The Miltons lived out in Chester Beach, about fifteen blocks, a long causeway, and a million miles from where I lived. There were two types of people who hung out in Chester Beach: there were hippies, and then there were hippies. My grandma Karen used to fall into the hippie category. Back when she was alive, Gran used to pluck me out of bed at an ungodly hour to greet the sun as it crept up over the water. Not exactly a morning person, I would grouse the entire fifteen-minute car ride, only to be hushed to silence by the sun bursting over the ocean and flinging yellows and reds and oranges into the sky. So I’d always liked Chester Beach. It reminded me of Gran. Even now—sitting in a hooptie of a minivan with a scrawny, bucktoothed kid who appeared to light up roughly a four-foot radius and his strangely affectionate mother—I thought of Gran. Not for very long, but I did think of her.
What I could see of the Miltons’ yard was weedy, scraggly, overgrown. The house seemed to sag on its foundation, its wooden clapboard siding slathered in a single layer of white paint that was chipped and weathered. On the front door, the brass knocker had been ripped off and reattached with duct tape. Regardless of all that, it was a comfortable sort of place that didn’t echo when I stepped through the front door, quite unlike my own house, which, I’d noticed since I lost my sight, yawned out in front of me when I walked inside.
The place smelled faintly of incense. A massive collage of snapshots dominated the entire entryway. It was crammed full with photos upon photos of Ben and an older, good-looking, dark-haired boy.
“Is that your brother?” I whispered, pointing.
“Yup,” Ben said, smiling brightly. “But I’m the bestest and the brightest.” He gestured to the photos and lowered his voice. “My mom is a freak about pictures. They’re everywhere.”
He was not exaggerating. The place was festooned in photos, most of which were slightly off—a little blurry or a little off-center or whatever. You’d think that, with all the practice, Ben’s mom would be a half-decent photographer.
Ben led me across the foyer, past an old-school upright piano, and down a hallway to his room. At his doorway, he pried an arm from its crutch and balanced with one side of his body. Sweeping his free hand out in front of him with a flourish, he said, “Welcome to my inner sanctum.”
From what I could see, it was the sort of room that would belong to a kid who spent far too much time studying. The tiny space was crammed full with solar system models, posters of Einstein, NASA memorabilia, and books up the wazoo.
“Ben? Ben. Tell me these aren’t your encyclopedias,” I said, squatting down and squinting at the spines lined along his bookcase. “Tell me you are storing them in your room until your mom sells them to a wrinkled-up eighty-year-old woman at a garage sale.”
Ben waved me off with his still-free hand. “Duh. They’re in my room, aren’t they? Of course they’re mine.”
I cracked up. “Aren’t you aware that there’s this new encyclopedia nowadays? It’s really compact and easy to use. It’s called the Internet,” I said, standing up and turning toward his closet. You can tell a lot about a person from his closet. Due to my limited scope of sight, I could see only the right-hand corner of the space, which was crammed full with a colossal stack of hats that sported a variety of semicatchy phrases. At the base of Mount Saint Hat was a soccer ball. It was the kind that kids use—the smaller, nonstandard size—but it was a soccer ball nonetheless. I swallowed and turned my back to it.
“Internet’s for sissies,” Ben said. “I started reading encyclopedias when I was eight.”
I snorted loudly. “Seriously? You read them for fun? Wow. That’s...that’s...vaguely pathetic.”
He dismissed my comment with a grunt. “What do you read, Thera?”
I hadn’t been ready for that question. I’d given up on books. Braille was too much work and I wasn’t very good at it, so I read with my fingers only when absolutely necessary. At school, usually. So basically the only words I’d actually tackled lately were on the computer, where I’d spent hours trying to figure out the next concert venue for the Loose Cannons. And that hardly counted, seeing as how my computer did all the reading for me. Finally, I answered the question as I would’ve six months ago. “Anything funny with a happy ending,” I said. “I hate reading stuff that is depressing or morbid or in any way crappy. That’s what life is for.”
He raised his eyebrows like, Well, aren’t you little miss sunshine and rainbows? “So you don’t read books about dragons?”
I shook my head.
“Sorcerers?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Mystics? Astronauts?”
