Blind

by Rachel Dewoskin

  There was a long pause, and I pushed my own “on” button and started blabbering. “It’s no big deal, I mean, it’s just Logan and I were trying to figure stuff out, about what’s going on in Sauberg, and we were wondering—”

  “Hey, man!” Zach shouted, because someone had walked by and slapped the back of his head—Carl Muscan, I realized, after hearing him whoop and laugh. I paused, waiting for them to work it out in whatever bizarre way guys do, but Zach didn’t chase him down the hall or tackle him or put him in a headlock or anything, because he’s not that kind of person. Mainly I was just relieved that the weirdness I had sensed—correctly—had nothing to do with me. That’s usually true, I guess; everyone’s thinking about their own problems, not yours. Unless you’re Claire and you drown yourself in Lake Brainch, in which case your drama infects the whole town and everyone has to think about it all the time.

  “Okay, cool,” Zach said. “So, you just want to meet at Bridge?”

  “Yeah,” Logan said. “And then maybe we can talk. We were hoping you’d help us, you know, get some people together or help lead or whatever.”

  She turned and started walking away, probably because the word choice embarrassed her, especially, if I had to guess, the part about “help lead,” which had sounded good when we thought of it but now was a little much. Logan often walks off in the middle of a conversation; it’s a theatrical habit for her, and it works, in the sense that it makes you feel like you want more of her. She’s always leaving before you’re done, because she hates awkward pauses and is worried that if she stays too long people will think she’s pathetic.

  Zach called out after her, “So, how about Wednesday, Logan? For Bridge?”

  I heard Logan call out, “Perfect,” from ten feet away. And then she didn’t come back; just left Zach and me to be like, “Uh, okay . . . so, see you Wednesday,” which was not generous of her, especially since Spark and I had to run after her and catch up.

  “That was good, right?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That, just now, with Zach.”

  “Yeah, of course,” she said. “He was totally Zach about it.”

  I asked if she would come to the bathroom and help me sneak a text to Leah asking her to call my piano teacher, Mr. Bender, and pretend to be our mom saying I was sick and couldn’t make my lesson. I can’t go to my lessons anymore because all of a sudden the sound of piano music makes me feel like I can’t breathe, almost like something is pressing the notes into my throat. I used to love piano—I was really good before. And I could read music easily, learn new songs without much effort. Even when I first lost my sight, piano was okay; it was the first thing that made any sense to me after my accident. I could still see the keys in my mind, their straight, dark edges, the little blank spaces between them, the off-white shine of their surfaces. It was a relief, kind of, the opposite of braille when I first started that—no raised cells, nothing to ponder or suffer over; just the smooth, easy feeling of something under my fingers that has always relied on my fingers to make meaning. But now I feel stupid playing; I haven’t been able to learn anything difficult, since I can’t see the music. And if I move at all, I look like I’m trying to imitate Stevie Wonder and am totally self-conscious. I don’t want to think about where to put my fingers or listen for my own notes. My ears are tired.

  So I’m adding piano to the growing list of things I can’t do: see, sleep, get anywhere near water or fire, show my eyes to anyone, figure out the truth about things that really matter, listen to or play music. My mom will be devastated when she finds out. Maybe I’m about to start breaking my winning streak in school, skipping actual classes, too. I never skipped class at Briarly, because what else did I have to do there, other than go to class or let Sebastian guide me around and try to make me a better person than I’ll ever have a chance of being?

  Sebastian’s name is like piano music. It sends me spinning back sickeningly fast to the feeling of last spring and the wet cut grass and laundry smells of Briarly. To his voice, always in my ear. When he had to write a paper on King Lear, Sebastian insisted on reading me practically the entire play out loud. Maybe he thought that since I’m one of a giant litter of children, I might have to compete for my parents’ kingdom at some point and that listening to him mangle iambic pentameter would put me at an advantage. He said his English teacher had told them in class that the point of Lear is that “nothing can come of nothing.” I didn’t say anything, and Seb said someday I would appreciate the wisdom of that, even if I couldn’t see it now.

  I said, “I can’t see anything.”

  And he said, “That’s what I mean, Emma. Something only comes of something.”

  I walked away, aware that he meant something about my self-pity, and annoyed enough not to care exactly what it was. Seb disapproved of my negative attitude, because he belongs to happiness like it’s a conversion religion. He’s a year older than me, in eleventh grade now. I wonder how it’s going for him. He told me last summer, before we never spoke again, that he was going to take the driver’s ed test, no matter what his parents said. I wonder if he did.

  Seb is a total now, like me. He has no vision left, not even the sliver he had as a kid. So maybe he faked his way through the driver’s ed test. If anyone could do that, it would be Seb.

  I wonder what he’s doing now. Probably driving by clicking his tongue and listening to the sound bounce off stop signs. He’s probably running a marathon, getting in a year early to Harvard, starting his own company, and curing cancer. I wonder if he has a new basket case to take care of now that I’m gone. I wonder if he misses me. And if I miss him. I can’t think about it. I have too many other problems to wade through, without remembering Seb or what happened last year.

