The One Thing (5 page)

Now, I’d never been especially skilled at reeling in my temper. Particularly in situations that involved arrogant males. So I turned my head and glared at him. Dead in the eye. Mason
crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, keeping one skeptical eye on me for the remainder of the meal.

I drummed my fingers on the table, keeping time with the drip-drip-drip of the kitchen faucet. Fine. Whatever. He probably wasn’t real anyway.

Mason said only a few words after that:
sour cream
and
um-hum
and
nope
. Every time he spoke, I made note of the velvety way his vowels rolled off his tongue. And every
time he spoke, I kicked myself for making note of the velvety way his vowels rolled off his tongue. Because clearly, the guy was an egotistical jackass.

I was sitting there, tapping out an aggressive faucet song and eating my quinoa-and-maybe-meat-or-maybe-mushroom enchilada, when Ben said to his mom, “So in swim practice last night? I
kicked ass.” He glanced at his brother for confirmation. “Right, Mason?”

Mason made an affirmative noise, and Mrs. Milton shot Ben a disapproving look and said, “Benjamin Thomas Milton. Language.”

Ben took in a monstrous breath and puffed out his cheeks, making his face almost completely circular. And then he leaned toward his mother, both palms flat on the table. “Sorry,” he
said. “It’s just that I beat my time from last year. That crappy backstroke one? And now I come in only a few seconds after everyone else.”

“You swim?” I said disbelievingly.

He sat up a little taller. “I’m on the swim team at North Bay Aquatic Club. The Dolphins?”

“Benjamin has spina bifida,” his mom explained to me. “He was born with it. The bottom half of his legs are pretty much paralyzed, but his upper body is strong. He’s been
on the swim team since he was three.”

“Wow, I’m impressed,” I said, my voice quieter than I’d intended.

Ben’s mom smiled. “Clearly, he gets his athletic ability from his father. I can hardly walk the dog without tripping. But Ben’s dad? He was quite an athlete.” The way she
said
was
left me with the distinct impression that Mr. Milton was no longer living.

There were a few seconds of heavy silence in which Ben squirmed in his seat and Mason cleared his throat, and then Mrs. Milton said, “Oh, I almost forgot—” She bolted to her
feet and hustled into some unspecified area of my non-eyesight, leaving her sentence open. But Ben and Mason seemed to know what was coming. There were two groans, the loudest of which was from
Mason, who put his fork down and rubbed his forehead with his palm. Before I knew what was happening, Ben’s mom popped back into my vision, holding a camera. A flashbulb went off in our
faces.

“Mom,” Mason complained. Just the one word:
mom
.

Mrs. Milton shot him a look. “Tonight is special,” she said. “We have company. And enchiladas. Life moves too quickly. If I don’t capture it, well...” Her voice
faded away and her expression turned wistful. Finally, she took a deep breath, gave a bit of a forced smile, and said, “I want to remember tonight.”

A
fter dinner, Ben and I went to his room, shut the door, and played video games. As it happened, I did look a bit like Thera, the badass dragon
slayer in Twenty-one Stones. But she was unquestionably the better looking of the two of us, even though she was animated. Yes, she had my curly auburn hair, and yes, she had my fair coloring, but
she had one of those cute button noses, whereas I had a chubby, unfeminine-looking nose. And she had boobs, while I was still waiting for mine to grow into something respectable.

Ben’s dog rested his muzzle on Ben’s leg, his nostrils working, and stared unblinkingly at Ben while we played Twenty-one Stones, which, in my opinion, was a little strange. After
several minutes of the staring thing, I jabbed my thumb in the direction of the mutt and said, “What’s with the dog?”

Ben spoke to me in the inconsistent, erratic way that kids speak while playing video games. “HURRY UP AND SHOOT YOUR FIRE OUT BECAUSE HERE COMES WYVERN—SHOOT HIM—NO WITH
FIREBALLS—Who? Wally? He’s my dog. Duh. I’m, like, his favorite person—WAIT, DON’T GO IN THERE. YOU’RE GOING TO GET US KILLED!”

“Don’t you think the way he’s staring at you is a little weird?”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Wally was a stray that some assnozzle left at the veterinary clinic where my mom works. So she brought him home. He’s been totally—TURN
AROUND—HE’S GOING TO INCINERATE YOU—my dog ever since.”

“Well, he ought to be off doing dog stuff—like barking and running around in the backyard and chasing cats and whatever,” I muttered under my breath, one eye on Wally.

“He does that, too—HIT THE DRAGON BETWEEN THE EYES—THAT’S WHAT KILLS HIM!” Changing the subject, he said, “So. I must know everything about you, starting with
the most important matter: what’s your Thing?”

“My Thing?”

“Yeah. Everyone has a Thing.”

“What sort of Thing?”

“You know, like, what is the Thing that makes you the happiest?—WATCH OUT BEHIND YOU!—What’s the Thing that makes you
you
? Your Thing. My Thing is swimming.
Like, obviously.”

“Okay, then. That’s easy. My Thing is soccer,” I said with an air of finality. I used to be amazing at soccer: the sprinting down the field, the dribbling of the ball with the
inside of my foot, the scoring.

He considered this for a moment, and then he said, “When was the last time you played soccer?”

“Like, six months ago, maybe? Right before I lost my sight?” I said, sort of defensively.

“Then it isn’t your Thing. Not anymore.”

I shrugged, trying not to let his words sink in enough to bother me. But they trickled in anyway, through the wide, jagged cracks the blindness had cut into me. They left my stomach pinched and
my mouth dry. “Okay, so then I don’t have a Thing,” I said, hoping he’d drop the subject.

