by Beth Vrabel
Jocelyn narrowed her eyes. “This is your next class?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “If I could just get there.”
“And you’re excited about that?”
“Duh! QLT, man!”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“It’s just not something I would’ve thought you’d be so thrilled about.”
I felt my chin jerk backward a bit. Did she think I wasn’t smart enough for Quantum Leap Theory? “Listen, doll. I’m not all good looks and wild sense of humor. I’ve got a serious side, too.”
Her eyebrow cocked when I said “doll.” Faintly I heard Alice’s voice in my mind, urging me not to call girls that. Maybe I should’ve listened. But Jocelyn let it go.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “But this is the up stairway. You should go to the down stairway to go downstairs.” She jerked a thumb at a sign with Up Only written in huge letters hanging to my right.
“This stairway is only for going upstairs?” I said.
Jocelyn nodded. “The down stairs are over there.” She pointed down the hall above us.
“But stairs can go both ways,” I protested.
“Clearly not. I mean, you’re going to be late for your, ahem, awesome elective.” She pushed the schedule back to me. The warning bell rang and I looked around, surprised to see the stairway was mostly clear. “Have fun!” she said.
I rushed the rest of the stairs and skidded down the hall to the right room, not bothering to look remotely cool as I tried to piece together the room numbers. No one else was in the hall anymore, anyway.
Finally I reached it, threw open the door, and rushed in. “Sorry I’m late!”
There, in front of me, was a huge table covered in fabric, an enormous quilted guinea pig in the middle. (Yes, I went closer to make sure it actually was a quilt with a guinea pig. It was.) Around it were four girls and Miss Singer, each holding a needle and thread. Well, except for Miss Singer, who was so startled by me busting in that her needle was poked into her thumb.
“Oh, dear me,” Miss Singer yelped.
QLT was not Quantum Leap Theory.
QLT was Quilting 101.
Gramps was a jerk.
The whole school empties out into the cafeteria at dismissal. Imagine kicking an ant’s nest and seeing the little black dots swarm up and out of the nest, running into, over, and past each other. You can almost imagine their shrieks and panic. That’s pretty much what happened when the dismissal bell rang, only everyone swarmed into the same space instead of out of it. And replace the shrieks and panic with squeals and cheers. I think I saw someone fall but I didn’t see him get back up. I’m pretty sure everyone else just trampled over him. The girl in front of me dropped her shoe, looked over her shoulder at the dozens of people stepping on or over it, and just kept going. I couldn’t blame her. When I twisted around to see what happened to the shoe, I slammed into someone in front me. The guy gave me a backward elbow jab and kept going.
I felt a rumble in my back pocket from my phone. I reached behind, accidentally knocking someone’s bag, so I could read Alice’s text.
How goes day one among the normal folk?
“Watch it!” Whoever I bumped into knocked me back with a hard elbow to the ribs. I ducked into a doorway to text back. Ever since Alice won a writing contest last year, she’s become a bit of a grammar queen. I knew she’d call me out on anything less than complete sentences.
Almost killed the bio teach. Most popular kid in school hates me. Sat alone in the bathroom at lunch because I couldn’t face the runway of shame that was the cafeteria. Might get the crap kicked out of me on the way to the bus. All in all, a success.
I hit send, then added:
And Gramps signed me up for a quilting class.
Alice’s reply was just a smiling poop emoji. She gets me, that girl.
Chapter Six
By the time I got on the bus, all I wanted to do was close my eyes and wake up in college. Or at least in my room at Addison, with my Modest Mouse posters and my twin bed and my mouth-breathing roommate, Hector, who never cared how late I kept the light on.
I didn’t want to get on a bus and try to figure out which stop was mine. I didn’t want to have to figure out which seat I could nab and which was social suicide. I didn’t want the bus to pull up to Gramps’s ’70s bungalow with its first-day-of-school-backpack-wearing yard horse or hear Gramps’s stupid cackling about signing me up for quilting. I didn’t want to sit on the stiff-as-concrete-and-slightly-less-comfortable couch and think about how this day might’ve been the worst in my life. And, just a reminder, I went through the whole removing-your-eye surgery. And cancer. And this was still definitely the worst day of my life. Ever.
