Love and First Sight(7)

“Hey, it’s the least we could do,” says Nick. “I shouldn’t have been silent like that when you asked if there was anyone here. I mean, we’re the academic quiz team. Answering questions is what we do.”

But even the defending district champion academic quiz team would have trouble answering the number of questions I get from my parents after school.





CHAPTER 3


I’m waiting at the edge of the curb.

“Right here, William!”

It’s Mom’s voice, startlingly close. Maybe two arm lengths. Yet I’m unable to hear the familiar hum of our family station wagon.

My hand reaches for the door handle, but my fingers jam into hard metal. I press my palm against the car, searching for the lever.

This goes on for a second or two, and I still can’t seem to find it.

Mom says, “Surprise, honey! New car!”

She claps a few times, as if I need additional auditory cues that she is excited. She’s been doing that since I was a baby, going out of her way to signal excitement to me when it just ends up making me feel like a toddler. And I think she still sees me that way: the same little boy who went off to boarding school in kindergarten. She doesn’t realize I’m grown up now.

“We got a Teslaaaaaaaaaa!” Mom says in a talk-show-announcer voice.

Apparently I’m supposed to be excited about this, but mostly I just feel dumb because, like, where’s the door handle? I grope around for a while, and finally she notices my struggle.

“Just a little to the left, honey,” she says, returning to her normal voice.

I locate it and climb in.

“Your father finished early in the operating room today, so we just went out and bought it!” exclaims Mom.

“It was the new less-expensive model, and it will reduce our carbon footprint and save on gas,” says Dad. “And we can install a bike rack on the roof.”

“What do you think? You like it?” asks Mom.

I sniff as I feel us silently accelerating away from the school.

“It certainly smells like a new car,” I say. “But it’s electric?”

“That’s right,” confirms Dad in the same voice he’d use to describe his favorite road bike. “Zero emissions, no fuel costs, and it can run for hundreds of miles on a single charge. Cool, huh?”

It’s so weird to hear your parents describe something as “cool.”

“Well… yeah,” I say. But really, it’s not cool.

“You don’t sound happy, Will,” says Dad. “When you were little, you used to love mechanical gadgets. I thought you would be impressed.”

“Oh, no, I am,” I stammer. “I mean, zero emissions, that’s great.”

“But?” prods Dad.

I came home to prove that I could live outside the blind bubble without burdening anyone. But here I am, already being an inconvenience.

“Well, electric motors are silent.”

When I walk to an intersection, I decide whether it’s safe to cross by listening to the flow of traffic. If an electric car is coming down the street, I might as well be blind and deaf.

Mom says, “Don’t worry. I told the salesman—didn’t you hear me ask him, Henry?”

“Yes, dear,” says Dad.

“I said to him, ‘Sir, I have a son who is visually impaired. Will he be safe with this vehicle?’ And the salesman told me, ‘Ma’am, don’t worry, I don’t think his condition will affect the performance of the air bags or the seat belts. And if your son is sitting in the driveway playing’”—Jeez. Sounds like she described me as a child or something—“‘it comes with a’… Hold on, I wrote this down.” She smooths out a slip of folded paper. “The engine emits a ‘sound like a gentle breeze’ that should alert pedestrians to the car.”

I say, “I was standing at the curb just now, and I didn’t hear any gentle breeze.”

After an awkward pause, Mom asks, “So how was your first day?”

“It was okay, I guess.”

Parents ask you questions about your life the way police officers interrogate subjects on TV cop shows. No matter how much information you provide, they will always follow up a hundred times with slightly reworded questions. So you might as well give short answers and let them pry out the facts incrementally so they feel they are making conversational progress.

“Was Vice Principal Johnston helpful? He seemed so nice,” says Mom.

“Sure,” I say.

“What about journalism class? You’re such a good writer, you must’ve had a ball.”

I think about third period—the girl crying and running out of the room, my burning-hot face.

“Totally.”

“Oh, good. I knew you would love it!” says Mom.

I feel us slow down, turn right, and then slow down again to wait for the gate to rise so we can enter our neighborhood. Despite how far away my mom imagines the “other side of town” to be, Toano, Kansas, is actually quite small. It only seems large to her because when she looks at it, all she sees is the giant divide created by this gate.

“Did you make any friends?” asks Dad.

“A few,” I say.

“Nice kids?” he asks.