The One Thing Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Marci Lyn Curtis

  Cover design © 2015 by Whitney Manger

  Designed by Whitney Manger

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-1954-1

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my parents, because they gave me the chance to dream

  I’m not a fan of the bouquet. I have nothing against flowers specifically, but once they’ve been plucked from the ground and clumped together in a grouping, I find them unnerving. Maybe even a smidge creepy. Nothing says Please admire my beauty while I die a long, slow death quite like the floral arrangement. Looking back, I realize it was probably some sort of omen that Benjamin Milton was standing beside a bouquet when I first met him. After all, I’d been blind for a full six months, and not once during that time had I encountered a floral arrangement.

  Most sighted people are under the assumption that those of us who are completely blind see nothing but blackness. But actually, they are wrong. Those of us who have no vision don’t see black. We don’t see anything at all. Basically, I see about as much as a fingernail sees: absolutely nothing. No black. No gray. Nothing. So I didn’t have a clue what the bouquet looked like when I sat down in Mr. Sturgis’s lobby. All I knew was, one, the thing was sitting on the front counter, where I’d plowed into it as I’d checked in, and two, it smelled suspiciously like minced-up old ladies, so I was guessing there were gardenias in it.

  As usual, the lobby had me elbow to elbow with criminals and juvenile delinquents. I waited a good thirty minutes or so before the receptionist—Cari or Staci or something that ended in a perky little i—finally called me up. I’d never actually seen Mr. Sturgis, my probation officer. In my head he was freakishly tall and he sported a stringy ponytail, a pair of beat-up man-clogs, and a faded peace sign tattoo. But according to my grandfather, he was squat and bald and he had a nasty habit of wearing pants that were about an inch too short. That’s the thing about being blind: you see people as they really are.

  As I walked into his office, Mr. Sturgis said, “Greetings, Miss Margaret.”

  “Actually, I prefer Maggie. Remember?” I said as I fumbled my way into my usual seat, folding up my cane and stuffing it in my purse. My full name, Margaret, is the sort of name you’d expect from someone who is three hundred years old. Or in line for the British throne.

  “So. Margaret,” he went on as I bounced my foot in time to a Loose Cannons song that had been stuck in my head all day. I could hear him shuffling papers around. “Miss Olive tells me that you are finished with your mandatory community service. In her words, she says”—he cleared his throat—“‘Margaret is a witty young woman who is highly skilled at looking busy while doing absolutely nothing.’”

  A long silence ensued. Presumably he was waiting for me to comment, but I said nothing. Instead, I brushed a little imaginary lint off my shorts, which was ridiculous, because even if I had lint on my shorts, I wouldn’t be able to see it.

  After a few moments, he went on to say, “How’s school?”

  “Spectacular,” I said. The last day of my junior year was yesterday. So, yes, school was going spectacularly today. I’d slept until noon, feasted on a sleeve of Girl Scout cookies, taken a three-hour shower, and slothed my way to the probation office.

  “Care to elaborate about your grades?” Mr. Sturgis said, his pen scratching on his papers.

  “Not really.”

  “What’s your current GPA?” he asked, chuckling. He and I had come to an unspoken agreement a couple months ago: I would be magnificently sarcastic, and he’d think it was amusing. Besides, I’d found it was best to keep my verbiage to a minimum when dealing with Mr. Sturgis. If I opened a conversational door, he’d bomb right through it and lecture me to unconsciousness about contributing to society and correcting my karma and whatever.

  I shrugged. “Two-point-oh-ish.”

  It would have been two-point-four-ish if it weren’t for my English teacher, who’d hated me ever since I’d caused a little incident in his class several months back. In my defense, I’d been miserable with my abrupt transfer to Merchant’s School for the Blind. Partly because I hadn’t wanted to leave South Hampton High, and partly because Merchant’s was a complete crock. Merchant’s was coddling me, patting me on the back, telling me everything was going to be okay. But everything wasn’t okay. Out in the real world? I was tripping over curbs I didn’t know existed, and I was finding it impossible to tell the difference between a ten-dollar bill and a twenty-dollar bill. I was coming to the realization that I would never kick another soccer goal.

  So basically, Merchant’s blew. And perhaps the worst thing about the place was my English teacher, Mr. Huff. His breath smelled like the inside of a belly button and he spoke one—word—at—a—time—like—we—were—all—incredibly—slow. A dozen years earlier, he’d had a bout of testicular cancer. So every day in class, he droned on and on about how he was a cancer survivor, and how he could relate to living with adversity, and how he’d overcome obstacles. And I would huff out these monstrous sighs and roll my eyes, hoping he’d get my point.

  And then one day, in the middle of one of my huffing-and-eye-rolling displays, he surprised me by saying, “Maggie? Is there something you would like to share?”

  Now, I couldn’t be blamed for what happened next. I was simply answering his question honestly. Besides, I could’ve said a lot worse. I was thinking a lot worse. “Actually, I can’t seem to grasp the correlation between your nutsack and our eyesight,” I informed him, swooping my arm around the classroom to include all the other poor, sightless bastards who had been stuck listening to him day after stinking day.

