Blind

by Rachel DeWoskin

Genres: YA Family

Synopsis

When Emma Sasha Silver loses her eyesight in a nightmare accident, she must relearn everything from walking across the street to recognizing her own sisters to imagining colors. One of seven children, Emma used to be the invisible kid, but now it seems everyone is watching her. And just as she's about to start high school and try to recover her friendships and former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Fifteen and blind, Emma has to untangle what happened and why-in order to see for herself what makes life worth living.

Unflinching in its portrayal of Emma's darkest days, yet full of hope and humor, Rachel DeWoskin's brilliant Blind is one of those rare audiobooks that utterly absorbs the listener into the life and experience of another.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 416

Sample

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

 Copyright © 2014 by Rachel DeWoskin

Bring me the flower that leads us out
where blond transparencies rise
and life evaporates as essence.
Bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

Eugenio Montale, 1948
Translation, W. Arrowsmith, 1994

-1-

Going blind is a little bit like growing up.

Maybe because the older you get, the more you have to close your eyes partway. From the time I was tiny, if I thought the words, When I die, I’ll be dead forever, I could actually under- stand, in my bone marrow, what forever meant. It was like falling into something textureless, silent, unscented, absolutely blank. And never stopping the fall. I grasped that terror early, and had just started forgetting it when my accident happened. Now I remember again. So I might not be “sighted” anymore, but maybe I’m not that much blinder than anyone else, just a different kind of blind.

If you’re me, then you see that we’re all only a half- second disaster, mistake, or choice away from being changed forever. Or finished. If you’re not me—like my sisters and brother and parents—then maybe you don’t see that. At least not in the same way. Maybe you don’t think about for- ever in the dark. Or what it means to feel colors, to relearn

Sarah, Leah, Naomi, Jenna, Benj, and Baby Lily by the shapes of their voices and the textures of their breathing. I know my sisters and brother by the baby powder, cheerio, and blue toddler toothpaste feeling of the little ones; the pickle, bubble bath, tousled pillow hair of my middle sisters; and the lemon and licorice of the two oldest. Maybe you don’t think about what it means to see or not see; you squeeze those thoughts shut, be- cause who can stand to stare straight at what’s happening? No one. We have to learn to look away so we can say—the way my parents still try to tell the seven of us—you’ll be okay; everything will be fine. In other words, we lie. I don’t do that anymore.

I don’t say much at all, because I have to keep track of what’s going on around me. And I was quiet anyway, even when I was still sighted. I learned that word from my doctors; I’d never heard of sighted until I wasn’t it anymore, never considered blind until it locked onto me like a parasite. I hadn’t noticed what an odd and colorless word it is, how it can suck the meaning out of whatever it attaches to: Blind love? Blind rage? Blind faith? Why are those the unthinking kinds? And who’s more lost or hopeless than the blind leading the blind? The most amazing love happens at first what? Right, sight. Seriously?

This July was the one-year anniversary of my accident, and I was shocked to find it hot again. Time was keeping its same pace, even though for me, the world had flipped onto a flat axis where days were dark and nights lit up my mind.

Hot didn’t make sense, and neither did the idea that a year had passed. I had missed half of ninth grade and spent the second half at a place called the Briarly School for the Blind. Until the accident, I never skipped thirty seconds of Lake Main, the school I went to my entire life. And then all of a sudden I dropped out and found myself at Briarly, where they teach history and braille and cooking and laundry. My life was like a horror movie about someone else’s life. One I couldn’t watch. Briarly was for The Blind, and I was the blind. The truth is, I keep getting surprised by that, even though everyone else seems to have accepted it.

