All right, so maybe the lunatic fan part was true. I mean, if I happened to stumble upon a hint today that helped direct me to the next Loose Cannons concert...well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be upset.
At any rate, Mason failed to acknowledge me when I said hello. Actually, check that; he acknowledged me by immediately sliding away from me, presumably cramming himself next to some woman, because I heard a surprised little “Oh!” as he moved.
I chatted idly with Mrs. Milton, keeping tabs on Mason with my senses (while appearing not to be keeping tabs on Mason with my senses). I could practically feel the aggravation crawling out of his pores, could hear his choppy, annoyed breaths.
Honestly.
Sure, he’d become something of an instant celebrity recently, but just how arrogant was he to believe I’d come to the swim meet just to be around him? I silently fumed, tapping my foot in time with the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh-swoosh of the swimmers cutting through the water. Mason’s aversion to me was maddening, frustrating, and...well, sort of absorbing. Did he really believe I was a crazed fan, or did he just find me atrocious-looking? Probably a little of both. I didn’t bother with makeup anymore. There were too many little bottles and too many little tubes and too many little opportunities to turn myself into a clown.
Whatever the reason, Mason refused to speak to me. He did, however, exchange pleasantries with another spectator and offered a hand to what sounded like a little girl who was struggling up the bleachers. “Whoa, there,” he said, and I felt the bleachers rise slightly as he stood. There was something genuine in Mason’s voice. Something authentic. It made me feel strange for some reason—either hurt or confused or exposed. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, except that there was a lot of it.
I grumbled under my breath for letting him get under my skin. Mason was not just a complete egotistical jerk—he was a complete egotistical jerk who obviously believed that I idolized him. And he was dead wrong. Sure, I loved his music. And yes, I’d likely give up my right kidney to learn the location of his band’s next concert. And of course, I thought he had an amazing voice. But that didn’t mean I worshiped him, that didn’t mean I’d go to such ridiculous lengths just to be near him.
Mrs. Milton nudged me with her elbow. “Ben’s race should be coming up any second.”
“Yeah?” I said, glancing covertly at Ben. He stood next to the pool, his entire body rocking with laughter as Teddy made faces at him. “Has he always loved to swim?” I asked, reaching down to scratch my calf. In my haste, I inadvertently brushed my arm against Mason’s. It was the smallest of touches and lasted only a fraction of a second, but something inside me lurched as a sharp bolt of electricity reverberated between us. I jerked away and folded my arms across my chest.
“Actually,” Mrs. Milton said, her voice slightly guarded, “a few months ago Ben went through a bit of a swimming funk because of a falling out with another kid on the team.”
I felt my mouth drop open. “Ben had a falling out? For real?”
Mrs. Milton muttered, “It was a girl.”
“Ah.”
“Ben had a huge crush on her,” Mrs. Milton explained, “and you know how Ben is when he likes someone. He goes all out, even if they aren’t the least bit interested. He saved his allowance for months to buy her a video game.”
“Twenty-one Stones?” I asked. Suddenly I didn’t want to hear the rest of this story.
“That’s the one,” Mrs. Milton confirmed. “Anyway, when he gave it to her, she didn’t react the way he’d hoped.” While her words were matter-of-fact, I could hear fierce maternal protectiveness hiding in her tone.
“What did she do?”
“Threw it in the trash and called him a...” She stopped, regrouped, and then tried again. “She called him a ‘stupid retard.’ He was heartbroken.”
I felt a sharp pang in the hollow of my chest, a clog in my throat. I whispered, “Is she still on the team? That girl?”
“No,” Mrs. Milton said in a sigh. “Coach has a strict policy about the kids treating one another respectfully.” She patted me compassionately on the leg. “Oh, don’t get upset, hon. The kids at school prepared him for this kind of thing. He’s kind, trusting, an easy target. And anyway, he has Teddy, and now you—someone who can appreciate what it feels like when life throws you curveballs.”
