The One Thing Read online

  Yup—yup—I could definitely see.

  Yet.

  Why?

  Twisting around, I looked behind me. I had maybe a foot of hazy sight, but beyond that, everything faded into oblivion. No waiting room. No chairs. No...nothing. I swung my head back, peering at a thin river of frothy light-green substance that snaked its way along the not-quite-white tile floor. Pistachio ice cream, I was guessing. Evidently this was what I’d slipped on. I had never been a fan of pistachio ice cream—nuts have no business hanging around in something smooth and creamy—but in light of current events, I might have to eat a whole carton of it tonight.

  Because really.

  The kid, Ben, cleared his throat, cranked his head around to face Mr. Sturgis’s office, and basically screamed, “UNCLE KEVIN! Mom wanted me to run in and ask whether you could come to dinner tonight, but you’re, like, obviously busy working and stuff, so I’ll take my new girlfriend instead.” All Mr. Sturgis could get out of his mouth was “Um” before Ben interrupted him by saying, “No, it’s totally cool, because I want her to meet my family.”

  “Er. Okay?” Mr. Sturgis hollered back, clearly confused.

  “I’m not your girlfriend,” I informed him in a low voice, but he just smiled at me like a complete lunatic. And then, chin raised high and spine straight and confident, he lowered himself to the floor with one arm, using the BITE ME chair as a prop. His skinny legs folded up limply underneath him.

  “So,” he said, one eye on me and one eye on the pistachio ice cream he was wiping off the floor, “shoplifting?”

  I didn’t answer him because his question made zero sense. Also, his head was turned a little, giving me a full view of the writing on his cockeyed hat: ALL THIS AND BRAINS, TOO! I was so idiotically thrilled to see the written word that I read it over and over. Finally, I realized that he was waiting for a comment or an answer or something—to what, exactly, I couldn’t quite remember—so I said, “Um. Excuse me?”

  “Why are you in my uncle’s office?” he said, turning toward me and taking away my brief view of the writing on his hat. “You don’t look like an ax murderer or a drug dealer, so I figure you’re a shoplifter.” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “What did you steal?”

  “Nothing,” I said sharply. In a normal situation, I would have replied with something quick-witted and smart-assed, but the throb in my head and the sudden one-eighty of my eyesight was interfering with my thought processes.

  “I think you are hiding something from me, beautiful,” he said.

  Well. I didn’t know how to reply to that. Mostly because I found it impossible to argue effectively with someone who had just called me beautiful. Even if the compliment had come from a kid.

  He stopped wiping the floor and waited for an answer to the shoplifting question. I straightened my posture and said, “I am not a shoplifter. I don’t even like to shop. I was...involved in a school prank.”

  His smile widened, and he laughed in one quick burst that had the sound and the feel of an exclamation point at the end of a sentence. “I love a girlfriend with hidden depths. Please...continue,” he said.

  “I’m not your girlfriend. I’m way too old for you,” I informed him.

  “Yes, but you will be my girlfriend, so technically it’s the same thing,” he said, flicking his eyebrows at me.

  “Technically, it isn’t. Technically, you’re, what, nine years old?”

  “Ten,” he sniffed, as though the one year made a huge difference.

  “Technically, you’re ten and I’m seventeen, and there are probably laws against ten-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds dating.”

  He waved me off and said, “So. The school prank?”

  There was something in his eyes—a realness or a sincerity, maybe—that I was beginning to notice, if only because it was so lacking in myself. It was this quality, and this quality alone, that prompted me to tell him about the prank.

  It went down something like this: Several months ago, while both the faculty and students attended a school assembly, I relocated the obnoxiously huge statue of our obnoxiously huge-headed school founder, Elias Merchant, a few feet across the hallway to the boys’ restroom. In front of the urinals, to be exact. Then I coated my feet in the Home Depot’s Moon Dust white paint and walked a short trail of painted footprints from where the statue had once stood to where I’d moved it. So basically, it appeared as though the statue had sort of walked off to the restroom and decided to stay there for a while. Okay, so I knew that none of the students would actually see my artistry, but I was certain they would hear all about it. And it was better that way. The embellishments you dream up in your mind are always better than reality. At any rate, it was all in good fun. Until I got caught, that is.