This summer, while my best friend, Logan, and all our friends from Lake Main were at the lake, shading their eyes, dipping in blue, falling in love, I was in summer school at Briarly, pressing the six long, flat keys of an old Perkins Brailler, listening, practicing, sliding and tapping my white cane, finding shorelines where the grass meets the curb, where the wall meets the floor, where each stair starts or stops. I was listening for traffic to the right, to the left, thinking, if I heard a chorus of engines rev, Stop! But if they idled, I thought, Okay Emma, okay me, okay, now you have the whole light, strike out, walk, okay, now, go. With chopped-up words in my mind and a million sounds and my ears and brain exhausted, I stuck my white cane out ahead of me, waiting to see—was anyone turning? Had I made a mistake? And if my cane remained uncrushed, then I struck out into the walk, tried to stay straight, to keep my body safely within the white lines. Hug the right, stay straight. I was working, focusing, trying not to panic, panting with the hope of being what the Briarly School for the Blind referred to as “mainstreamed,” my dad called “back on track,” and Logan and I knew was just me going back to real school. Back to Lake Main, to my actual life.

And then it happened; in August, we got the yes, the “paraprofessional,” the promise of “special-needs dispensations,” and even though it was humiliating and I still couldn’t see, I was going back to Lake Main, and a rainbow blew up around me. Logan was at my house, as always, and she grabbed me and we danced through the living room, until I banged into my older sister Sarah. She screamed at me, but I didn’t care. I had learned to walk, read, and survive life in my house and at Briarly, so everyone was assuming I could manage tenth grade at Lake Main.

I would get my assignments early, either braille or audio versions, and have my paraprofessional read the chalkboards out loud to me. I would eat in the lunchroom with Logan and have my life back. I was flying with pride, and so was my dad. My mom was terrified, but faking that she wasn’t. Sarah was furious that everyone was paying so much attention to me “again,” because I had used up my quota after the accident. And my crazy, lovely, oldest sister, Leah, was talking about how we’d walk every day and pick up the little kids from Lake Main primary, and how great it would be for all of us to be together again.

It seems insane now, but my family and I were actually— after one small, terrible year—backing into the warm groove of things-might-be-okay again. That’s how easy that mistake is. Even I had started thinking it, whatever it is, couldn’t hap- pen to us; had started feeling stupidly safe again, the way people do, even though we should know better by now.

Because right as I finished summer school and Logan and I were planning what I’d wear my first day back, a girl from Lake Main, Claire Montgomery, disappeared. At first we all thought her ultraconservative parents were exaggerating— she was probably just in the city again, since one time she’d gone for a day with her best friend, Blythe Keene, or maybe she had run away. But then the days multiplied, and it seemed like something might be really wrong, so people started freaking out and searching frantically. News teams came and circled like turkey vultures. Then the last Sunday night in August, when it had already started to cool down and smell like fall and school and burning leaves, Sarah screamed in front of the TV.

We all ran. I came last, sliding my cane along the hall- way wall, with my dog, Spark, barking in front of me. Spark and I hate screaming. I listened while everyone else watched.

Even my dad was home, because it was Sunday and he wasn’t on call for once. We were scattered all over each other and our huge gold couch, red chairs, tan rug. I was at my mom’s feet, on a pillow, one of my hands holding the ankle of her jeans. I felt the scratch of paint on the hem, wondered what color it was, what she had been making and when. Because she doesn’t paint anymore. Leah was on the floor next to me. “They’re showing Lake Brainch,” Leah whispered, her

voice quiet and steady in my ear, competing with the news- woman’s vicious report. The worst words tore up to the top: body of . . . washed . . . drowned . . . local teen . . . don’t know . . . foul play . . . haven’t said. I smelled lemons. Leah had leaned in toward me, set her head on my shoulder. “I’m Emma-izing,” she said, pulling my hand up to her face so I could feel her closed eyes, lashes against her cheek. “I’m just listening, too.” Words have vivid edges and colors now, and listening

to Leah is like being inside a book with glistening pages, or seeing the sun from the roof of our house. When I was little, Leah used to take me out there some mornings before anyone else was awake, including our parents or Sarah, Leah’s cranky, inferior, one-minute-younger twin. Leah liked to see the sun as it woke, and to show me, too. Now, when she speaks, I can feel each tile’s smooth curve and the way my body tilted into the rise of the roof. Mostly I remember what the sun looked like, hot over the sliver of lake we could see from up

there, hot over our small bodies. Like “our own burning gold balloon,” Leah once called it. She said since we were the only ones up, the sun belonged to us, even if just for a moment. And it was true. That sun is one of the things I can still see, in my mind. That and my mom’s face. I remember exactly what my mom looks like. Maybe because her voice and face are everywhere in our house, or because she keeps us all in a loose orbit around her, I still see her in a different way than I see anyone else. Now Leah and I will never climb out onto our roof again—Leah is seventeen and a senior and busy with college applications and I’m, well, it’s obvious.