Pretty much the only thing more annoying than being the one-eyed new guy in middle school is a one-eyed new guy in middle school throwing himself a pity party. I put my earbuds in and tried to drown out the bus line chaos around me. I knew Jocelyn rode the same bus, so I kept an eye on her rather than try to hear the bus numbers being called. I couldn’t seem to stop watching her, so it wasn’t all that hard. Except Lash Boy Max caught me staring and glared at me. I twirled my fingers at him in a wave, which had the strange effect of making his face turn purple, but he didn’t look at me again.
I turned up the song playing on my phone. One thing I missed already about Addison was the music. Now don’t go all weird on me, thinking that because it was a school for the blind all the students were super good at music.
Note to anyone who meets a visually impaired person: Do not—I repeat—do not say something as well-meaning but stupid as, “I bet you’ve got great hearing, though.” This is majorly annoying. Yet it happens so often that there was a huge jar in my dorm that got a dollar added to it every time a student heard this from a clueless stranger. At the end of the year, we raffled off the jar. We called it our Music Lesson Fund.
Here’s the deal: God doesn’t give visually impaired kids an extra dose of musical inclination as a perk for the crap eyes. It doesn’t work that way. But, that being said, music is one of those evener playing fields. And maybe it was just my school—I mean, Addison—in particular, but there was an awesome music department. Even more so, everyone was into making original music or finding cool bands no one else had heard of and then doing covers of their songs.
Not me, though. I can’t play an instrument or even, if I’m being honest, clap to any beat all that well. But I could totally one-up anyone on musical discovery. I’m the guy to go to for finding the best tracks for studying. The best for working out. The best for watching a gorgeous girl ignore you from the other side of the jam-packed middle school gymnasium. In fact, I met with the folks at Apple about that whole Genius feature they have on iTunes, the one that suggests songs you might like.
Yeah, I totally made that last bit up. But the rest is bona fide truth. I especially love the bands that no one else really knows about yet or the ones so old that everyone’s forgotten them. And here’s another little nugget of honesty: I especially like acoustic sad music. You know, the kind that’s so bleak and depressing and gut wrenching that you feel like, man, my life is in order by comparison. Like, sure it stinks (literally) to be stuck in this gymnasium with a couple hundred hygiene-challenged kids. And, yeah, my gramps was a tremendous pain in the rump who went out of his way to make my first day miserable. And all my friends were in another state, hanging out together while I took on the role of class freak in a new school. And I was crushing hard-core on a girl who already had a boyfriend. A boyfriend who clearly would’ve liked me to choke on my own fake eye, I might add. But, hey! It wasn’t as bad as this girl singing in my ear about wishing she could turn into a bird and fly away but she’s too depressed to get out of her bathtub so she might just drown instead. So there’s that.
Anyway, I guess I got a little too into listening to that song and sort of lost Jocelyn for a second. I yanked off the earbuds and, sure enough, my bus number was being called. By the time the
teacher standing out on the platform could direct me to my bus (“The numbers are right on the side, kid, just look”—pause while teacher notices something is off with my vision, then resumes in much more polite tone—“Oh, I mean … it’s right there.”), the doors were already shut and the driver had shifted from park to drive. I banged on the side of the bus and he opened the doors. “Find a seat,” the massive driver practically belched.
Now with a background in boarding school, I’m not all that up to date on the whole where-is-the-cool-place-to-sit-on-the-bus know-how. But I had a hunch it wasn’t that empty seat directly behind Bubba the Burpy Driver. So I made my way down the aisle. Near the middle, two seats only had one person in them but the guys in each moved their backpacks onto the empty space in a really obvious no-vacancy sort of way.