  By the time I finished explaining all of this to Ben, his face looked as though it might break in half from smiling. He burst out laughing, a long, loud stream of exclamation-point laughs.

  “That’s awesome!” he said, using the same chair to pull himself to his feet. After he jammed his arms into his crutches and regained his balance, he froze in place, squinting down at me. “Wait,” he said. “You go to Merchant’s? Isn’t that a school for the blind?”

  For the past few minutes, I’d almost forgotten that I was blind. I’d felt so...normal. More normal than I’d felt in months. Yet I knew: there was so much out there that I couldn’t see, so many things beyond Ben and beyond me and beyond the murky ring around us.

  I was still blind. Mostly.

  After a notable silence, a few words worked their way out of my mouth. They weren’t eloquent, but they were words nonetheless. And right now, I couldn’t afford to be picky. “Um. Yeah. Merchant’s is a school for the blind.”

  His eyebrows crashed together. “So why do you go to school there?”

  I stood up and dusted off my backside, stalling. I had no idea what to say to the kid. Finally, because I didn’t have any available brain cells to make up a civilized lie, I told him the truth. “Because I’m blind.”

  He grinned at me disbelievingly. “Nuh-uh.”

  “Trust me. I’m blind.” To prove my point, I pulled my cane out of my purse and unfolded it. “And if that isn’t enough proof, go ask your uncle.” I made a little gesture with my hands. “Go ahead.”

  Without moving the rest of his body, he turned his head toward Mr. Sturgis’s office and hollered, “UNCLE KEVIN! THE CURLY-HAIRED GIRL OUT HERE? THE ONE WHO GOT IN TROUBLE FOR A SCHOOL PRANK? IS SHE BLIND?”

  There was a muffled, uncomfortable little cough from Mr. Sturgis, and then an affirmative noise.

  Ben slowly turned back toward me. He shifted his weight on his crutches, and then his expression changed to something that I could only call enchanted.

  “I’ve been blind since I got meningitis, about six months ago,” I explained. “Before I slipped in here today? I couldn’t see anything at all. But when I fell, I must’ve knocked something loose in my brain. Because I can see you, but only you and a little bit around you. Beyond that, there’s...well, nothing.” I squinted along the rim of the dusty circle that surrounded him, where the gray light receded, still mystified by how it just seeped into the void.

  “Holy shit,” Ben whispered. “It’s a miracle.”

  I opened my mouth to argue with him, but then promptly shut it. The truth of it was that I didn’t know why I could see him. I didn’t know anything at all, really. I didn’t know whether I should tell someone—Mr. Sturgis, my parents, a teacher, a doctor.

  A shrink.

  I chewed on my thumbnail. Would anyone actually believe me? Probably not. Due to compelling lying practices generally frowned upon by adults, my parents—or anyone else, for that matter—didn’t put much credit into the things I told them these days.

  Hell, I wasn’t sure whether I believed myself. Something about this wasn’t quite ringing true. And I had to wonder whether I’d been so desperate for my eyesight that I’d gone straightjacket, whether my neurons ha
d started randomly firing off, creating...this.

  I squinted at Ben, at his bucktoothed smile and his floppy blond hair and his crutches, and I swallowed. If I were to be perfectly honest with myself—something I generally strived to avoid—then the answer would be a resounding yes. I’d probably gone out of my nut.

  Still, though.

  I had no desire to end up in a psych ward while some Egbert dissected my brain. So until I worked out exactly what was happening, I wasn’t telling another soul that I could see Benjamin Milton.

  “First off, you’re too young to cuss,” I told Ben. “And secondly, it’s not a miracle. When I fell, I hit my head. Hard. It sort of rattled my brain and...um...now I can see you. Possibly.”