I nodded woodenly, and, eyes closed, tried to pull myself together. Beside me Mason was still as stone, but I’d swear I could feel his breath feathering against my cheek. I’d swear that he was facing me, that his eyes were on me. Was he staring at me?
I dipped my head, letting my hair curtain my face for a few seconds. Then I raised my chin. I still felt his eyes on me—scorching like the desert sun. I twisted my hands in my lap. Why was he staring?
Trying to take my mind off Mason, I peered across the nothingness to where Ben was getting ready for his race. He now sat on a wooden bench alongside the pool, so stuffed full of smiles that they just spilled out of him. He pulled on a pair of red swim goggles that warped his face a little, like those mirrors that distort your chin and make your head look fat in all the wrong places. Pumping one fist high in the air, he cheered for someone in the pool. There was something about the upward curve of his mouth that filled me with an overwhelming, protective affection. Some people have so many layers to them that you can hardly see who they are. But when I looked at Ben, I saw everything that made him him.
Why would anyone intentionally hurt someone like him?
When they announced the next race, Ben approached the water. There was a long pause while he climbed the podium. He moved slowly and deliberately, as though savoring the moment. When he finally made it to the top of the podium, he stood there for a long fragment of time. Supporting himself with the metal rails of the podium and peeling off his crutches, he scanned the crowd until he found us. And then he smiled.
Instinctively, I smiled back and began to lift my hand to him, but I stopped, midwave, and ran my fingers through my hair.
Too late. Apparently Mason had already seen it. He made an irritated sound in the back of his throat.
I felt as though I should play it off, so with my gaze facing the pool and with all the innocence I could muster, I said, “Are you okay, Mason?”
He bit off a “Yes” through what sounded like clenched teeth.
Well. At least he’d spoken to me.
Ben, oblivious to my bonehead move, stretched his toes toward the water, leaning over the edge. I held my breath. Beside me, Mrs. Milton’s camera fired off pictures, one after another in rapid succession.
There was a loud pop, a monstrous splash, and the stands erupted in cheering. Ben didn’t appear partially paralyzed in the water. He looked strong and confident, like any other kid, yet so insanely different. As the race went on, I caught snatches of swimmers passing him. Though Ben moved slowly, deliberately, he had an obvious advantage on another swimmer, a chubby kid at his ankles. When Ben turned around at the far end of the pool to make his final lap, he glanced behind him. And then, little by little, he slowed his pace, letting the kid gain ground on him.
I couldn’t believe it. He was deliberately letting the kid beat him.
This really shouldn’t have surprised me. Not really. Ben was just...good-hearted. CEO of the National Society of Encyclopedia Britannica Readers, president of the Department of Constant Bucktoothed Smiles, grand pooh-bah of Letting the Fat Kid Win.
Who was I? I didn’t know.
Once I allowed myself to harbor the hope that I might completely regain my vision, the idea possessed me. That evening, my mind hopscotched between the ways my life would stitch back together if my sight fully returned, how I’d reclaim the soccer field, the hallways at my old school, the afternoons with Sophie and Lauren. How my troubles with my mother would dissolve.
Doubts snuck in there, too. I worried that my newfound sight was temporary, transient. That maybe nature would realize its mistake and return me to complete blindness. That if I didn’
t hurry up and figure out all the whys and the hows and the wheres, my little island of eyesight, along with the explanation for it, would disappear just as quickly as it had come.
Best I could guess, the crack I’d taken on my head had been the catalyst. Yet I wasn’t exactly dying to field-test this theory. Bashing myself on the skull with a hammer for another inch of vision? No, thank you. My luck, I would knock myself right back into complete blindness. Besides, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was overlooking something crucial. I felt oddly as though I were a moth stuck in a lamp shade, bumping around the light but missing the bigger picture.
By the time I wandered into the living room, where Gramps and Dad were listening to an ancient Beatles album and swapping conspiracy stories about John Lennon’s death, I was complete wreckage. I felt compelled to see Ben again, which then made me feel guilty because he was just a good-hearted ten-year-old kid who didn’t deserve to get used just so I could see, which then made me feel frustrated because currently I could not see one freaking thing, which then made me long to see Ben again, which then made me feel guilty for wanting to see Ben again, which then made me realize why I usually ignored my goddamn feelings. I groaned quietly and buried my face in a couch pillow.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Dad asked.
