Love and First Sight(32)

“Did you see that, Cecily?” I ask, giddy with excitement. “I drove a school bus!”

“Yes, I saw,” she says dryly.

“That was so cool!”

She gives a sort of humph sound. I ask the driver a few questions for my article, recording our conversation on my phone, and then Cecily and I begin the walk back to the classroom.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” I ask Cecily once we are the only ones walking the corridor.

“If you ask it, do I have to answer it?”

“Not if you don’t want to,” I say.

“All right.”

“That first day of school,” I say. “How come you cried because I was staring at you?”

She hesitates. “What do you mean?”

“Now that I know you better, it just doesn’t seem like you.”

“I’d just had a big fight with my mom that day before school,” she says. “I’d been crying already and was just on edge. And when I thought you were staring at me, it just set me off again.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Are you close with your mom?”

She laughs mirthlessly. “No, we don’t really get along.”

“What about your dad?”

“Yeah, he’s much better than my mom, but they’re divorced. I only get to see him a few times a year.”

“Where does he live?” I ask.

“In Los Angeles,” she says, her voice becoming more cheerful. “Near Venice Beach. He has this little yellow bungalow on a corner lot. There’s always a bright red surfboard on the front porch.”

“Does he surf?”

She laughs, for real this time.

“No, it must’ve come with the house or something. The closest he comes to exercise is watching football on TV,” she says.

“He doesn’t even go to the beach?” I ask.

“Sometimes, but he drives there. It’s, like, six blocks away, and he refuses to walk,” she says. “I’m always telling him to get in shape, but he doesn’t seem to listen.”

We walk in silence for a while. On a long, empty stretch of hallway, I hear two sets of footsteps approaching. Just as they pass us, a male voice says, “Hey, look! It’s Batgirl!”

And then there’s a cackle of laughter and the smack of a high five.

An intensity of feeling like I’ve never experienced shoots through my body. Anger, raw and pure, and the knowledge that I must fight, I must hurt, I must destroy the owner of that voice. I drop Cecily’s arm and whirl toward the sounds of their laughter, letting fly an arm trained by years of swinging a cane, a fist strengthened by a lifetime of touching and gripping. But my hand only breezes through the air, and the force of the swing knocks me off balance. I nearly topple to the floor.

The misfire of my punch just makes me angrier. I spread my arms out wide and charge toward where I last heard their laughter, hurling myself with the intent to bring anyone in my path to the ground. Instead, I run face-first into something metal. I bounce off with a pop and land on my back, losing my balance for real this time.

“Oh, Will!” says Cecily. She’s already crouched beside me, and I can hear that she’s crying.

What I don’t hear is anything from the boys who passed us in the hall. There’s no jeering, no laughter, nothing. They just walk away. And that’s what hurts the most, so much deeper than the smack to my face when I hit what must’ve been a wall of lockers: that my attempt to fight doesn’t even warrant mockery. It’s not serious enough even to be made fun of. I lost myself in rage and set my mind for combat, and it resulted in exactly nothing.

I’m shaking with anger. They called her Batgirl because she’s associated with me, because she was walking with me, and I’m blind. Like a bat. They ridiculed her for being my friend, and I couldn’t stop them.

And that’s when I come to two realizations. Number one, I will have the operation. I want that freedom I felt driving the bus. The freedom to move through the world without a cane. I want that every day. And I want to experience the pigments on a painted canvas and soak in the texture of a sunrise. I want to examine every floor tile in the hallway at school and watch water gush out of the faucet in a bathroom sink. I want to see it all; I want to savor every fiber of this other layer of reality.

And number two, I recognize that I had a weirdly strong reaction to those guys. I’m not the kind of person who usually gets in fights. So why did I swing at them? There’s only one possible explanation, one that I’ve been trying to ignore but now must admit to myself: I am definitely falling for Cecily.





CHAPTER 15


The stem cell transplant happens three days later, on Thursday. I had my tonsils removed when I was a kid, so this is not my first time under anesthesia. This first operation, then, doesn’t feel like a big deal. And it’s not like I’ll wake up being able to see. I have to wait for the second operation for that. Until then, I will wear bandages under my sunglasses. My eyes will be sensitive from the trauma of the transplant and need protection to heal.

Mom comes with me. She wouldn’t take no for an answer this time.

Dad isn’t here. Well, actually, technically he is in the same building. Working. Tying up some old guy’s testicles or whatever he does. He said he couldn’t reschedule his operating room time today, but I think he’s really just unhappy with my decision and didn’t feel comfortable being here.