The One Thing (28 page)

“I haven’t walked in my sleep for months,” I pointed out. “So technically, I’m more of a menace to myself when I’m awake.”

After a long moment, Dad said, “Just be careful, okay?” His voice sounded light, but I could sense the thin river of unease snaking through his words.

My chest knotted up reflexively. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

I opened my mouth to tell him I missed him, but then promptly shut it. Irrational as that declaration would be, it was true. I missed what we used to be, what had been. I wanted to backpedal
through the past seven months and become invincible to him once again, wanted to hang out with him first thing on Saturday mornings, one hand holding a to-go coffee and the other flipping through a
dusty box of timeworn records. But in the end all I said was, “Mind taking my snowboards down to the basement for me?”

It took me a full two hours to weed out my upstairs room. But after I finished, I’d created a home for the things I wanted to move up with me, namely my computer, my CDs, and my clothes.
Since my clothes were all color-coded, they took the longest to move. I lugged them in sections: blue, then white, then green, then red, then black. When I got everything put away, I hesitated in
the middle of my room, all too aware that it wasn’t a sighted girl’s room anymore, but it didn’t quite feel like a blind girl’s room, either.

With a loud sigh, I collapsed on my bed, thinking about Ben, thinking about my parents, thinking about Sophie, thinking about Clarissa, thinking about Mason—feeling oddly as though I had
one foot stretched out in front of me, planted in a new world, and the other behind me, rooted in the past. Straddling two worlds, but not fully belonging in either one.

I
don’t know what it’s like to get shot by a hit man, but I’d venture to guess it’s not unlike having Ben sneak up behind
you and blast a party horn in your ear. At the time, I was sitting in the Miltons’ living room, hate-watching a fishing show while mentally running through my descending bass line. And so the
horn-in-the-ear thing took me by absolute surprise. With a loud screech, I jerked upright, clutching my chest. “Ben, what the—”

Ben blew the horn again and then let it dangle out the side of his mouth like a cigar, supporting it with his smirk. I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t Ben’s birthday, and it wasn’t
even his half birthday. It was his quarter birthday—which, evidently, was a big deal.

From the floor, Mason smiled at me with one side of his mouth. He’d been sitting on the carpet with his legs crossed and his guitar in his lap, brows knotted together while he’d
plucked a major D chord again and again.

“Ben,” I said, “you need to stop doing that because you’re going to give me a—”

Another blast from the horn and, grinning maniacally, Ben swung off to the kitchen, where his mother was making a cake. Wally trotted off behind him.

I watched Ben leave the room, wishing I couldn’t see so well. My eyesight was everywhere now, refrigerator-bright light blasting brutally through the Miltons’ house and halfway
across the street. A few weeks ago that would have thrilled me. Now it made me want to puke.

With a loud sigh, I paced across the room and unloaded on the Miltons’ piano bench. It creaked and shifted precariously underneath me. I stared at the lid, where Mrs. Milton’s photos
were strung in a jumble of mismatched frames and blurry faces and dust. I found Ben and Mason in dozens of them—Mr. Milton, too. The pictures were a reel of film, where the boys aged in each
frame. They looked happy and relaxed, even after the notable absence of their father. I wondered how they’d done it. How they’d made the best of their lopsided lives. How they’d
stood up and kept walking.

And how I hadn’t.

I stared at the most recent picture of Ben—at a swim meet, looking young and outrageous with his wet hair sticking up in a fauxhawk. A swell of emotion rising in me, I let my eyes fall
down to the piano keys and slowly plunked out the Chopin-Clarissa tune, marrying it with the descending base line. The three of them slid together now, connected by some invisible notch.

“What was that?” Mason asked, standing up.

“One of Chopin’s waltzes,” I muttered.

“No, it wasn’t,” he said, sitting down beside me. “It was something...else.”

“Right. So I just pieced a bunch of stuff together that’s been running through my head. Was it that bad? God, it was bad. Just tell me it was bad and get it over with.”

“Actually, I liked it. You’re really good. Like, a natural.”

I glanced over at him. Mistake. He was
right there
, a breath away, staring at me with those soulful eyes—the sort of eyes that were almost painful to gaze into, and equally
painful to look away from. My lungs felt like they were folding up, collapsing in on themselves. “Um,” I said, sort of breathlessly, “I took ten years of piano lessons, so I spent
a lot of time bent over the keys. You can’t just unlearn something like that, you know? It sticks with you.” Clearing my throat, I gestured to the keys. “What about you? Do you
play?”

He shook his head. “Dad used to play. Piano never interested me like the guitar does, like lyrics do.”

“So you always wanted to be in a band?”

He shrugged with one shoulder. “My head has always been stuffed full with songs, so being in a band wasn’t something I wanted to do, it was something I had to do.”

“It’s your Thing,” I surmised.

He nodded and then glanced toward the kitchen. “It’s my Thing,” he agreed quietly. His eyes flickered back to me. “Music wasn’t ever a choice for me. It just
was
.” The way he spoke made music seem so simple, so elemental, so magical. I felt oddly as though he were disclosing one of life’s great mysteries to me—as though he
were weaving creationism and the big bang theory together as one—and I held my breath as he went on.