I steadied myself on the floor in front of the TV, tucked my head, and rocked as Sarah said, “They found her body. Oh my god. How can they be showing this?”

I felt like I was falling. Sarah smells like pepper, and her words sound like stilts, hooves, or heels. She and Leah are each other’s opposite, maybe like most twins. Sarah’s hair is so dark it’s hard to believe her eyes could be darker, but they are. Flat, black, and glinty. Leah’s are almost black, too, but they shine like stones you’d hold in your pocket for comfort. When Leah tells me what’s on TV, it’s because she doesn’t want me to feel left out. When Sarah does, it’s so I’ll have to suffer, too.

My mom, slapped back to consciousness suddenly, took a sharp breath and stood.

“Benj, Jenna, time for bed!” she sang out in the cracked plastic voice she puts on to hide fear. She leaned over me to hand Baby Lily to my dad, and then herded the little kids out of the zone of dangerous news. My dad stood, too. “Come on, Benji,” he said. “Let’s take Lily to her crib.”

But they were too late. The scary part was over, and we had all heard or seen it. Naomi, who’s ten and not really a little kid anymore, but also not one of the big kids, asked, “Um, should I go to bed, too?” I felt bad for her. No one answered—maybe my parents didn’t hear—so I said, “Come sit on my lap,” and she did. The words had turned to cooking sugar over whatever the shot was: . . . beloved by her family and friends, the television was chanting. Friends say fifteen-year-old Claire loved animals and sports; she was a star on Lake Main Middle School’s Sweet Pea Synchronized Swim Team. According to authorities, foul play does not appear to have been a factor. What a shock to the tiny town of Sauberg, where residents are stunned by the occurrence of such a tragedy in their own backyards.

I buried my face in Naomi’s hair as a new reporter joined in, her words at first squeezed white and flat and then pumped up with the breathy thrill of someone dying. Someone young. Someone she didn’t know but we did. At least I didn’t have to see those anchorpeople with their mannequin faces, pre- tending to be heartbroken while they practically sang about misery and death. Since my accident, I’ve noticed that the

gorier and more horrible the story, the lower the reporters’ voices go; there’s a drumbeat under their words, a music that blooms and swells like it’s leading to a love scene. But it isn’t, at least not in Sauberg, where before Claire, the biggest story was my eyes, my “horrific tragedy,” as they put it, so everyone would look. Everyone except me.

And now Sauberg is in the news again because Claire’s dead—streaky-haired, allergic, freckled, daring, athletic Claire. Claire of the clear lip gloss and chipped front teeth, of the skin so thin you could see through it, of the lopsided smile and shockingly strong legs. Soccering, swimming, smoking, partying Claire. Claire of the usual contradictions times a thousand. The one who could do everything, including get in deadly trouble, better than the rest of us.

I’m probably the only one in Sauberg—including the toddlers—who hasn’t seen the footage of her body being re- moved from the lake. Which may be why I can’t believe she’s gone. Kind of like I still can’t fully believe I’m blind. If there’s any truth to that stupid expression “see it to believe it,” then what can I believe? I still wake up thinking, Okay, Emma, now open your eyes, and then—well, then nothing. I can practice the facts of my accident, just like I can repeat what I know about Claire: she drowned and washed up. But in neither case do the “facts” really help, maybe because facts aren’t exactly facts. They’re just names someone puts on what happened, and then we all repeat them straight into the encyclopedia. What actually happened to Claire? And maybe more importantly, why?

Maybe we can’t make sense of things like my accident or Claire because there is no sense. Maybe we’re all stunned numb because we thought my eyes were enough karmic tragedy for our whole town. We believed nothing else so terrible could happen again. Lightning twice? Not here. Not to us.

