Blind (15 page)

Before Logan could press me further about the pen, or ask what Mr. Hawes had been doing with my stylus, or talk about the Mayburg place meeting we were cooking up for right after Thanksgiving, someone screamed “Boo!” and I was so startled that my teeth chattered.

“You’re an asshole, Chad,” Logan said, and I heard her hand fly out and smack somebody. Chad Andrews, I assumed. Logan has a beautiful life. When guys make fun of me, or threaten me, she sees it first and beats the shit out of them. She gets to throw the skateboards down the trash chute and smack Chad Andrews. What would it feel like to be the one protecting her? And how could I have thought Logan would ever be jealous of me? What did I have? A pen?

• • •

I had to tell my mom about Mrs. Fincter’s project over Thanksgiving, because I haven’t started and the class has met roughly two million times since we got the assignment. My mom was wearing Baby Lily and roasting a turkey. The smell of the cooking bird was like noise for me, hot and complicated. As soon as I told my mom about the assignment, she asked Leah to watch the oven and took me to her studio in the backyard.

It was sharp and cold and quiet in there, a giant relief from the house. It smelled good, like glue and turpentine. My mom was so thrilled she could hardly contain herself. She set Baby Lily in this swing she has, with plush seafood rotating over her head. The thing clicks and rocks and plays tinfoil lullabies. Benj once identified the creatures for me, because after squeezing them myself, the only one I guessed correctly was the octopus.

“You knew because of the tenstacles!” Benj said.

“Exactly,” I told him.

My mother put two giant lumps of unformed clay in my hands, and then fabric and buttons and wires and all manner of junk I had no idea what to do with. I was going to make a “representative art memoir” out of some clay and wires and recyclables?

“Let your mind guide you,” my mom said. “Just listen to your thoughts and your hands will do the work.” My mind rolled its eyes. Then I listened to my thoughts, but all I heard was the clicking of Lily’s swing.

I snorted. But for the rest of Thanksgiving break, whenever my mom was busy, which was basically every second, I sneaked into her studio by myself, feeling the walls, the concrete floor under my bare, cold feet. I left Spark in the doorway, and found the clay, which she took out of a huge wet bucket. I listened to and smelled it: it was off-red to me, and prehistoric, like my mom had dug it up from the core of the earth. I smushed it around for a bit, thinking about my face, wondering if human beings would be extinct soon anyway, and if so, whether that made my problems any less real. It kind of did, I decided, and I made a mental note to think about the apocalypse anytime I started feeling sorry for myself. Then I thought, as I always do, no matter what train leads me there, of Claire, under the ground. Is it worse to be dead if everyone else is still alive? Yes. Just like it’s worse to be blind if everyone else can see. Even though being different is the only way we can define ourselves against each other, it still sucks. If everyone were blind, it wouldn’t be a big deal that I can’t see. And if everyone were dead, then Claire wouldn’t be at a disadvantage anymore.

I made a ball out of the clay, and picked up a twig of wire my mom had also given me. I twisted the wire into a spiral, and then picked up another one, and made a spiral out of that, too. My mind was quiet while I was doing this, a rare relief until it became like a creepy, empty room. Then I gave up and, in an odd move, carried the lump of clay with its spirals out of my mom’s studio. For a week I kept it on my nightstand, until it was dry and crumbling, but the wires stayed in.

Then I wrapped it up and brought it to Deirdre Sharp’s house the first weekend after Thanksgiving, for the second sleepover of my blind life. I guess it was like a blanky or teddy bear or something, but smaller and grosser, since it was crumbly. I was really nervous about the sleepover. It was me, Logan, Blythe, Amanda, and Nicole, a girl whom none of us had ever met before but who was apparently Deirdre’s best friend from summer Bible camp. And I don’t think Deirdre would have invited that group if it hadn’t been for the Mayburg meeting we’d already had—and the one scheduled for the day after her party.