  Naturally, my answer earned me a seat in the principal’s office, where I proceeded to tell the principal what I thought of Mr. Huff’s nutsack. Next thing I knew, I was spending my afternoons in detention, and Mr. Huff was speaking to me in a pinched voice and handing me an unwarranted amount of crappy grades.

  Mr. Sturgis jerked me back to the present. “How’s your mother?” he asked.

  My head snapped up. “Why? Did she call you?”

  “I haven’t heard from her. Are you in trouble at home?”

  “Nope.”

  He gave me a probation-officer sigh—slightly suspicious, slightly entertained, slightly annoyed—and then he said, “I’ll see y
ou next month. And Margaret? You’re a good kid. Keep your nose clean.”

  Grandpa Keith was late. He was supposed to pick me up at Sturgis’s office at four o’clock sharp, but my phone had just chimed four thirty. Gramps’s tardiness was no huge surprise. He was exceptionally talented in the field of late arrivals. Probably because he moseyed toward his destinations at about half the speed of smell. I was fingering my cell phone, wondering whether I should prod him along, when the door of Mr. Sturgis’s crypt-silent lobby opened with a ding.

  “Finally,” I said, popping up and striding toward the door, not bothering to use the cane I’d tucked into my purse. I discovered almost immediately that some genius had dropped an unspecified, fantastically slick substance on the tile floor and had neglected to clean it up. Naturally, I stepped right in it.

  I’d like to say that I fell with the dignity and grace of a self-respecting blind girl—the sort of girl who understands and accepts that, yes, there are hidden dangers out there, and yes, she will probably get a little banged up every now and then. But I didn’t. And the four-letter word that came out of my mouth as I hit the floor was extremely loud and so thick that it could’ve been heated up and drizzled over pancakes.

  So my eyes were squeezed shut, and I was lying on my side with the reek of that bouquet all around me, clutching my skull as though it would surely fall apart all over the lobby if I let it go, when I heard a kid’s voice say, “That was the most majestic fall I’ve ever seen.”

  Gosh, thanks was what I wanted to say to him. But I’d whacked my head on something hard-cornered and it wasn’t functioning properly. I couldn’t get any words to transit to my mouth. They slid around in my brain, unable to find the exit.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He didn’t sound concerned.

  “I’m just dandy,” I managed after a moment and with some difficulty, sounding more slurred than sarcastic.

  The left side of my head was ringing. I stuck a finger into my ear canal and wiggled it around. It didn’t help. With a groan, I rolled onto my back.

  “Need a hand getting up?” he said.

  There was something about the way he spoke—all energetic and lively, as though there were a mariachi band parading out of his mouth—that prompted me to open my eyes. And that was when I realized I was hallucinating from the smack I’d just taken on the head.

  Because I could actually see him.

  It had been six months since bacterial meningitis stole my sight, six months since I’d seen anything at all. Sure, what I was seeing was a cheesy hallucination, but it was there. I should hit my head more often.

  A young boy peered down at me. I figured he was maybe eight or nine years old, but I’d never hallucinated before, so my hallucination-age-guessing skills could have been a little off. He was small, golden-toned, and ribby, and he wore board shorts about three sizes too big, a cockeyed baseball cap, and a wide, toothy smile.

  I sat up, swaying a little as I came to rest in a seated position. My brain was swimmy and I had a massive headache. “You,” I began, shaking an index finger at him, but the kid furrowed his brows at me and I completely lost my train of thought.

  I peered at the space around the boy. I wasn’t just seeing him. I was seeing several feet around him as well, as though he were a pale gray lightbulb, emitting the sort of muted light that yawns into existence at dawn—almost more the idea of light than actual light. But it had been so long since I’d seen anything that it seemed more like a spotlight.

  On the floor beside his sneakers, I could see a crumpled-up Skittles wrapper. Red. The wrapper was bright red. God, I’d missed red. Beside it was a bright blue plastic chair, on which BITE ME was carved in big block letters. And above the chair? A soft, buttery beam of slanted late-afternoon sunlight. Beyond that, everything just got dimmer and dimmer, slowly petering out into the void.

  Even for a hallucination it was weird.

  I looked up at the kid, suddenly realizing that he was supporting himself with a pair of crutches. Not the kind that cram into your armpits, but the short aluminum ones that attach to your forearms. Strangely, they seemed to be a fundamental part of him—if he were standing here without them, he’d look as though he were missing something vital, like a nose or an ear or whatever. He was smiling at me with half his mouth, his expression stuck somewhere between amusement and disbelief. “Are you drunk?” he asked.

  I’d never met a hallucination until just now, but I was fairly certain that this particular one was a little presumptuous. Maybe they all were. “I am not drunk,” I said indignantly. “I am concussed, which explains your presence here.” I swooped an arm around with a flourish, as if introducing him to the situation.

