Love and First Sight(16)

As if she were reading my mind, Cecily asks, “Do you want a ride home?”

But I realize, if I go home, Mom will think my new friends stood me up. Cue the hints about returning to the school for the blind. So leaving early is far worse than a possibly awkward dinner with the photographer girl from journalism class.

“How about we just stay for dinner?”

“You sure?” she asks. “I mean, it’ll just be… you know, me.”

“Yeah, definitely,” I say. “We’re already here. Might as well eat.”

She guides me in a pattern of ninety-degree turns, left, right, left, right, around the tables in the diner. We end at a countertop bar with tall stools covered in smooth plastic. Across the counter, a mere arm’s length away, I hear the sizzle of meat on a grill and the hiss of boiling oil in a fryer.

I hear Cecily pop the lens off her camera and snap a few photos. There’s a whisper of plastic twisting over plastic as she adjusts the lens—zooming or focusing or something—and takes a few more.

I ask, “For Instagram? Hashtag food porn?”

She laughs a little.

“You’re on Instagram?” she asks, surprised.

“Yeah. I like the captions. Anyway, what’s your picture of?”

“Us,” she says simply.

“You and me?”

“Well, mostly you. The camera is covering my face. There’s a mirror across from us.”

“What I would give to have a mirror,” I say. “I’m constantly wondering if my shirt is on backward or if my hair is sticking up or something.”

“You’re not missing out. Mirrors just make people overly concerned about their appearance,” she says dismissively.

“Really? I’ve always assumed that if I could see myself in a mirror, I would be less concerned about my appearance. Because I wouldn’t have to wonder what I looked like anymore. I could stop worrying about it.”

“In my experience, it’s usually the other way around.”

“Is that a mirror joke?”

“What?”

“The other way around. Because isn’t everything flipped in mirrors? Like upside down?”

“Close. Wrong axis. Everything is flipped left to right. It’s backward, not upside down. But no, that wasn’t a joke. I mean, I think it works the opposite of what you’re saying: Mirrors make everyone more worried about their appearance.”

I hear the swish of a waitress walking by on the other side of the counter. (And yes, I infer her gender based on the sound of her footsteps, an educated guess I’m usually right about.) I want to get the waitress’s attention to ask for menus. It’s silly, but part of me hopes this will impress Cecily—that she will notice how sensitive my hearing is, or at least that she’ll feel like she’s hanging out with a normal person who knows when a waitress is walking by, not a helpless blind kid who needs someone else to flag down a server for him.

“Excuse me, can we get some menus?” I ask.

“What are you, blind?” the waitress snaps.

I squirm. Her tone implies that she was using that word blind to mean my question was stupid.

She wouldn’t be the first, unfortunately. One time, for a paper at my old school, I searched blind in the thesaurus app on my phone. The synonyms included ignorant, oblivious, irrational, mindless, reckless, and violent. Kind of rude if you are actually, you know, blind. But her accusation also happens to be factual enough to stand up in a court of law: I am 100 percent legally blind.

“Yes, actually, I am blind.”

“Oh my God, I am so sorry!” she says, realizing. “Holy… oh, wow… I am the worst person ever. I am so sorry. God. That was so rude. I’m just having the worst day—not that that’s any excuse—I just wasn’t thinking.”

“It happens,” I say.

“The menu is already on the counter. I’m sorry we don’t have it in braille or anything. Do you want me to, like, read it to you?”

“I’ll read it for him,” Cecily says coolly.

Cecily talks me through the menu. A few minutes later, the waitress returns for our orders.

“I’m not really hungry,” says Cecily. “I’ll just have a Diet Coke, please.”

“And what will he be having?” the waitress asks Cecily.

“I will be having the grilled cheese,” I say.

“Oh, get it cut into triangles instead of rectangles,” suggests Cecily. “It tastes so much better that way.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Please prepare the sandwich as the lady suggests.”

“One grilled cheese, sliced into triangles,” repeats the waitress, making audible scratches with a pen.

After the waitress walks away, Cecily asks, “So how come you signed up for journalism class?”

“I want to be a writer. Seemed like good practice. You?”

“Same. Except I want to be a photographer.”

“Of nature, I assume?”

“Yeah. I want to see the world through the lens of my camera. That’s everything to me, everything I want.”

“No house with a white picket fence and two-point-four babies?”

“Well… it’s not like I don’t want those things. It’s just that I’ve always assumed…” She trails off.