The One Thing (15 page)

My chest squeezed as feelings for Ben crowded in my heart. I hadn’t counted on this affecting me so much. But for some reason my emotions had been sitting right on the surface lately,
sharp and intense. I felt exposed. Fragile. It took several seconds to organize my thoughts enough to continue, and Mason didn’t speak. Why, I wasn’t sure. But he wasn’t the
easiest person to figure out. Like me, he was damaged. He’d just done a better job adjusting than I had. Maybe because he’d been forced to adjust, for his family’s sake. He was
the scaffolding of his family, the support that helped hold everything together.

What was I to mine?

I blinked up at the ceiling, focusing on the white stucco as my words came tumbling out. “Anyway, if I’ve offended you in any way I’m really sorry. It’s been sort of a
tough few months for me—” My throat closed up and tears clouded my vision.

Shit.

I could feel them now, the tiny cracks that were starting to form in me, fractures of a self I wasn’t sure I knew anymore, a self I’d divided in half over the past several weeks, a
self that was too broken to stand in front of Mason.

I had to get out of here.

“So anyway, your brother has been sort of a lifesaver for me,” I went on quickly, my words piling up on top of one another as I backed out of the room. My voice shook and gave out
and did that awful thing that voices do when you talk while crying. “He’s...well, he’s just Ben, you know? He’s kind and sweet and funny. I keep thinking that, if I hang
around him long enough, he’ll start to rub off on me.” Laughing without humor, I groped for the doorjamb and then clung to it as if it were a life preserver. Mason’s huge form
swam in my vision. “Anyway, I guess I just wanted you to know that I don’t plan on stepping out of Ben’s life just because you don’t like me.” I brushed the back of my
hand down my cheek, swiping away the wetness. And then, spinning on one heel, I left him there. And I noticed, as I ran down the hall toward Ben’s room, that Mason had finally stopped
playing.

I was standing outside on the deck that afternoon, wholly adrift in my thoughts, digging my iPod out of my pocket while reconstructing and deconstructing my meltdown in front of Mason, and also
trying to decide whether it was worth accidentally-on-purpose twisting my ankle to get out of my next session with Hilda, when the sliding glass door jerked open and a female voice behind me
hollered, “Maggie?”

I shrieked—like, literally shrieked—and lurched around, my iPod skidding off to some unknown area of my non-eyesight, probably never to be found again. “Who’s
there?”

“Clarissa!”

Clarissa.

Was it Wednesday already? Oh dear God: it was Wednesday. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Oh, hey, Clarissa,” I said, working to keep my tone sociable.

Tapping her way toward me until her cane thunked against my feet, she greeted me by taking my right hand between both of hers. I had no idea how she’d found it. It had been propped on my
hip, directly across from my left hand, which, by no great coincidence, was propped on my left hip. Squeezing my fingers excitedly, she said, “
Heeey.
Hope you don’t mind that
Dad dropped me off a little early? He had, like, only a quick break before his afternoon rounds at the hospital to give me a ride. Cripes, my backpack is
so
.
ridiculously. heavy.
Too many books! Think we can go inside and get started?”

Extracting my hand, I wiped it on my shorts. Which was juvenile, but I did it anyway. “Um. Sure,” I said.

When we got to my room, she unloaded herself on my bed and launched into one of her erratic, exclamation-point soliloquies about our illiteracy paper, during which I set about ignoring her by
means of thinking about what I’d said to Mason. And also thinking about the way he’d looked. And sounded. With a sigh, I turned my attention back to Clarissa. She was still talking.
She’d moved on to a full discourse about Iced Coffee Guy. I thought that maybe she’d stop there, that maybe she’d realize she was oversharing, but she didn’t. She slid right
into a painfully long description of the buttercream frosting she’d made in cake-decorating class. Finally I said, “You’re seriously taking a cake-decorating class?”

“Yes,” she sang with a friendliness that made me feel slightly guilty. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Just seems like it would be hard, is all,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets, and then pulling them back out, and then folding them over my chest. I cleared my throat. “I
mean, you can’t even see what you’re doing, so what’s the point?”

