I figure if Mia just has a break from Charlotte for a bit, maybe she’ll see things differently, appreciate Charlotte for the person she is, without just seeing the implants.
But Mia does not see things differently.
‘If she turns up at camp, I’m not talking to her,’ she signs. ‘She can go to a camp with all her hearing people if that’s what she wants.’
There’s a churn in my stomach.
Because suddenly I’m confused. And a little bit scared as well. Is Mia only letting me in the group because I’ve taken out my hearing aids? What if one day I decide to put them back in? I know I’m ‘less’ deaf than she is; probably less deaf than most of the group at camp. Is there room in this new world of mine for a girl who’s only hard of hearing? Or am I going to have to become more deaf than I really am?
The thoughts chug through my head every night as I lie in bed. The ceiling in my new house is brand new and clean-white, unlike the old one with its funny patched cornices and old yellow mould streaks. I lie there and look at it, and I think that I preferred the one that wasn’t perfect. It didn’t matter that there were marks on it. The stains and the patches and the tiny bits of peeling paint just all mashed together. You wouldn’t have noticed one more odd bit. I move my eyes around the perfect rectangular lines and perfectly-centred light fitting above me. You’d notice, on this ceiling, if there was something out of place, or a bit grubby, but you wouldn’t have, on the old one. It didn’t try to be something it wasn’t.
I lie there, under the perfect, white paint, and wonder if there’s really room for me in this new world I’ve chosen. Maybe, when it comes down to it, I’m like Charlotte. A person who doesn’t seem to fit anywhere.
I try talking about it to Mum, even though I know it’s kind of a pointless exercise, really, because it’s not as if she’s understood anything of what I’ve told her in the last few months. But there’s something about the idea of talking to your mother which seems like it should be really good, even if it doesn’t work out in practice, so I give it a go.
She’s sitting out in the garden on a deckchair Geoff surprised her with a week ago. He bought three, actually, one for each of us, and even though I didn’t show I was pleased, I secretly was, especially because the fabric he chose was yellow and white stripes, exactly the same colours I painted the fence at the other house more than a year ago.
“I thought you might miss the old garden,” he said.
He was more right than he knew. I do miss it. But the thing I miss is not so much the garden itself, but the fact that I made it. I had the vision for it, I dug it, I planted it, I coaxed it into growing. Out of a patch of ground that didn’t seem to fit anywhere, I made a place of my own, and I made it beautiful.
I miss feeling like I belong in my garden.
When I go out to talk to Mum, I have my hearing aids in. I try to ignore the look on her face when she sees them. It’s a sort of stifled delight, and it makes me happy and frustrated in equal measure. I pull up a second deckchair next to her, in a speckled, half-sun-half-shade spot and sit.
“It’s so pretty, isn’t it?” she says.
“Uh huh,” I say. And it is pretty, in a ‘new garden in a new suburban house’ kind of way. Lots of grass, shrubs that follow the fence line and a small, new, crepe myrtle tree towards the back of it all.
“Do you think you’ll get into the garden soon?” she asks. “Geoff will help you dig a patch out if you want.”
I twist my face and make an ‘I don’t know’ kind of noise. If I do make a garden, I won’t want help. I’ll want to do it myself, like before. It’s hard to say that though. Not when I’m sitting in a chair bought by Geoff, next to my Mum who does actually love him.
She looks over at me, and I can see she kind of wants to push the issue, but instead she takes a deep breath and looks out to the sky.
“How’s it going with your friends?” she asks. “Have you been chatting much?”
Strangely, my eyes well up immediately and I get a choke in my throat. I have to turn my head to the side so Mum won’t see, and I awkwardly wipe the tear that escapes down my cheek. When I finally feel that I can control myself, I turn back to her.
“It’s okay,” I say. I sign it as well, just because I’m so used to doing that now. “It’s weird, though. Charlotte got a cochlear implant.”
