“You might take that ‘I’m sorry’ and give it to Mason. You hurled all over his car last night when he drove you home. But don’t worry about it. It only took him a few hours to clean it up. Probably the smell will go away in a month or so.”
So Mason Milton had cleaned up my puke. Lovely. Add that to my list of offenses. “Is he home?”
“Nope,” Ben said, popping the P to let me know just how little he cared to be speaking to me at this very moment.
I thunked the back of my head against the door, just once, and pianoed my fingers on the floor—a sad, lonely riff from one of Chopin’s waltzes.
“Look,” Ben said tiredly, “I’m not going to feel sorry for you, okay? You were using me to see, using me to get close to Mason.” I folded my arms over my stomach. There was a vein of truth in his words; I couldn’t refute them. After a beat, he went on. “Truth is, sometimes you do shitty things. Sometimes you say shitty things. Sometimes you’re not a good friend. I’m not going to try to make you feel better about that.”
I thought about those words in Gramps’s truck all the way home, and all the way up my porch steps, and all the way to my room. Flopping facedown on my bed, I recollected all those times I could have called Sophie to explain how I was feeling, to apologize for avoiding her, but didn’t. I thought about how I’d let our friendship wither up and die because I was too ashamed to tell her I was scared and miserable, too focused on holing up in my house and hoping my blindness would just go away. It had been a decision I’d made months ago and every day after that—a decision I’d made to push her away.
And it had worked.
Right now my life was so broken, so mangled. I needed to glue something back together before my shaking frame fractured into a million different pieces. So I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed Sophie’s number.
“Sophie. It’s Maggie.”
Her name sounded odd coming out of my mouth. Foreign. I wedged the phone between my shoulder and ear and then crossed my arms. Then I uncrossed them. Then I crossed them again. What did I usually do with my arms when I was on the phone?
I noticed a strange hiccup of silence before Sophie spoke, and when she did her voice sounded off: gluey and stuffy, like she was just getting over a cold. “Hey, Maggie.”
I cleared my throat. Why was I so nervous? This was Sophie. We’d known each other practically all our lives, lost baby teeth together, gone through period trauma with each other. “Hey. Um. I was wondering if you want to come over? You know, like, to my house. In Bedford Estates.” Oh my God. Did I just say that? I just said that. I cleared my throat again. “It would be cool if you bring Lauren, too.”
“Okay.” She sounded hesitant, dubious, and I guess she had every reason to be.
An hour later the doorbell rang. I padded into the entryway and stood there for a long moment, my heartbeat fluttering in my throat, before I took three unstable strides forward and grasped the knob. Sucking in a breath, I yanked the door open, hovering there for the space of several breaths before fundamental hospitality kicked in. I said hello and Sophie said hello. I asked if Lauren had come along, and Sophie said that she hadn’t been able to make it. And then we just stood there, on opposite sides of the threshold, as silence wedged itself between us.
Finally I waved her inside and led her to the living room, which in and of itself was a little awkward. Back in the day, we’d always hung out in my room. But I was hesitant to take her to my new bedroom. I didn’t want her asking questions I had no clue how to answer.
So: the living room, where I sat on the couch as though I had a javelin shoved straight up my spine. I waited for Sophie to start talking. She didn’t. Even though the air-conditioning was set on glacial, I felt sweaty and feverish and short of breath. Wiping my palms on the couch, I opened with the brilliant “So. Um. Lauren’s busy today?”
Sophie pulled air through her teeth, a nervous habit of hers. It used to drive our fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones, completely out of her head. Finally she said, “I guess she had plans or something?”
In all honesty, I hadn’t actually expected Lauren to come along today. Out of all the girls on the team, Lauren was the one who had seemed the most uncomfortable with my blindness. I waited for Sophie to say something else, but she didn’t, so I let out a little cough and said, “So. How are you?”
Sophie sighed. It made me feel weird for some reason. Heavyhearted. “I’m doing well,” she said softly. I got the impression that she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince me. “You?”
