Being Jazmine (Invisible Series Book 3)

by Cecily Anne Paterson

  I stand up and face her. I’m ready to sign back at her, to tell her what’s really hard, what’s really silly, and just for a clue, it’s not me, and it’s not my fault things are like this, and if you actually understood what I’m talking about, you might not be trying to crush me and control me, like Mia says, but Geoff stands up too. He puts his arm around Mum, and leads her away from the table for a moment. I can see him talking to her, and her crying a little and putting her head on his shoulder. For a second, that hurts my heart, because I was always the one Mum cried to, before. I was the one she was close to, and she was the one I was close to. Just the two of us, after Dad died. And now it’s different.

  In the corner of my eye I see Mum wiping her face, and Geoff going off towards the study. Mum swallows a few times and comes back to the table. She sits, and I slowly sit as well. I take a bite of my dinner, and so does she: beef stroganoff with rice, cooked by Geoff. It’s nice. Grandma might even be impressed, if she tasted this. Mum throws me a tight half-smile and I give her back the same kind of face, and then Geoff comes back into the room.

  He’s holding a clipboard, with a half-centimetre wad of paper clipped into it, and he has three pens in his hand. He says something to Mum, which I can’t hear, and I see her reply, and then Geoff starts writing on the paper. When he’s done, he pushes the clipboard towards me.

  We can use this to communicate. His handwriting is a bit messier than I expected, which makes me smile. He keeps going. If you don’t want to wear your h.aids, that’s your choice. But I can’t sign, so maybe writing?

  I shrug at him. ‘Okay,’ I sign.

  He writes again. I also can’t understand your signs, so could you write it down?

  Okay, I write. And I’m disappointed with how my handwriting looks next to his. It’s rounder, and neater, but definitely younger. I wanted it to be more mature.

  Mum grabs a pen and starts in on the clipboard. Have you been wearing your H. Aids at school?

  I shoot her a look, as if it’s any of her business, but I write, Yes.

  She looks relieved. Good.

  I’ve been talking to Miss Fraser though, I write. She’s getting me some support at school. When I’ve got an Auslan interpreter, or maybe some captioning or something, I’m going to not wear them.

  Mum’s face goes down again. I can see her teeth clenching around her jaw. She’s breathing a bit faster too. Why are you doing this? she writes, and again, I see Geoff move towards her, as if to stop something.

  I told you why, I write, and inside I feel strong. Almost victorious. Like I’ve broken out of something that was holding me back. A butterfly out of its chrysalis, if you want to make up clichés about it.

  Geoff picks up the pen. You didn’t tell me, he writes. I’d actually like to hear it. He smiles, and beside him, Mum shakes her head, like she can’t even say anything else to me. I see Geoff put his hand across to her, as if he’s telling her to leave it to him. Can you explain it?

  I take the clipboard and put it directly in front of me, pick up a pen, and consider for a moment what I’m going to say. Then, I start to write.

  At the camp, it felt like I came home.

  All those people signing. It was like they spoke my language. And no one had to interpret for me.

  No one had to wait for me.

  No one said I should hear more, or listen carefully.

  No one got frustrated by me.

  No one treated me differently from everyone else.

  I shake my hand out a little bit, trying to get rid of the cramps. Behind my eyelids, I feel the beginning of tears, which I fiercely blink away.

  The difference was, at camp, I was part of it all. I fitted in.

  I guess, it was like, if I’d lived with fuzzy vision my whole life, and then put on a pair of glasses. I suddenly felt like I could see. Really, really, clearly.

  I’m deaf. I never realised it before. Now I do.

  I stop writing, turn the clipboard around and shoot it over the table towards Mum and Geoff. The look on Mum’s face is not great. She looks almost like she’s lost hope. It’s a look of depression. Geoff’s face is different. His look is more of trying to understand, but not really getting it. He says something to Mum, probably a question, and she just shrugs back at him. It’s a ‘dunno’ shrug.

  Geoff picks up the pen, and then puts it down again. He furrows his brow and then picks it up once more.