  He wasn’t listening to me. He was pacing around, saying, “Holy crap holy crap holy crap holy crap.” Finally he jolted to a stop, let his head fall back, stared to the heavens, and bellowed, “HOLY CRAP IT’S A MIRACLE!”

  I strode forward and clamped my hand over his mouth. Bending down to his ear, I said in a low voice, “You need to keep this quiet until I figure out what’s going on. Can you promise me you won’t tell anyone?”

  He nodded slowly, eyes wide. My hand fell from his mouth. He murmured, “Okay, Thera.”

  Thera? “Actually, my name is Maggie. Maggie Sanders.”

  “But I’m gonna call you Thera,” he whispered through nearly unmoving lips. His eyes were still huge bowling balls as he stared up at me.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and index finger. I wasn’t wearing enough deodorant for this conversation. “Actually, I prefer my real name.”

  “The thing is,” he said, still whispering, “you look just like Thera. On Twenty-one Stones? She shoots lightning out of her fingers and fights dragons with magical weapons.”

  I scrubbed my forehead with the heel of my palm. “What are you talking about?”

  “Twenty-one Stones? The best video game in existence?”

  Ah. So I’d been named after a heroine in a video game. What a compliment.

  I stood there, arms crossed, as he looked at me as though I were the best roller coaster in the history of roller coasters. Finally he said, “Would you please please please come to my house for dinner? I won’t tell my family about the miracle thing. Promise.” He jerked his head toward the door. “We can even give you a ride. My mom’s right outside.” He walked his crutches together and then bent his wrists so his fingers were steepled in an I’m begging you position. “Please, Thera?”

  Generally, I wouldn’t hang out with a ten-year-old unless there was babysitting money involved. Lots of it. But I was desperate to find out whether Ben Milton was just something my brain had conjured up on its own, whether, after months and months of blindness—and like a time-release Tylenol gelcap—some hard protective coating had dissolved and the crazy had finally kicked in.

  Or whether my sight was returning.

  “Yes, I’ll go,” I blurted. “Just stop calling me Thera.”

  I called Gramps before we left the building. I got his voice mail, naturally. He was not a phone kind of guy. His outgoing message unfailingly made me smirk: at first, there’s this long pause, and I can hear him banging around, breathing into the phone, and finally he says, “Heh,” and then the line beeps.

  Heh was Gramps’s word. It was a multiuse word that could mean whatever he wanted it to mean. It could be a question, a statement, a filler word, or an answer. Those of us who really understood Gramps could decipher what his conversational heh meant.

  “Gramps,” I said into the phone. “You were supposed to pick me up, like, an hour ago? Anyhow, I’m going to have dinner at—” I stopped suddenly, unsure of how to categorize Ben. Ben soundlessly mouthed my new boyfriend’s house. “—a friend’s house,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. “I’ll call if I need a ride home. So. Um. Okay? Bye.”

  I stared at my phone after I hung up, mystified. It was something my parents had sprung for shortly after I’d lost my sight. A sympathy gift. It wasn’t a phone as much as it was a computerized voice that shouted at me every time I touched a key. So I’d hated it at first, and getting me to use it had been a bit like trying to baptize a cat. But I’d come around to it. Sort of.

  I gave it one last speculative glance before stuffing it in my pocket and glancing at Ben. He was just a couple feet away, still smiling idiotically at me. Feeling strangely as if I were taking something that had never been mine, I said, “C’mon, kid. Let’s go. And remember: mum’s the word.”

  He pried one hand free from its crutch, twisted an invisible key to lock his mouth, and then tossed it over his shoulder before we stepped out the door.

  When I first lost my sight, I spent an inordinate amount of time holed up in my room, sleeping and listening to music. This did not go over well with my parents. So after a good week of my refusing to leave my room and my refusing to go to school and my refusing to do basically everything, my parents yanked me out by way of Hilda, an orientation and mobility specialist whose main purpose was to teach me to navigate the world, whether I wanted to or not.