“Fantastico,” I said. As an expert liar, my voice didn’t waver one iota.
The quiet settled over us again.
Small talk. I needed more small talk.
“Are you still going out with that guy?” I said, sort of loudly. “The one with the hair?” Just before I’d lost my sight, she’d started dating some guy from Central—a wide-shouldered jock who looked as though he’d styled his hair by gelling it up and jumping backward out of a plane.
“Jason Salamone? Um. No,” she said. Her no had two syllables, the first one for the no and the second one for the rest of the story.
I bit my thumbnail. God, this was excruciating. “What happened?”
“Jason moved to North Dakota.”
I had the feeling she was still leaving out something huge—like maybe he’d dumped her or had treated her badly or something—but I wasn’t going to press. Instead I said, “North Dakota? What the hell is in North Dakota?”
“A military base. Jason’s dad got transferred there,” she explained.
“Oh.”
Silence.
I shifted on the couch. Folded one leg under my butt. Twisted my hands together. With every shift of position, I begged myself to apologize to her. To tell her how hard the past several months had been. But the truth was, I was terrified of what she might say. So instead I blurted, “Are you sick?” The question took her off guard for some reason, because she didn’t answer right away. “You sound stuffy, is all. Like you have a cold.”
“I—yeah. I mean, I don’t feel well.”
More silence.
This ranked as the most awkward conversation we’d ever had, even worse than the Target conversation, which was saying something. I never thought we could disintegrate this badly. Never thought we’d end up here, like this, sitting next to each other and groping for words that neither of us had. Okay, fine, I wanted to scream up at the sky. Lessons learned. Payback noted. Hallmark moment not going to happen. And I couldn’t blame Sophie. It was exactly what I deserved.
The next day I kept picking up my phone to call Ben for dumb, random stuff: to tell him that maybe chocolate Pop-Tarts were my Thing, and to ask him if he knew when the word anniversary was invented, because it seemed like one of those words we should be celebrating, oh, I don’t know...say, once a year. But then I’d realize he wasn’t speaking to me, so instead I’d just flop down on my bed and mope all the air out of my room. Once the evening rolled around and I was properly tired of moping, I checked out the post Clarissa had mentioned earlier.
They were still there, Cannon Dude’s pompous, self-righteous ramblings, and listening to my screen reader shout them into my room irritated me to no end. I wasn’t the only one annoyed. Several people had posted since, all telling him he was a complete, total, absolute raging jackass.
I dialed Clarissa’s number. “Hey,” I said when she picked up. “Cannon Dude is the douchiest of bags.”
She snorted. “Right? After I got off the phone with you yesterday, I checked out his profile. Age: thirty-five. Sex: male. Occupation: computer scientist at Apple. He works at Apple, for Pete’s sake! So—hello!—he’s a supersmart techy guy who probably hacked into Mason’s computer. Hence ‘the secret lies with the singer.’”
As she paused to take a breath, I realized that I’d just spent the past several seconds tapping my fingers to the cadence of her speech. That weird, manic way she spoke, the stopping and start
ing and stopping again, had a chaotic rhythm, an almost-melody.
“Anyway,” she went on, and I heard the rattle of her iced coffee and a pronounced swallow. “That flu! How are you feeling? Are you all right?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. Truth was, I wasn’t all right. Not in the slightest. And part of me wanted to tell her everything: how my life had cracked down the middle when I’d lost my sight, how my mother had disappeared while I was in the hospital, how I’d walked away from my old friendships, how I’d shattered my new ones. And my sometimes-eyesight, I wanted to tell her about that, too. But I didn’t trust my judgment or my mouth right then, so all I said was, “Couldn’t be all righter.”
“My soup! It helped, right? Was it good?”
I’d actually forgotten about her soup, and so after we got off the phone I took a bowl of it to the living room. It was a summer night, so Gramps and Dad were in their usual summer-night spot: in front of a baseball game, grousing about the Red Sox’s current losing streak. This went on for several minutes, their complaining, and then Dad cleared his throat, which was my first indication that the conversation was about to go south.