I was so close to telling him the truth—honest, I was—but the words seemed too twisted to make sense coming out of my mouth, so in the end I replied that everything was fine, that I had a headache, and I walked back to my room and shut the door.
I paced a little. Sat on the edge of my bed a little. Listened to the radio a little. And then I lurched up, unloaded in front of my computer, and signed on to Dr. Darren’s website.
This wasn’t the first time I’d turned to Dr. Darren. I’d always skewed a bit toward the hypochondriac side of the wellness scale. Back in the fourth grade I’d had imaginary thumb cancer for a while. And then flesh-eating disease of the ankle. In middle school I’d acquired a touch of fabricated tuberculosis, which, given my track record for medical misadventures, my parents had not taken seriously. I’d therefore done what most paranoid quasi-tuberculosis sufferers would do: I’d signed on to the Ask Dr. Darren website and requested advice.
From what I remembered of his website photo, Dr. Darren was a gray-haired, leather-skinned man who had long, scraggly eyebrows that must’ve grown tired of lying down flat because they stuck straight out of his forehead. He had a strong, direct manner of answering questions—a convincing sort of approach that always managed to help me sort out my preoccupations. And that was what I needed right now.
It took me forever to navigate through his website. When I finally located the Q and A section, my fingers hovered over the keys for a moment before I typed in my question: “Hello, Dr. Darren. I was wondering whether it’s possible for a blind person to get their sight back from a head trauma?”
I gnawed on my thumbnail while I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Jerking out of my chair, I paced back and forth in front of my desk, shaking out my hands and trying my best to keep from becoming too optimistic. Finally: a little ding of an incoming message. I collapsed in my seat and tabbed down the screen to find his reply: “Good evening, Maggie. I’m afraid the answer is no.”
I rubbed the back of my neck for a moment and then typed my response: “Not even part of their sight?”
Dr. Darren: “Part of their sight?”
Me: “Just around one person. Like, if I hit my head and then afterward I could see someone.”
Dr. Darren: “If you hit your head and you’re suddenly seeing things, you’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury and you are hallucinating. Or”—the screen reader paused for some time, so long that I bolted to my feet again and crossed my arms—“you have a psychiatric disorder.”
I collapsed on my bed and threw my forearm over my eyes. This was exactly what I’d feared would happen if I turned somewhere for answers. I was on my own.
The feminine hygiene aisle in Target wasn’t the best place to be marooned. Gramps was in the store somewhere. He’d shoved me into this aisle, muttering that “the sort of things” I was looking for were right in front of me. And then he informed me that he’d be right back, that he needed fishing supplies and also something that had sounded like toenail clippers, but I couldn’t be certain. His words generally came out a little muffled, so half the time I didn’t know what he was saying.
In contrast, my other grandfather, Grandpa Brian—whom I called Repeat Grandpa because everything he said came out of his mouth twice (“How was school? How was school?”)—made his words difficult to miss. Repeat Grandpa lived in California and was not very grandpa-ish because he was tall and skinny, and he rarely cussed. In order to be a grandpa, you should be old and grumpy and bald and opinionated and fat, like Gramps. Or at the very least, you should have a big potbelly, the tendency to grouse about people who drive too fast, and an affinity for the phrase “goddamn it all to hell.” But that was just me.
Gramps had been my best friend since I lost my sight. He offered me a couple of things that girls my age could not. One, he didn’t feel sorry for me, and two, he wasn’t about to treat me differently because I couldn’t see. I could not say the same for my old friends.