But he didn’t. He set down his controller and stared at me, aghast. On the screen, his character got incinerated by a purple dragon. “Thera. Everyone has to have a Thing.”

“But I don’t,” I argued. My life had been so stuffed full of soccer that I’d had little time for anything else. I grant you, I’d tried other things. Summer yoga
camp. Snowboarding club. A decade’s worth of piano lessons. But for countless reasons, they hadn’t cleaved to me like soccer had.

“What about the Loose Cannons?” he said, gesturing to my T-shirt. “Are they your Thing?”

“The Loose Cannons are a band,” I explained. “They can’t be my Thing.”

“Why not? Do they make you happy?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” I said. “I guess. They’re my favorite band. They just seem to get me. But that doesn’t make them my Thing.”

“Have you ever been to one of their concerts?”

I rolled my eyes. “No.” Rather than having conventional concerts, the Loose Cannons played impromptu in completely random places—like the mall or the bank or whatever—and
then uploaded the footage online. Five months ago, when they’d burst onto the music scene by posting their first concert on YouTube, they’d snagged a million hits. Their second concert?
Three million. But as big as they were right now, the only way you could see one of their concerts was to uncover the band’s obscure online clues to where and when they’d play next,
which was something I’d been trying—and failing—to do for months on end. “Seeing the Loose Cannons in concert is next to impossible.”

Ben shook his head and picked up his controller. His on-screen character immediately jumped up and started running through a cave. My character followed. “Thera,” Ben said,
“seeing the Loose Cannons is totally possible.”

“Sure. Uh-huh. Right.”

“Woman. Your words wound me greatly. You’ve already seen them—or one of them, anyway. My brother is the lead singer. Hel-lo? Mason Milton?”

Mason Milton.

That was when reality fell over me like a suffocating wool blanket. I had to be hallucinating. I’d spent the better part of the past several months either pining for my eyesight or pining
for the Loose Cannons.

Of course I’d conjure up both of those things when I cracked.

Of course I would.

On top of that, the Mason Milton I’d met tonight looked brutally close to the one I’d pictured over the past several months. I huffed and let my head fall back. Fine.
Fine.
It was time for me to wake up or whatever it is that happens when crazy people realize that they are crazy.

I didn’t, though. I just sat there and continued to be crazy.

A half hour later, Mrs. Milton knocked on Ben’s door and pleasantly informed him that she was dropping him off at swim practice in “exactly forty-two minutes” and he needed to
find his suit “and use the restroom, because the pool is not a toilet.”

Ben looked mildly embarrassed. “Mom. I have plenty of time. We can even drop Thera off at her house on the way. She just lives in...” He turned to me. “Where do you
live?”

“Bedford Estates,” I said, and his eyebrows shot up.

“Bedford Estates,” he informed his mom. “So we have plenty of time.”

It wasn’t until after we piled into the backseat of the Miltons’ minivan, and after we pulled out of the driveway, and after I gave Ben’s mom directions to my house, that Ben
leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You seriously live in Bedford Estates?”

“Yup.”

Our house was just like the others in Bedford Estates, outrageously huge and sort of gaudy. We’d moved there when I was four, and even at that tender age I thought the place was
outrageously huge and sort of gaudy. So I spent most of my time upstairs in my bedroom. It was a dreamer’s room that stared out at the great maple in our front yard. It had slanted ceilings
plastered with a couple dozen glow-in-the-dark stars and a little cutout in front of the window, the perfect place to read. A thousand memories lived there now, all in suspended animation: pictures
of friends slapped on a corkboard, a half-deflated soccer ball wedged in the corner, books jumbled on the nightstand. I’d set foot in it only once after meningitis took my sight, and it had
felt as though it belonged to someone else. Someone with possibility. So I stayed downstairs in the boxy, functional room my parents had set up for me before I came home from the hospital.

After we came to a stop in my driveway, Ben leaned out the window, craning his neck to peer up at my house. He whistled, long and low. “Sweet,” he said, dragging the word out as
though he were talking about a skateboard trick or a new video game.

And then, silence. Ben and his mom were waiting for me to climb out of the car.

I swallowed. This was it: the end. The dream of the past couple hours had freight-trained past me in a blur of normalcy. All those minutes and seconds were gone now, and I felt like I’d
squandered them. I wasn’t ready to let them go. I swallowed again, louder this time, and looked around, taking in the back of Mrs. Milton’s head and Ben’s skinny legs and the
cracked vinyl seats.

“Um. Thera? I’m gonna be late for swim practice,” Ben prompted.

I flinched. “Right,” I said, yanking down on the door handle and stepping out of the van on wobbly legs. With one last aching look at the colors and the textures and the
life
, I said good-bye.

G
randpa Keith’s first words that evening were directed at an auto auction on TV: “Nineteen sixty-eight Dodge Ram. Absolute piece of
crap.” (Technically, the first thing he said was, “Your dad just called. He wants to know where you’ve been all afternoon and why you aren’t answering your cell
phone.” But that little spiel was just the sort of thing that I didn’t want to deal with right now, so the “absolute piece of crap” comment was the first thing that I
actually paid any attention to.)

I was sprawled out on the sofa in an unladylike tangle of legs and hair and confusion. My cat, Louie, the laziest feline in the feline cosmos, was a massive lump of sleeping fur beside me.
Gramps had commandeered Dad’s overstuffed, overused armchair, something he did every evening just before Dad got home from work. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that he was
getting even for all the childhood grief Dad had put him through. But Dad was the most ho-hum guy on the planet, so the only thing Gramps could possibly be avenging was getting bored to tears all
these years.