He said, “So, Maggie. I was talking to your mother this morning, and she mentioned that Merchant’s has a soccer team.”
“Yeah. I know,” I said, dubiously poking at the soup with a spoon. Brothy things were generally not my cup of tea. Mostly because I didn’t like my tea served with wilty vegetables floating around in it.
“Have you thought about checking it out this fall?”
“Nope,” I said, cramming some soup in my mouth so I didn’t have to comment any further on the subject. My school counselor had mentioned the soccer team a couple months back. Five-a-side soccer: soccer adapted, so the blind can play.
I wanted no part of it.
“You ought to consider it,” Dad said. “Keeping involved in soccer really helped your mom when she had to stop playing.”
What I wanted to tell Dad was that it hadn’t been soccer that had helped my mother. It had been me. I had been the one who had given her hope again. I had been the one who had given her a new dream to chase.
And I had been the one who had stripped everything away.
She hadn’t forgiven me for it yet, that much was true. But then, neither had I.
Gramps saved me by changing the subject. “What the hell are you eating, kid?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Soup.”
“That the crap your mom bought with all the fiber?” Gramps asked.
“Nope,” I said. “It’s homemade. And why is Mom buying you high-fiber soup?”
“Prostate is swollen. Fiber is supposed to shrink it.”
Once you get as old as Gramps, no subject is particularly good or bad, so all of them can be freely discussed over chicken noodle soup. I made a little gesture in the air to him, like Hello, I’m trying to eat here? and in doing so, I managed to knock the bowl with my elbow and tip the soup into my lap. I lurched sideways, slamming my shoulder into the end table.
Dad was beside me in seconds. “Maggie! You okay?”
I jerked upright, irritated that my father was hovering over me like I was an invalid. The worst thing? I couldn’t get angry with him about it. Not really. He was just trying to do something. Sure, he was gentle and rangy and awkward, but it had always been his job to make sure I didn’t get hurt—a task he’d never failed to take seriously. It was difficult for him to accept that he hadn’t been able to protect me from losing my sight. As though something like that is even possible. You can’t stave off life. Sometimes life just happens, no matter how careful you are. “I’m fine,” I mumbled, jerking to my feet.
“Let me just run down to the laundry room and grab a rag—”
“I’ve got it, Dad,” I said, sort of loudly, spinning on one heel and hustling to the basement before he could protest. But in my haste I caught my foot on some unidentified object at the base of the stairs, pitched forward, and—yes—spectacularly took out whatever was in my path, namely a waist-high object that thumped hard on the carpet.
Perfect.
“Maggie?”
“I’m fine, Dad,” I yelled, totally annoyed now. Groping for purchase of my second casualty of the day, my hands bumped against familiar glassy plastic. An indefinable, complex emotion socked me in the gut.
My old keyboard.
I sat down hard on the floor, resting a palm on the instrument’s cellar-cooled plastic, where stickers of my favorite bands had been slapped every which way. Though it didn’t look the part, the keyboard had been the top of its class and I’d practiced it thusly, taking full advantage of all of its features. I’d thrust an arm into Mr. Hawthorne’s pieces, fishing around in the melody and then jerking out what had interested me, marrying it with the various synthesized effects that the keyboard offered.
I ran a finger along the stickers, seeing them vividly in my mind. Phantom Keys. The Dead Eddies. Drift District. Operation Scarce. A couple of Dad’s bands, too: Led Zeppelin, the Eagles. Feeling guilty for some reason, I pressed down on a key, which protested momentarily before it gave way with a tunk.
I didn’t know why I’d expected a note to sing out in the room. Surely the keyboard was unplugged. I ran an index finger down the flats and sharps until I found middle C. The pads of my fingers paused over the keys for only a moment, and then I played the song I’d tapped out earlier to Clarissa’s speech, my fingers reacting automatically to the twisty, knotty little melody that had run through my head while we’d been on the phone.