I harrumphed.
“Wow, Thera. You need to get a life,” he said. He was smiling as he said it.
“This from the kid who reads encyclopedias for fun,” I pointed out.
“It’s entertaining,” he said indignantly. “When I had my last back surgery? I was, like, stuck in a hospital bed forever. Bored. The only thing worth a crap in the library at Memorial was their encyclopedia set. So I read the As for two weeks straight.” He smiled his toothy smile and gestured to the bookshelf, to the first book in the set. It was rather thick. “There are a lot of As. Now? I have my own set. And except for the Qs, which”—he paused for half a beat and his grin fell, just a little, but then it bounced right back and he continued—“I don’t have, I’ve made it clear to the Rs. And things are starting to get interesting, what with the rail-babbler and Arkady Raikin.”
“Do I want to know what those things are?” I asked, not bothering to hide my amusement.
“The rail-babbler is a goofy-looking Malaysian bird—”
“So it’s the Ben of the bird kingdom?”
He went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “And Arkady Raikin? You haven’t heard of him? The Soviet comedian?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” I said dryly. Just what I needed: a ten-year-old friend whose SAT scores could blow mine out of the water.
He shook his head and clucked his tongue. “Thera, Thera, Thera. You’ve been missing out.”
I just nodded. I couldn’t agree more.
Ben wanted me to meet his dog. Since dogs weren’t exactly my thing, I told him that introductions were completely unnecessary. But he didn’t listen. Leaving me in front of his encyclopedias, he swung off to retrieve his dog from the backyard. He took my sight with him, the room ebbing away to nothing as he stepped into the hallway.
I knew there was a whole room full of the sort of crap that brainy ten-year-olds find fascinating, but I felt as though I’d been left alone with nothing but the soccer ball I’d seen inside Ben’s closet. Tripping over God knows what, slamming my shin into something hard-cornered, and cussing creatively, I finally came to a stop with one hand on the doorjamb of Ben’s closet. I stared into the void, seeing the soccer ball all too well in my mind’s eye.
My phone rattled to life in my back pocket. Startled, I flinched and sucked in my breath, heart throbbing in my chest. Yanking the phone out, I fumbled my way across the room and stuffed it in my purse. It was Clarissa Fenstermacher calling, no doubt. A fellow student at Merchant’s. A couple weeks ago, Mr. Huff had paired us up to work together on a summer research paper about illiteracy in America, and Clarissa had been hounding me about it ever since. I’d been doing my best to avoid her.
I didn’t hear the distinctive tink tink tink of the dog’s nails approaching until the mongrel slammed into me. Ben’s dog, Wally, was a monstrous, shedding, yellow thing who slobbered all over Ben until dinner. While I was admittedly no expert in dogology, I was reasonably certain that he was a yellow Lab or some variation thereof. Whatever he was, he barked at random items—ink pens, scissors, the hem on Ben’s shorts—and then he followed us to the dining room, where he planted his oversize ass on the floor at Ben’s feet and panted as though he’d just run the Iditarod, stealing all the good air and replacing it with dog-breath air. It wasn’t as though I hated dogs, exactly. I’d just prefer they were smaller, calmer, and clea
ner. With a long, skinny tail and a meow rather than a bark. That would be the perfect dog.
Ben’s mom had changed into a gauzy blue dress that billowed around her when she walked and made her look like a gypsy. She’d prepared quinoa enchiladas. She pronounced the word quinoa like “KEEN-wah.” I’d never heard of the stuff before, and it must’ve shown on my face, because she went on to explain that quinoa was a “healthy grain.”
Now, I was generally opposed to health foods. In my experience, they tasted like either dirt or air—like something nasty or like nothing at all. Also, I figured the preservatives in my diet would keep me alive longer, just by virtue of the fact that they were, well, preservatives.
With one eye on Ben’s mom, I covertly spun my plate a quarter turn, so my enchilada was positioned at exactly twelve o’clock. It was purely out of habit and completely unnecessary, but I did it anyway. Meals had been a challenge for me since I’d lost my sight, and if my main dish wasn’t sitting at exactly twelve o’clock, where I could locate it easily, everything just felt screwy.
