by Beth Vrabel
“What issue?” I asked, as all around us kids settled into their seats. Miss Singer motioned for me to stay put in front of the room.
“Don’t worry,” Jocelyn whispered as she settled into the seat in front of me. “Miss Singer means well. It’s just that she used to be a kindergarten teacher.”
“Oh,” I said, too shocked that Jocelyn was actually speaking to me to think of anything clever to say. (Oh. It’s not even a word. It’s just a letter with another pity letter tacked on, trying to make a noise into a real word.) I sat down in the seat to the right of her.
“Um, that’s my seat.” A tall kid with floppy brown hair and ruddy face pointed to the chair I was sitting in. His voice was surprisingly deep, like a frog croaking, considering his skinny body.
“Oh, sorry.” But I was slow to stand, not wanting to move away from Jocelyn. I thought about Alice, how she had admitted that the only reason she really sought me out at first was because I was easy to spot with my red hair. Maybe I just wanted to be around Jocelyn because she was the only person here who had actually seemed friendly. But just then I took a deep breath, ready to sigh and move away. When I did, I breathed in the soft powdery flower smell of her hair. Nope. Not just because she was nice. Because I was hard-core crushing on this girl.
Apparently so was floppy-haired-seat-reclaimer. “I sit next to Jocelyn,” he said, a little louder. Two panicky red blotches appeared on his cheeks. Guess I wasn’t vacating the seat fast enough.
“Logan!” Miss Singer snapped from across the room. “I’m giving our new student that seat. You can sit here now.” She pointed to an empty seat in the back of the room. It was next to a chubby girl with greasy hair who was actively digging in her ears. I shuddered as she took off her glasses and used the arm of it to reach farther into the ear canal. She sucked the glob of wax off the tip.
Logan must’ve been watching, too, because when I turned back around those two splotches on his face had bled into a full-fired face of fury. He shook his head at me and stomped off to the back of the room. Great. Add Logan to the growing list of people who hated me—and I’d only been in school for just under an hour.
Jocelyn laughed beside me like she could hear my thoughts.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head, still laughing. “It’s just—you sure do make new friends fast, huh?”
I laughed back. “How long have you lived next door to Gramps?”
“All my life. He’s awesome, isn’t he?”
“Gramps? You and I have different definitions of awesome.”
“Oh, come on!” Jocelyn leaned forward, resting her hands under her chin. She pulled the sleeves of her shirt down so they were stretched up to her knuckles. Her dark hair swung forward, covering the rest of her hands. “Mr. Raymond’s the best. He’s the only person who gives out full-sized candy bars on Halloween. I didn’t trick-or-treat one year … I didn’t want to …” Jocelyn twisted the ends of her shirt sleeves in her hands. “But your grandpa, he knew how much I loved candy. So he came over in costume and hand-delivered it to my house.”
“My gramps? Wait—he wasn’t dressed up like a pony, was he?”
Jocelyn grinned. “No, he was a duck. I think he called himself Disco Duck, but I’m pretty sure it was a Donald Duck costume. He has a spot-on Donald voice, too.”
I leaned back in the chair, crossing my arms over my chest. A memory tugged at me, a dream of a duck talking to me in the hospital after my surgery.
“Huh,” I said. “That surprises me. I would’ve thought he’d be all over the trick part of trick-or-treat.”
“Oh, he was!” A smile tugged at her lips. “He made me pull his finger first.”
“No way.” I shook my head. “That’s wrong.” Gramps had gotten me to pull his finger exactly once. I think I was three. I tugged on his finger and bam! Gross grandpa fart erupted out of him.
Jocelyn laughed behind her fingers. “He gave me the Fartinator, too.”
“The what?”
“The Fartinator,” she said. “You know, a little remote control with buttons for different fart sounds. And I got a full-sized candy bar.”
I was pretty sure I had gotten the full force of a genuine Gramps release when I was three. “Doesn’t sound like much of a joke, really,” I said. “Kind of lame.”
