Blindsided Page 5

  As always, the day ended with dreaded O and M lessons. Cane instruction.

  “You need to coordinate your steps with the cane. When the cane is at your left, you’re stepping with your right. Remember,” Miss Audra repeated, “the cane previews what is coming and where you are going.”

  What an awful phrase, Natalie thought. Previews what is coming. What they thought was coming was a horrible world of darkness. Natalie did not want to go there. She certainly didn’t want a preview of the place!

  Natalie swung the cane so hard it whacked into the wall on her right.

  “No! Stop, Natalie! Again, now. More gently,” Miss Audra begged. “Sweep only two inches wider than your body. Think about it. . . .”

  No. She did not want to think about it.

  Natalie’s roommate arrived after school when the kids were gathered for Teen Group in the library. Teen Group was mandatory. It was supposed to be fun, an activity followed by dinner, although it appeared no one had been told about the fun part. The kids sat stiffly at tables arranged in a horseshoe, canes folded and placed under their chairs. As they did introductions, Natalie recognized most of the faces, although there were a couple new ones, too, including Thomas, who had brought his knitting.

  “Do we have to come every week?” Murph asked sourly.

  “Yes,” said Miss Simon, a social worker in charge of the program.

  “It’s part of your schedule, Murph.” She sounded tired, but forced a little more enthusiasm when she introduced four young women from a nearby state college. Their names seemed to run together—Mindy-Ellen-Sasha-Latanya. “They’re special education majors here to help us.”

  Suddenly, a door opened at the side of the library.

  “People,” Miss Simon said, “I want you to meet a new student. Her name is Gabriella. This is her first day.”

  Natalie was sure this was her roommate and sat up to get a better look. But the girl’s head was down, her face obscured by long, wavy hair that was either white or very blond, Natalie couldn’t quite tell. She appeared neither fat nor skinny, just kind of ordinary, with no other apparent disability, which was a relief to Natalie.

  “Gabriella is from Baltimore,” Miss Simon said. She turned to the girl. “Is there a nickname you would like us to use?”

  Gabriella remained as still as a statue.

  “Is there anything you’d like to be called other than Gabriella?”

  But the adult might just as well have been talking to the wall.

  “Gabby maybe?”

  Nothing. The silence that followed made Natalie uncomfortable. Maybe there was something wrong with her.

  “Well, I hope each of you will take the time to introduce yourselves to Gabriella later.” Miss Simon pulled out a chair, whispered something, and Gabriella sat down.

  “Okay, guys. I’m Mindy!” One of the college students took over by clapping her hands together, like a cheerleader, Natalie thought. “I thought tonight we’d share some pizza—it’s on its way—and maybe just talk a little. Get to know each other. Like, maybe you guys can give us an understanding of your world.”

  Sheldon shot to an upright position and slapped both his hands on the table. “Our world is the same world as yours!” he exclaimed. “It pisses me off when people like you make comments like that.”

  Miss Simon stepped back. It was obvious she was going to let the college students handle it.

  “Okay!” another of the college students piped up. “Thank you so much for your honesty. What else do you, uh, find frustrating? Tell us!”

  Natalie looked around at the others, who had kind of slumped back in their seats. She knew no one else was going to say anything, and she actually started to feel sorry for the college students. After all, they wanted to be special ed teachers. Maybe they lacked some communication skills, but they did want to help kids with problems.

  Natalie took a breath and raised her hand.

  “Yes!” Mindy said eagerly. “I’m sorry, I forgot your name.”

  “Natalie.”

  “Natalie, yes. Please, go ahead, Natalie!”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing that frustrates me,” she began, noticing the slight movement to her right as Sheldon lifted his head and turned toward her. “I have to wear a hat to keep bright light out of my eyes and it’s awkward sometimes. People think I’m rude or have a hat fetish.”

  A couple of the kids laughed softly.

  “It’s also pretty embarrassing when I stumble over things,” Natalie continued. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Gosh, she’s so clumsy,’ and it hurts my feelings. I can’t help stumbling over something I can’t see.”

