Love and First Sight

by Josh Sundquist

  It’s way different than a tandem bike, where, sure, I have the sensation of movement, but the front rider is steering. Here, I’m in control. I’m moving fast and I’m driving a big heavy machine and it feels amazing. It is freedom and independence and control, not just of myself but of something much bigger than myself.

  People with driver’s licenses must feel this way, like, every day. They probably don’t even notice how cool it is. And if I have the operation, I could get a driver’s license. I could drive a bus or a car or the front side of a tandem bike. And if I did, I would never forget to notice how good it felt. I would always remember what it was like to be without that freedom, and I would appreciate it every time I grabbed the steering wheel or the handlebars and looked at the open road ahead.

  After we complete a lap around the parking lot, he takes over at the seat to put on the parking brake and cut the engine.

  “That was real good,” he says. “You’re a natural!”

  “Thanks.”

  “I hear there’s a job opening up around here. Maybe you should apply?”

  I laugh.

  The hissing sound comes again, letting in the outside air. I walk down the stairs.

  “Did you see that, Cecily?” I ask, giddy with excitement. “I drove a school bus!”

  “Yes, I saw,” she says dryly.

  “That was so cool!”

  She gives a sort of humph sound. I ask the driver a few questions for my article, recording our conversation on my phone, and then Cecily and I begin the walk back to the classroom.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” I ask Cecily once we are the only ones walking the corridor.

  “If you ask it, do I have to answer it?”

  “Not if you don’t want to,” I say.

  “All right.”

  “That first day of school,” I say. “How come you cried because I was staring at you?”

  She hesitates. “What do you mean?”

  “Now that I know you better, it just doesn’t seem like you.”

  “I’d just had a big fight with my mom that day before school,” she says. “I’d been crying already and was just on edge. And when I thought you were staring at me, it just set me off again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Are you close with your mom?”

  She laughs mirthlessly. “No, we don’t really get along.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “Yeah, he’s much better than my mom, but they’re divorced. I only get to see him a few times a year.”

  “Where does he live?” I ask.

  “In Los Angeles,” she says, her voice becoming more cheerful. “Near Venice Beach. He has this little yellow bungalow on a corner lot. There’s always a bright red surfboard on the front porch.”

  “Does he surf?”

  She laughs, for real this time.

  “No, it must’ve come with the house or something. The closest he comes to exercise is watching football on TV,” she says.

  “He doesn’t even go to the beach?” I ask.

  “Sometimes, but he drives there. It’s, like, six blocks away, and he refuses to walk,” she says. “I’m always telling him to get in shape, but he doesn’t seem to listen.”

  We walk in silence for a while. On a long, empty stretch of hallway, I hear two sets of footsteps approaching. Just as they pass us, a male voice says, “Hey, look! It’s Batgirl!”

  And then there’s a cackle of laughter and the smack of a high five.

  An intensity of feeling like I’ve never experienced shoots through my body. Anger, raw and pure, and the knowledge that I must fight, I must hurt, I must destroy the owner of that voice. I drop Cecily’s arm and whirl toward the sounds of their laughter, letting fly an arm trained by years of swinging a cane, a fist strengthened by a lifetime of touching and gripping. But my hand only breezes through the air, and the force of the swing knocks me off balance. I nearly topple to the floor.

  The misfire of my punch just makes me angrier. I spread my arms out wide and charge toward where I last heard their laughter, hurling myself with the intent to bring anyone in my path to the ground. Instead, I run face-first into something metal. I bounce off with a pop and land on my back, losing my balance for real this time.

  “Oh, Will!” says Cecily. She’s already crouched beside me, and I can hear that she’s crying.

  What I don’t hear is anything from the boys who passed us in the hall. There’s no jeering, no laughter, nothing. They just walk away. And that’s what hurts the most, so much deeper than the smack to my face when I hit what must’ve been a wall of lockers: that my attempt to fight doesn’t even warrant mockery. It’s not serious enough even to be made fun of. I lost myself in rage and set my mind for combat, and it resulted in exactly nothing.

