thanks for saying that. Consider yourself forgiven.

  I migrate from my bed to my desk. The wall of the savory. I scratch the pizza sticker and take a big whiff. I scratch a hot dog sticker and find it blends surprisingly well with the waning aroma of pizza.

  Then she writes back.

  Cecily: That’s really nice to hear.

  Me: I’m a pretty nice guy… when I’m not accidentally staring at people.

  Cecily: Can you do emoji?

  Me: I don’t know. How do you do it?

  Cecily: They’re little pictures you send by text. Here I’ll send you one and you can tell me what your phone says.

  On her next message, my phone reads, “Smiling face, dancing monkey, cat face with wry smile.”

  I text her what it said.

  “Cool,” she replies. “So it’s reading you the names of the pictures. What does this one say?”

  I listen to her next message and tell her what it said: “Smiling pile of poop.”

  I wonder what that could possibly look like. And, for that matter, why would anyone ever send it?

  Then she sends me three more. Siri reads me the message: “Small up-pointing triangle, large red down-pointing triangle, black left-pointing double triangle.”

  I write: “?”

  There’s a pause before Cecily replies with a long text: “Before today, I never noticed how roads look like triangles as they disappear into the horizon. I only saw roads getting smaller as they got farther away. Now, thanks to you, I’m seeing triangles everywhere.”

  I smile. I open Facebook and send her a friend request.

  There’s a knock on my door. My door, by the way, is covered on both sides with scratch-and-sniff stickers that fall more into the “odor” category than “scent.” Rotten eggs, gasoline, smelly socks, skunks. That kind of thing. Sort of an olfactory-based KEEP OUT sign.

  “William, time for dinner,” says Dad.

  “Okay, just a sec.”

  I text Cecily, “Gotta go, family dinner.”

  I get one more text from her before I head downstairs to dinner. “Just accepted your request. Glad we are officially friends now.”

  CHAPTER 7

  That Friday I sit alone at lunch. The academic quiz team is at an away tournament all day. So Cecily’s not in journalism, either.

  But after school, Ion texts me to say that they won, so they’re going out for a celebratory dinner and would I like to join them?

  I’ve never been to the restaurant before, so after Mom drops me off—I decline her offer to park and guide me in—I stand outside and hope someone from the group will arrive to show me inside.

  A door swings open, dinging a bell. I recognize the next sound: the deliberate but controlled steps, treading gently, as if she’s trying not to leave footprints. I’ve never seen a footprint, of course, but my understanding is that the harder you press, the more of an impression you leave behind.

  “Hi, Will, it’s Cecily.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I was waiting inside and saw you standing here, so…” Her voice drifts off as she guides me inside, and we wait in the front of the restaurant, me still holding her arm.

  Then I get a text from Ion. She’s so sorry, but Whitford is sick and she is going to have to skip the dinner so she can take care of him.

  “That’s weird,” says Cecily.

  “What?”

  “He didn’t seem sick at the tournament today.”

&n
bsp; Then Cecily’s phone buzzes. It’s a text from Nick. His mom is going out, and he has to babysit his brother.

  Well, this is awkward. No longer is it a celebration dinner with five people. Now it’s like… a date.

  And I mean, Cecily is a nice person and all, but dating is the last thing on my mind at the moment. I’ve had girlfriends before, and it was cool and everything, but it brings all kinds of drama. And I’ve got plenty of drama to deal with already, thank you very much.

  As if she were reading my mind, Cecily asks, “Do you want a ride home?”

  But I realize, if I go home, Mom will think my new friends stood me up. Cue the hints about returning to the school for the blind. So leaving early is far worse than a possibly awkward dinner with the photographer girl from journalism class.

  “How about we just stay for dinner?”

  “You sure?” she asks. “I mean, it’ll just be… you know, me.”

  “Yeah, definitely,” I say. “We’re already here. Might as well eat.”

  She guides me in a pattern of ninety-degree turns, left, right, left, right, around the tables in the diner. We end at a countertop bar with tall stools covered in smooth plastic. Across the counter, a mere arm’s length away, I hear the sizzle of meat on a grill and the hiss of boiling oil in a fryer.

  I hear Cecily pop the lens off her camera and snap a few photos. There’s a whisper of plastic twisting over plastic as she adjusts the lens—zooming or focusing or something—and takes a few more.

  I ask, “For Instagram? Hashtag food porn?”

  She laughs a little.

  “You’re on Instagram?” she asks, surprised.

  “Yeah. I like the captions. Anyway, what’s your picture of?”

  “Us,” she says simply.

  “You and me?”

  “Well, mostly you. The camera is covering my face. There’s a mirror across from us.”

  “What I would give to have a mirror,” I say. “I’m constantly wondering if my shirt is on backward or if my hair is sticking up or something.”

  “You’re not missing out. Mirrors just make people overly concerned about their appearance,” she says dismissively.

  “Really? I’ve always assumed that if I could see myself in a mirror, I would be less concerned about my appearance. Because I wouldn’t have to wonder what I looked like anymore. I could stop worrying about it.”

  “In my experience, it’s usually the other way around.”

  “Is that a mirror joke?”

  “What?”

  “The other way around. Because isn’t everything flipped in mirrors? Like upside down?”

  “Close. Wrong axis. Everything is flipped left to right. It’s backward, not upside down. But no, that wasn’t a joke. I mean, I think it works the opposite of what you’re saying: Mirrors make everyone more worried about their appearance.”

  I hear the swish of a waitress walking by on the other side of the counter. (And yes, I infer her gender based on the sound of her footsteps, an educated guess I’m usually right about.)