Anyway, a half hour earlier, Gramps had hollered into my room, “Going to Target. Need anything?” At the time, I’d been camped on the Internet for a good three hours, first trying to figure out the Big Secret by, as Tommy X had suggested, looking “beyond the surface” (i.e. going all the way back to the band’s first official website post and then picking through it for clues), and then, after coming up empty, moving on to listening to my screen reader recite entries from an online encyclopedia. I’d started with the Ds rather than the As to pay homage to the Dead Eddies. Back in the day, the Dead Eddies were the band that had first gotten me into music. I mean, their song, coincidentally enough called “The Beginning of It All,” was singularly responsible for transforming my life. And so: the Ds, out of respect. At any rate, I was cursing Tommy X and perusing the Ds when Gramps came into my room and asked me the Target question. Naturally, I was in dire need of some girly things. And naturally, Gramps wasn’t about to set foot in the girly aisle for me. So I’d had to go along.
Gramps drove a Ford truck that was so old it had probably driven Moses to church. But he refused to replace it. He claimed the old stuff was sturdier than the new. Which was probably a good thing, because Gramps’s driving skills were a little on the sketchy side. Just last year, he’d gotten into a fender bender with his barbershop. As he’d pulled into the shop’s parking lot, he’d hit the gas instead of the brake. It had ended up being a very expensive haircut.
“Mom at work?” I asked Gramps as we pulled out of the driveway.
“Yup,” Gramps said. “Left at dawn and said she’d be working late tonight.”
My chest knotted up reflexively, like it always did when Mom spent long days away from home. It was childish and paranoid, but ever since she’d disappeared while I was in the hospital, I wondered whether this would be the time she wouldn’t come home, whether my blindness had scared her away for good. I cleared my throat and said, “What about Dad?”
“Left for work at five thirty.” This didn’t surprise me. Dad got up with the chickens to commute to Manhattan. He was an intellectual property lawyer. Whatever that was. He’d dutifully explained it to me one day, and I’d dutifully forgotten.
It took only a couple of minutes in Gramps’s passenger seat for me to start to yawn. When I first lost my sight, I spent a lot of time yawning, and in turn I spent a lot of time wondering why I was yawning, which just made me yawn all the more. It took a doctor to explain this phenomenon: I was yawning because of my sudden lack of visual stimulation. My brain thought that nothing was going on, so it figured it must be nighttime. In other words, my life was so freaking boring that my brain thought it was time to sleep.
I figured that I was yawning n
ow because all Gramps talked about was the weather and the weather and the weather some more. And after that he gave me an update on his trick knee, which, for those who do not speak Prehistoric Doofus, is not a magical knee but a knee that locks up once in a while. Finally he said, “So. Why are you hanging out with the crippled kid? A bit young for you, if you ask me.”
Gramps didn’t have a batter-up circle for his thoughts. He just opened his mouth and struck out. Swing and a miss. No political correctness whatsoever.
“Gramps,” I chastised, suddenly the moral one in our relationship. “He’s not crippled—he has spina bifida. And as far as his age goes, he’s actually pretty mature.”
Gramps harrumphed. “I hear he sucks at swimming.”
“Who told you that?” I asked, feeling weirdly protective of Ben.
“Hank.” Hank was Gramps’s friend. Without fail, the two of them met for coffee and donuts every morning.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I said, “How would Hank know about Ben’s swimming?” Though I already knew the answer to this question. Hank was the town gossip.
“Hank’s mailman’s son told him,” Gramps said, and I rolled my eyes. “The whole family has had a rough go. The older boy? Mason? A hothead. Suspended from school a couple years back. After his dad died. In some local rock band called the Squeaky Guns.”
“The Loose Cannons,” I muttered, not appreciating the reminder of Mason.
I was quiet for the remainder of the ride. And now, as I stood stranded in Target, Mason Milton was still on my mind. Which was to say that I was standing there like a complete mindless idiot. Huffing out a monstrous gust of air, I reached up, miscalculating the location of the shelves and knocking what sounded like a thousand boxes off the Great Wall of Tampons. I squatted to pick them up, grumbling under my breath. Gramps’s dumping me off here felt more than a little premature. Hilda had yet to teach me how to navigate in stores. Hell, I’d barely walked down the sidewalk yesterday without breaking my face.
The One Thing Page 6