  How are we going to communicate? he writes. I can read the words, even though they’re upside down, across the table from me. Talking’s easiest, isn’t it? It’s quicker than this. He puts in a smiley face and grins at me as well. What do you want?

  I shrug. To be honest, I hardly know. I guess I just want to feel normal, like I did at camp. Like I do when I’m chatting online with my deaf friends now. At camp we were all the same. We were all deaf. None of us had to be hearing. None of us had to look like we could hear, when we couldn’t. None of us had to try. It’s the trying that’s tiring. It’s the trying that makes me feel trapped.

  What do I want? I want to feel happy. I don’t want to feel like everyone thinks there’s something wrong with me, like there’s something I have to fix.

  What do I want? Just to be me.

  But it’s hard to write that down, especially now the tears feel like they’re going to come harder than ever.

  Can I go? I write on the paper. I want to text my friends.

  Mum throws up her hands like I’m impossible, but Geoff nods at me. Sure. We can talk about this later, okay?

  I push back my chair to leave the table without answering, but he taps my arm, and underlines the words about this later. He raises his eyebrows at me and mouths the words. Talk about this later, okay?

  I give a hidden sigh, and make a thumbs-up sign at him. Okay.

  In my bedroom, with the door firmly shut, I pick up my phone. It’s like a magic portal to my new life. I’ve got messages stacked up, waiting to be answered: texts from Freya and Charlotte, mostly just saying hi, how ya going? One of Charlotte’s texts is longer: her operation is coming up, and she’s feeling nervous about it. She hates hospitals, apparently, especially the smells. She also hates the idea of them shaving a bit of her hair off. I send her back a ‘be brave’ message and she texts back immediately. Remember not to tell Mia, okay? There’s a Face Time notification from Truck, which makes me sad to have missed because he’s so funny on Face Time. He called me the day after camp for the first time, and we propped up our phones and signed for ages, about nothing in particular.

  There’s also a Facebook message from Mia. When I see it, I pounce on it.

  Hey Jaz. All cool? School sux. Gotta laugh though.

  I scrolled a little bit further and found a reason for her laughter: a puppy meme showing a dog with a pencil in its mouth, and glasses on its nose. “I did the math: we can’t afford the cat.” It’s cute, and I laugh, and then press reply.

  Hey Mia. Cute dog. That’s funny.

  Mia’s obviously online because the little bouncing button shows her typing back to me. A second or two later, her message pops up.

  Recovering from camp?

  I take a second or two to think, and then reply.

  Loved camp. So great. When I got home I took out my hearing aids. My mum is going nuts.

  She sends me an ‘oooh’ face immediately and a second later types a reply.

  Ohmigosh. So cool. Yay Jaz. (Your mum is hearing, right?)

  When I read it, I get a thrill.

  They’re trying to get me to write notes to them. Mum only knows a bit of signing and Geoff knows nothing.

  A mad emoji face pops up on my screen, and soon after a message. Sux. Stay strong. Don’t let them destroy you.

  It’s a strong word, destroy, and I fiddle with my bracelet as I turn the word over in my mind for a moment. Then I dismiss it as nothing, and reply.

  I’m deaf, sistah. Nobody messes with that.

  About a million thumbs up, love heart and muscle emoji
s from Mia flood into my inbox. I feel the phone vibrate every time a new one pops up and I smile as I see each one.

  Then there’s another vibration. I look down, expecting to see more from Mia, but it’s not from her. It’s from someone totally different.

  Someone I don’t feel like talking to just now.

  It’s from Gabby.

  Chapter 15

  It’s not that I don’t like Gabby. I mean, she’s my best friend. It’s just… I hardly know. Something in me doesn’t want to talk to her. I’ve ignored her texts since I got home from camp.

  It’s like the garden.

  My plants have been sitting in a corner of the lawn for a few weeks now, since the move. But I haven’t done anything about them. It’s not that I don’t like them. It’s not even that I don’t want to set up a new garden. It’s just that something’s changed.