“Frosting,” Clarissa trilled. “Frosting is the point. Ganache and citrus curd. Whipped cream. Fondant. And—
oh
—meringue. Besides, cake decorating is so much
fun! And supereasy. You just have to go slowly and pay attention to what you’re doing—the position of the decorating bag, the amount of pressure you put on it, yada yada yada. Want to
come to my next class? You should totally come. You’re so hilarious—the ladies there will love you. Doesn’t even matter if the cake turns out hideous, because really: still tastes
like cake!”

“Huh,” I muttered noncommittally as I made my way toward my desk, determined to fire up my computer and get working on this paper. Halfway across the floor, though, I tripped on
Clarissa’s massive backpack, which she’d evidently deposited in the middle of my room. Grunting, I pushed it aside and said, “What the hell is in your backpack?”

I heard the rattle of ice in a cup—iced coffee, I was guessing—and a pronounced swallow. And then she said, “In order to get a ride here, I had to go with Dad to work for a
couple hours. He had patients to see. Somebody’s bladder to stitch up or whatever. So I brought my books, because it pains me to sit there for hours, listening to him talk to his coworkers
about prostates and penises and hurtias.”

“Hernias,”
I corrected, and then, like the child that I was, I smirked. Because: penises.

“Whatever. Hernias,” she dismissed lightly. “Anyhoo...the books! I’m reading two simultaneously because they both came in the mail at the same time and I couldn’t
choose. They both sounded
so
good. Do you like to read? I’ll loan them to you when I’m done. You’ll freak—just keel over and die. I mean, the
romance
.”

“No, thanks,” I said, not particularly keen on exploring the ins and outs of romance at this particular juncture. And besides, thus far I’d managed to conquer only Grade 1
braille, which worked like a simple substitution code. Most books these days were written in complicated, twisty Grade 2 braille, which I was still learning.

“Sure?”
she chirped. “You’d fall in love with the guys! The one in
Enchanted Kiss
is in this crazy-good indie band that totally reminds me of the Loose
Cannons! The drummer is so insanely talented. And the lead singer is Mason Milton all the way, so swoony and—”

I coughed like I’d just swallowed my tongue.

“You all right?” Clarissa said.

I clapped my hands together overzealously. “Yup. Totally fine. I just...” I cleared my throat. Twice. “You like the Loose Cannons?”

She snorted. “I have an unhealthy amount of like for the Loose Cannons. In fact, the Loose Cannons take up so much Like Space in my brain that there is hardly room for anything else
besides baked goods.”

I sat down hard in my chair. “Huh.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, the Loose Cannons’ lyrics? They slay me. ‘Eternal Implosion’ goes to some crazy-deep places, Maggie. Brilliance. Factor.”

“Huh,” I said again. Because I was verbose like that. But honestly I didn’t know what else to say. I was too shocked. Clarissa just didn’t seem the type to like my kind
of music. And anyway, she started talking again so it didn’t really matter.

“A friend of mine—Jase Crenshaw?” she said. “He knows Mason Milton. I know, right?
Mason Milton.
They go to school together at Brighton.”

My chair squeaked sharply as I jerked toward her. “Has Mason told him the Big Secret?” I practically shouted.

I heard her collapse on the bed. Drum her fingers on my wall. “No. He hasn’t, no.” She blew out a loud exhale. “What do you think he’s like? I feel like he’s
superhot. Or else superintense.”

“Both. Definitely both,” I said with a sigh.

A sigh.

Dear God. I could hardly stand myself.

“Anyway,” Clarissa sang, “I feel like the Big Secret can’t be all that hard to figure out. There’s probably this
gigantic
clue right in the middle of the
website somewhere—so easy that it’s hard, you know? We should totally hang out more so we can brainstorm.”

“Sure,” I said immediately. Because the truth of it was, there were certain sacrifices I was willing to make to attend a Loose Cannons concert. And hanging out with Clarissa
Fenstermacher was one of them.