  I’m shaking with anger. They called her Batgirl because she’s associated with me, because she was walking with me, and I’m blind. Like a bat. They ridiculed her for being my friend, and I couldn’t stop them.

  And that’s when I come to two realizations. Number one, I will have the operation. I want that freedom I felt driving the bus. The freedom to move through the world without a cane. I want that every day. And I want to experience the pigments on a painted canvas and soak in the texture of a sunrise. I want to examine every floor tile in the hallway at school and watch water gush out of the faucet in a bathroom sink. I want to see it all; I want to savor every fiber of this other layer of reality.

  And number two, I recognize that I had a weirdly strong reaction to those guys. I’m not the kind of person who usually gets in fights. So why did I swing at them? There’s only one possible explanation, one that I’ve been trying to ignore but now must admit to myself: I am definitely falling for Cecily.

  CHAPTER 15

  The stem cell transplant happens three days later, on Thursday. I had my tonsils removed when I was a kid, so this is not my first time under anesthesia. This first operation, then, doesn’t feel like a big deal. And it’s not like I’ll wake up being able to see. I have to wait for the second operation for that. Until then, I will wear bandages under my sunglasses. My eyes will be sensitive from the trauma of the transplant and need protection to heal.

  Mom comes with me. She wouldn’t take no for an answer this time.

  Dad isn’t here. Well, actually, technically he is in the same building. Working. Tying up some old guy’s testicles or whatever he does. He said he couldn’t reschedule his operating room time today, but I think he’s really just unhappy with my decision and didn’t feel comfortable being here.

  I go to the operation prep area, and Mom and I sit down, me on the hospital bed. A nurse slides a curtain around us, the hooks grinding along their track on the ceiling until the fabric surrounds us like a little bubble, dampening slightly the sounds from the rest of the room—soft voices, whirring machines, beeping monitors. Several different people cycle through, asking me a bunch of questions to make sure I’m not allergic to anesthesia, that I don’t have a history of breathing problems, I haven’t eaten in the last twelve hours, and on and on. Each question implies a potential complication, something that could go wrong. And these aren’t even issues related to eyesight; they are just the general risks of surgery. I’m starting to wonder if maybe Dad was right, maybe there are too many risks here, and I can feel my heart racing as they put the IV in my arm. Then I start to feel really good, just relaxed and calm. Mom strokes my hair like I’m five years old, but I don’t even care, because I feel wonderful and I love my mom.

  • • •

  The next thing I know, I am waking up, the beeps and whirs slowly coming back to life in my awareness.

  “Honey?” says Mom, apparently noticing I’m awake from the movements of my hands (it’s not like she can see my eyes opening after all, not with these bandages over them). “How do you feel?”

  I feel great. Pain meds are awesome. I should have surgery more often.

  “Fine,” I say.

  It’s an outpatient sur
gery so Mom drives me home that afternoon. Over the weekend, I just chill. As the medicine wears off, my eyes start to hurt more and Mom’s doting starts to get annoying, so I spend most of the weekend in my room, poking around the Internet on my laptop.

  • • •

  During morning announcements the next Monday at school, Xander reveals that the schoolwide votes have been tallied for the first round of auditions. Tripp and Connor are eliminated. Cecily and I advance. We have our second and final audition Friday.

  Mrs. Everbrook gives Cecily and me a copy of the script in advance, and we spend the week practicing so we can memorize it ahead of time instead of reading it on air. Unlike the first audition, where we just sat behind the desk, the next one includes a green-screen segment.

  Victoria hosts that segment for Xander and herself, standing in front of a green wall that, Cecily explains, runs through a computer that makes the background look like something else. Apparently it’s the same technology meteorologists use on television to show maps of weather patterns. It all means nothing to me. For now.