But actually, getting struck once doesn’t change your odds for getting struck again, and I spent my first day of mainstream tenth grade feeling like a lightning rod. In the Lake Main High School building, where I’ve been waiting to go my whole life, I was lost in a maze of friends I once knew but couldn’t see or understand, waiting to see what might electrocute us next. Most of them were too traumatized about Claire to care about anything else; some were angry that I had ignored them for the entire year since my accident, and others were vicariously curious in the way people get when something awful happens to someone else. It wasn’t exactly the homecoming Logan and I had dreamed of.

Logan tried hard to help. She kept a running commentary as she walked me down halls rushing with gossip I couldn’t quite get. There was so much movement and noise. I was in a

barrel, spinning and falling down some huge flood. I tried to push the thoughts of Claire and last year at Briarly back down into my bones, to focus hard on Logan’s voice. “Not a germ on it!” she said, and laughed until she snorted. Adrian Woyzniak must have walked by. I shared a desk with him in second grade, and one time he said, “Hey, Emma, look at this!” And when I looked over, he had unzipped his pants, and there it was, resting on the outside of his corduroy bell-bottoms like a forlorn class pet. I said, “Oh my god, Adrian!” and he responded, “Not a germ on it!” It’s Logan’s favorite thing anyone has ever said. Whenever she hands me anything, usually something to eat, she says, “Not a germ on it.”

Now she was whispering names in my ear. But even though I remembered all the people Lo could still see, it felt like none of us knew each other anymore, least of all me. And Logan didn’t seem to get that now I was one of the actual weirdos, someone who would probably never be normal or okay. Before my accident, we both thought that with enough of her influence, I might eventually be less of a silent shadow girl, but what hope is there now? If I was too shy to be any fun before my eyes, how will I ever be more like Logan after them?

“Oh my god, Elizabeth has gained another fifty pounds,” Logan said, and then, “Blythe got her nose pierced, and has on four-hundred-dollar boots I bet she stole from Claire M.’s closet—” Here she paused, and then decided to go the worse of two routes I could hear her consider: “Or her body.”

“God, Logan,” I said.

I reached down to feel my outfit: the usual striped hoodie, long-sleeve V-neck T-shirt, and jean skirt. I had on blue Con- verse with tennis socks, and pink, cat-shaped sunglasses with jewels in their corners, from Logan. She likes to accessorize, which means she’s always hanging scarves and necklaces and glittering things off us so we sound like wind chimes. I love this about her; she’s festive and likes to decorate things, including me. Even though she has no money, she has bought me eleven pairs of sunglasses since my accident, including the athletic ones with a band to hold them on. At first, she was big into encouraging me to take my glasses off whenever I was ready, but I don’t want to, and I’ll never want to, and I can’t even stand to talk about it. And she’s figured that out. So we haven’t mentioned it in months. Kind of like how we’ve stopped saying the words driver’s ed, license, and car.

As we walked, I tried to lead Spark, who Lake Main let me bring, maybe because they don’t know he’s not a real guide dog, or they don’t care, or probably they just figured it wasn’t worth arguing, since my parents fight so endlessly over everything that everyone else has to give in, just to avoid dying of exhaustion. Lake Main already knows that, because my parents love the separation of church and state, and famously made Lake Main take down all the Christmas decorations and remove “Away in a Manger” from the roster at the annual holiday concert.

All day I kept checking the parts of my body, making sure they hadn’t disappeared just because I couldn’t see them. I counted my fingers, felt my knees, ankles, and elbows. I had to work not to rock back and forth or tuck my head down, habits I started when I first got out of the hospital. Last year at the Briarly School for the Blind, the king of my ninth-grade universe, a boy named Sebastian, used to come up and hold my shoulders whenever I rocked. His hands were so confident they felt kind of rough, and he smelled like leather jackets and tangerines.

“Okay to rock out with me, Emma Sasha Silver,” Sebastian told me, “but you can’t do it with sighted people or they’ll think you’re a freak.”