Jocelyn was in the very back of the bus, sitting near the window, but was so wrapped up in a whispered, forehead-to-forehead conversation with Max that she didn’t appear to see me. But considering how carefully she and Max didn’t turn at all toward me, I sort of suspected they saw me but failed to note it. I stood stupidly there for a second at the last row. On the other side of Jocelyn and Max were two guys, heads bent over their phones and earbuds in their ears. They also ignored me with intensity. I don’t know what I expected—that Max would suddenly hop up and offer me his seat or that he’d scoot over to make room for me or something—or why I just stood there.
“Get in a seat!” the driver croaked.
I made my way back up the aisle, noting the backpacks that once again took residency in what would’ve been an open seat, and finally sank down just behind Bubba the Burpy Driver.
All in all, I’d say Day One was a rousing success.
Jocelyn and I got off the bus at the same stop, about a half block from our houses.
I didn’t get up right away to exit the bus, listening to her argue with Max when he got into the aisle behind her. “Why are you getting off here? Your stop is two blocks away.”
“Thought I’d walk it,” Max said.
“I’ve got a lot of homework,” Jocelyn said. Max sat back down and I silently cheered.
She didn’t say a word to me, just walked by me in a superfast stride. I called her name and she didn’t turn at all. It was like she was trying to block me out entirely. At least, she acted that way until the bus pulled down the street and turned the corner. Then, suddenly, her steps slowed a little. I picked up the pace and soon we were beside each other.
“Did you make it to your super awesome quilting class?” she asked, still not looking at me.
“I thought it was quantum leap theory.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “Like the bad TV series?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I had to cross the street to get to Gramps’s house. It was such a beautiful, bright early fall day. The trees around us swayed with leaves firmly attached and green. The sky was a perfect blue. The air smelled fresh like the clothes Mom would wash and leave to warm in the sun when we were camping. Or maybe that was just Jocelyn, who now stood close enough that our arms—mine bare in a T-shirt, hers still covered down to her fingertips by her long button-down—brushed as we walked in ever slower strides. Her black hair shimmered in the sunlight. It was the lone perfect moment of this day but for some reason, I felt drained. I don’t even know what I wanted. I just knew it wasn’t to walk into Gramps’s dark house.
“See you tomorrow,” I said, looking away from Jocelyn and toward the house. I was sure he’d be waiting by the big window in the living room, laughing like a crow and dying to hear all about my first day as Richie Ryder the Quilter. I took another deep breath before turning from Jocelyn. My feet weighed more than a bucket of bricks as I stepped away from her.
“Wait!” Jocelyn’s hand wrapped around my wrist.
I didn’t say anything.
“Must’ve been a rough day. You’re not even trying to joke around.”
I shrugged.
“I like that. When you’re not ‘on’ so much.”
I half-turned back toward her. “What do you mean?”
This time, Jocelyn was the one to shrug. “I like that you’re just being you. Not trying so hard to be funny.” She let my hand fall.
I turned more so I could see her face. Jocelyn’s nose was crinkled up as she stared into the sunlight. She had to be hot in her long flannel shirt, but she tugged on the ends so they covered even more of her hands. I leaned toward her, I don’t know why, and was surprised that she didn’t jerk away. She sneezed, and it was such a loud, clattering pictures-would’ve-fallen-off-walls noise that both of us cracked up.
“Are you okay?” I said.
Jocelyn grinned. “Sorry about that.”
I again took a half-step closer to her, and again she sneezed. Then hiccupped, making us both laugh. I noticed the General’s yellow fur still clinging to my backpack.
“Allergic to cats?” I asked.
Jocelyn nodded. I tossed the backpack a few feet away, and Jocelyn took a deep breath in through her nose.
“That’s better!” she said.
It was nice, just standing there with Jocelyn. Then I had to go and ruin it. “You talk to me when it’s just the two of us. But anytime Max is around, I’m invisible.”
Jocelyn hiccupped again. “Dude, someone with hair that red is never invisible.”
I whistled between my teeth. “Listen to you, trash talking.”