  I don’t feel like Jazmine the gardener anymore.

  I don’t feel like Jazmine who wants to giggle with Gabby any more.

  And I don’t know why.

  In three weeks it’s the holidays and once again, I’m going to Grandma’s house. I asked if I could go and Mum and Geoff said a very fast yes, probably out of desperation to get me out of here. I can imagine them talking to each other:

  “We need a break from her.”

  “She’s getting worse.”

  “We just need time to ourselves.”

  I scratch my nose and realise, when a leather strap hits against my cheek, that I’m still wearing Mum’s bracelet. I haven’t taken it off since I got it out of the packing box. I look at it for a moment. It has so many memories of just Mum and me, and our years when it was just the two of us. Instead of feeling sad or wistful, I just feel annoyed.

  Why didn’t she take me to deaf camps?

  Why didn’t she keep doing Auslan courses with me?

  Why didn’t she show me there were people like me out there?

  What was she thinking?

  I take off the bracelet and fling it towards my closet. It lands on a pile of jumpers and falls off, towards the wall. I narrow my eyes at it, and check my phone for messages but there’s nothing new.

  Except a notification from Gabby. Again.

  I open it.

  JAZMINE!!! WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO CALL ME??? ARE YOU COMING FOR THE HOLIDAYS? TEXT ME. WHAT IS GOING ON?????

  I close it.

  There are four more messages from her, just from this morning, and at least 13 others that I haven’t opened in the last week.

  I have a brief twinge of feeling bad - guilty, I guess, so I open her message again and press reply.

  Hey, Gab.

  Yes, coming for the holidays.

  I pause for a moment on the delete button, but then I don’t delete it.

  We should catch up.

  Something in my finger presses ‘send’ super quickly before I can even argue with myself about whether to send it or not, and I sit, feeling a little bit dumb, waiting for the reply I know is coming in five seconds.

  Okay, so three seconds.

  My phone vibrates in my hand and the message pops up.

  Ohmigosh, yay. So much yay. The whole two weeks? I have SO MUCH STUFF we can do. I’ll start making plans, ‘kay?

  There’s a smile on my face, and then a distorted, confused feeling in my brain. I take the smile down and close the message without even replying to it. Later, I tell myself. There’s plenty of time.

  And there is.

  Honestly? I don’t think three weeks have ever gone more slowly. School is still not right for me. Miss Fraser hasn’t been able to organise the captioning for in class and Mia keeps messaging me to go back and insist.

  You have to stand up for your rights, she texts. Otherwise, how can you get the same access as the other kids? If they don’t get you what you need, they’re deliberately pushing you down. You need to go in there and fight.

  I’m still wearing my hearing aids at school because it would be impossible otherwise, but I’m tired, and no one really seems to understand what my new mission for help in the classroom is all about anyway.

  “But you can hear,” says Olivia.

  “Can’t you?” adds in Caitlin. “We always thought you could.”

  They look at me like they’re trying to get it, but nothing I can say seems to make it clear for them.

  “You’d have to be deaf to understand,” I end up saying, but it’s unsatisfying, because they don’t understand, and then I realise that’s the reason I don’t really want to see Gabby, either. Because she won’t understand. She can’t possibly. She’s hearing, from a hearing family, living in a hearing world. And I’m her token deaf friend, cute with my little hearing aids stuck in my ears. The sympathy friend. The one you take pity on.

  I don’t want to be that friend.

  But it looks like I’m not going to be able to get out of it.

  Because Gabby has rung Grandma.

  She tells me in the car trip down the coast to her place. I’ve put in my hearing aids, much to Mum’s relief - and annoyance.

  PLEASE, wear them with Grandma, she wrote on the notepad yesterday, and I shrugged my shoulders like, maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. Mum’s nose twitched and she turned her face away from me. I thought about it overnight, but there was never really any question about whether or not I’d wear them. I put them in just before Grandma came, and when Mum kissed me goodbye before I got in the car, I saw her eyes move to my ears, checking, and I could see the half smile on her face, but also the anger in her eyes.