  Xander wraps up their audition with a reminder to cast votes for their favorite pair of hosts during lunch. The winners will be announced in a few weeks. Then it’s our turn. Cecily begins with a few announcements from the desk and then tosses to me at the green screen, where I’m standing wearing my usual sunglasses. No one knows the bandages underneath are from a surgery that may soon result in eyesight. For now, I’m still just the blind kid. I launch into my thirty-second explanation of the upcoming school renovations. A series of floor-plan diagrams is appearing behind me, and I point out different areas as I speak.

  “A little higher, now to the left—perfect,” says Cecily in my ear.

  Last night we decided that I should be the one to do the green-screen segment. Because it’s the exact opposite of what everyone would expect. The blind kid standing in front of a green wall—a color he’s never even seen—and gesturing at imaginary pictures as if he knows where they are. It seems like the perfect trick to get people talking about us, and maybe even voting for us, too.

  Just as we practiced yesterday at his house, Whitford gave me a wireless earpiece that he said looks something like a hearing aid. From off camera, Cecily turned her television mic off and turned on another hidden mic that sends a signal to the device in my ear. That way she could direct my hand movements as I recited the script, and all the while I look like I know where I’m pointing. Pretty clever, right? We thought so.

  At lunch everyone agrees that we nailed the audition. But the winners won’t be announced for a few more weeks. By then, I will have already had my second operation. Or not, depending on whether they find a cornea donor. My future, or more specifically the future of my eyesight, lies with the destiny of one unfortunate organ donor. Somewhere out there right now, presumably, is a healthy person looking through a pair of functional corneas with no idea of the future that awaits him. I wonder what he’s looking at right now. A spreadsheet at work? A documentary on Netflix? The cracks in a sidewalk? He could never imagine that in a matter of days, someone else will be looking through those very same eyes. Or maybe it’s a she. Either way, something calamitous will have to occur in order for those corneas to become available to me. Is it wrong for me to hope for such a thing?

  CHAPTER 16

  The weeks tick by slowly. First I have to wait a month for the stem cells to (hopefully) be accepted by my body and begin to replicate into daughter cells. I still go to school, do my journalism work, hang out with my friends, and sometimes with just Cecily. But I never really feel completely there because in the front of my mind, right behind my eyes, in fact, is the uncertainty of my future. After the month of healing is up, it’s a waiting game. There’s a two-week window in which I can receive a transplant. If no corneas become available, game over. The procedure fails. So the wait is painful, that buzzing anxiety even louder in my mind. It’s tough to concentrate at school or on my homework. They seem so mundane compared with the breathless narrative of my mind. I sit in my room and jump at the slightest sound, hoping it’s the telephone with the call from Dr. Bianchi’s office. Finally, after almost two weeks, just as my window is closing, the call comes. A donor has been found. My corneas are en route.

  This is a strange feeling, discovering that I might gain a new sense. I’ve gone my whole life without eyesight, assuming that I wanted it, assuming that my life would be so much better if I had it. But now that it might possibly happen, I’m actually kind of afraid. Afraid of all the stuff that could go wrong, the complications, the side effects, the chance of infection. And there are the difficulties adjusting that Dad told me about. The possibility of confusion, stress, headaches, depression.

  Who will I be when I am no longer Will Porter, blind teenager? What will I be like? And the other kids in school—the hundreds of voices I pass by each day in the hall—what will they think? To me, they’re an undifferentiated and anonymous mass of chattering, but to them I must be memorable. I mean, I’m the only blind kid in the school. The one with the sunglasses and the long white cane that swings shin-whackingly wide through the hallway, the guy who occasionally makes wrong turns, who uses the girls’ restroom, and who’s trying to host the morning announcements. Will they think that I am a sellout, giving up the life I was meant to live, the body I was born with, not accepting my place and my condition and my community? Or will they accept me as one of their own, without question?

  Cecily comes over and sits with me in my room the night before my operation. “You know what bothers me?” I find myself telling her as we sit beside each other on my bed. “Blind people have a difficult time because most people have eyesight. But if the whole human race had evolved without eyesight, we would have adapted to it. Like bats. That species figured out how to survive without it.”