  Once, only once, I was crying at Briarly—I never cried in front of people before my accident, and I hardly wanted to become a sobbing public wreck after it. But I couldn’t find my brailler or my phone and I was groping wildly around my cubby (we had cubbies instead of lockers there, one of the few patronizing concessions they made to our being blind) and I just started crying, and Seb’s hand was instantly on my shoulder and he sat me down in a chair I hadn’t known was there and he found my brailler and my phone, both in the inside pocket of a newish backpack I had hung in the wrong cubby and he had found somehow.

  All he said was, “Sit for a sec, Emma,” and that was it. He handed me the things as soon as he found them, and then he walked away calmly as if nothing had happened, leaving me sitting there. Later that day, he introduced me to a bunch of kids as “my awesome friend, Em,” and I rocked wildly and didn’t speak and didn’t listen to—let alone try to learn—any of their names. They were all going skiing that weekend with some teachers from Briarly on a school trip, and Seb begged me to come.

  “Are you nuts?” I asked. “I can’t speak for you, but I can’t see anything, including trees or other people in my way, if I’m plummeting down the side of an icy cliff.”

  “I know,” he said, laughing his deep tunnel of a laugh. “I’m familiar with that scenario. But they do have skiing for blind kids like us.”

  I took the “like us” part and put it away in the place in my mind reserved for festering and denial.

  “Really? How do you avoid breaking your neck? Because I’m not available for any more maiming.”

  “You have a guide,” Sebastian said. “How about my mom calls your mom and they talk it over, and then see if you want to come? Me and Dee do it every year—they’re open through spring. A bunch of the teachers come, and they have ski instructors for beginners.”

  “It’s really empowering,” Dee said.

  I didn’t like the word empowering. And I didn’t like Dee. I had the sense that she didn’t want me to go skiing, but I wasn’t sure why and I didn’t care. Maybe because she was in love with Sebastian and preferred not to share him. Or maybe because I was unbearable to be aro
und. Both things were true. Lately, I can’t stop thinking about Seb. But I also can’t face him. Or Dee, for that matter. He called me last week and then again this week, both on days when I’d skipped piano, been miserable and scared all day, and couldn’t do anything, least of all talk to him. When I heard my phone say his name, my pulse accelerated so much it was like I’d been running every second since I saw him last. Maybe picking up and hearing his voice might have been a break, breath, rest from the racing. I remembered the way his hands felt, what his laugh sounded like. But I wasn’t brave enough to talk to him; I couldn’t bring myself to, maybe because I don’t deserve it. Or maybe I’m just too ashamed. I can’t be that fragile Seb-Emma and also the new tough person I’m trying to be. So I can’t talk to Seb until I am actually her, until I have something to tell him that isn’t utterly pathetic.

  Because Seb, more than anyone else, makes me remember something I’ve been pushing down into my bones, which is where I put things I can’t think about now, things I don’t have facts for, can’t understand or face, can’t say. Something about myself, some kind of truth. He didn’t leave a message.

  • • •

  Yesterday at school, I decided to test myself. Maybe I’m bored of being so needy. Or maybe I just thought I had a better chance of being awesome at our coffee date with Zach Haze if I had done something, anything brave before it. Like going to the lunchroom without Logan.

  Sometimes this happens—an idea or challenge or whatever you want to call it will come to me, and then I’ll feel like I have to do it. Once, when I was ten, we had just started building the tree house in our backyard, but not yet put up walls, and I climbed up on the platform and sat there with my legs dangling over the edge. I looked down at the ground. It was only five feet up or so, but I had this terrible feeling that I had to jump, just because the idea of jumping had come into my head while I sat there. I told myself I couldn’t get down unless I jumped, that I wasn’t allowed to use the rope ladder I had climbed to get up in the first place. So I sat there for almost an hour, trying to get my brave on to do it. Finally, Sarah came outside and yelled at me, “What are you doing up there, Emma? Mom wants you to come inside,” and I squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could, and made sure I was remembering to bend my knees, and I jumped. It wasn’t even that bad once I’d done it. My feet and knees hurt a little, but I was fine.

  “Are you insane?” Sarah shouted. “Why didn’t you climb down the ladder? You didn’t have to kill yourself to get inside this instant—thirty seconds would have been fine!”

  I walked over to her. “I didn’t do it so I could hurry. I just wanted to see if I could.” She sighed as if I were stupid, but later, when I told Leah, she was like, “I totally do that sometimes. But you should let yourself off the hook if the thing is really scary or dangerous. Come and tell me if you think of something and start to convince yourself you have to do it. I’ll help you do it if it’s a good idea, and I’ll talk you out of it if it’s a bad one.”