I want to say more. I want to say that Mia’s dumped her, and everyone’s following Mia, and even though technically I understand why they’re doing it, in my heart, I don’t understand, and it’s upsetting because Charlotte is my friend, and I don’t see why you’d just dump a friend because she’s a bit less deaf than you.
A bit less deaf than you. Gabby pops into my head, and I push her out again. That’s different. I don’t want to think about that.
I go back to Charlotte, but Mum’s on the topic before I am.
“A cochlear implant?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s her second one.”
“How does she find it? I mean, does it work for her? Can she hear normally?”
There it is again - the ‘n’ word. Normal.
Whatever that means.
“Um,” I say. “I guess. She says things are clearer.”
Mum sits up and turns around to me. “We could look at that for you, Jaz. I’ve always thought about it, but I’ve never had the energy or money to look at it seriously before.” Her face is glowing. Or maybe that’s just the sunshine on her cheeks. I can’t quite tell. “We need to find out about it, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I’m calm on the outside but on the inside there’s a storm starting in my brain. I get off the chair and stand up. A twig crunches under my shoe: I can feel it. “I don’t know, okay?” I can hear my voice almost yelling, louder than I mean it to. “I just don’t know.”
And then I go into the house, and into my room, and I cry.
Chapter 20
Mum doesn’t bring up cochlear implants again, although I know she’s still thinking about it, and doing some quiet research, because I see brochures and information sheets on her desk when I go into the office one day.
Curious to know if cochlear implants are right for you or your loved one?
Take control of your hearing.
Our commitment to hearing is so strong that our implant recipients feel a special sense of family.
It’s all printed in happy colours like blue and yellow, with full colour pictures of happy people. I can imagine what Mia would say if she saw them.
Curious to know how you can destroy deaf culture?
Use surgery to ‘fix’ your ‘problem’.
Our commitment to getting rid of Deaf people is so strong that we want to destroy their sense of family.
I look at the brochures again. There’s a picture of a girl just my age, with dark hair like Charlotte’s. She’s talking with her Mum, and listening, and laughing. The mum has her arm around her daughter. They look like they like each other; like they understand each other.
It makes me feel sad inside.
I push the brochures away with my finger and find a book to put on top of them.
I don’t bring up Charlotte again, not with Mum, nor with anyone, really. But I think about her, probably every day. Mia still talks about her, with a disgusted look on her face, and we, Freya, Truck, Nick and I, nod along, because it’s so much easier to agree with Mia than to disagree with her.
‘She’ll regret it,’ signs Mia, in a chat, and I nod and sign ‘yes’ like everyone else.
But I don’t know if she’ll regret it. Maybe she will. Maybe she won’t. How could I know what someone else will regret or not? Maybe it’ll be the worst thing she’s ever done. Maybe it’ll be the best.
All I know is that she’s lost Mia’s friendship by doing it. And that makes me sad.
‘Will she come to touch footy?’ I ask. The organising for the game in the holidays, down near Grandma’s place, is picking up steam. Lots more people are saying they�
�ll come. Enough for two full teams, I think.
Mia scowls. “She’d better not. And if she does, I’ll tell her what I think about it.”
I turn away, pretending to scratch my leg. I hope Charlotte doesn’t come. I have no doubt that if she did turn up, all dressed for footy, hair in a french braid, looking happy and earnest like she always does, Mia would tell her what she thought. I have no doubt that Mia would tell her a lot about what she thought. I have no doubt Mia would make a very, very, big fuss. And big fusses never lead to happy outcomes.
Charlotte should try to make peace with Mia, I think. She should talk to her, and just explain her reasons. They might not agree, but at least they can try to understand each other. And they can still be friends, even though they might have different opinions, right?
School ends for the term, and Mum delivers me down to Grandma’s again. It was pretty easy to get from going down for one day to play touch footy, to staying for the whole two weeks. Mum and Geoff are easy to persuade, when it comes to them having alone time together, it seems.
