Blind (12 page)

Jenna was screaming, “Aigh! Benj, no! I hate peas!”

“Just leave them on your plate, Jenna. Don’t scream,” our dad said.

“Benj is throwing them at me!”

“Benj!” my mom shouted. “Stop throwing peas at your sister! Eat your chicken!”

“Chicken meat has arsenic in it,” Sarah said. “We read an article about it in bio. It’s disgusting.” Most of us ignored her, but my dad was like, “Tell me about bio these days, Sarah.”

“I’m not throwing peas; I’m rolling them,” Benj said. My mom cleared her throat, and she must have thrown my dad a glance, because he laughed. Sarah hadn’t bothered to answer his question about bio. She just wanted to pick a fight.

“This is organic chicken, Sarah,” my mom said. She’s more easily provoked by Sarah than my dad.

“The arsenic is in the chicken feed,” Sarah told her. “All chickens eat it, even the lucky organic ones.”

“More challah! More challah!” Benj shouted. I was trying not to fret about the candles my mom had lit, thinking,
Dark is cool, light is hot,
even though nothing helps with the smell of heat. For the first six months after the accident, we used fake electronic candles, because the first time my mom lit the candles my face and hands went numb and I thought I was paralyzed. My dad said it was an anxiety attack, so we just stopped lighting fires in the house. This fall, we started lighting actual candles again. Leah or Logan sits with me and whispers candle updates.

Naomi was chattering about the story she’s writing at school, something about a warrior princess cheetah, and Jenna was singing “Oh, I Had a Little Chickie,” the way my mom taught us: “Oh I had a little chickie and she wouldn’t lay an egg, so I poured warm water up and down her leg. And the little chickie danced and the little chickie sang. And she laid a hard-boiled egg. Bang, bang.” She had to add the bangs to make it rhyme, because it’s supposed to go, “So I poured hot water up and down her leg. And the little chickie cried and the little chickie begged. And the little chickie laid a hard-boiled egg.” Yet another pathetic attempt to hide the hideousness of the world from us.

Naomi refused to eat her chicken. Benj started crying because he didn’t want to eat anything other than challah. Then Jenna and Naomi had a fight over who was hogging the saltshaker. Sarah’s phone rang and she answered it and stood up, and my mom started bossing her furiously because we’re not allowed to take phone calls at dinner, and I seized the beautiful moment to say, quietly, “So I think I’m gonna sleep at Logan’s tomorrow,” into the air.

Both my parents froze like I’d stun-gunned them. My mom immediately forgot Sarah’s infraction and turned the scalding beam of her attention toward me.

She smoothed out her voice like a bedsheet. “Did Logan’s mom say that was okay?”

“It’s fine, Mrs. S.,” Logan said, and she cleverly took a big, wet, crispy bite of salad, to win my parents over. Because watching kids eat salad puts grown-ups in an unconsciously good mood. It makes them feel like civilization will continue after they die. Something biological, I mean, which is why watching us eat junk food makes them hysterical; it gives them the feeling that we’ll all be obese heart-attack victims and the human race will die out either with them or—if we eat enough “crap,” as my mom calls it—before them.

“Well, it’s okay with me, then,” my mom said. “Robert?”

My dad cleared his throat. “You’ll take Spark?”

“Of course,” I said.

“And you’ll call if you need anything?”

I sighed. “Yes, Dad.”

“And Logan’s mother will be home?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Fine then,” he said, and I heard him put his hands against the table, as if he were bracing himself for the impact of letting me spend a night out of the house.

“Just give us a call to let us know you’re all right at some point during the night, okay?” my mom said. “And it’s so cold out. Do you want me to drive you?”

“No thanks, Mom. We’ll walk.”

I haven’t slept at Logan’s—or anyone else’s house—since the accident. I was impressed that my parents didn’t insist on convening a meeting about it; that they didn’t have to talk it over “privately,” while we all secretly listened, first. Or maybe they had their conversation in a series of glances at each other—the kind that used to annoy me. Maybe I don’t get as much as I used to. But whatever. I could go to Logan’s, and therefore to our meeting at the Mayburg place.