“When I was Ben’s age,” he said, “I mowed lawns for an entire summer to earn the money for my first guitar. It was a gaudy, piece-of-shit red electric, and it came with
an amp that cranked up loud as hell. My parents despised it.” His mouth twisted into a half smile, half frown. “But I was shy—sort of a loner—and music was just a way to be
me, you know? So they let it slide. Until I was fourteen, that is,” he said, his Adam’s apple sticking out a little as he spoke, “when I was in my room, banging out this
alternative chord progression at seven in the morning. Dad came marching in, and without a word he plucked the guitar from my hands, not giving it back no matter how much I begged. Looking back, I
can understand why: it was the weekend and the entire world was asleep. But at the time? I was pissed. I told him I hated him, then refused to talk to him.” He took in a slow breath, and in
his exhale he added softly, “He died a couple days later.”

I let out a little gasp—just a small, inhaling sound. But Mason heard it anyway and he turned toward me, his eyes tired and world-worn. “Yeah,” he said. Just the one word:
yeah
. But I understood the subtext. “Anyway,” he said, “when Dad died, I couldn’t even think about music. I refused to talk to my family, my grades were a train
wreck, I was just...messed up. I spent my days mouthing off to teachers, my afternoons in detention, my evenings holed up in my room, my weekends playing video games.”

“So what pulled you out of it?” I whispered.

“My principal.”

“Your principal,” I repeated blankly.

Mason nodded. “Yeah. Principal Morris. I spent a lot of time in his office. Particularly at the end of sophomore year, when I got into a fight at school.”

“Ah. Right,” I said.

“You heard about it? The fight?” Mason said.

I waved a palm at him. “Ben might have mentioned it.”

The corners of Mason’s mouth tugged up. “Right. So I was sitting across from Principal Morris, and he was informing me that I was a loser and that my grades were absolute crap and
that I would never amount to anything—” He abruptly stopped, evidently noticing the shocked look on my face. “Yes, he actually said that I would never amount to anything.”
Mason ran an index finger slowly over the edge of the piano lid. “I was just so angry. Angry at life, angry at myself, angry at Dad, angry at Principal Morris for being right.
Nothing—
nothing
—is more infuriating than having some holier-than-thou asshole call you out on your bullshit, you know? So it was when Principal Morris was telling me what a
piece of crap I was that I made a vow to myself: I would become so goddamn successful that I would force him to choke on his words.”

I just stared at him.

Mason nodded as if I’d spoken, and he said, “The way he looked down on me that day? It made me want to bust my ass, practice every night—become someone.”

“I imagine you’ve succeeded,” I said in a whisper.

He shrugged, an unassuming little jerk of his shoulder. “I’m not there yet,” he said.

Neither of us spoke for several minutes. I closed my eyes, placed my fingers back on the keys, and replayed my song. Everything in my life was a mess and I felt completely overwhelmed, but for
once in my life I was just...there—on that piano bench with Mason and nowhere else. And when I played the last note, I left my fingers on the keys for several seconds, keeping the music
hanging in the air, and then I inhaled, as if drawing the moment deep into my lungs, where I could keep it safe.

My mother was eating dinner at the kitchen counter when I got home. We spoke, but not really. As I sat down with a plate of leftovers, I said, “Hey, Mom. How was your day?” and she
said, “Not bad. Yours?” and I said, “Pretty good. It was Ben’s quarter birthday, so we had cake,” and she said, “What kind?” and I said, “Marble
fudge,” and she said, “Sounds yummy,” and then we were silent.

I had thousands of things I wanted to say to her. Real, genuine things. But that soccer ball from the other day—I could still feel it between us. So I just picked at my food until she got
up and rinsed off her plate. While she banged around at the sink, I thought about how she’d silently stood there when that ball had rolled to a stop at our feet. And I thought about how Dad
had lied to me so he could slip off on his own to the garage sales. My parents had hardly tried to connect with me since I’d lost my sight.

I remembered all the smiling pictures I’d seen on the Miltons’ piano lid. Mrs. Milton was involved in her kids’ lives; she loved them unconditionally. The three of them were a
family. My parents and I had been sleeping under the same roof and that was it.

Could blindness make you invisible to your parents?

I blinked a couple times, took a deep breath, and, plate in hand, went to my room to finish my dinner.

I
woke up to Mason singing in my ear. I rolled over and yawned, figuring it had to be morning because there were little splinters of light shooting
through the cracks in my eyelids.

Wait. What?

My eyes flew open and I sat straight up in bed. Bold light was blasting through my room. I didn’t know whether to answer the phone—which was blaring out my latest ringtone, the Loose
Cannons’ “Eternal Implosion”—or run to the window, so I did both.

“Hello,” I said, staggering out of bed.

“Thera!” Ben said.

I looked out the window. Mason’s car was parked on the street, and he was leaning against it, looking almost unjustly gorgeous. He gave me a little wave—the kind where only your
fingers move. Next to him, holding a phone and wearing both cowboy pajamas and a fuzzy hat with earflaps—as though he were braving the Alaskan tundra instead of a summer night in New
England—was Ben.

I looked around my room, drinking it in for a moment. It was a strange melding of past and present that somehow felt like me. I sat on the window’s ledge and made a little gesture in the
air like,
What are you doing here?
Into the phone, I said in a rush, “What’s going on? What time is it? Is everything okay?”

“Duh. Of course everything’s okay. It is four-oh-seven in the morning, and I’m taking you on a date,” Ben said.

Oh, Christ. “Seriously? Where?” I said, searching for some cleanish clothes and running a hand through my bedhead.

“Surprise.”