“Please don’t call me Emma Sasha Silver,” I said. “Just Emma.” And I kept rocking. But every time I wanted to rock at Lake Main, I remembered Sebastian telling me it would make me look like a monster, and stopped myself. Because unlike Briarly, Lake Main was throbbing with people who could see me; everyone I’d been to nursery school with, in school plays with, eaten cookies and Jell-O and macaroni with my entire life. I didn’t want them to think I was a freak. And knowing them wasn’t the relief I’d thought it would be. Not just because

I stayed blind, but because they had all changed, too.

Logan held my hand and pulled me along, whispering about where classrooms were, the newly lime library (“someone barfed green paint on the walls; you’re lucky you can’t see it”), electronic doors to the gym. “Don’t trip on that backpack, Em.” We were on our way to the office to “check in with” Principal Cates, which meant reassuring her that Spark and I had gotten to school without dying, and that Logan would get Spark and me to my locker, English, art, and the lunchroom without us getting trampled, lost, or devoured by rubberneckers. At the end of the day, Logan was to deliver me to Leah, who would take me home. Leah. Leah was my walk home, my finish line; she was like an icy lemon drink at the edge of a desert I still had to cross.

Leah was hours away. The office smelled like the core of school-earth, an even more intense version of the hallway’s sloppy joe meat and hot Xeroxed copies, Bactine, Windex, sneakers, molding books. There was no laundry smell; there were no kitchens. I guess kids at Lake Main don’t have to learn “life skills,” or they get to learn them privately at home. The office, unbelievably, was noisier than the hall had been, and I couldn’t make any sense of the sounds until Principal Cates’s voice came both over the PA system and into my ears directly, because we were standing next to her. Her words doubled in my head.

“Welcome back back to Lake Main middle middle and high high school school.” I inched away from the door, thinking I might be able to avoid the echo if I could hear only the PA and not also Principal Cates’s live voice. I thought, Focus in, Emma, focus in. Logan followed me. “Where are you going?” I didn’t answer; tried instead to tune into individual words: We . . . are . . . thrilled . . . to . . . have . . . you . . . herethisyear. PleaseriseforthePledgeofAllegiance. I felt the thunder of chairs being pushed back, bodies standing, hands clasp- ing, and then more words, a chorus, vibrating under my bones and above me, the whole school shaking in unison with liberty and justice for all. At the end, I thought, as I often do, Okay, now I’ll just open my eyes. I can’t tell anyone that this still happens, because how stupid is it to keep getting re-surprised by what should be obvious now? After more than a year? I haven’t even told my therapist, Dr. Sassoman. She would just say it hasn’t been long at all and I’ve made amazing progress and blah blah yadda yadda. I don’t have to tell her anything anymore, because I already know what she’ll say. It’s almost like she lives inside of me. I shuffled back toward Principal Cates, disoriented, trying to feel

Spark ahead of me and Logan to my left.

“Emma Silver, glad to see you,” Principal Cates boomed. She shook my hand so vigorously I thought she might rip it out at the shoulder. Principal Cates is weirdly competitive. She was a runner when she was young, and then a running coach, and now she’s a principal who loves slogans. Her favorite is “Champions are made in the morning,” because she gets to school before dawn and roams the grounds, congratulating any other human being also running in circles before the sun comes up. Champions, in other words. She also likes to say, “Now is the time to do more than the minimum.” Until I lost my eyesight, she had no idea who I was. Which I preferred. I liked being invisible in my family, too, recording what I saw without being seen myself. I used to be the secret keeper of words, but in some very unfair way, being blind is the opposite of being invisible.

“Logan, we’re all counting on you,” Principal Cates was saying. “Be a team player, please, and make sure Emma gets to her locker and her classes.”

“Will do, Principal Cates.”

“Good-bye, young ladies.” No matter what comes out of her mouth, it’s a cheer.

And we were free. As if she were programmed to do it, Logan resumed her commentary instantly: “Oooooh. There’s Trey, more beautiful than ever. Be a team player, Emma, and go ask him if he wants to check out my Monday undies.” She laughed until she snorted again.

“You’re still wearing day-of-the-week underwear?” I asked. “Are you in third grade?” “They’re thongs.”