The fact that my accident happened with them one foot away is sometimes lost on my parents. They’ve had this feeling ever since that if they’re just nearby all the time, nothing bad will ever happen to me again, but it’s totally irrational. I mean, I was standing right in front of my dad, leaning back into him, when it happened. He still had his hands on my shoulders.

• • •

Spark and I were giddy on the walk to Logan’s. He galloped along and I kept up, the rubber bulb of my white cane finding sticks and wet November leaves and sidewalk cracks and the shoreline, the edge of the grass. It smelled just right, the hint of winter around a corner.

Maybe because the night was unfolding so deliciously in front of us, I felt as good as I have in forever, kind of extra human. Like a cartoon hero with sidekicks and special powers or something, my bones and my ears and mind and dog and stick doing the work my eyes used to think they were doing. Work they weren’t necessarily doing all that well on their own. I wish I felt that way more often. Lots of kids at Briarly hate their canes, and some kids, like Seb, fake that they’re not blind. But I can’t do that. And I sometimes like the way my white cane feels, the noise it makes, the way it finds things for me. I like it folded neatly in my bag; like to unfold it, feel its parts snap together, the rope inside go taut. It’s part of me, like Spark.

Logan jingled her keys as we approached her door, and I bent down to give Spark a kiss. He nuzzled me back with his wet nose. He doesn’t like Logan’s place, because her mom keeps millions of plants and it smells green and loamy, which makes Spark think we’re outside, so he gets disoriented. I also dislike places that smell wrong.

“Mom?” Logan called out.

“I’m downstairs!” her mom shouted, and I heard shoes on the backless wooden stairs that lead up from Logan’s basement. We used to do chemistry experiments down there, and when I heard her mom coming up, I remembered vividly, in full-color 3-D, adding borax to boiling water, stirring to dissolve it, and then squeezing out drops of red food coloring. The way that fake blood bloomed came back into my mind so brightly it was almost more beautiful than it had been when I could actually see it. I tried to hold the image.

“Emma!” Logan’s mom said, high-pitched, excited. It was only then that I smelled food. I hadn’t noticed it when we came in. I don’t like it when what I smell or hear feels random or disorderly. Logan’s mom said, “I made spaghetti and meatballs!”

“Oh!” I said. “Thank you.” Spaghetti and meatballs was my favorite when Logan and I were in first grade, and her mom has remembered it forever, even though I actually stopped eating meat three years ago, after my parents took us to a farm and I saw some chickens snuggling each other and realized that chickens are actually just people, except bumpier and smaller and covered with feathers. They snuggle their family members, is what I’m saying, and that was enough for me—I could never eat anybody’s body again, even a chicken’s. But I made Logan swear not to tell her mom, because once I didn’t mention it the first time and instead made a huge deal about how great her meatballs were (and hid them under my napkin and threw them out later), it was already too late. Now I’d rather toss some meatballs to Spark once every few years than have Logan’s mom realize I’ve been lying to her for years about the giant balls of ground-up flesh she feeds me.

“Thank you, Ms. F.,” I said. I kicked my Converse off and felt my way to Logan’s room, which is smaller than Naomi’s and my room, and which she has described to me so many times I feel like I can still see it. Every time Logan changes a poster, she tells me, so I’ll still know what her room looks like. She does it as much for herself as for me, but I don’t mind.

“I put up that picture of us. From the first week back? On the field?” she said. I closed the door behind me and sat on her bed, felt Spark relax and curl up next to me.

“What picture?”

“One Trey took on his phone. It’s super cute of you—you’re leaning your head back and your hair looks especially dark in the sun and your glasses are perfectly balanced on your face and you’re laughing. You look amazing, and you have my lipstick on—remember I put X-S on both of us? Anyway, I’m right next to you, looking over at you. I’ll give you a copy. And I posted it on Facebook so everyone can see how hot we are.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Um, Em, do you mind going up to my mom’s room with me, just for a little bit?”

