Love and First Sight(26)

“So you are trying to set me up with a girl who might reject me?”

“Didn’t you just say you are trying to learn to live independently?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Well then, find out for yourself.”

? ? ?


Two days later is the first round of auditions. I wear my new blue button-down shirt.

The announcements begin as normal. But after three minutes, Xander says, “Well, my fellow students, we have reached that exciting point in the year when you all decide who will have the distinct honor and privilege of bringing you your announcements every morning beginning in the spring semester. This year there are three teams of potential cohosts: team one, which is myself and Victoria; team two, Will Porter and Cecily Hoder; and team three, Tripp Atkinson and Connor Forthright.”

I feel so nervous it’s like there’s a balloon expanding in my stomach and pressing against my insides. I told Cecily, and she said not to worry about it. Being nervous was perfectly understandable. I was shocked by how calm she sounded. Honestly, I wanted to drop out. But her voice brought me back, and here I am, getting ready to go on camera.

“And now team two will take over the next section of today’s announcements. Good luck to all the teams!” says Xander. He sounds sincere. Almost.

Cecily and I take our seats at the anchor desk. I feel heat from the studio lights on my face. I angle my head in that direction, knowing the lights are positioned near the camera. I’m wearing my glasses so people will assume that I’m making eye contact with them on their screens.

“Good morning, I’m Cecily.”

“And I’m Will.”

Cecily begins a flawless read of her first announcement, about the canned-food drive next week. I’m filled with dread. I know I’m going to screw this up for us. I’ll probably puke all over the camera.

My fingers are in the ready position on the braille terminal. This is it. I’m about to read my first announcement.

When Cecily finishes the details about the food drive, I hear her hand move quickly to the iPad in her lap, where she scrolls the teleprompter to the next announcement. As she does, I feel the braille letters refresh under my fingertips.

I begin to read aloud, like a kindergartner nervously sounding out words for the first time. “Tickets for the homecoming dance are—”

At this point, there’s a gap in the text where the next word should begin. Three empty characters instead of one space. Which is weird.

“—still for sale in the main—”

The line of text refreshes, but it begins with another set of three blank spaces. It’s quite distracting, these typos.

“—office for only ten dollars. Get yours—”

I hit another empty slot where a word should be. What’s going on here? Reading braille aloud is difficult enough if you are, say, in your bedroom all by yourself. But I’m on camera in front of a thousand pairs of eyes for an audition. And now I have to deal with problems in the script? Is there a glitch in the program? Or is Cecily not scrolling correctly?

“—today so you don’t miss out on an unforgettable night this Saturday.”

I hope my face doesn’t show how upset I am. I’m speaking like a person who barely knows the language.

Everyone probably thinks I’m nervous. Like I’m stuttering because the whole school is watching. Or maybe they think I’m a slow braille reader.

I want to stop reading from the script and say, This is not my fault! I don’t know what’s going on here, but there’s something messed up with the script, not me!

I knew this wouldn’t work. I knew I shouldn’t be auditioning for a position where my performance is entirely reliant on other people to hold their own. Lean on others long enough, and eventually you’ll fall. And in these auditions, I’m falling hard, crashing and burning in front of the whole entire school.

It also occurs to me that if I could see, none of this would’ve happened. My reading would have sounded just as smooth and confident as Cecily’s.

As soon as our part of the broadcast is over, we return next door to Mrs. Everbrook’s classroom. Cecily and I sit together while we wait for the announcements to end. Tripp and Connor begin their audition on the classroom television.

I whisper to Cecily, “When you were scrolling through my script, could you see those gaps between words?”

I’m trying not to sound as accusatory as I feel.

She pauses, then whispers back, “Those weren’t gaps.”

I’m confused. “They felt like gaps on my braille terminal. I wasn’t sure what to say. I don’t understand. What were they?”

“Don’t worry about it, Will,” she says, as if she’s speaking to a child or something. Which only makes me feel worse. First I look stupid on the announcements, and now Cecily acts like she’s doing me a favor by not telling me why?

“What were they?” I repeat, frustration creeping into my voice.

“They were images,” she finally says.

That’s not the answer I was expecting. “What kind of images?”

“They were, like, emojis. But not the normal ones,” she says reluctantly.

“Meaning?”

She shifts uncomfortably in her desk. “They were, I guess you could say, X-rated emojis. Of, like, human… anatomy and stuff.”