  But Leah was somewhere in class, and all I had to do was get to the first floor alone; it didn’t seem like a bad enough idea to warrant looking for Leah or even talking myself out of it. So as soon as Ms. Mabel left, I pretended I was going to wait for Logan like I usually did, but then I quickly steered Spark and my white cane out the door and down the hall and into the first door, which led to a stairwell I didn’t usually use. There was such a rush of people that I lost my focus and my way. My heart was banging around and coming loose inside me and I thought I might cry. I didn’t want to ask anyone where I was, so I listened and held the banister and got out at the first platform, pushing through what I assumed were the second-floor doors. I walked a bit, holding the wall, until I heard flushing, and made my way to the door of a bathroom, which I determined from some high voices was the girls’ room. I slipped in, locked myself and Spark into the big, handicapped stall, found my cell phone, called Logan. I listened to it ring, praying she would pick up, trying to block out the deafening smell of the air freshener, cheap perfume, contraband cigarettes, and Lysol, the rattle and bang of people coming in and out. Lo picked up.

  “Em! I’m in the cafeteria. I can’t be on the phone. Where were you? I went to Ms. Spencer’s, but Amanda said you’d already—”

  “I’m in the bathroom,” I choked out.

  “Which bathroom?”

  “I don’t know. Second floor?”

  Three minutes later, she was there. Maybe she ran. Maybe she heard in my voice that I was sad or scared. I don’t know, because I didn’t say anything about it and neither did she. She just knocked on the stall door and I opened it and then she took my hand and led me quietly down to the cafeteria, where I bought a sandwich in the cold lunch line while she waited. Then we sat at a table together somewhere, and I didn’t ask who was near us or next to us or even if there was anybody we knew or anything happening. Usually Logan tells me who’s saying and doing and wearing what, but she stayed quiet, too. We were surrounded by a lunchtime so loud in my ears that the room might as well have been filled with indiscriminate screaming. I unwrapped my sandwich mechanically, took several dry bites, felt around for a small plastic package of mustard, tore it open, and squeezed it onto a piece of bread I had worked to place flat up in my hand. When I bit into the sandwich, it was covered with mayonnaise, which I hate but thankfully Spark loves. Logan held my hand after, as we walked down the hall together, and I knew she was trying to make me feel better, because she spent an eternity telling me what everyone was wearing, and I half listened, half detached and floated up above us.

  What everyone is wearing is something I barely cared about before the accident and obviously can’t bother with now. Logan claims not to care, either, because she thinks caring about that is fun and doesn’t want me to feel left out, but she can’t keep herself from telling me that Amanda Boughman is still super gorgeous even though her dad left and her mom has no money, so where does she get all her clothes? And Monica Dancat, who Logan says must buy all her clothes at the army supply store, because she looks like she’s “going to war in a lesbian costume.” I don’t know what “lesbian costume” means—maybe Monica wears camouflage? I never ask any follow-up questions. Because I hate that kind of conversation. Whenever I say someone is pretty or cute at Lake Main, people laugh, even Logan, like what can I mean by cute? But there are ways to be pretty that don’t involve the things Logan looks for.

  She described Blythe Keene’s leather jacket for ten minutes. Maybe she’s obsessed with Blythe, just like everyone else. Blythe moved to Sauberg in sixth grade, years after the rest of us, so she’s been the beat of Lake Main’s gossipy heart ever since she got here and moved in next door to Claire’s giant castle of a house, which Claire’s parents built themselves, making everyone else’s parents angry.

  By middle school everyone knew Blythe and Claire had danced naked on the roof of the school, on a dare. The roof is slanted and dangerous, and it was still light out, and apparently they took pictures, although I never saw them and neither did anyone else I know. They also went swimming at night, even when it wasn’t summer, in other people’s pools and in Lake Brainch, and they were the first ones to drink. Blythe once got sent home from school for wearing a skirt so short you could see her underwear. She was always older and more rebellious than anyone else, and Claire had a better shot at being like her than anyone else. Maybe because her family was different; they were a catalog family, 2-D, shiny and shellacked. Claire’s hair was a mix of colors that didn’t occur in nature—so streaky she looked like some artsy god had poured paint on her head and shoulders. Blythe’s hair was straight white blonde, until Claire died, when, according to Logan, she dyed it a horrible, oily black. It still smells blonde to me, like a clear, square mint.

  Logan says it’s their parents’ fault that Blythe is always in trouble and Claire’s gone. Because they were fanatically strict, and apparently hated each other. I’m not sure that’s right, but I
get what she means: if you forbid your kids to live, they’ll live anyway, probably harder than they would have. And lie to you. If you were over at Blythe’s house and you said “God,” even just like “Oh my god” or something, her mom sent you home for taking the lord’s name in vain. They weren’t allowed to say or do anything, which might be why they did so much of everything. Although Claire wasn’t wild with boys the way Blythe is; we all know Blythe has slept with lots of guys, and that she doesn’t care about the rumors or the boys themselves.

  Even my older sisters know about Blythe having sex with seniors, and then afterward not caring whether they call her. And not picking up when they do call, or calling them, for that matter. I once heard Sarah say Blythe is “the guy about it,” I guess meaning she cares more about whom she likes than who likes her. It kind of makes her the movie star of my mind. I don’t even get to try to be like Blythe, because of what happened. But maybe I would have if I could have. Been wild, I mean. And proud. I wish I were wild and proud.