Love and First Sight(43)

“I… well… I can see colors, and I know some shapes, but it’s hard for me to identify objects,” I confess.

“Can you see me?” asks Nick.

I swallow. “No, I can’t really pick out people yet.”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Ion. “Let’s roll to see who goes first. Will, do you want to do the honors? The die is right in front of you.”

It’s thoughtful of her to tell me where the die is. But even so, the concept of “right in front of me” is vague at best. Furthermore, I know a die is small, and small equals hard to see. If I can’t pick out a person, how will I ever see a die on the table?

I look around for it, but all I see is the usual waterfall of colors. I am able to identify them better now than I could yesterday—there’s blue, that’s green, here’s brown—but I can’t pick a small die out of the background.

“Here,” says Nick, picking it up and placing it in my hand.

I know he’s just trying to be nice, and I appreciate that. I mean, Nick’s not exactly known for his niceness. But at the same time, it feels like a regression. When I was blind, he never would have handed me a die after Ion had just told me it was right in front of me. Nick would have known that I could simply reach out and find it with my fingers.

“Thanks,” I say, trying to sound grateful but probably not pulling it off.

I roll the die and hear it tumble across the table. And as I do, I lose track of it. It disappears into the vortex of my confusing vision, one tiny white cube among millions of pixels.

“Can you see it?” asks Nick cautiously.

It pains me that I can’t, and that my friends are now realizing that I can’t.

“Uh… well, I can see movement better than stillness. Can you wave your hand over it?”

“Like this?”

I see the blur of white that must be Nick’s hand.

“Yes. Great.”

I stand up and lean over the table, pressing my nose almost to its surface so the die becomes large.

“Found it!” I say. It’s ridiculous, pretending this is a victory after Nick just showed me exactly where it was.

“Can you…” Nick says. “Can you see the number?”

The number of dots. Here’s something I should be able to do. After all, the dots on a die are kind of like braille. I’ve been reading dots all my life. Surely I can count dots on a die.

Except that I can’t.

It’s not that I can’t see them. I can see the white square of the die, and I can see little black circles on it. But the dots wiggle and shift when I try to count them. One, two… but then I can’t figure out which dot I was looking at, and I lose count.

This is absurd. Now I can’t count? Toddlers can count! I’m sixteen years old. How am I unable to count up to a number of dots between one and six on a stupid little piece of plastic?

“I… I…” I stammer.

They say nothing.

“I have to go home.”

I grope around the table with my hands, searching for my sunglasses and sleep mask. No reason to bother trying to find them with my eyes. That could take all night. Touch is much faster, much more natural. I find the objects and stuff them in my pocket, close my eyes, and flick out my cane, hurrying out the front door before anyone can argue.

Cecily follows and calls after me.

“Will, wait!”

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I say. I don’t stop. If I stop, if I talk to her, if I try to look at her and just see that blurry image instead of her actual face, I know I will implode.

? ? ?


I missed Thursday and Friday because of my operation, but the next morning, Monday, I have to go back to school. It’s not exactly the triumphant return I had hoped for, in which I would shock my classmates with my miraculous ability to walk down the hall without a cane. No, it seems my fantasies were just that. Fantasies.

I keep my eyes closed as I walk because seeing makes me too dizzy and confused to move. I turn left, take twenty-three steps, turn right, go up the stairs, turn the corner, ascend more stairs, and walk eighteen steps toward Mrs. Everbrook’s classroom. It’s the same route Mr. Johnston taught me on the first day of school. That day I remember being so excited about my future as a blind student at a mainstream school. Today I feel only disappointment. It’s the same school, the same route, and even essentially the same disability—I’m still legally blind, just like I used to be—but today, the walk feels completely different. Fortunately, no one at school besides the academic quiz team and Mrs. Everbrook knows I had the surgery. So they won’t give my apparent postoperative blindness a second thought.

I’m sitting at my desk listening to Xander and Victoria read the announcements from the studio next door.

“And finally today,” says Xander’s voice from the television behind Mrs. Everbrook’s desk, “we will announce the cohosts of your morning announcements show starting next semester.”

His voice has all the confidence of someone whose victory is all but assured.

In all the details leading up to my surgery and then missing school last week, I forgot the winners would be named today. Great. Just what I need. A crushing defeat. On the day when I’m already totally defeated.

“And your cohosts are…”