“Of course not,” I said.

We sat in Logan’s mom’s room while she was getting ready to go out, because Logan likes to, even though we’re too old and it always ends up making Logan feel bad. She can’t resist; there’s some magnetic pull between her and her mom. Whenever her mom is in the house, Logan slides and drags and races, almost against her own will, toward her. Probably she just wants to spend as much time as she can with her mom. So they chatted about dresses her mom might wear, and the whole room had a silvery feeling, the glittery clicking of her heels and the smell of her perfume, which was sweet and sharp, nothing like my mom’s. My mom smells like shampoo and bread, and she’s soft when she hugs you. Logan’s mom is skinny, and if she hugs you, you can feel her breasts like they’re attached to her bones, olives-on-a-toothpick style. She came over and told me to touch a dress. It was crunchy and awful, and she laughed when she saw my face.

“You’re right, Emma,” she said. “It’s synthetic and itchy.” She changed, and when she came back, in a blaze of perfume, the next dress was so silky it felt cold.

“I like that one,” I told her, but Logan didn’t like it, said it looked too much like a nightie.

Her mom laughed: a metal sound of money, coins touching each other in a pocket.

“That’s the idea,” she said to Logan, which made Logan unhappy, and her mom must have noticed, because she added, “I’ll wear a little bolero over it, of course,” and I heard Logan breathe in a bored way, and then she stood up from the bed and I sank.

“We’re gonna eat now, Mom,” Logan said, and she paused for a minute, waiting for me, before starting out of the room. I bounced up off the bed, relieved.

“Let me come down and get your dinner on the table before I head out,” her mom said, and followed us down the stairs. Then she put pasta on plates for us, heated it up, and left for her date. The night felt deep blue and cool, and Logan and I sat at the table, eating noodles and tossing meatballs down to Spark.

“You okay?” I asked Logan. I could hear her moving food around on her plate, almost rhythmically.

“Yeah,” she said. She stood up, cleared our plates, and ran some water over them in the sink, and then we went back to her room to get ready for our meeting at the Mayburg place.

“It would be nice if—” she started, and then cut herself off.

“If,” I repeated gently, thinking maybe she just didn’t want to finish whatever it was.

“Whatever,” she said. “Nice if I had to sneak out, I guess. It’s not a big deal. I was just thinking how your parents have two hundred kids, but they’re still all like, ‘Don’t freeze to death, and call and check in,’ and if they knew my mom was gone they wouldn’t let you stay over in a million years. And my mom only has me, but she didn’t even—”

I cut her off, knowing she’d feel bad in a minute and say something kind about her mom. “That’s because I was blinded in an accident and my parents can never forgive themselves.”

“I know,” she said. “My mom is great. It’s not that bad. It’s not like I’m that unlucky or she’s doing a horrible job or whatever.”

I felt a stab of pain for Logan. “Your mom
is
great,” I said, tasting the faint, purple, fake-grape taste of the lie in my mouth. Maybe learning to lie to Logan was part of growing up. And even though I didn’t want to keep doing it, didn’t mean to, for some reason I couldn’t stop.

“Yeah,” she said, and then we were both quiet, agreeing in our silence to pretend this was true.

I hadn’t been
to the statue since my accident, and maybe Logan sensed my fear, because she held my hand the whole way there and didn’t drop it even when we arrived and heard Trey Brighton’s voice. I could hardly believe they were there waiting for us, for our meeting, but they were. Everyone used to hang out on Lake Street at night, but since Claire there are always adults present: Officers Crag or Muscan, the town cops, or someone’s parents. It’s almost as if there’s some weird, unspoken law in the town that we can’t be left alone. Because we might kill ourselves. The only difference it makes is that if you’re going to drink, you have to do it in someone’s basement before you come hang out at the statue. There’s never been much to do in Sauberg; everyone always just went “downtown” and wandered around looking for other kids who were also wandering around looking for other kids who were also . . . you get the point. Like most towns, I think. And now we still do that. One of the weirdest things about being alive—being me, especially—is how much stays the same. Even when everything has changed.