Anyway, I’d just taken my first bite of my twelve o’clock, healthy enchilada—which, for the record, had nothing on a bag of Cheetos, but was surprisingly okay—when I heard massive footsteps approaching the dining room. Loud and clunky, they came from some area in the left of my non-eyesight. Suddenly, Ben’s older brother—the good-looking, olive-skinned boy I’d seen in, oh, fifty million or so pictures around the house—emerged from the nothingness and sat down directly across from me.
If I had just one word to describe him, it would be big. Not fat, mind you. Just large. Muscly. He was tall, probably six feet or so, and he towered over my hundred-pound, five-four frame. He wore a black V-neck T-shirt, jeans, and these monstrous boots that somehow succeeded in making him appear even larger. His dark hair was scratched into universal messiness—in a way that may or may not have been intentional, and in a way that made me want to stare at the little angles created on his head. Ignoring me completely, he scooped a guy-size portion of enchiladas onto his plate and dug in.
Okay, so I was fully aware that this entire evening might be something my brain had conjured up on its own, that there was a possibility—more probable than not—that I was still lying on Mr. Sturgis’s floor, dreaming or hallucinating or whatever it is that crazy people do when they’ve completely lost it.
Still.
There was something about this guy, invented or not, that made me keenly aware of all my physical imperfections. I was too short, too boring-faced, too disheveled. I hadn’t combed my hair all afternoon, and I was relatively certain that by now it resembled the hair inside a man’s armpit. Also, I was wearing those baggy mom-shorts, a well-worn Loose Cannons T-shirt, and the oldest flip-flops known to mankind. I was complete disarray.
“Mason, this is Thera,” Ben said to his brother by way of introduction, gesturing grandly toward me.
Without even a glance in my direction, Mason jerked his head up in a nod. “Hey,” he said in greeting, the long vowel sound rolling smoothly and richly off his tongue.
Strange. He was such a huge, broad-shouldered guy that I’d expected his voice to be gravelly. Regardless, something about his tone was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I was replaying it in my mind, picking apart the timbre, when I realized that I hadn’t replied. Staring above his head like a proper blind girl, I said, “Hi. Actually, my name is Maggie.”
When his eyes finally flickered toward me, taking in my ratty hair and my ratty Loose Cannons T-shirt and my ratty everything, I caught a flash of something that I couldn’t quite put a finger on. Anger, maybe? I wasn’t sure. But I knew this: it was the first real expression he’d had since he’d sat down at the table. Half a second later it was gone, replaced by a certain coolness.
If I were a lesser woman I would have squirmed in my chair. Blushed. But I didn’t. Chin held high, I tossed his aloof attitude right back at him and casually carved off a bite of my enchilada. I didn’t know what his problem was, but I couldn’t be bothered.
“Where do you go to school, Maggie?” Mrs. Milton asked me as I pretended to have difficulty scooping up a glob of my enchilada filling. There was something questionable in there, something brown mixed in with the quinoa. Either meat or mushrooms.
“Merchant’s School for the Blind,” Ben answered loudly, going overboard in advertising my lack of eyesight. Then he nudged me in the foot. He was a smooth one, this kid.
“Merchant’s,” I repeated, only because it should have come out of my mouth in the first place.
“Mason goes to Brighton,” Mrs. Milton said cheerfully.
In a normal, polite conversation, this would be the point where Mason would jump in and add something. But he didn’t. I could see him in my peripheral vision, ignoring my presence with utter indifference.
Now, I’d never been especially skilled at reeling in my temper. Particularly in situations that involved arrogant males. So I turned my head and glared at him. Dead in the eye. Mason crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, keeping one skeptical eye on me for the remainder of the meal.
I drummed my fingers on the table, keeping time with the drip-drip-drip of the kitchen faucet. Fine. Whatever. He probably wasn’t real anyway.
Mason said only a few words after that: sour cream and um-hum and nope. Every time he spoke, I made note of the velvety way his vowels rolled off his tongue. And every time he spoke, I kicked myself for making note of the velvety way his vowels rolled off his tongue. Because clearly, the guy was an egotistical jackass.
