Love and First Sight(5)

She’s always been that way. Overprotective. Not for my sake as much as for hers. I think she wants my life to be easy because it will make her life easy. She can’t let me fail because then everyone would think she failed as a mother.

So that’s why she yells at people for staring. And why she tries to make me “fit in” so they don’t stare in the first place. She’s actually always wanted me to wear sunglasses in public.

And I guess she was right about that one, because here I am now, making some girl cry because she thought I was staring at her. Wouldn’t have happened if I had been wearing the glasses.

? ? ?


After journalism is lunch. Mr. Johnston invites me to eat with him in the staff lounge, but I decline. He deposits me in the cafeteria, where I stand holding my cane in one hand and a bag lunch in the other. Is the entire room staring at me? Or am I invisible to them? I don’t know. All I have to go on is the sound of hundreds of people talking at once, the voices blending together so that I can’t pick out individual conversations.

The noise of the cafeteria is not unlike the smell of the cafeteria. It combines the long list of foods that are being consumed today, or have been consumed in this room at some point in the past, into one overpowering yet nondescript odor that welcomes you like a smack across the face.

I walk forward until my cane clinks against the metal legs of a chair. Further cane taps determine that the chair is already pulled out from a circular lunch table.

“Excuse me, is anyone sitting at this table?” I ask the void.

In return, I get nothing but the chattering voices of the room.

“No one?”

No response.

So I sit. But instead of a chair, my butt makes contact with another animate life-form. A pair of legs, I think. I jump.

“What the—” I holler, completely startled.

“AHHHH!” comes from the owner of the legs.

I drop my cane.

Mrs. Chin always said that a blind person losing a cane is like a sighted person dropping a flashlight and having it turn off after it hits the ground in a dark room. Not only will I have to find the cane, I will have to do so on hands and knees because I’ve lost the very thing that normally helps me detect lost objects.

“Dude, let me get that for you,” says the owner of the legs. With enviable quickness, he retrieves the cane and places it in my hand. “There you go. Sorry, bro. So sorry. That was majorly awkward and totally my fault.”

“It’s all right. But, I mean, did you hear me ask if anyone—”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you. Like I said, I’m sorry, it was totally messed up not to answer you. I just… I don’t know, I saw you walking over here and froze. Look, you wanna sit down? The chair next to me is empty.”

I hesitate.

He says, “I swear, no surprise occupants.”

I sit down. “Okay, sure, thanks.”

“I’m Nick, by the way.”

“Will.”

I reach my hand toward his voice, and he shakes it. (Side note, Mr. Johnston: I am perfectly capable of shaking hands.)

I hear more people sit down at the table.

“So, Will, before we have any more awkward butt contact, I should introduce you to my friends,” says Nick. He’s loud. Loud enough that I assume much of the cafeteria is forced to listen to his nasally proclamations.

“Friend. Singular,” says a female voice to my right. “I’m retracting my friendship with you, so you’ve only got one left.”

“That’s Ion. We’ve been feuding recently,” Nick says to me. “Argument about time travel. Won’t bore you with the details. She’s just pissed because she knows I’m right.”

“Please. Another dimension is the only explanation that—” says Ion.

“If you had the technology to travel in time, you could obviously figure out how to remain—” interrupts Nick.

“WHOA, WHOA,” I say, overpowering their voices. “Too much talking at once. You are welcome to bore me with the details, but at least take turns, please.”

“Okay,” says Nick. “SparkNotes version: A while ago some geeks made a permanent monument out of stone or whatever that was inscribed with an invitation to a party that would be thrown in honor of time travelers from the future. The idea was that millions of years from now, when time travel exists, the stone invitation thingy would still be around, and humans of the future would see it and travel back in time to attend the party. The only problem was—”

“No one showed up,” interrupts Ion. She continues at what I assume is the maximum words per minute a human is capable of pronouncing without compromising diction or dropping syllables. “From the future, I mean. But that doesn’t mean that time travel will never be invented. Because anyone who has consumed any science fiction knows that there are paradoxes created when you travel back in time and meddle with the past. So it stands to reason that if humans did travel back in time, they would be entering a time line of a parallel dimension. The first dimension would be the way things are now, without time travel. That’s where we are living, obviously. The next dimension would be the version of reality that was created when they traveled back in time. So maybe a bunch of time travelers attended the party; it just happened in a different dimension.”

“Which obviously makes no sense,” says Nick. “Because—”