Jocelyn grinned and sort of skipped backward to her house, still facing me. “Richie?” she called.
“Name’s Ryder,” I reminded her.
Jocelyn rolled her eyes. This time her hiccup was a little bop of her slender shoulders. “Give Max a break, okay?”
Just like I had thought, Gramps was waiting as I walked in.
“How was your day?” Gramps rushed over to his tweed recliner, acting like he had been there all the time instead of spying on me from the window.
“Fine,” I said. I walked through the room to the kitchen and dumped my backpack on the table. Day One for me, but Week Two for everyone else meant no respite from homework. Luckily, we had started to cover algebra at Addison last year. Plus, private school education is much tougher than public, right? So I was sure ten minutes, tops, and I’d be done with the math work. Problem one: A train traveling thirty miles per hour reaches a town twelve times longer than the length of the train. It takes the train seven minutes to get through the town. How long is the train?
Man, my parents wasted their money on that private school, didn’t they?
“So, you liked all your classes?” Gramps prodded.
“Yep.” Maybe I’d do the English homework first. I hadn’t been able to read the homework announcement on the white board but the teacher said she’d also have assignments on her website. I used my tablet (thank you, Mom, for the Wi-Fi!) to log onto the site. Read the first 50 pages of Angela’s Ashes and compile a list of five initial social issues facing the protagonist. I pulled the book from my backpack. Maybe Gramps wouldn’t seem so bad compared to what Frank McCourt endured.
And then I heard Gramps’s cah, cah, cah laugh. “Any surprise classes?”
“Nope, all pretty standard.” I held the book up to my face to block out his stupid smirk.
Gramps sat down across from me at the table. At the same time, the General jumped to the tabletop, settling, of course, in a ball on my backpack. I tried to pull the bag out from under her, and the fur-devil slammed her claws in my hand. Awesome. Now I’d probably get Cat Scratch Fever and die.
“Got some homework?” Gramps prodded.
I nodded.
“Should I get you some needle and thread? Cah, cah, cah.”
“Hilarious, Gramps.” Truth be told—and I wouldn’t be telling Gramps—quilting wasn’t all that bad. Just sitting quietly for an hour, poking fabric with a needle. I even was a bit of a rock star about threading the needle. Everyone else had to squint and close one eye. Me? I could just do it.
“Ah, I wasn’t t
rying to be mean. Just think a boy ought to have a hobby.” Gramps stared at me with pale blue eyes. I almost believed him.
“A hobby?” I sighed. “And you thought of quilting?”
Gramps shrugged. The General purred and curled up between his arms. Now both stared at me. “You’re a strange kid, Ryder. How am I supposed to know what’s going to float your boat?”
After a lull, where Gramps just sat petting the General, sending clouds of yellow fur through the air, he said, “Seems like you and the girl next door are getting along well.”
I shrugged, putting my earbuds back in. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, Gramps.”
“Be careful there,” Gramps said. “That girl, she’s been—”
I was spared Gramps’s dating advice by my phone ringing. Mom. “Hey,” I said.
“Ryder! I had hoped to leave early and be there to hear all about your day, but I’m getting swamped here.” In the background, I heard clacking sounds and figured Mom was typing while she talked with me.
“It’s okay, Mom. No big deal.”
“You’ve got your gramps with you, right?” she asked.
“Yep, we’re good.”
Clack, clack, clack.
“Are you going to be here for dinner?” I asked.
Clack, clack, clack.
“Dinner? Mmhmm.” This is how Mom gets when she’s researching. She doesn’t hear anything I say, just repeats the last word. It’s pretty irritating. But it also has its advantages. I pushed away from the table and headed to my room, away from Gramps.
“I’m just going to walk to school every day, okay? It’s only like two miles and a straight shot. Only cross one road. The bus is full.”
“Full? Mmhmm. That’s fine.”
“And I’m going to cook the General for dinner.”
“Dinner sounds good.”
“All right. Off to kill the cat, then.”