  Hilda was ridiculously intense and ridiculously bad-breathed, and she had this creepy Romanian accent that turned her Ws into Vs, which was entertaining in an immature sort of way. Hilda and I disagreed on several key points when it came to my training, namely the long white cane. While I detested the thing, she adored it. She called it a “theoretical extension of my fingers,” which was somewhat of a coincidence because whenever I used my cane, I wanted to extend my middle finger.

  Canes, I believed, were made for old people. Frail people. People who didn’t mind announcing their blindness as they walked down the sidewalk. I didn’t want to announce anything as I walked. I just wanted to walk. So I accepted the cane with great disdain. Even now, as I made my way out of Mr. Sturgis’s office, it felt heavy in my hand, cumbersome even, and I fought the urge to fold it up and cram it back in my purse.

  I didn’t see Ben’s mom—a bright-eyed, fair-haired, roundish woman wearing feather earrings and hospital-type scrubs—until we were practically on top of her. It was disconcerting to be walking along in Ben’s little bubble of muted gray light, seeing only asphalt and car doors and litter, and then—boom—suddenly there was a woman standing right in front of me, leaning against a banged-up burgundy minivan and chatting on a cell phone. Yet there she was, plain as day. And she, like Ben, was so beautifully, desperately real. Everything about her, from the warm tones in her voice to her welcoming smile, was screaming I like baking cookies and going to PTA meetings! at me. Could my mind fabricate something like that?

  Yes. No.

  Maybe.

  Ben introduced us. “Mom, this is Thera. Thera, Mom.” And then he added rather indelicately, “Thera is blind.”

  Resolved to see this through as planned, I did my best to focus on her left ear instead of her eyes as she dropped her phone into the front pocket of her scrubs. Her face exploded in a smile, as if I’d done something exceptional just by existing. “Oh! Nice to meet you, Thera!” she said. She threw herself toward me, taking me completely off-guard by giving me a massive hug. She was soft and squishy, and I sank in to her—like she was an honest-to-God hugger and I was an honest-to-God huggee and this was something that was actually happening.

  I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so finally I settled on giving her an awkward pat on the back. “Maggie, actually. My name is Maggie,” I said into her shoulder.

  She took a step back and considered this, her face scrunched up and her feather earrings swaying in the breeze. “Actually, you look more like a Thera.”

  Ben appeared thoroughly pleased with himself. To his mom, he said, “So. Uncle Kevin is busy working tonight, but Thera can take his place at the table if that’s okay?”

  She clapped her hands as if someone had just informed her that she’d won a brand-new, ding-free minivan. One that didn’t look as though it would keel over if a bird landed on the antenna. “Yes! Absolutely,” she sa
id.

  Ben swung his way to the back passenger-side door and waited for his mother to unlock it. But I stayed rooted where I was, suddenly terrified as I stared down at myself, where the outer rim of fragile gray light dissolved my body, quite literally, in half. Albeit muddy and faded, the left side of my body prevailed as per the norm, but the right...well, it fell into oblivion.

  None of this made sense.

  I wiped my palms on my shorts. Maybe I didn’t want to figure it out right now. Maybe I just wanted to go with it and see where it took me. Minutes ago, when I’d sat in Sturgis’s office talking to Ben, I’d forgotten all about my blindness. My blood had seemed carbonated, all light and fizzy, and I’d felt more like myself than I had in ages.

  Maybe, just for a little while, I wanted to be Maggie again.

  I could do that. Having a wedge of my eyesight back, hallucination or no, was so distracting, so exhilarating, that I could easily stop thinking about all the whys and the hows for a while and just be myself. After six months of nothing, I deserved that.

  Taking one bold step toward Ben, I bent over and whispered in his ear, “Remember: keep the eyesight thing on the down-low.”

  He saluted me. “Alas, I shall speak of your secret to no one,” he said, all serious.

  I rolled my eyes.

  The van wheezed as it fired up. Once it got going, it rattled like there was a loose marble rolling around in the engine. The upholstery was layered with a thick dusting of animal hair. Also, animal cages and kennels and such were crammed all over the place. Ben’s mom explained that she worked for a local veterinary hospital and occasionally had to pick up wounded animals from the streets.