  “Have a good time,” she said, and she emphasised the ‘good’, before turning away. Geoff waved at me. “See ya, Jaz.”

  I wound down the window and waved back. “Two weeks.”

  At the sound of my voice, Mum blinked hard and did something with her face which kind of looked like she was frustrated but couldn’t show it. I put the window up again and grinned at Grandma.

  “This will be great.”

  She smiled back at me. “Your friend called me.”

  “Which friend?”

  “Which friend?” She sounded half-teasing. “Gabby, of course. All keen to know when you were coming. She’s organised to do something with you… I wrote it down. Wednesday of next week, I think. She’s very keen. I can’t remember what it is, but she’s already bought the tickets. You’re to call her back as soon as possible.”

  “What did you say?”

  She glances at me, half-surprised. “What do you mean? I said Wednesday shouldn’t be a problem. We can make our plans around it, so we don’t clash.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Are you and Gabby having a fight?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “Has she done something wrong?”

  “Uh uh.”

  Grandma shrugs her shoulders. “Well, give her a call, okay?”

  I call her. She’s all, “Yay, Jaz, you finally called me, hooray hooray,” and I’m all, “Yeah, cool, great,” trying to be enthusiastic so that Gabby won’t have her feelings hurt.

  “So, Wednesday?” she says.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “So exciting,” she says. “I can’t even tell you, it has to be a surprise, okay? You are going to love it, and I am going to love it.”

  I laugh, despite myself. “Are you going to give me a clue?”

  “Gosh dang you, Jazmine Crawford,” she says in mock exasperation. “Always looking for a clue. Okay. Just one though. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “My life is going to be complete,” she says. “That’s all. No more clues. My lips are sealed. Forever. I mean, until Wednesday, obvs. Oh, and I’ll get Mum to bring me around tomorrow morning as well.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay.” Because I can’t really say anything else.

  She arrives in the morning, bouncing and chortling her way into my room while Grandma stands at front door being polite to her mum. I follow her through the house because I always follow her, and t
hen we sit on the bed together.

  “So, how are things? And like, what is with you and not answering your messages anymore? Did your mum make you throw your phone away? You didn’t even reply when I told you about Leighton the Dreamboat who I’m like totally in love with.” She lies down on my bed like she’s lost in a dream, and then sits straight up again. “Plus, anyway, you didn’t tell me how that camp thing was.”

  I take a breath, and open my mouth, but I’m so used to not talking now, to her or to anyone, that it’s hard to really get started.

  “It was great,” I say. And then I get brave, and I use Auslan as well. “Really great. Maybe the best weekend of my life.”

  She’s transfixed by my hands. “That’s so cute. It looks like you’re one of those deaf people on TV.”

  I swallow and put my hands down. “We all used Auslan at camp.”

  Her face gives me a confused Gabby look. “What, all the time?”

  “All the time.” I smile, remembering it. “It was actually amazing.”

  “But wouldn’t it just be weird?”

  I look away from her for a second, and then I look back. “You know, you could learn it too. That camp was the best weekend of my life. If you learned Auslan, we could speak it together.”

  “Why would I?” Gabby says, and gives me a blank look. “But anyway, Wednesday. I’ll come pick you up at 1, okay? It’s in the afternoon. It’s gonna be heaps cool.” She hugs herself with glee. “Like, really cool.”

  I agree, because it’s tiring not to agree with Gabby.

  But later that afternoon, I cancel.

  Freya texts me to tell me that she and Mia will be in town in a couple of days’ time; they want to go shopping, and can I meet up with them to just hang out?

  What day? I ask.

  Wednesday, she texts back. In the afternoon.

  I have a moment of hesitation, but it’s not a long moment, and I text back, Sure.

  Immediately, there’s a rush of something in my chest. Guilt, I think. Or excitement. Or maybe both. Whatever it is, it makes my body unable to move. I sit paralyzed on my bed.

  I have to tell Gabby, I think.

  And it’s not going to be good.