  I want to get the waitress’s attention to ask for menus. It’s silly, but part of me hopes this will impress Cecily—that she will notice how sensitive my hearing is, or at least that she’ll feel like she’s hanging out with a normal person who knows when a waitress is walking by, not a helpless blind kid who needs someone else to flag down a server for him.

  “Excuse me, can we get some menus?” I ask.

  “What are you, blind?” the waitress snaps.

  I squirm. Her tone implies that she was using that word blind to mean my question was stupid.

  She wouldn’t be the first, unfortunately. One time, for a paper at my old school, I searched blind in the thesaurus app on my phone. The synonyms included ignorant, oblivious, irrational, mindless, reckless, and violent. Kind of rude if you are actually, you know, blind. But her accusation also happens to be factual enough to stand up in a court of law: I am 100 percent legally blind.

  “Yes, actually, I am blind.”

  “Oh my God, I am so sorry!” she says, realizing. “Holy… oh, wow… I am the worst person ever. I am so sorry. God. That was so rude. I’m just having the worst day—not that that’s any excuse—I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “It happens,” I say.

  “The menu is already on the counter. I’m sorry we don’t have it in braille or anything. Do you want me to, like, read it to you?”

  “I’ll read it for him,” Cecily says coolly.

  Cecily talks me through the menu. A few minutes later, the waitress returns for our orders.

  “I’m not really hungry,” says Cecily. “I’ll just have a Diet Coke, please.”

  “And what will he be having?” the waitress asks Cecily.

  “I will be having the grilled cheese,” I say.

  “Oh, get it cut into triangles instead of rectangles,” suggests Cecily. “It tastes so much better that way.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Please prepare the sandwich as the lady suggests.”

  “One grilled cheese, sliced into triangles,” repeats the waitress, making audible scratches with a pen.

  After the waitress walks away, Cecily asks, “So how come you signed up for journalism class?”

  “I want to be a writer. Seemed like good practice. You?”

  “Same. Except I want to be a photographer.”

  “Of nature, I assume?”

  “Yeah. I want to see the world through the lens of my camera. That’s everything to me, everything I want.”

  “No house with a white picket fence and two-point-four babies?”

  “Well… it’s not like I don’t want those things. It’s just that I’ve always assumed…” She trails off.

  “What?”

  “That I will never be in a relationship,” she says. And then she adds quickly, “If I was, you know, traveling that much.”

  A few seconds later, the grilled cheese arrives. Cecily is right. It does taste better this way.

  “Are you going to audition for the morning announcements show?” I ask, mouth still partially full of grilled cheese.

  “On the school TVs?” she asks. “Definitely not.”

  “Not your thing?”

  “No. I mean, there’s a vote. You know that, right? The school elects the next semester’s hosts based on the audition.”

  “So?”

  “I just don’t think I could ever win a vote like that.”

  “How come?”

  “Weren’t there popular kids at the school for the blind?”

  “Sure, there were.” In fact, I was one of them. But I don’t tell her that. “That doesn’t matter, though. I think you have… well, a really nice voice. I would vote for you.”

  “Why don’t you audition?” she says.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “I can’t read printed text. I mean, I assume they are reading scripts or something, right?”

  “Oh,” she says, her voice dropping. “You’re right. They read off teleprompters that scroll the words in front of the camera.”

  “So yeah, there’s that. I mean, it would be cool and all, but I just don’t think it would work.”

  “But what if—what if we could find a way to make it work?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, I don’t know. I could read the announcements into a little microphone that would play them into an earpiece you were wearing. Something like that?”

  “No way,” I say, imagining all the ways that could go wrong. “It would never work.”

  “Whitford is pretty good with tech stuff. Maybe he can figure out a way that you could read the script yourself.”

  I’m not sure how this conversation got so turned around. The point was that I thought Cecily should try out. She’s the one with the beautiful voice.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll try out if yo
u will.”

  “But I’m really not—”

  “That’s my offer,” I say.

  She hesitates for a while.

  “Fine. We’ll both audition.”

  “If we figure out a way to make it work for me.”

  “We’ll find a way. Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Dr. Bianchi, the doctor who is doing the experimental surgery, works in an office building at PU’s med school. True to our agreement, Mom drops me off at the curb after school on Thursday.

  “There’s a revolving door,” she warns. “You sure you don’t want me to guide you in?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How will I know you made it safely to your appointment?”

  “I’ll text you when I’m there, okay?”

  “If I don’t hear anything within ten minutes, I’m going to come inside and find you.”

  “Fine.”

  I try to walk at a normal pace from the car to the building; I don’t want Mom to see me hurrying to beat her ten-minute deadline. Once I’ve navigated the revolving door, however, I hustle across the lobby to the elevator.

  Because of the way the braille numbers are staggered on the inside of two columns of buttons, it’s not entirely clear which button corresponds to the twelfth floor.

  I press one, and the elevator goes up. When it stops and the doors open, I walk across the hall, only to discover that the first door I come to is 602. I’m looking for office 1239.

  I quickly review my training with Mrs. Chin, hoping I can fix this problem before Mom helicopters in, no doubt with a full SWAT team in tow to rescue me.

  If the braille was lined up better, I could use a basic blind ninja trick: hold my hand on the button I pressed and wait till the doors open and then start to close, then press it again to see if they reopen.

  Of course, it’s possible that I pressed the wrong button in the first place. It’s also possible someone on the sixth floor pressed the Up button, but when my elevator stopped for him and he saw a blind guy standing in it, the guy froze, not wanting to infringe on my space, but also not wanting to make noise, lest I detect his presence and think him blind-phobic.