Shining On (12 page)

“Yes.”

“Then it's time for our next step.”

I led the way along the fence towards the tennis courts.

“I have no idea where we are,” Kyle said, perplexed.

“That's OK. I do.”

We walked on for another few minutes before I stopped.

“Where are we now?” asked Kyle.

“What can you hear?” I asked.

He was still for a moment. “Birds and a faint whirring sound.”

“That whirring is the traffic on the other side of the school building,” I replied.

Kyle turned his head slightly. “I can hear some cheering now from the sports field, but it's very faint.”

“Anything else?”

“I don't think so.”

“OK. Kneel down.”

“Why?”

“Trust me!”

“I wish you'd stop saying that!” Kyle's tone was dry, but he still knelt down.

I smelled what I was looking for. The scent was overwhelming. I took Kyle's hand and put it out to touch the thing I could smell.

“Just use your index finger and your thumb to touch this,” I said.

When Kyle's fingers were on the object I let go of his hand.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice more than curious.

“What d'you think it is?” I asked.

“I don't know …,” Kyle said slowly. “It feels like a bit of velvet, but there wouldn't be velvet around the tennis courts.”

I reached out and touched the object, my fingers next to Kyle's. “A deep yellow velvet.”

“How can you tell what color it is?”

“Yellow has got quite a high voice. This yellow's voice is slightly lower, which means the shade is deeper, but it's definitely yellow,” I told him.

“Do you know what it is I'm touching?” Kyle asked.

“Yes, I do.” And all at once I didn't want to do this any more. I felt wistful and sad. “Take off your tie now. Have a look at what you're touching.”

Kyle removed his tie at once and gasped. “It's … it's a flower …,” he said, shocked.

“Beautiful, isn't it?”

“A yellow flower,” Kyle whispered.

“There's more to seeing than looking, Kyle,” I told him. “Your eyes work. Never forget what a gift that is. I can taste light and feel colors and I'm grateful. But to
see …
”

“A flower …” Kyle's voice was awestruck. I didn't have his full attention. I wondered if he'd even heard me.

“Kyle, touching that flower and seeing it with your fingers—that's what seeing with my other senses is a tiny bit like. I see things in ways that you can't or won't because you don't have to. I'm grateful for that as well. Because I can still appreciate the things around me. Maybe even more than a lot of sighted people do.”

I sensed Kyle looking at me then. Really looking—for the first time. I wondered how he saw me now. I smiled at him as he straightened up.

“I … look, I have something to tell you,” Kyle began uneasily.

“Forget it.”

“No, it's important. I …”

“Dean and Joseph bet you that you couldn't get me to go out for a burger with you. But just so you know, they've each asked me out and I turned them down flat, so they reckoned you had no chance.”

Silence.

“Stop it! You're staring!” I laughed.

“How did you know that?”

“What? About the bet or that you were staring?”

“Both.”

“‘Cause I'm brilliant!” I teased. “And by the way, I wouldn't tell my brother about the bet if I were you. He's a bit overprotective where I'm concerned and he'd probably want to punch your lights out.”

“I … I suppose you don't want anything more to do with me?”

“I knew about the bet before you'd even said one word to me—remember?”

“I still don't understand how.”

“I heard you.”

“But we were practically across the field,” Kyle protested.

“No, you weren't. You were only several meters away and the wind was blowing in my direction.”

When Kyle didn't answer I said, “Are you OK?”

“We'd better go back,” he said, his tone strange.

Now it was my turn to be surprised. “What's the matter?”

It was a long time before Kyle answered. We started back to the sports field, my arm lightly resting on his. I knew the way back without any problems, but I had wanted to sense what he was feeling. And it didn't take a genius to guess from the way his muscles were stiff and tense what was going on in his head. He wasn't happy.

“Kyle?”

“I'm sorry, Amber. I guess you hate me now. And I don't
blame you. I behaved like a real jerk.” The words came out in a rush of genuine embarrassment. And there was some-thing else, something more, behind them.

“Why should I hate you?”

He looked at me then. And his eyes hadn't changed back—I could tell. He was still looking at me with the eyes of someone who could see
me.
Not a blind girl. Not someone to be pitied or patronized. Not someone who had less than him. But a girl who could see without using her eyes.

“So d'you still want to go out for a burger later?” Kyle's voice was barely above a whisper. If it wasn't for my bat ears I doubt if I would've heard him.

“Course. I'm starving.”

There was no mistaking the sigh of relief that came from Kyle. It made me giggle.

“D'you know something?” Kyle stopped walking. He looked all around him, then straight at me. “I hadn't noticed before, but everything around me is …”

He shut up then. I could feel the selfconscious waves of heat radiating from him. I couldn't help it. I burst out laughing, which made Kyle even more selfconscious.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's go and watch my brother come last in the four-hundred-meter relay.”

And we walked over the bridge together to join the others.

M
olly is in the hospital again, and it's my fault.

Why can't I learn when to keep my mouth shut? I'd already said something I regretted, to Ben, and hadn't had the nerve to go to him and apologize. It was just a week later that I blew it with Molly.

She was lying on her bed, in her nightgown, even though it was eleven in the morning. She's gotten so darn lazy, and my parents don't even say anything to her about it. That's partly why I was mad at her, to begin with, because she was still in her nightgown at eleven in the morning.

She was grouchy and mad, too. I'm not sure why. I think mostly it was because school had just ended, before she'd even had a chance to go back. Tierney McGoldrick hardly
ever calls her anymore. She doesn't know it, but toward the end of school he started dating a redhaired senior girl. At least I was smart enough not to tell Molly
that.