  “Yes, yes! I know exactly what Natalie is saying,” Arnab added enthusiastically. “It is very frustrating when I walk into a wall!”

  Some of the kids chuckled again.

  “Also,” Arnab went on, “it is so difficult when I do not know whether someone is talking to me.”

  “People need to identify themselves,” said Paula from her seat in the wheelchair. “So we know who we’re talking to, or who is talking to us.”

  “What really burns me up,” JJ said, “are people who tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Guess who this is?’ I mean, don’t play those stupid games with me, man!”

  “Yeah!” Murph agreed. She sat up and was rubbing her hands together excitedly. “I hate that! And I hate it when people ask me why I’m smelling that book. You know? Just because I have to hold it close?”

  “People see you with a cane and they think you’re weird—or else they treat you like a baby,” Eve added.

  “Or like you’re mentally retarded!” JJ interjected. “You know, ‘Here, sweetie, let me help you across the street.’ ”

  “OH! I HATE THAT SWEETIE VOICE!” Murph shouted.

  “Shhhhhhh!” Miss Simon warned her to keep her voice down.

  Eve raised her hand timidly. “It really annoys me,” she said softly, “when people talk so loud. They practically shout in my ear sometimes. Really, just because I’m blind, it doesn’t mean that I’m deaf, too!”

  “She’s right,” JJ agreed loudly. “What’s wrong with people? I’ll tell you what was really embarrassing for me. At this public school where I used to go? I walked into the girls’ room!”

  The kids burst out laughing.

  “Yeah. Oh, man, you should’ve heard them scream,” JJ went on. “But I said, ‘Whoa! Don’t worry! I can’t see anything!’”

  The kids laughed even harder. Even the college students joined in. When things started to settle down, Mark, one of only a couple kids who weren’t laughing, spoke up from his wheelchair at the far end of the table.

  “Public school. You want to talk about public school? Kids at my school would jump in front of me to see if I could see them,” he told them. Natalie could tell by his voice that it was a bitter memory. “They would snap their fingers in front of my eyes. One time they pushed me down a hill. Another time into the trophy case!”

  The group fell quiet.

  “Do you know why my arms are full of tattoos?” he asked them. “It’s because I needed to show those kids that I was not a coward. Maybe I’m in a chair. And maybe I’m blind. But it doesn’t mean I’m a sissy.”

  The room remained silent.

  Mindy finally spoke up and tried to shift the conversation by focusing on Natalie’s silent new roommate.

  “Gabriella,” she said, “what frustrates you?”

  The girl lifted her chin and shook back her hair. She had a pretty face with clear skin. Her long hair was tucked behind one ear now, and Natalie thought she saw the sparkle of several earrings.

  “I’ll tell you what frustrates me,” Gabriella said. “You. All of you. You’re a bunch of freaks, if you ask me! I have no intention of staying here and being part of this . . . group.”

  Her words hurt. Stung, actually. The table went silent again. Even Natalie felt the bite of her insults. She felt sorry for the group—for herself as well, because she was part o
f the group now, however much she wanted to deny it.

  But Natalie would have to admit something else: she understood exactly how Gabriella felt.

  MEANINGLESS BUMPS

  Slow down! You’re going too fast!” Miss Karen warned. “You can’t possibly decipher what you’re feeling!”

  Natalie reined in her galloping fingertips and moved them more gently, with exaggerated slowness across the meaningless bumps on paper. But even with intensive, one-on-one attention from Miss Karen, learning Braille seemed hopeless. Why even try? It certainly didn’t help that Natalie was distracted by the recent cell phone call from Meredith: Natty, here’s the plan. We’re all going to the county fair—you, me, Coralee, and Suzanne—Friday night. So call me as soon as you get off the bus on Friday, okay?

  Natalie didn’t answer right away because as much as she wanted to be with Meredith and her friends, doing stuff at night was scary now. The glaucoma that had robbed Natalie of her peripheral vision bit by bit over the years had also destroyed the millions of tiny rods in her eyes. With those rods—those tiny photoreceptors—went the ability to see at night. She had confided this in Meredith recently, although she hadn’t exactly told her how frightened she was going out at night. No one knew. But couldn’t Meredith imagine? Didn’t she care?