Jocelyn shrugged and opened a notebook as Miss Singer called out for the class to quiet. Homeroom, which was really just a quick attendance, slid right into biology class with all the same students after the bell. I was relieved I wouldn’t have to search for another classroom. That is, until Miss Singer nodded to me in a we’ll-address-you-soon sort of way.
“I think your gramps is funny,” Jocelyn said during the break. “The Fartinator made me laugh so hard I cried.” She pressed her lips together, like she was tasting a thought another few seconds before speaking. I noticed that she pulled on the edges of her sleeves—already pulled down to her fingers—until her hands all but disappeared inside of them. Even quieter than before, she breathed, “It’s nice to just laugh, even if it is at something as stupid as a Fartinator. Everyone around me is always so serious, so careful with me.”
The room quieted down as other kids followed suit and pulled out notebooks and pencils. I knew I shouldn’t—I mean, she made it pretty clear that the conversation was over by hunching over her notebook. And Lash Boy made it crystal clear that I should back off getting to know Jocelyn. But I couldn’t resist leaning into the gap between our desks. She looked so sad suddenly. I thought maybe she wished she had swallowed that last sentence she spoke instead.
“You know,” I whispered, “I’m pretty funny, too.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jocelyn didn’t look up from her notes but she did tilt her chin a little in my direction.
“I bet I can make you laugh.”
Jocelyn shrugged.
I jumped as Miss Singer’s hand landed on my shoulder. She motioned for me to stand. “All right, class,” she boomed. “We have a new student.”
“Ryder!” I cut in before she could introduce me as Richie Ryder.
Miss Singer put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. Her eyes were wide and blinking, and she pressed her lips together. Giving my shoulder another awkward squeeze, she turned to the class. “Now, friends,” she said, “I’d like you all to welcome Rich—I mean, Ryder—to our class.”
She looked at the class as though she really thought they’d all chant welcome. From the way Miss Singer’s potato face crumpled inward, I think she really was missing teaching kindergarteners.
In the same drawn-out, let’s-share-our-feelings voice, my teacher continued, “Ryder is here from a school in South Carolina called Addison School for the Blind.” Slight pause to acknowledge the whiplash effect of her words—kids suddenly straightened up in their seats, squinting as they stared at my heated face.
Someone said, “What the—?”
Miss Singer raised the hand not wrapped around me. “Being a new student is tough, isn’t it?” she crooned. “It’s even harder when you’re differently abled. Let’s all put on our compassion hats”—I swear, she actually mimed putting on an invisible hat—“and give our warmest welcome to Richie Ryder.”
“It’s just Ryder,” I mumbled.
“Any questions or comments?” Miss Singer continued.
This was it. I could just stand there like the doofus Gramps set me up to be, stared at like one of Mom’s bugs, lobbed questions I didn’t feel like answering. Or, I could stop this right now, Ryder style. Jocelyn raised an eyebrow like she had heard my internal debate.
I raised my hand.
Miss Singer’s little eyes popped. “No, sweetie,” she said slowly. “The questions are for the class about you.”
“I have a question for the class, though,” I replied. I took a deep breath and nodded to myself like I was really considering sharing something deep. I let my eye sweep across the room, knowing everyone’s gaze would snag on Artie. Then I asked, “What did the o
ne-eyed pirate say to the captain?”
“Excuse me?”
“Eye, Captain.” No one moved. Jocelyn’s eyes widened, but no one laughed. “Instead of Aye-aye? Get it?” Someone in the back groaned. “All right, not my finest. What did the cavemen call the one-eyed dinosaur?” Now a couple people grinned. “DoYouThinkItSawUs.” A laugh erupted out of the girl with the ear wax, so hard it sounded like she was choking. Or maybe she actually was choking. I took it as encouragement.
I rocked on my heels, firing out another one before Miss Singer could turn her potatoey grunts into words. “Where should the five-hundred-pound one-eyed monster go?”
“Where?” Jocelyn called out softly.
“On a diet.” A few people kind of laughed. I took off my glasses and wiped at one of the lenses with the edge of my shirt. I cupped them in my hand, getting ready for the grand finale.