“Hey, guys,” Logan said, a shimmer in her voice, probably because Trey was there.

“Hi, Lo. Hey, Emma,” Zach Haze said. So he was the one Trey had been talking to.

“Hi, Zach,” I said. Then, as if we were doing a cheesy dance number in a musical, we all turned and headed together toward the woods.

The walk wasn’t as terrible as I thought it was going to be, except for the part along the highway, cars whipping by, the wind they created almost knocking me down. I was terrified that Spark would get hit; I could not live a single day without him. I tried to listen to the traffic and also hear the conversation. I’ve learned how to pick words out of the stream, and I know everyone’s voice from everyone else’s in a way that’s almost impossible to describe. There’s a weird clarity to it—like each voice is a ribbon, stretched out, glittering, unique in its color, depth, variety. I hear them like hearing is seeing. Trey has a purple voice, low and dark and deep, and he was talking over the traffic about how his brother had tickets to this upcoming Cannons concert that was going to be so badass that they were holding it at Sable Arena in the city because no other venue could possibly accommodate such massive throngs of people, and his brother had apparently slept outside the night before tickets went on sale so he could wake up and buy the first ten that were available, because ten was the limit you could buy so they could discourage scalping. But radio stations and super-rich people had vouchers so they could buy fifty, which was total bullshit, but his brother had three extra tickets and blah blah.

“I love the Cannons!” Logan said, a little too loud, right into an unlikely moment of silence in Trey’s endless rock ’n’ roll monologue. Her pale, naked words hung in the air, shivering. I was getting my brave on to say something bland, anything, to unembarrass Logan, but before I had a chance to choke out, “Yeah, the Cannons are cool,” Zach’s molten voice flowed out: “Me too. How about two of the tickets for Logan and me? I’ll buy them from you.”

Something tumbled down from my chest, past my stomach, and into my feet, maybe whatever boring words I’d been about to say. I felt like I might sink to the core of the earth. Logan tried to save me. “Aren’t there three? Emma, you like them, too, right? Why don’t we all go?” No one said anything.

The night was getting colder, the air so damp I could feel it chill my skin and hair. All the channels of my mind clogged with a thick, slushy feeling about Zach. It’s a big deal in our school if someone asks you out alone. It essentially makes you instant boyfriend/girlfriend. Hooking up doesn’t, but if you go out on an actual date with someone else, everyone knows and makes fun of you and you might as well get married.

We began to slow down, and I could hear the heaviness of the trees as they thickened at the side of the road. The leaves had fallen and the dense smell of winter seemed to originate in the woods. Fear slowly took over my misery about Zach. Spark nuzzled his way into the trees, because I was directing him that way, but then he lifted his head and turned back to me, whimpering a little, as if to ask, Are you serious? Are we actually going in here, and if so, why?

Josh Winterberg and Zach and Trey got up in front, shone flashlights, and cleared a path for us in the branches, which we powered through. Logan took my hand again and walked in front of me, leading me. I tried not to cry. Spark was panting, and my heart rattled around in my rib cage. We walked for five or six minutes in silence, listening to the branches snap under our feet, pushing leaves and twigs out of our faces. I had another floating moment—imagined suddenly that I was my own mom, watching me, and I felt an opaque, climbing fear; thought,
What is
she
doing in the woods at night? Will she trip? Will she get hurt?
But then it went away, and I was me again, stumbling along with Spark, smelling the rotting wood of the Mayburg place, and we were there. Trey and Zach were arguing over who would go in first; they both wanted to, maybe because they were competing for who could impress Logan the most.

But then once we were inside, Trey said, “Oh man, why didn’t we just do this at someone’s house, with all of our parents there?” and we laughed, relieved. I thought it was cute that he was willing to be a huge public chicken. I would never have admitted how scared I was.

