The One Thing (18 page)

Maggie.

He’d called me Maggie. Not Thera.

My heart twisted. I hated the idea of fighting with Ben, of having caused him heartache, of screwing up our friendship. Not just because he’d gifted me with a portion of my eyesight,
either. It was more than that. “Ben—”

“No,” he said, more forcibly this time. “I need you to leave me alone. I’m sad right now, and I’m not going to be un-sad for a long time, and all I want is for you
to get out of my house.”

Guilt corkscrewed around me and twisted into my gut. I leaned against the door, sliding down until my butt hit the floor with an uncomfortable thud. I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I
was afraid that if I tried to speak, more
stupid
would come out. “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

“You might take that ‘I’m sorry’ and give it to Mason. You hurled all over his car last night when he drove you home. But don’t worry about it. It only took him a
few hours to clean it up. Probably the smell will go away in a month or so.”

So Mason Milton had cleaned up my puke. Lovely. Add that to my list of offenses. “Is he home?”

“Nope,” Ben said, popping the
P
to let me know just how little he cared to be speaking to me at this very moment.

I thunked the back of my head against the door, just once, and pianoed my fingers on the floor—a sad, lonely riff from one of Chopin’s waltzes.

“Look,” Ben said tiredly, “I’m not going to feel sorry for you, okay? You were using me to see, using me to get close to Mason.” I folded my arms over my stomach.
There was a vein of truth in his words; I couldn’t refute them. After a beat, he went on. “Truth is, sometimes you do shitty things. Sometimes you say shitty things. Sometimes
you’re not a good friend. I’m not going to try to make you feel better about that.”

I thought about those words in Gramps’s truck all the way home, and all the way up my porch steps, and all the way to my room. Flopping facedown on my bed, I recollected all those times I
could have called Sophie to explain how I was feeling, to apologize for avoiding her, but didn’t. I thought about how I’d let our friendship wither up and die because I was too ashamed
to tell her I was scared and miserable, too focused on holing up in my house and hoping my blindness would just go away. It had been a decision I’d made months ago and every day after
that—a decision I’d made to push her away.

And it had worked.

Right now my life was so broken, so mangled. I needed to glue something back together before my shaking frame fractured into a million different pieces. So I pulled my phone out of my pocket and
dialed Sophie’s number.

“S
ophie. It’s Maggie.”

Her name sounded odd coming out of my mouth. Foreign. I wedged the phone between my shoulder and ear and then crossed my arms. Then I uncrossed them. Then I crossed them again. What did I
usually do with my arms when I was on the phone?

I noticed a strange hiccup of silence before Sophie spoke, and when she did her voice sounded off: gluey and stuffy, like she was just getting over a cold. “Hey, Maggie.”

I cleared my throat. Why was I so nervous? This was Sophie. We’d known each other practically all our lives, lost baby teeth together, gone through period trauma with each other.
“Hey. Um. I was wondering if you want to come over? You know, like, to my house. In Bedford Estates.” Oh my God. Did I just say that? I just said that. I cleared my throat again.
“It would be cool if you bring Lauren, too.”

“Okay.” She sounded hesitant, dubious, and I guess she had every reason to be.

An hour later the doorbell rang. I padded into the entryway and stood there for a long moment, my heartbeat fluttering in my throat, before I took three unstable strides forward and grasped the
knob. Sucking in a breath, I yanked the door open, hovering there for the space of several breaths before fundamental hospitality kicked in. I said hello and Sophie said hello. I asked if Lauren
had come along, and Sophie said that she hadn’t been able to make it. And then we just stood there, on opposite sides of the threshold, as silence wedged itself between us.

Finally I waved her inside and led her to the living room, which in and of itself was a little awkward. Back in the day, we’d always hung out in my room. But I was hesitant to take her to
my new bedroom. I didn’t want her asking questions I had no clue how to answer.

So: the living room, where I sat on the couch as though I had a javelin shoved straight up my spine. I waited for Sophie to start talking. She didn’t. Even though the air-conditioning was
set on glacial, I felt sweaty and feverish and short of breath. Wiping my palms on the couch, I opened with the brilliant “So. Um. Lauren’s busy today?”

Sophie pulled air through her teeth, a nervous habit of hers. It used to drive our fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones, completely out of her head. Finally she said, “I guess she had plans or
something?”

In all honesty, I hadn’t actually expected Lauren to come along today. Out of all the girls on the team, Lauren was the one who had seemed the most uncomfortable with my blindness. I
waited for Sophie to say something else, but she didn’t, so I let out a little cough and said, “So. How are you?”

Sophie sighed. It made me feel weird for some reason. Heavyhearted. “I’m doing well,” she said softly. I got the impression that she was trying to convince herself more than
she was trying to convince me. “You?”

“Fantastico,” I said. As an expert liar, my voice didn’t waver one iota.

The quiet settled over us again.

Small talk. I needed more small talk.

“Are you still going out with that guy?” I said, sort of loudly. “The one with the hair?” Just before I’d lost my sight, she’d started dating some guy from
Central—a wide-shouldered jock who looked as though he’d styled his hair by gelling it up and jumping backward out of a plane.

“Jason Salamone? Um. No,” she said. Her
no
had two syllables, the first one for the
no
and the second one for the rest of the story.

I bit my thumbnail. God, this was excruciating. “What happened?”

“Jason moved to North Dakota.”

I had the feeling she was still leaving out something huge—like maybe he’d dumped her or had treated her badly or something—but I wasn’t going to press. Instead I said,
“North Dakota? What the hell is in North Dakota?”

“A military base. Jason’s dad got transferred there,” she explained.

“Oh.”

Silence.