My mom had insisted on calling Minister Sharp and Mrs. Sharp to make sure they were okay with having a dog at the house for the sleepover. They said yes, likely because my mom made it clear that it was a deal-breaker for me if Spark couldn’t come, because of my “situation.” And even if she hadn’t called ahead and made a huge thing of it, no parents really want to be the ones who don’t let their child befriend the blind kid. Having a blind friend might widen your kid’s small, homogeneous life experience, especially if you’re raising her in Sauberg. I didn’t come up with that by myself, by the way. It’s something I heard someone say to my mother after I got out of the hospital and everyone came to our house with lasagnas so we wouldn’t first get blinded and then also starve to death that month. That’s what we do in this town: we make lasagna. No matter what. When my eyes caught fire? Lasagna. When Claire drowned in the lake? Lasagna. When our second-grade teacher, Mrs. Jacobson, had to stay in the hospital for two weeks after her baby was born? More lasagna. The only death or emergency that ever went uncelebrated by a two-ton brick of pasta was Bigs the rabbit’s. So maybe it’s a species thing. Maybe you have to be a human being to warrant a snaking lasagna parade arriving at your clan’s dwelling in the wake of a maiming or death.

Deirdre’s dad is a minister, and her mom is a mom, but for some reason (one that interested Logan intensely), their house was fancier than either of ours. Deirdre also wasn’t interested in stuff or popularity or clothes. Logan asked if Deirdre would take us on a tour of the house. The walls felt beige, like Dr. Sassoman’s. There was no smell of cooking, or chaos, or art supplies, or animals, or even people, really. Logan held my arm and whispered in my ear, “I had no idea her house would be so posh. And she never shows off, you know?”

Deirdre’s parents were hugely conservative, and maybe they preferred a modest, quiet daughter. I wondered why they’d been successful in making one, while Claire’s parents would definitely have loved a Deirdre-like daughter but had gotten Claire. Blythe’s parents, too. I thought of my own mom, who has so many daughters that she gets to have it every way possible, maybe another reason for wildly overpopulating the earth with your offspring.

Mrs. Sharp ordered pizzas for us and then vanished upstairs. Minister Sharp came down and said that he and Mrs. Sharp would be on the fourth floor.

“Enjoy yourselves, girls,” he said. “And if you need anything at all, don’t be shy. Just come up to the fourth floor and tell us right away. Or text me, Deirdre.”

“Okay, Dad,” Deirdre said, clearly impatient for him to leave and not embarrass her any further, although he didn’t seem to me to be more or less embarrassing than any of our dads.

“We are at your service,” he joked. Okay, so that was embarrassing.

“Thank you, Minister Sharp,” Logan said in her pink-flower-and-glitter voice.

“Bye, Dad,” Deirdre said.

“I’m going, I’m going!” he said, and then his footsteps bounced up the carpeted stairs. He was wearing socks. I wondered what they looked like—whether they were sporty and white tube socks like Benj wears, or sleek man-tights like Logan’s dad’s, or argyle socks like my dad wears under his loafers. You can tell a lot about people from what socks they wear. If they’re unmatched, or have holes, or are pristine or whatever. But before I could ask Logan about Deirdre’s dad’s socks, a question only she would have understood and forgiven, she leaned into my ear. “Minister Sharp is hot,” she said. “He’s super young and looks like Mr. Hawes.”

“I gathered,” I told her.

“How’d you gather? From his beautiful voice?”

“From yours, actually.”

She giggled again. “He was wearing jeans,” she said. “And blue socks, in case you were wondering.”

“I was, actually.”

“I know, you weirdo. Can you believe they have a four-story house?”

We all gathered in the kitchen and ate pizza and drank Coke. I poured my own, dangling my pinky slightly into the Styrofoam cup like Mr. Otis had taught me, so I could feel when the soda reached the top. Nicole, Deirdre’s summer camp friend, lived in the city, and you could tell she thought she was a super-cool urbanite among a bunch of hayseed-chewing bumpkins, because she was like, “Oh, your accents are so cute! No one in the city talks like that.”

While we burned all the skin off the roofs of our mouths on pizza, Nicole chattered about her private Catholic school in the city. “It’s a total celibacy prison,” she said. “We’re the inmates.” Only Deirdre laughed. I wondered if they were like Logan and me.

“Can Nicole come to the Mayburg place tomorrow afternoon?” Deirdre asked, and I said, “Sure, of course.” Then Nicole said, “Cool, thanks. I’ll check my schedule,” and Logan snickered.

“Yes, do that!” she said. “And have your people call my people.”

No one laughed; it was too hostile. Nicole said, “Um, did I piss you off in some way? Because if so, I’m sorry.”

“I was just kidding,” Logan said.

“I don’t think you should haul in just to sit in that creepy dungeon and listen to a bunch of whiners from Lake Main,” Blythe said. I was surprised, but didn’t say anything.