  Natalie: I’m not sure—

  Meredith: But you have to! I can’t eat all that funnel cake by myself. And you love the Ferris wheel! Besides, we’re meeting some people there.

  Natalie: People? Who?

  Meredith (giggling): You’ll see.

  Natalie (seriously, and very annoyed because Meredith wasn’t remembering): But I won’t see!

  Meredith (sighing): Sorry, Nat. You know I didn’t mean that.

  Natalie: Yeah. Then why did you say it?

  Pause.

  Meredith: Look, I have to go now. . . .

  And so Natalie had ruined the phone conversation. She was driving away her own best friend. She slumped and pulled her hands into her lap, so lost in thought she had forgotten she was sitting directly across from her Braille instructor.

  Miss Karen sensed Natalie’s frustration and must have figured it was the Braille. “Why don’t we take a short break?”

  As though on cue, Herky, Miss Karen’s guide dog, noisily rearranged himself beneath the instructor’s desk and stretched out his long legs. His metal dog tags jangled against the wood floor.

  “You’re fighting this, Natalie. Why?” Miss Karen asked.

  Natalie felt her teeth clench. How could Miss Karen possibly understand how humiliating it was for Natalie to have to learn Braille? Like the cane, it wasn’t even the difficulty of learning it so much as what it represented.

  Miss Karen waited for a reply.

  “I guess I don’t understand why blind people have to learn Braille at all,” Natalie said, sidestepping the issue. “I mean, there are books on tape and CDs, scanners that read print, and computer programs that talk. In English, a couple kids use a special laptop.”

  Miss Karen smiled. “Yes. Their Braille notebooks,” she said. “Indeed, Natalie, there is so much new technology out there. But not everything is available in an audible version. And say you needed to label something—a box of cereal, for example—because how are you going to tell all those cereal boxes in the cupboard apart? Or the directions for a cake mix? Or a tag in your shirt telling you what color it is, or whether it’s striped or solid. How will you know these things if you can’t read and write Braille?”

  None of that had occurred to Natalie.

  “What if your technology breaks down or loses its battery charge? How are you going to take notes that you can read back?”

  “I don’t know,” Natalie answered.

  “If you lose your sight and you can’t read Braille, Natalie, you will be considered illiterate.”

  Here we go again, Natalie thought, jumping to the worst possible conclusion. She plucked a water bottle from her backpack on the floor beside her.

  There was an uncomfortable pause. Natalie took a sip of water and looked away.

  “Is it because learning Braille would be admitting that you have a serious vision problem?” Miss Karen asked.

  Natalie’s eyes widened and she swung her head around. “Miss Karen, you don’t understand how hard this has been.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong, Natalie, because I do understand. I lost my sight when I was fifteen years old. Like you, I had to make the transition from reading print to recognizing Braille code. It was difficult—losing my sight, learning Braille, learning to use a cane. I won’t kid you. Many times I wanted to give up.”

  Miss Karen was fifteen years old when she lost sight? A swarm of questions raced through Natalie’s mind. How did it happen? What was it like? Was she devastated?

  “Everything may seem overwhelming right now,” Miss Karen went on. “You just have to take things one at a time. At least with the Braille, there is a system that you can learn, Natalie.”

  Miss Karen seemed so together—so upbeat—how did she ever get to that point?

  There was another long pause. Miss Karen cleared her throat. “So. Are you envisioning the Braille cell?” She was going to continue the lesson. “The raised dots numbered one through six?”

  “Yes,” Natalie replied. She should at least try. “One through six.”

  “The first ten letters of the alphabet use only the top four of the six dots in the cell,” Miss Karen noted. “The next ten letters, K through T, are identical to A through J, except that they have an additional dot in position three. . . .”