I shifted on the couch. Folded one leg under my butt. Twisted my hands together. With every shift of position, I begged myself to apologize to her. To tell her how hard the past several months
had been. But the truth was, I was terrified of what she might say. So instead I blurted, “Are you sick?” The question took her off guard for some reason, because she didn’t
answer right away. “You sound stuffy, is all. Like you have a cold.”

“I—yeah. I mean, I don’t feel well.”

More silence.

This ranked as the most awkward conversation we’d ever had, even worse than the Target conversation, which was saying something. I never thought we could disintegrate this badly. Never
thought we’d end up here, like this, sitting next to each other and groping for words that neither of us had.
Okay, fine,
I wanted to scream up at the sky.
Lessons learned.
Payback noted. Hallmark moment not going to happen.
And I couldn’t blame Sophie. It was exactly what I deserved.

The next day I kept picking up my phone to call Ben for dumb, random stuff: to tell him that maybe chocolate Pop-Tarts were my Thing, and to ask him if he knew when the word
anniversary
was invented, because it seemed like one of those words we should be celebrating, oh, I don’t know...say, once a year. But then I’d realize he wasn’t speaking to me, so instead
I’d just flop down on my bed and mope all the air out of my room. Once the evening rolled around and I was properly tired of moping, I checked out the post Clarissa had mentioned earlier.

They were still there, Cannon Dude’s pompous, self-righteous ramblings, and listening to my screen reader shout them into my room irritated me to no end. I wasn’t the only one
annoyed. Several people had posted since, all telling him he was a complete, total, absolute raging jackass.

I dialed Clarissa’s number. “Hey,” I said when she picked up. “Cannon Dude is the douchiest of bags.”

She snorted. “Right? After I got off the phone with you yesterday, I checked out his profile. Age: thirty-five. Sex: male. Occupation: computer scientist at Apple. He works at Apple, for
Pete’s sake! So—
hello!
—he’s a supersmart techy guy who probably hacked into Mason’s computer. Hence ‘the secret lies with the singer.’”

As she paused to take a breath, I realized that I’d just spent the past several seconds tapping my fingers to the cadence of her speech. That weird, manic way she spoke, the stopping and
starting and stopping again, had a chaotic rhythm, an almost-melody.

“Anyway,” she went on, and I heard the rattle of her iced coffee and a pronounced swallow. “That flu! How are you feeling? Are you all right?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. Truth was, I wasn’t all right. Not in the slightest. And part of me wanted to tell her everything: how my life had cracked down the middle when
I’d lost my sight, how my mother had disappeared while I was in the hospital, how I’d walked away from my old friendships, how I’d shattered my new ones. And my
sometimes-eyesight, I wanted to tell her about that, too. But I didn’t trust my judgment or my mouth right then, so all I said was, “Couldn’t be all righter.”

“My soup! It helped, right? Was it good?”

I’d actually forgotten about her soup, and so after we got off the phone I took a bowl of it to the living room. It was a summer night, so Gramps and Dad were in their usual summer-night
spot: in front of a baseball game, grousing about the Red Sox’s current losing streak. This went on for several minutes, their complaining, and then Dad cleared his throat, which was my first
indication that the conversation was about to go south.

He said, “So, Maggie. I was talking to your mother this morning, and she mentioned that Merchant’s has a soccer team.”

“Yeah. I know,” I said, dubiously poking at the soup with a spoon. Brothy things were generally not my cup of tea. Mostly because I didn’t like my tea served with wilty
vegetables floating around in it.

“Have you thought about checking it out this fall?”

“Nope,” I said, cramming some soup in my mouth so I didn’t have to comment any further on the subject. My school counselor had mentioned the soccer team a couple months back.
Five-a-side soccer: soccer adapted, so the blind can play.

I wanted no part of it.

“You ought to consider it,” Dad said. “Keeping involved in soccer really helped your mom when she had to stop playing.”

What I wanted to tell Dad was that it hadn’t been soccer that had helped my mother. It had been me.
I
had been the one who had given her hope again.
I
had been the one
who had given her a new dream to chase.

And I had been the one who had stripped everything away.

She hadn’t forgiven me for it yet, that much was true. But then, neither had I.

Gramps saved me by changing the subject. “What the hell are you eating, kid?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Soup.”

“That the crap your mom bought with all the fiber?” Gramps asked.

“Nope,” I said. “It’s homemade. And why is Mom buying you high-fiber soup?”

“Prostate is swollen. Fiber is supposed to shrink it.”

Once you get as old as Gramps, no subject is particularly good or bad, so all of them can be freely discussed over chicken noodle soup. I made a little gesture in the air to him, like
Hello,
I’m trying to eat here?
and in doing so, I managed to knock the bowl with my elbow and tip the soup into my lap. I lurched sideways, slamming my shoulder into the end table.

Dad was beside me in seconds. “Maggie! You okay?”

I jerked upright, irritated that my father was hovering over me like I was an invalid. The worst thing? I couldn’t get angry with him about it. Not really. He was just trying to do
something
. Sure, he was gentle and rangy and awkward, but it had always been his job to make sure I didn’t get hurt—a task he’d never failed to take seriously. It was
difficult for him to accept that he hadn’t been able to protect me from losing my sight. As though something like that is even possible. You can’t stave off
life
. Sometimes
life just happens, no matter how careful you are. “I’m fine,” I mumbled, jerking to my feet.

“Let me just run down to the laundry room and grab a rag—”

“I’ve got it, Dad,” I said, sort of loudly, spinning on one heel and hustling to the basement before he could protest. But in my haste I caught my foot on some unidentified
object at the base of the stairs, pitched forward, and—yes—spectacularly took out whatever was in my path, namely a waist-high object that thumped hard on the carpet.

Perfect.

“Maggie?”