“Whiners?” Logan asked. “We were just trying to have an honest conversation.”

“Yeah, well,” Blythe said.

Deirdre was like, “Let’s have cake.”

Nicole had a mind of her own, apparently, because she said, “‘Creepy dungeon’ sounds cool. Why don’t we go over there tonight?” No one answered her.

We ate a chocolate cake that Deirdre’s parents had set out on the counter, and then she opened up the presents we’d brought. Nicole got her a locket, Logan and I brought leopard-print pajamas and slippers that matched, which Deirdre claimed to love. Logan had picked them, obviously, and I felt shy and sad giving a present I had never seen. Amanda gave Deirdre a Ouija board, which I thought was an awful and unfunny joke, and Blythe brought three bottles of wine she had stolen from her parents. I wondered how Deirdre felt about that. I mean, we were in her perfect house with her minister parents—were we really going to risk them coming down and catching us drunk? And if so, why? She also got Deirdre a set of lipsticks I would have found insulting, maybe like a hint that Deirdre wasn’t working hard enough at being pretty.

We took Blythe’s wine to the basement, where there was a dull hum of machinery, which reminded me of a hospital. It would be weird to be an only child like Deirdre, with her super-adult parents and life and immaculate house. I was thinking maybe she did homework all day long, taking breaks only to go to church. Nothing in her house was loud or broken or dirty. I had a rare stab of envy. I was never jealous of Logan’s house, because it felt terrible and lonely, but Deirdre’s felt luxurious to me. There were many ways to live.

“Let’s break these open!” Blythe said, and then there was laughter.

“What if your parents come down?” I asked.

“No chance,” Deirdre said. “They promised to leave us alone. They have no reason not to trust me, and they can’t hear us; they’re, like, a mile away upstairs.”

Suddenly they were all laughing again, but I didn’t know why. “It’s a miracle you got that out,” Amanda said, and Logan whispered in my ear, “Blythe had the wine opener in her pocket, and her jeans are so tight she had to pry it out with a crowbar.”

I was sitting on the carpet, with Logan’s sleepover voice in my left ear and my back against a couch that smelled of new car. I had a hand on Spark; he and I were both twitchy and homesick, and I was petting him, wondering if I was going to have to relearn how to relax and have fun at a slumber party now, too. Although honestly I couldn’t remember if I had ever found a slumber party much fun, even before the accident. Are slumber parties fun or just one more thing we all do because we don’t want to be the only ones not doing them, the way grown-ups have dinner parties and go to holiday “functions” at the hospitals where they work? If I could have gone home the instant we finished pizza and cake and presents, I would have, just like a four-year-old. I would have snuggled my mom and Benj and Babiest Baby Lily and Naomi and gone to sleep in my own bed, happy.

At least Spark was there, in between me and Blythe, who was on my right. We had opened all three bottles of wine and started drinking them simultaneously when Amanda brought up the Ouija board idea again. I stayed quiet. I was hoping that Amanda would drop it and we could hang out and talk and maybe put on some music. But I didn’t want to be the one to admit to being scared, of course. I can always find a reason to say nothing. Logan handed me wine; we were drinking straight from the bottles so that Deirdre wouldn’t have to hide wine-stained glasses from her parents in addition to the empty bottles, which Blythe had already said she’d take out in her sleepover bag in the morning.

“This present includes delivery and removal service,” she said, swigging from the bottle and passing it to me, and for some reason—maybe the wine taking effect and warming me up—her voice gave me a jittery feeling. I was oddly aware of it every time her arm brushed mine over Spark, or her hand grazed me when she passed me one of the wine bottles.

“You okay, Emma?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, and took three quick sips from the top of the bottle, before passing it to Logan, her familiar head leaning in close to mine.
The wine,
I thought.
Taste the wine, focus. Relax.
Close your eyes and relax, Emma, focus in
.

But as soon as I narrowed in on the taste of the wine, it reminded me of finding my mom drinking in the kitchen last year, and I went hurtling back toward that night, toward my own left eye and the word
livid
and my mom’s weird, sad laugh. I tried to hold my nose. Not smell the wine or laughter, not think of mud or rubber ducks or
livid
, even though the braille cells lit up in my mind: the straight, clean, logical line of the L; the 2 and 4 of the I; the V, just like L except that dot 6 is also raised; another I; and then D, which I no longer confuse with H. D is 1, 4, and 5.