“What time is it?” Logan asked him, in her lavender voice.

“Nine fifty-two,” Trey said, which I thought was flirty because it was so specific. But maybe he’s the kind of guy who’s so detailed and controlling that he can’t just be like, “Ten of ten,” or, “Nine fifty”; he has to have his fifty-two exact. Maybe I just wanted Trey to like Logan back so there was no chance of her and Zach falling in love.

Whatever Trey was thinking about Logan, I wanted to be her, and hated myself. A yellow envy was tearing at me, and I saw it in my mind, like a mouth full of wolf teeth. If I couldn’t be Logan, then why not Blythe Keene? Or anyone other than me? Well, anyone except Claire.

Logan touched my shoulder. “We have a few minutes. Maybe we should set up a little bit.”

“Set what up?” I asked, more sharply than I’d meant to. I was feeling around in the dark, unable to make out anything.

“You know,” she said. “Find things to sit on, make a kind of circle, get all the flashlights and lanterns on, that kind of thing. Shit. This place is hell on earth. What was I thinking?” So maybe we were all going to admit how afraid we were. I liked the idea. I hung back with Spark while everyone else banged random, noisy, broken things into a circle.

“Shit!” Logan said again. “What was that?”

“Mice, probably,” I said, with my brave metal voice on. Spark was breathing fast, like he was scared, or hunting, or worried for me. I petted his head, but he kept on with the barbed breaths.

“This place is perfect,” Josh said. I thought this must be his way of compensating for his tragic nerdiness and, probably, fear.

“Perfect for what?” Trey asked. “A horror movie?” Trey was too confident to have to hide his babyishness.

Just then there was a banging sound and we all jumped ten feet, in sync, as if we had been choreographed by terror. Blythe Keene came into the room, laughing. I listened for information about the guy she’d brought.

“This is Dima, you guys,” she said in an exhale-y way. I smelled cigarette smoke, wondered when Blythe had started smoking. It was possible that she had always smoked; it’s not like I had hung out with her on the weekends since we were kids.

“Hey,” Dima said. She didn’t go to Lake Main, and I had never heard her voice.

“Oh my god!” Blythe said then, in her minty, twinkling way, the inimitable popular-girl inflection I had learned to recognize even more after the accident. It was like, no matter how few syllables were in a word, she could break it up into tons of them, and make the sounds of the word climb hills, duck into valleys, move all over the map. She reminded me of Ariel’s voice in
The Little Mermaid
, every note bursting with want. Blythe has this huge appetite and sometimes it seems like the world exists just to feed her. And to want her back.

“This is horrifying,” she said. “What are we doing here?” Her friend Dima laughed again, and in her laugh I heard a puff of smoke.

“We’re having a get-together,” Logan said in a crunchy voice that was like salt on sidewalk ice. “Please sit.”

“You guys may be having a get-together,” Blythe said. “I’m having a heart attack. Here, Deem, you sit here.” She must have pulled something over for Dima to sit on, because I heard it scrape along the floor. Spark whined uneasily, while Trey Brighton laughed louder than was necessary, maybe to show how charming he found Blythe, and then shuffled toward her voice. I heard Logan inhale like something had given her physical pain, and Blythe said, utterly indifferently, “Thanks, Trey.” I didn’t know what she was thanking him for. A box to sit on? A backrub? An offer of undying love?

Logan sat me down next to her on a single milk crate. I reached out to feel for it, and she said, “Not a germ on it.”

Then Blythe was like, “Hey, Deem, can I bum another one?”

And to my amazement, Logan chimed in, “Me too?”