  That night, while some of the kids went to the gym to play Bingo (with Braille cards), Natalie stayed behind in her room. Her roommate was sitting in the hall with her cell phone, talking to her boyfriend, so Natalie figured it was a good time to practice. The sooner she learned everything, she figured, the sooner she could return home for good. So she picked up the heavy gray Brailler that she’d been tripping over the last few days and set it on her desk. There was a short stack of heavy Braille paper in the desk drawer. She rolled a piece into the Brailler.

  The Brailler worked like a typewriter, except that it had six tabs, one for each dot of the Braille cell, instead of letters. The tabs needed to create each letter had to be pressed simultaneously. After creating a letter, Natalie felt with her fingertips what had been punched out in the paper. She had to put some muscle into making each Braille letter. It wasn’t nearly as easy as using the sensitive computer keyboard. She did ten letters, messed up on five of them, and, arms resting on the desk, leaned her head on one hand.

  Her heart just wasn’t in it. The Brailler was difficult to use, and Natalie’s right wrist hurt from the cane lesson that afternoon with Miss Audra. Reach out and take hold of the cane as though shaking hands, Natalie. The movement should come from the wrist. Your hand may hurt. It takes a lot of practice. But Natalie didn’t want to “shake hands” with her cane. She didn’t want to learn how to hold it, or sweep the area in front of her. She wanted to break the darn thing over her knee!

  Natalie moved the Brailler to one side of her desk. Her mind drifted. Learning Braille would be admitting that you have a serious vision problem. . . . Meredith’s chirpy voice echoed: You’ll see. . . . Natalie’s cranky reply haunted: But I won’t see!

  Natalie squeezed her eyes shut with deep regret. A, one dot . . . B, two down . . . C, two across . . . Those Braille cells—darn them!—they had staked out a spot in her brain and were doing calisthenics. Natalie couldn’t get them out of her head now. Thank goodness there were only two more days until she could get on a bus and go home for the weekend. She wanted to sleep in her own bed, cook with her mother, get her hands on the goats, and tell Meredith so many things: how sorry she was about the phone call, how Eve had no concept of color and memorized her clothes by the way they felt, how much she hated the cane—and maybe—maybe she would confide in Meredith—about how much she had changed in the past three weeks, ever since the last visit with D
r. Rose. No one else knew how scared she was, underneath.

  Would Meredith be able to help her? Would she even want to help her? Or would confiding her fear simply scare away her friends? They could be fluky, especially Coralee and Suzanne. Probably best not to let any of them in on it, she concluded. They wouldn’t be able to deal with it.

  God knows those weren’t the biggest questions either, because deep, deep down in her core, Natalie wondered if she would be able to deal with it, too.

  SHADES OF BLUE

  Finally. Natalie was going home for the weekend. She had all her books and clothes packed. Even the wretched cane was there, although it had been shoved deep inside her duffel bag under some dirty laundry. Miss Audra made Natalie promise to take the cane home, but Natalie certainly didn’t plan on using it.

  “Bus fifty-two!” Natalie’s bus. Eager to go, she hoisted her backpack, grabbed her duffel, and moved quickly. But as she rushed to climb aboard, she missed the step completely and fell forward, scraping one leg on the step and landing in an awkward heap half on, half off the bus.

  “Are you okay?” Several hands rushed in to help her up.

  “I’m fine,” Natalie said quickly, the blood rushing to her cheeks in embarrassment. “I didn’t see the gap.”

  “You sure? Can you put weight on that foot?” someone asked.

  Natalie stood. “Yes. Yes, I can, it’s all right.” She reached down and winced upon touching the shin, but could tell there wasn’t an open cut.

  She was grateful when one of the teachers helped her to get on board. After he left, she reached down to touch the spot again and felt a bump already forming. She wished she’d asked for some ice.

  The others clambered on board after her. Most kids took up an entire seat with their feet up and backs against the side of the bus. Right away, they popped in earphones to CD players or iPods and ripped open bags of snacks they’d grabbed from the vending machines—with Braille labels. Natalie plucked a water bottle from the side pocket of her backpack, took a swig, and pressed the icy bottle against her shin to dull the pain.