A crowd of people surrounded us suddenly, most of them to pet and play with Spark, and the first bell hadn’t even rung. I apologized to Logan for the nightmare of having to be my tour guide/bodyguard, but she slapped me and said, “Don’t be stupid. You’re famous. I’m living vicariously.”

I am famous in the gross sense that my showing up means that everyone has returned from the new horror of Claire’s death to the passé buzz about my eyes. But only for a moment. Claire’s “accident” is a distraction from mine— and even though this makes me mean, I’m grateful for the weird demotion from worst-luck-girl-of-all-time in our town. What happened to Claire is so much worse than what happened to me that it makes getting blinded seem sneezy and manageable. Of course, Claire doesn’t have to come back and face whatever her story is. Or the crowds of people telling it to each other. I couldn’t help wondering—if this was what my dad called “back on track,” then what was a track? And why be on one at all, let alone back on one? Maybe if there was anything worthwhile about being blinded, it was that it knocked me off the unthinking, lemming track I was on. For a moment, anyway.

Someone came up and said, “Hey, Emma, nice to have you back,” and I realized it was Coltrane Winslow, and I tried not to rock, managed to squeeze “Thank you,” out right from the top of my throat like a bird, just as an adult voice, maybe belonging to a teacher, came from above me: “Excuse me!”

I was still hoping to say something normal to Coltrane, who is a calm, really smart guy we all figure will be on the Supreme Court someday because his parents are both lawyers and he’s super ambitious and fair and nice to everyone. But I was dizzy and unsure if Coltrane was even still standing there when the big voice interrupted. Whoever it belonged to had cleared a pathway, because she was standing right in front of me. And judging from how high up her voice was, she was apparently the Jolly Green Giant.

“You must be Emma Sasha Silver,” she boomed, so loud it sounded like she was standing on a building shouting down into a megaphone. I knew then that she was my “paraprofessional,” Ms. Mabel, because who else would be in the hallway armed with all three of my names? My parents had met her over the summer, but I’d refused to come.

Logan sang, under her breath but not quietly enough for my taste, “Wonder Woman, Diana, Princess of the Amazon!” I tried to slap her quietly, but missed, and ended up waving my arm around like some kind of useless flapper. Spark perked up, anxious to see why I was moving and whether we were headed somewhere. I bent and petted the top of his head. It was hard to stand back up, honestly. As soon as I touched Spark I wanted to fold up on the floor next to him. But I didn’t. I stood back up, straight, like I was proving to myself that I could.

“Are you Ms. Mabel?” I asked.

“Yes, dear. I certainly am. May I walk you over to English class, Emma Sasha, and help get you situated? And who is this?”

“Um, my friend, Logan.”

“Hi, Logan. And your dog’s name?”

“Oh,” I said, realizing that she had meant Spark the first time and I had introduced Logan. I flushed. “He’s Spark.”

“Hello there, Spark,” she said. “Come, Emma Sasha, we’ll go meet Ms. Spencer.”

I wanted to tell her that Sasha is my middle name and I prefer to be called just Emma, like a normal person, but I couldn’t think of a way to do so politely, and anyway, as soon as Ms. Mabel took my hand, Logan said, “See you after class, Emma Sasha! Good-bye, young lady! Be a team player!” and took off, laughing and snorting down the hall. It was the first time all day that I’d been away from her, and my knees wobbled as I took my first solo steps. I wondered if anyone was watching. Or everyone.

Logan had promised both my mom and me that she wouldn’t leave my side for a single second except during English, because I’m in accelerated and she’s in regular, what she calls Lobotominglish. Logan doesn’t care about school and she hardly tried last year in ninth grade, because her dad moved away to California and I got blinded and went to Briarly and

she skipped a bunch of school and didn’t turn in her papers, so she got put in the lower-level class. It’s not because she’s slow. She’s amazing at the things she cares about. But in my family, if you don’t turn in an English paper, you might get executed or, worse, disappoint Dr. Dad, so none of us would ever skip a single class or turn in anything thirty seconds late, let alone miss an entire paper. Well, except Sarah, who didn’t start her college applications on time and apparently also got a snake tattoo around her a