W
hile I had a closetful of perfectly acceptable shoes, I’d worn nothing but flip-flops since I lost my sight. Even in the winter. I
wasn’t sure why exactly, but I presumed it was because their thin soles helped me to get a sense of my environment, to detect tiny changes in the landscape and the slope of the ground and
whatnot. Or maybe I was just too lazy to tie my shoes.

Whatever the case, I liked the statements that my flip-flops made. They said,
I think my toes are pretty
, and they said,
I don’t plan on dressing up any time soon
, and
they said,
I have no intention of trying to outrun law enforcement today
.

At any rate, since my feet were always exposed they tended to be constantly cold, which in turn made them ghostly white. And as Ben and I sat side by side on his living room floor in front of
the TV, they looked practically see-through next to Ben’s exceedingly tanned, exceedingly dirty feet.

“How come your feet are so grimy?” I asked, leaning against the couch.

He shrugged. “Haven’t been wearing shoes much lately because I found out my shoes are sweatshop shoes. I need some new, non-slave-labor ones, but Mom has been busy with work. And so:
I have been barefoot.”

“Sweatshop shoes?”

“Duh, like the kind made in third-world countries by five-year-old kids. It was on the news the other day. Turns out, my favorite shoes were glued together by slave labor. I may give up
shoes altogether. I may become shoeless.” I rolled my eyes as he went on, pointing with his head to a pair of white sneakers by the front door. “If you put them to your ear,
you’ll hear the voices of a thousand disadvantaged kids forced to work for a penny a day.”

My reply was interrupted by raucous laughter coming from the direction of Mason’s room, where Mason and David had been holed up the entire time I’d been here. Although Mason and I
hadn’t actually spoken since my unbecoming breakdown in his room, in the past few days I’d noticed less tension in his shoulders when I was around, and he’d seemed to surface in
the same room as Ben and me more often. Consequently, I thought maybe my little speech had made an impression. I grant you, it was just one flimsy, splintered piece of plywood slid across the giant
ravine between us. Not enough to support the weight of either of us, but just enough to tell me that we weren’t as far away as I’d once thought.

Grumbling at myself for getting distracted by Mason again, I kicked Ben’s grubby foot, just lightly. “It’s a good look for you, the dirt,” I teased.

“Glad you’re finally coming around, Thera. Maybe we can reconsider that kiss?”

I stabbed him in the ribs with my elbow and said, “Reasons that I will not kiss Ben Milton—GO: One, he’s seven years younger than me. Two, although he isn’t my brother,
he feels like my brother. Three, he has grilled cheese sandwich stuck in his front teeth.”

“Shit. Really?” he said, scrubbing his teeth with an index finger.

“Four, he’s too young to cuss, but he cusses anyway. And five”—I lowered my voice—“I found a Loose Cannons CD hidden under his bed yesterday.”

“Shit,” he said again, louder this time, making his Flabrador retriever—who had his legs spread out behind him like a frog and his nose propped on Ben’s knee—raise
his dog-brows.

I shot the dog a look. Honestly. Wally was a little too reliant on Ben for attention.

“Please don’t tell Mason about the CD,” Ben whispered like we were in a James Bond movie and I’d just uncovered the truth about a top secret file.

I would have gladly tortured him for a while, but Mrs. Milton stuck her head into the living room and said, “Benjamin Thomas Milton, what did I ask you to do today?”

Ben’s head fell back theatrically and he stared at the ceiling. “Scrub my toothpaste out of the sink?”

“And?” she prompted.

He filled his cheeks with air and then let it out all at once, flapping his lips. “Vacuum the Doritos out of my carpet before the room”—he made quote fingers—“turns
into an ant pile?”

“Could you take care of that now, please? I have the early shift tomorrow and I need to go to bed soon. I don’t want to be listening to the vacuum at midnight, like the last time you
cleaned your room.”

Ben gave me an apologetic shrug and took off, leaving me in the dusty, indiscriminate outskirts of my eyesight. But it was enough to just barely make out Mason, minutes later, as he came loping
down the hallway, passing by the living room without noticing me. He headed straight out the front door, leaving it open for David, who was a few paces behind. David’s eyes snagged on me just
before he crossed the threshold. He jerked to a stop.