  He puffed out his cheeks and sighed. “So then you’re a pothead. Crap.” Under his breath, he added, “The good-looking ones always have a tragic flaw.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Well. The thing is? I used to be totally in love with Jessica Baylor. She sat next to me in math. She was hot. Like, she had shiny hair and shiny eyes and a shiny smile. But then? She told me she hates cake, and I’m fundamentally opposed to cake-haters. Then there was Hannah. From band? She had boobs. They were magnificent. Just thinking about them was enough to make a guy go bonkers....” He blinked once. Hard. Like he was using his eyelids to wipe the image off his brain. “But the thing about Hannah was that I caught her throwing a rock at a squirrel. A squirrel, for Pete’s sake. It just wasn’t right. Then today, when I saw you—hello—I thought you were perfect. That fall? Wow. Just...wow. But then I find out you’re a pothead.” He huffed out another huge gust of air. “It’s tragic.”

  Whoa. I must’ve really knocked the crap out of my head. “I’m not a pothead,” I informed him, although I wasn’t sure why I was defending my honor to a young, semiperverted apparition.

  “Then why are you staring at me like that?” he asked. “Like, all blank-faced and goofy-eyed?”

  Staring? Well, I guess I was. I wondered briefly why pointless social conventions applied to hallucinations. “You’d have to be staring at me to know that I was staring at you,” I said. Clearly, he couldn’t argue with such logic.

  His smile grew wide, commandeering his entire face, and then he said, “You were staring at me first, so you started it. I am just an innocent bystander who is taking note of all your staring.”

  I tapped an index finger on my chin. There’s nothing like a good argument to knock the fog out of your brain. And I could tell by his expression that he noticed my improving mental clarity as well, that he realized his pothead theory had been way off base. “Actually,” I said, “when I first saw you? Right after I fell? You were already looking at me, which makes you the one who stared first. My staring, therefore, is just a byproduct of all your staring.”

  There was a long silence, which then became a longer silence. Finally he whispered, “I believe I’ve just found my next girlfriend.”

  I laughed so hard that I let out an unladylike snort. Evidently I had a way with hallucinations. But people? Well, I sort of sucked with people.

  A sharp clicking of high heels came into the room. From somewhere behind me, the receptionist said, “What the...? Maggie? Why are you sitting on the floor? Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m grand,” I drawled, not taking my eyes off the kid. “Never better. Just had a teensy slip, followed by a not-so-teensy fall. Something on the floor is a smidge slippery.”

  She was dead quiet for a moment, and then she said in a whine, “Oh—no, no, no, no. Not now.”

  What her problem was I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t be bothered. Right now, for some reason, life just seemed to like me.

  “Benjamin Milton,” the receptionist scolded, “stop flirting with the poor girl. Can’t you see that she’s way too old for you?”

  The kid took in a big breath and puffed out his cheeks. Holding up one index finger, he said, “I am not flirting, per se. I cannot help that I am a sexy piece of man-flesh and—”r />
  But she cut him off before he could finish his sentence, her words flying out of her mouth so quickly that I could barely understand them: “Sorry Ben but listen I have to go because I’m late late late and I have three minutes to pick up my son or the day care will charge me and I can’t pay them extra or else I’ll be short on my rent so be a dear and wipe that stuff off the floor before someone breaks their neck.” I flinched as a dingy rag flew out of nowhere from behind me and landed on top of the boy’s shoulder. “Thanks a ton I really appreciate it!” She raised her voice and said, “MR. STURGIS I’M LEAVING AND YOUR NEPHEW IS HERE AND DON’T FORGET TO LOCK UP!” Bottle-blond, thin, and middle-aged, the woman half walked, half ran right through my faint bubble of sight. And then she was gone.

  For several seconds, I forgot how to breathe. My eyes traveled back to the kid standing in front of me. I felt as though I’d collided with something massive and unyielding and then exploded into a million tiny pieces. I shut my eyes, trying to gather what was left of my sanity. When I opened them, he was still there.

  I sat there for a few seconds, gaping at the kid. He shifted toward me on his crutches and grinned widely, flashing me his largish set of front teeth. “Why can I see you?” I asked. He didn’t answer my question because I didn’t actually say it. I tried the words out in my mind, but they seemed too ridiculous to say out loud. I ran a hand over the new lump on my head, wondering whether my fall had knocked something back where it belonged—whether some cog in my brain had been slammed back into the notch labeled SIGHT.

  Was that even possible?

  I swallowed and let my eyes fall downward. I didn’t know what I was expecting to see, but it surely wasn’t...myself. My blindness had caused me to doubt my own existence, made me believe that I’d evaporated into nothingness—a ghost of a person. My hands were bone-white, thin, frail-looking, a single callus on my right index finger from learning braille. I was wearing a white T-shirt advertising my current obsession and the best emerging band of all time, the Loose Cannons, and also the shorts my parents had purchased for me a couple months back. I’d always thought the shorts were comfortable and unique, but now that I saw them I realized why. They were too big, too bunched up in weird places, and too reminiscent of something my mother would wear. My toenails still had a couple specks of Blue Bayou polish on them. It had been my favorite back when I could see. On the side of my right ankle, just north of my flip-flop, was the scar I’d gotten when I’d fallen out of a tree back in the eighth grade. I stared at it for a few heartbeats, long and hard, feeling oddly as though I were standing an inch from a big screen, marveling at every little pixel.