  “Bats?” That word seems to catch her off guard.

  “Yeah, like bats. I mean, sure, if the entire human race went blind all at once tomorrow, the world would fall into chaos. But if it happened very gradually, we’d figure it out. We’d find a way.”

  “I guess,” she says reluctantly.

  Then I realize what I’m hearing in her voice: She’s remembering the incident in the hallway, when those guys called her Batgirl because she was hanging out with me. I don’t want her pondering the price she’s paid for being my friend, so I abandon the bat example and move on to a different line of reasoning, speaking quickly to distract her.

  “You probably think blindness is really difficult, but that’s just because you have adapted to your situation. That would be like if Superman looked at you and he was like, ‘Cecily’s life must be so terrible because she can’t fly.’ He’s only saying that because he’s used to flying. He doesn’t know that you can get along just fine with the abilities you have as a normal human.”

  “Are you having second thoughts?” she asks, interrupting my train of thought.

  “I guess. Maybe. I don’t know,” I say slowly. “I mean, sure, I’m fine the way I am. But I think things could be better.”

  “Like because you’d enjoy seeing things?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “And I’m tired of the way people treat me. Like the way people are so overly nice to me because they assume I can’t do stuff for myself.” I pause, thinking back on the Incident. “And sometimes the opposite. Sometimes they’re… cruel.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  So I tell her the whole story. About Alexander, about Candy Land, about my parents’ decision to send me to the school for the blind.

  “And after that,” I conclude, “I eventually realized I just couldn’t rely on other people. Maybe that sounds stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid,” she says. “I’ve had a hard time trusting people, too, because… well, I was bullied a lot when I was a kid.”

  I pause, waiting for her to elaborate. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  It’s quiet again, and eventually she says,
“Do you want me to take your picture?”

  “With bandages over my eyes?”

  “Just in case you want to look back and see what you looked like before.”

  “Not really, thanks. But can I take a picture?” I ask.

  “Of what?”

  “Anything. How about my savory wall?”

  “All right.”

  I hold the camera in front of me, and she flips out the monitor so she can see the picture. She directs my aim and takes my hand in hers, guiding it to the lens. She lets go so I can adjust the focus myself, but I wish she had kept her hand on mine.

  “Rotate slowly, slowly, right there. Now press with your pointer finger.”

  I do and hear the familiar snap of the shutter.

  • • •

  That night, I barely sleep. When I do, I dream about Cecily. I can see her, and it’s very strange because I’m not actually seeing. Still, this one feels different from my usual dreams, which are just hallucinated representations of my everyday experience, loosely chronological narratives of touch, sound, and smell.

  Dad takes the day off so he and Mom can accompany me to the hospital. Which must suck for him, using a vacation day to go hang out at his place of work.

  The three of us sit in a waiting room for a while. Mom fills out my paperwork. I wonder what it will be like when I can fill out my own paperwork. I hear Dad shuffling through the newspaper. I imagine how it will feel to read with my eyes. I run my fingers over the upholstery of my chair and wonder what color it is. Sure, I could ask Mom. Or I could use my iPhone app that identifies colors. But that’s not the point. I don’t actually care what color the chair is. I just want to be able to determine it at a glance. Like a normal person.

  We are called into another room and go through the same pre-op conversations as we did six weeks ago for the stem cell operation. The anesthesiologist asks me a million times if I’m allergic to anything. He knows Dad, and they exchange pleasantries. Dr. Bianchi comes by for a final check-in. He says he is hopeful the operation will succeed, but he reminds me that “we cannot predict outcomes with certainty.” The stem cells have been in my eyes long enough now to have created daughter cells, which will hopefully get my retinas to function. The stem cells are like a foundation, he says, and the corneas are like the house. Assuming my body doesn’t immediately reject the new corneas, it’s possible I might be able to sense light as soon as he takes the bandages off after this operation.