Miss Singer, voice stern, said, “I don’t think this is appropriate—”
I cut her off, determined to reach the big finish. “Right, right, of course. It’s been super inappropriate. Here’s the deal: I have low vision in my left eye, about twenty-seventy acuity instead of twenty-twenty like the rest of you. And my right eye is plastic. I think what Miss Singer hoped to say was that it’d be great if you all “—pause while I brought my fingers up to Artie—” kept an eye out for me.” And pop! I held my eye in my hand over my head.
A few kids laughed. One even hooted. But most kind of groaned. Sadly, Jocelyn was not among the laughers. She smiled and shook her head. “I thought it’d be round,” she said.
I laughed. “Yeah,” I said, flipping it around in my hands. “Most people think that.” Actually it’s kind of like a super thick, super big contact lens. Sort of oblong and flattish. I heard a couple more huhs but no laughs. Tough crowd, I guess.
I was a little surprised when a second later, as I was popping my eye back into place, everyone started buzzing. Suddenly Jocelyn rushed toward me, arms out. I stupidly raised mine, too. Like maybe she finally thought everything I had said was hilarious and was literally throwing herself at me. But she wasn’t. She was throwing herself toward Miss Singer, beside me, who tumbled forward, out cold.
Yep. I made my biology teacher pass out.
“Wow,” said the kid whose seat I had stolen. “She didn’t even squirm when we had to dissect the frogs last year.”
“Yeah,” someone else said, “or the fetal pigs.”
“Oh man,” I muttered. Killing the teacher was not the way to impress girls and make friends. I shimmied my way in so that I could make sure Miss Singer was breathing. Her eyes moved back and forth behind closed lids. “I think she’s waking!”
Slowly Miss Singer’s eyes opened. And there I was, smack dab in front of her, staring at her with a lifeless eye. “Aaargh,” she groaned, and passed out again.
Awesome.
Chapter Five
Know what’s even worse than making your bio teacher pass out on your first day?
Having your crazy-pants grandpa pick your electives.
After homeroom and bio, I couldn’t quite make out the abbreviation on my schedule for my next class. The letters were QLT and the room number started with a zero, meaning it was in the basement.
QLT? What could that possibly stand for?
I trudged down the stairs, getting plowed over by about fifty kids, still trying to figure out which class I was heading to. The whole eighth grade had electives for second period. I saw some poor fool dash by in a swimming suit and goggles. Another kid was toting an enormous canvas painting up the stairs. Everyone seemed in a super hurry to get where they were going. And weirdly, every single one of them was going up the stairs. I was the lone guppy going downstream in a river of salmon heading up.
“Oh, come on!” I yelled as yet again I was pushed into the railing.
“Wrong way!” someone snapped as she literally tried to walk through me. I pressed against the wall. Hate to say it, but man, I missed Addison. Everyone was so laid back there. Hallways were for casual conversations. For fist-bumping your buddy and making plans to catch up at lunch. Not this determined mosh pit. And let’s just say it, there is a serious dearth of proper deodorizing going on among our age group. Seriously, ten quick swipes per pit, people. It’s not that tough.
“Well, I have to go down! Not everyone can go up all the time!” I yelled back over my shoulder at the girl who had tried to pass straight through me.
When I turned back around, there was yet another person directly in front of me. I put my hands up to push this person back and at the exact same moment, for some reason I still don’t get, I knew—just knew—what QLT stood for.
Quantum Leap Theory.
That had to be it. Gramps was a genius.
Here’s a little trip down memory lane. Don’t forget that in this moment, I’m trapped, spine squashed against the railing in a torrent of smelly middle-schoolers, but the mind is a magnificent thing capable of, in one second, reflecting on an entire memory. That’s just what happened in that second. I was flooded with a memory. It was back when I was seven, right after I had been diagnosed. I remember that Mom and Dad cried a lot, but I wasn’t really all that nervous. I mean, the doctors told us that my one eye had to be removed, but I still had the other one. Plus, I couldn’t see much out of that bad eye anyway, so it didn’t seem like a huge deal. Not for me, anyway. Mom and Dad on the other hand … Mom kept taking pictures of me. The tumors behind the eye made it look white in the flash, so she kept erasing the digital image and snapping another. “I just want one normal picture,” she said. I don’t know why I remember that so clearly, except that Mom sort of freaked out a little after saying it. Her face looked like paper, all crumpled up into itself.