“Is Grandma okay with it?” Mum asks me. I frown at her. ‘Write it down,’ I sign, so she grabs her pen and scrawls out the question in sharp, spiky letters.
‘Yes,’ I sign back to her. ‘I asked her already.’
Mum looks at Geoff and tells him what I’ve signed, and they make that face between them, like, well, it seems to be okay, so why not?
She grabs the pen again. Are you going to hang out with Gabby?
I twist my face and shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe not,” I say.
Mum’s face is so easy to read, it’s ridiculous. I just know she wants to say, “Don’t forget about your friends, Jaz,” and, “Why are you so into these new friends, when you’ve known Gabby for so much longer?” But I look away so I don’t have to see it.
I’m feeling pinches of guilt about Gabby. Just a few, every couple of days. It started about the same time as the Mia/Charlotte fight. Gabby doesn’t message me, which I feel relieved about, but then, every time something interesting happens, I think, ‘oh, I should tell her…’ and I have to stop myself from getting my phone out.
Truth: I miss her.
But it’s a weird kind of missing.
There’s a hole where Gabby should be. It doesn’t fit Mia, or Freya, or Truck, or Charlotte in it. And when I think about it some more, I realise it’s an old hole, in a funny shape that’s a little bit stretched out and fraying.
It’s like when you’ve been wearing one pair of shoes for ages, and then you get a new pair. You miss the way the old ones felt, but you can’t go back to them, not now that your feet have felt how things have improved.
Truth: I may miss Gabby, but I’ve moved on from her. And I don’t think I can ever go back.
Mum seems anxious before she takes me down the coast. Please wear your hearing aids, she asks me, by note, while I’m throwing clothes in my bag. I don’t tell her that she didn’t have to ask. I was always planning to wear them. She’s old, and it would be hard for her, writes Mum, over explaining. Of course I know that. Of course I want to make it as easy as possible for Grandma and me to talk to each other. But if I tell Mum, she’ll ask why I don’t want to make it easy for her at home, and that’s not something I can really explain just yet.
Grandma is wearing red and pink and orange with a bright green necklace, and she’s standing on the deck, outside her front door, when we pull up. I’m out of the car and up the steps before Mum’s even turned the engine off.
“Jazmine.” Grandma holds out her arms, and I fall into them and feel my insides relax.
“I’m so glad to see you,” I say.
“And me you.” She kisses the top of my head. She smells like cherry blossoms.
I want to wave Mum goodbye, but I have to wait for her to come in for a cup of tea and chat to Grandma for half an hour before she finally makes her farewells.
“Bye, sweetheart,” she says, hugging me around the shoulders. “Be good, okay?”
Her last phrase irritates me but I try to hide it. “Okay, see you, Mum.”
She looks at me again, like she wants to say something else, but can’t decide if it would be a good idea or not, and I kind of stare back at her as though everything in her face is perfectly normal and neutral and relaxed. After an awkward second she smiles as though she agrees, as though everything is fine between us, and I smile back.
“Drive safe,” I say to her, and walk her out the door and down the steps. “Say hi to Geoff for me.”
And I do mean that last part. Before I left, Geoff slipped fifty dollars into my hand with a smile and a scribbled note in permanent pen. Have a lot of fun. See you soon. I can still feel the note in the back pocket of my jeans and it makes me grin and wave to Mum as she turns out of the drive.
Back inside, Grandma is boiling another kettle for more tea. “I’ve got chocolates too,” she says with a wink. “Let’s have a few.” So we sit out on the deck, sipping tea and eating Lindt balls in the sun. She has the brown ones and I have white ones. I slip my shoes off and let my toes get warm, and she does the same.
“So, what plans have you got? And what should we do together?” she asks.
I look out over the view down to the town and the ocean. “Nothing,” I say. “We should just do nothing at all.”
And I mean it. I just want to be here, with her, hanging out, digging in the garden, and drinking tea. Just being.
“Your mum said you had a touch football game. Was it Thursday?”