I was sitting there, tapping out an aggressive faucet song and eating my quinoa-and-maybe-meat-or-maybe-mushroom enchilada, when Ben said to his mom, “So in swim practice last night? I kicked ass.” He glanced at his brother for confirmation. “Right, Mason?”
Mason made an affirmative noise, and Mrs. Milton shot Ben a disapproving look and said, “Benjamin Thomas Milton. Language.”
Ben took in a monstrous breath and puffed out his cheeks, making his face almost completely circular. And then he leaned toward his mother, both palms flat on the table. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I beat my time from last year. That crappy backstroke one? And now I come in only a few seconds after everyone else.”
“You swim?” I said disbelievingly.
He sat up a little taller. “I’m on the swim team at North Bay Aquatic Club. The Dolphins?”
“Benjamin has spina bifida,” his mom explained to me. “He was born with it. The bottom half of his legs are pretty much paralyzed, but his upper body is strong. He’s been on the swim team since he was three.”
“Wow, I’m impressed,” I said, my voice quieter than I’d intended.
Ben’s mom smiled. “Clearly, he gets his athletic ability from his father. I can hardly walk the dog without tripping. But Ben’s dad? He was quite an athlete.” The way she said was left me with the distinct impression that Mr. Milton was no longer living.
There were a few seconds of heavy silence in which Ben squirmed in his seat and Mason cleared his throat, and then Mrs. Milton said, “Oh, I almost forgot—” She bolted to her feet and hustled into some unspecified area of my non-eyesight, leaving her sentence open. But Ben and Mason seemed to know what was coming. There were two groans, the loudest of which was from Mason, who put his fork down and rubbed his forehead with his palm. Before I knew what was happening, Ben’s mom popped back into my vision, holding a camera. A flashbulb went off in our faces.
“Mom,” Mason complained. Just the one word: mom.
Mrs. Milton shot him a look. “Tonight is special,” she said. “We have company. And enchiladas. Life moves too quickly. If I don’t capture it, well...” Her voice faded away and her expression turned wistful. Finally, she took a deep breath, gave a bit of a forced smile, and said, “I want to remember tonight.”
After dinner, Ben and I went to his room, shut the door, and played video games. As it happened, I did look a bit like Thera, the badass dragon slayer in Twenty-one
Stones. But she was unquestionably the better looking of the two of us, even though she was animated. Yes, she had my curly auburn hair, and yes, she had my fair coloring, but she had one of those cute button noses, whereas I had a chubby, unfeminine-looking nose. And she had boobs, while I was still waiting for mine to grow into something respectable.
Ben’s dog rested his muzzle on Ben’s leg, his nostrils working, and stared unblinkingly at Ben while we played Twenty-one Stones, which, in my opinion, was a little strange. After several minutes of the staring thing, I jabbed my thumb in the direction of the mutt and said, “What’s with the dog?”
Ben spoke to me in the inconsistent, erratic way that kids speak while playing video games. “HURRY UP AND SHOOT YOUR FIRE OUT BECAUSE HERE COMES WYVERN—SHOOT HIM—NO WITH FIREBALLS—Who? Wally? He’s my dog. Duh. I’m, like, his favorite person—WAIT, DON’T GO IN THERE. YOU’RE GOING TO GET US KILLED!”
“Don’t you think the way he’s staring at you is a little weird?”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Wally was a stray that some assnozzle left at the veterinary clinic where my mom works. So she brought him home. He’s been totally—TURN AROUND—HE’S GOING TO INCINERATE YOU—my dog ever since.”
“Well, he ought to be off doing dog stuff—like barking and running around in the backyard and chasing cats and whatever,” I muttered under my breath, one eye on Wally.
“He does that, too—HIT THE DRAGON BETWEEN THE EYES—THAT’S WHAT KILLS HIM!” Changing the subject, he said, “So. I must know everything about you, starting with the most important matter: what’s your Thing?”
“My Thing?”
“Yeah. Everyone has a Thing.”
“What sort of Thing?”
“You know, like, what is the Thing that makes you the happiest?—WATCH OUT BEHIND YOU!—What’s the Thing that makes you you? Your Thing. My Thing is swimming. Like, obviously.”
The One Thing Page 3