When Logan flicked the lighter right next to me, the sound and fuel smell made me flinch with fear. Then Lo sucked in noisily, maybe so everyone would know it wasn’t her first cigarette ever. It was her third. I knew because she and I had smoked our first one together in her backyard when we were twelve; I stole it from Sarah’s purse, after I found out she was smoking. Logan and I put on lipstick and practiced posing like movie stars with the cigarette. We took some pictures, but then we deleted them because we were so dramatic about “oh my god, what if our parents found out we smoked a cigarette?” Now I’m pretty sure they would have laughed, but at the time it felt important to think we were doing something criminally dangerous. Logan had smoked her second cigarette in California the time she got her period. She was feeling wild on her solo maxi-pad run, and apparently as she walked to the drugstore, some guy who lived in her dad’s building was outside smoking and he offered her one. When she told me the story, she reverted to the Logan she’d been when he asked her, because she was like, “I just had to have a smoke, you know?”

“Are you ready?” Logan whispered to me as Amanda, Deirdre, Carl Muscan, and David Sarabande came in. Logan smelled like smoke, unfamiliar, scary. Logan and Zach and I were sitting next to each other, with Spark at our feet. The room quieted down and Logan nudged me.

“So, um,” I started, “thanks for showing up, you guys. Obviously this is kind of a weird and crazy time to be meeting, and a weird, you know, place.” My sunglasses were sliding down my nose, and I pushed them back up. “So, the reason we wanted to get together—well, there are a couple, actually, and, well . . . here.” I reached into my pocket, unfolded my notes, and ran my fingers over them. “We wanted to talk, you know, try to figure out what’s going on around us, and maybe, I don’t know, try to figure out some way to have some control. Over our lives, I mean.” The room was scarily quiet.

Then Blythe Keene asked, “Why?” into the stillness. There was no color or music in her voice anymore, no cartoon.

“Why what?” I asked.

“Why are we meeting like this, if it’s just to talk?”

“Lots of reasons,” I said, just like I had planned to, since I had known this question would come up. I hadn’t expected it so soon, or from Blythe Keene. Her being the one to ask made it harder to answer, but also more urgent. I said, “Mainly because of Claire. Since she was, you know, one of us, and we were just feeling like, well, no one’s really said why she . . .”

There was a collective surge in the room’s pulse. I felt our chests tighten and our breath get short. There was a dead girl among us, and we had done nothing to save her. I didn’t have to explain this, it was obvious, but I had chosen to make it explicit by inviting everyone and speaking her name in a dark, abandoned house near the beach where she’d washed up. I broke an unspoken rule: that we weren’t going to admit, at least not in a giant group, that Claire’s suicide was our fault, that we hadn’t done enough, and still weren’t doing enough. Were we really just going to lean back into the story of her drug-induced “accident” and relax for the rest of our lives until another one of us died? Didn’t we have to know what it was to avoid it? But sometimes making everyone face what you’ve all already been thinking is just as dangerous as saying something new, unknown. Because admitting the truth locks it into the world in a terrifying way.

“Uh. I’m having trouble following the bouncing ball here,” Trey said. “What do you mean, exactly?” He just wanted to be on Blythe’s side, but wasn’t even sure what side that was.

Zach spoke up quickly, rare for him. “We just mean if what had happened to Claire had happened to one of us, we would want the rest of us to talk about it, figure it out, be honest about it in some way that it doesn’t feel like anyone’s being.”

I was more in love than ever.

“For one thing, shouldn’t we all be trying to make sure nothing like this happens again?” Logan added. “I mean, maybe if we have an actual conversation about what’s going on, we can figure out how to protect each other.” She sounded amazing, like a warrior pumping her fist in the air, eyes flashing. I was really proud of her, even though I’d wanted to say that part myself. I wanted to speak next, too, but I was still out of breath from having talked first. I tried to channel Leah, dug around for some of her words. I’d been storing them up for so long, and if not for this, then for what? But I came up blank.

“What
is
going on?” Amanda Boughman asked. “I mean, if we were going to ‘tell the truth’ or whatever?”

“And do we not know because no one knows? Or just because no one wants to tell us?” Zach added.

“I agree,” David Sarabande said. “It’s some real bullshit.”

I ran my fingers over the notes again, mainly for comfort.

Josh Winterberg noticed, because he said, “It’s cool you can read in the dark.”