I nod. “That’s the only thing though. I don’t have anything else.”
I can feel the question in the air before she asks it.
“Gabby?”
I shake my head, but I don’t look at her directly. “Not this time.”
In the corner of my eye I see Grandma look out to the view. “Okay,” she says. “That’s fine.”
So that’s what we do. Nothing much at all. For two full days, we get up, weed and water in the garden, and then cook breakfast which we eat out on the deck. We go back to the garden, mulching and trimming, and on the second day Grandma shows me how to use the ride-on mower, which is more fun than I expect it to be. We eat lunch. We have a rest, and a read, and then we drink tea, and go out to the garden again before we cook dinner, eat it, and sit out on the deck again.
“I haven’t done this for ages. Not since we moved,” I tell Grandma when I’m up to my ears in dirt, shovelling compost.
“Are you going to start a garden at the new place?” she asks, from where she’s kneeling over the garden bed.
“I haven’t yet,” I say. “But I think I might.” I think for a moment. “Maybe.”
“What would the maybe be about?” she asks. She swipes some hair away from her face and leaves a streak of mud on her cheek, and I laugh.
“Nice, Grandma,” I say.
“You’re just as bad.” She points to her face as if to show me where mine is filthy too and grins. “But seriously. Why wouldn’t you start a garden? There’d be plenty of room, wouldn’t there?”
I shrug. “There is. It’s a big back yard. It’s just…” I look around me, at Grandma’s shovel, her roses, her lawn, and her trees. “I’m just not sure if it’s my place yet.”
She stops working for a moment and sits up on her heels. “The house doesn’t feel like it’s yours?”
“It’s not the house,” I start. It’s so hard to get straight, even in my own head. “It’s like, the whole thing. My whole life. Where I belong. Who I am. I don’t know what’s mine, and what’s not. And until I get it figured out, I don’t think I can grow a garden.”
Grandma thinks for a moment before she goes back to digging. “The thing about gardens is, you can plant one wherever you are, and however you feel. And then, when it grows up around you, you’re part of it, no matter what.”
I breathe in and out again, but I don’t say anything. I don’t know if she’s right. Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ll think about it for sure.
&nbs
p; That evening, I check my phone. There’s a text from Mum.
Gabby called to talk to you. I told her you were there. Could you call her please?
But I don’t call her.
Because I don’t know what to say.
Chapter 21
The next morning, Gabby turns up. Early.
She comes right into my room, and wakes me up, by bouncing on my bed. It takes me a few seconds to figure out where I am, and who she is, and why my head is getting jolted around on my pillow. My eyes blink hard to get themselves into focus, and I sit up.
Gabby stops bouncing and sits opposite me. She’s holding a bag on her lap, and saying something but I can’t hear her properly.
“What?” I say.
She gestures to her ears and mouths, ‘Put your hearing aids in.’
I’m still half-woozy with sleep, so I do what I’m told, kind of like I’m in a dream. Then I screw up my face and shake my head a few times, to try to clear my brain.
“I came to see you,” she says. “You wouldn’t text me back. I had to find out from your mum where you were.”
“It’s early,” I say. “What time is it?”
She bounces again. “Who cares?”
“Why did you come this early?” I can’t get the time thing out of my head.
She sighs, like she’s frustrated. “It was the only time Mum would drop me off. I figured it would be okay. And anyway, I could always wake you up.”
“You did,” I say. I’m still looking at her with confusion in my face.
“And you have terrible breath, by the way,” says Gabby. She grins. “You’re probably gonna want to brush your teeth.”
I put my hand over my mouth so I can sniff my breath. She’s right. It’s totally gross morning breath. I feel like I can’t move my hand away or I’m going to blast her with disgusting smelling air.
There’s a knock on the door and Grandma sticks her head around.
“I was going to let you sleep, Jaz, but Gabby turned up.” She smiles brightly, like she’s pleased to see us together. “Do you want breakfast? I’ve got some raisin toast, and I can do eggs if you like.”
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