She left the hospital room and it was just me and Gramps. I didn’t know him super well, so I sort of jumped back when he dumped the bag he had been carrying around on the bed. It was a little travel movie player and a DVD. “It’s the complete first season of Quantum Leap,” he said, as though I had asked.
“Huh?” I said and picked up the DVD. There was a picture of a dorky man in a shiny leather jacket with, like, flames or lasers or something surrounding him.
Gramps sighed, grabbed the DVD, and put it into the player. The chair screeched as he yanked it over to settle next to my bed. “Richie, I’m going to tell you the honest truth. They’re going to cut out your eye.”
“I know,” I said, but I remember being shocked a bit at the word “cut.” I mean, I had guessed that much already but Mom and Dad kept using the word “remove” instead of cut. The doctors called it “the procedure.”
“And there are a couple tumors behind your other eye.”
I nodded. Most kids who have the type of cancer I did—retinoblastoma—only have it in one eye. If they’re unlucky enough to have it in both eyes, most of the time that’s because it’s hereditary—something that runs in their family. Me? I’m unlucky and odd. I have no hereditary reason for having retinoblastoma but I somehow managed to have it in both eyes. The good news was that a type of radiation, or sort of laser-like treatment, killed the tumors behind my left eye. But the right eye had to go. More good news was that since it wasn’t hereditary, it probably wouldn’t ever come back. I was supposed to get scanned for it every year, just in case, though. (A part of my magnificent mind paused mid-memory and took note that I was due for one of those checkups.)
Anyway, Gramps still wasn’t telling me anything new.
“Well, if those know-it-all docs weren’t able to get rid of those tumors like they thought and you’re already getting one eye yanked, we’ve got a limited amount of time to show you all the things you need to know. Things like how to be a man.” He pressed play on the movie player.
“This show’s going to tell me how to be a man?” I asked.
“Of course not. Cah, cah, cah. A lifetime of perfect vision wouldn’t show you that. Being in the hospital, awaiting your surgery, that’s no time for such an undertaking.”
Gramps rooted around in his pockets, pulling out candy bars and sweets. “Richie, this is a ridiculous series about a man who ends up in a different body all the time, sailing through time and space. It’s probably the stupidest premise that ever was. But it was big in the late eighties and now it’s on sale on at Walmart in the five-ninety-nine bin.”
“Why are we watching it, then?” I remember asking.
“It’s that or sit here, thinking about how you’re down one, maybe two eyes.”
“Oh.”
Gramps handed me some red licorice when I started to cry. “That’s being a man,” he said. “Facing the facts and moving through them. Now, dry up. I want to watch at least three episodes before you go pirate on me. Cah, cah, cah.”
So we watched the ridiculous show. And I have to admit, I sort of loved it. I even begged my parents to buy me a leather jacket and everything a few months later.
QLT.
Quantum Leap Theory.
You forgot where I was, didn’t you? Squashed in the hallway, almost late for what I just discovered was an incredibly amazing class, remember? I had just put up my hands to push back against whoever was about to shove me over the railing when a soft, mildly amused voice said, “Hey, hands down.”
“Jocelyn,” I breathed.
“What are you doing trying to go downstairs?” she said, glossing over the totally geeky, shameless way I had just said her name. Up close like this, I could see freckles sprinkled across her nose and cheeks. My freckles? They were more like splattered paint than a sprinkle.
“I have to get to class!” I shoved my schedule at her. She squinted at where I pointed. “Look what Gramps signed me up for! I take back anything bad I ever said about the old fart. He’s a genius! And now I’m going to be late, since no one will let me go downstairs.”