“Maggie?” Dad’s concern carried down the stairs.
I touched the stickers one last time, staggered to my feet, and then took off for the laundry room, leaving the keyboard exactly where it had fallen.
With Ben’s sudden disappearance from my life, loneliness crept in. Which was oddly reminiscent of my first couple months without my eyesight. Technically, I had lost my sight again—the small sliver I’d recovered, at least. I felt abandoned in some strange way, like life had decided I wasn’t worth the effort, and in all honesty, I sort of agreed. What’s worse, my parents were hardly ever home. Dad was working on a big case that kept him in the city until late at night, and Mom, in addition to her regular job, started coaching an evening soccer clinic, which meant that she spent even less time at home. I stayed up late, my bedroom door cracked open, listening for her to return.
Wondering whether she would.
Then on Wednesday afternoon, Clarissa called. At the time, I was in the kitchen with Gramps, trying to locate a slice of leftover pizza. Gramps was giving me the complete lowdown on his prostate issues, and I was thinking that if I had three wishes, two of them would be for him to stop talking about his prostate and the other one would be for more wishes, and then my phone rang. Plucking it out of my back pocket, I said hello, and by means of a greeting, Clarissa said, “You’re going to freak because I just found something out about the Big Secret and it’s really reliable and there’s only one other person out there who knows about it and cripes, Maggie, cripes!”
“Cripes!” I yelled, even though I’d never yelled that particular word once in my life. But in my defense, it was the only thing that seemed to fit.
“I have reason to believe there’s a concert tonight,” Clarissa said in a rush. “Right now I’m smack in the middle of cake-decorating class—worst timing ever—so I’m going to hang up and call Dad and ask him to pick me up early and bring me to your house because we have to figure out the Big Secret now. Maggie, we have to figure it out now now now.” And then she hung up.
Clarissa didn’t knock or anything when she arrived. She just burst through the front door, hollering my name. “Two things,” she said as we hustled down the hallway to my room. “First off, tell me you’ve downloaded-and-or-made-accessible the video from the last Loose Cannons concert. Please tell me you’ve done this. Please. Time is of the essence here. Time is tick-tick-ticking.”
“Yes,” I said as we stepped in my
room. “I mean, I keep it up on my computer, so yes.”
“Oh thank God,” she breathed. “So the other thing is that if we, by some great miracle, figure out the Big Secret today, we’ll need a ride. To the concert. My dad will be busy sawing out someone’s organs, so we are rideless unless you can get us a ride.”
“My grandpa can take us.”
“Perfect. Yes. That’s absolutely perfect.” All quiet and fast, she whispered, “Okay so here’s the deal: Remember that kid I told you about? Jase? My friend who knows Mason? Well, I guess Mason butt-dialed Jase today during a rehearsal, and Jase overheard some awfully interesting things.”
I swallowed. Butt-dialed by Mason Milton.
I would not think about Mason’s butt.
I would not.
I would not.
Yet, because I was weak and pathetic and generally irresponsible, there it was: the image of Mason’s butt. Followed by another image of Mason’s butt. Followed by another image of Mason’s butt. And so on and so forth.
I was completely out of control. I needed a padded cell or a straightjacket or some sort of medication that limited the amount of sheer idiocy that my mind produced.
Clarissa was still talking: “So at first the band is just playing, and then after a couple songs, Carlos starts complaining about how “singing the clue is lame” and about how “everyone is going to figure it out” and about how “tonight they have to be more careful.” She grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me. “You understand what this means, right? They sneak their clues into their songs. It’s genius.”
Three hours later we were side by side on my desk chair, squashed up against each other, listening to last week’s concert for the third time in a row. We had yet to hear any sort of clue. Clarissa, too wound up to concentrate any longer, sat next to me and lorded over her wristwatch, yelping about our elapsed time.
The One Thing Page 13