But there she was, lying on her bed, grumbling about how awful she looks. I am so sick of hearing Molly talk about how she looks. Her face is too fat. Her hair is too thin. To hear her talk, you'd think she was really a mess, when the truth is that she's still a billion times prettier than I am, which is why I'm sick of listening to her.

I told her to shut up.

She told me to drop dead, and before I dropped dead, to pick up my sneakers from her side of the room.

I told her to pick them up herself.

She started to get up, I think to pick up my sneakers and throw them at me, and when she swung her legs over the side of the bed, I suddenly saw what they looked like.

“Molly!” I said, forgetting about the sneakers. “What's wrong with your
legs
?”

“What do you
mean,
what's wrong with my legs?” No one had ever criticized Molly's legs before; in fact, even I have to admit that Molly's got nice legs. She held up her nightgown and looked down.

Both of her legs were covered with dark red spots. It looked like a lot of mosquito bites, except that they weren't swollen.

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” she said slowly, looking puzzled. “What could it be? It wasn't there yesterday, I know it wasn't.”

“Well, it's there now, and it sure looks weird.”

She pulled her nightgown down to cover her legs. Then she got into bed and pulled the covers up around her. “Don't tell anyone,” she said.

“I will, too. I'm telling Mom.” I started out of the room.

“Don't you
dare,”
Molly ordered.

I'll be darned if I'll take orders from Molly. Anyway, I really thought my parents ought to know. I went downstairs and told Mom that there was something wrong with Molly's legs; she jumped up with a frightened look and went upstairs. I stayed out of it after that, but I listened.

I heard Mom and Molly arguing. I heard my mother get my father from the study. Then more arguing with Molly. I heard my mother go to the upstairs phone, make a call, and go back to Molly.

Then Molly crying. Yelling. I had never in my life heard Molly like that before. She was screaming, “No! I won't! I won't!”

Things quieted after a few minutes, and then my father came down. His face was very drawn, very tired. “We have to take Molly back to the hospital,” he told me abruptly, and without waiting for me to answer, he went out to start the car.

Mom came downstairs with Molly. She was in her bathrobe and slippers, and she was sobbing. When they were by the front door, Molly saw me standing all alone in the living room. She turned to me, still crying, and said, “I hate you! I hate you!”

“Molly,” I whispered, “please don't.”

They were in the car and ready to leave when I heard my mother call to me. I went outside, letting the screen door bang behind me, and walked over to the car. “Molly wants to tell you something,” Mom said.

Molly was in the back seat, huddled in the corner, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. “Meg,” she said, choking a little because she was trying to stop crying, “tell Ben and Maria not to have the baby until I get home!”

“Okay.” I nodded. “I'll tell them.” As if they had any control over it! But I would tell them what Molly said, just because Molly asked me to. At that point I would have done anything in the world for Molly.

I went back upstairs, picked up my sneakers and put them in the closet. I made Molly's bed. The pussy willows were still there, in their little vase. The photographs of Will were back on the wall, and the two of Molly and her flowers were with them now. The chalk mark was still there, faded, but there. It was a nice room, except that an hour before, Molly had been in it, and now she wasn't, and it was my fault.

I went down to the darkroom, gathered up the photo-graphs of Maria I'd been working on, and walked across the field to their house.

Will Banks was there, having lunch with Ben and Maria. They were all sitting outside at the picnic table, eating the entire crop of peas. There was a huge bowl of them in the middle of the table, and they were each eating from
it with their own spoons, as if it were the most normal sort of lunch in the world.

“Hey, Meg!” Ben greeted me. “How's it going? Have a pea. Have
two
peas!”

He fed me two peas from his spoon; they were the ten-derest, sweetest peas I've ever eaten. I sat down on the bench beside Will, and said, “Molly's back in the hospital, and she says please don't have the baby until she comes home. I know that's a dumb thing to say,” and then I started to cry.

Will Banks put his arms around me and rocked me back and forth as if I were a baby. I cried until his shirt collar was wet clear through, saying “It's my fault, it's my fault, it's my fault” over and over again. Will said nothing except “There. There.”

Finally I stopped crying, sat up straight, blew my nose on the handkerchief Will gave me, and told them what had happened. No one said very much. They told me, of course, that it wasn't my fault. I knew that already. Ben said, “You know, sometimes it's nice just to have someone to blame, even if it has to be yourself, even if it doesn't make sense.”

We sat there quietly for a minute, and then I asked if I could borrow Maria's spoon. She wiped it on her napkin and gave it to me, and I ate all the peas that were left in the big bowl. There were
pounds
of peas, and I ate them all. I have never been so hungry in my life.

The three of them watched in amazement while I ate all those peas. When I was finished, Maria started to giggle.
Then we all started to laugh, and laughed until we were ex-hausted.

It is so good to have friends who understand how there is a time for crying and a time for laughing, and that some-times the two are very close together.

I took out the photographs of Maria. Will had seen them, of course, because we'd worked on them together. He is as able in the darkroom now as I am, but our interests are different. He is fascinated by the technical aspects of pho-tography: by the chemicals, and the inner workings of cam-eras. I don't care so much about those things. I care about the expressions on people's faces, the way the light falls onto them, and the way the shadows are in soft patterns and contrast.

We looked at the pictures together, and talked about them. Ben was much like Will, interested in the problems of exposure and film latitude; Maria was like me: she liked seeing how the shadows curved around the fullness of the baby inside her, how her hands rested on the roundness of her middle, how her eyes were both serene and excited at the same time.