Blindsided (6 page)

“Maya. Just Maya, I guess. I’m new this year. I was born in South Korea, but I’m from Prince George’s County . . .”

Natalie’s mind drifted. Did her parents miss her? Were they worried? When her father closed up the barn for the night, would he have a dog biscuit tucked in his jacket pocket? Nuisance would be waiting for it, her enormous eyes peering between the wooden slats of her pen. . . .

“Natalie, it’s your turn,” the counselor said.

“Oh! Sorry!” Natalie let go of the stone and pulled her hand out of her pocket. “I’m Natalie O’Reilly. From Hawley—it’s a small town in western Maryland. It’s okay to call me Natty—or Nat if you want. I love to read, to listen to books on tape, and I’m interested in government and politics. I’m on the student council at my school back home.”

When introductions were finished, the counselor suggested that the two halls might want to start thinking about what to call themselves.

“I’ve already thought about that!” Serena called out, waving her arm enthusiastically. “Yeah, I think if we have to be animals again, then B Hall should be the Blind Bats.”

Chuckles and snorts all around. Natalie was astounded.

“That wasn’t very kosher, Serena,” a girl named Murph said. “I have pretty good vision. I’m not blind as a bat!”

“They’re not blind! Bats aren’t blind!” Eve burst out, stopping everyone. “It’s a myth.”

“Eewww. But they’re like flying rodents,” Murph said, screwing up her face. “They give me the creeps! And they carry that disease.”

“But they don’t all carry it!” Eve snapped back. “They’re less likely to carry rabies than raccoons! It’s a myth, that’s all.”

Serena said coolly, “Yeah, you know what a
myth
is, Murph. For example, it’s a
myth
that you have pretty good vision.”

“Girls, please!” the dorm counselor called out. “We will have
dignified names
for our halls. I’m thinking maybe The Explorers and The Voyagers.
Now
. Just a heads-up so everyone knows what we’ll be doing together this year. We will be cooking and cleaning, doing our own laundry, and taking some field trips, too. Just so I have an idea, how many of you have been to the grocery store?”

The grocery store? Was she kidding? Natalie hesitated before raising her hand. She turned her head, her small circle of vision scanning the group. But it was clear: hers and Serena’s were the only two hands up in the air.

 

When the meeting ended, Natalie got up to leave—she wanted out of there fast—but the counselor called her back.

“I have a new schedule for you, Natalie, and I also wanted you to know that a roommate is coming tomorrow. You should clear off the other bed and make space available in the bathroom for her things.”

Natalie’s heart dipped because there went her privacy.

With one hand on the wall to guide her, Natalie rushed back to her room and closed the door. Sitting on her bed, she simply took in a few breaths and let them out. A roommate. What else would they do to make her life more miserable?

Then she remembered the new schedule. She smoothed out the wrinkled paper on her lap. Even though it was printed in large font, the letters still weren’t big, or dark, enough for her to read, so she reached over to pull her pocketbook up from the floor and rummaged in it for the handheld illuminator/magnifier she always carried. Clicking it on, she focused on the blocks one at a time to see that they had now scheduled Braille and Orientation and Mobility (the cane) every day instead of three times a week. And what was this? A weekly meeting with a social worker? What for?

Angry, Natalie balled up the schedule in her hands and threw it across the room, where it bounced off the wall and rolled under the absent roommate’s bed.

She tried hard to stop herself from losing it. Write a poem, she thought. Sometimes she wrote little poems in her head.

Twenty-four hours. She had been here for a little more than one day and already it was too much. Her father’s parting words came back to her: “You’ll be okay, Natty. You’ve got way too much going for you. . . .”

That was it exactly, Natalie thought, sitting up and opening her hands as though to argue the point with an invisible stranger. She had so much going for her! She was a good student, a girl who laughed with her friends, who loved peanut M&M’s and fuzzy socks and a Nubian goat . . . so why her?! Why would God do this to her?

Sometimes Natalie wished there was someone—or
something
to blame. But she was born without an iris, and that simple fact was the root cause of her juvenile glaucoma. Sporadic aniridia, they called it. Simple, irrevocable bad luck. The gene that was responsible for eye development didn’t do what it was supposed to do.

“You’ll have to accept it, Nat,” her mother had whispered in the hallway when they left Dr. Rose’s office that last time.

No! For years, Natalie had chosen to ignore the facts they gently
hammered
into her. She just refused to change her way of thinking. She could never say it out loud, but the conviction was deep. Natalie was certain that as long as she worked hard, prayed hard, and totally believed in herself it would never actually happen. Because how could it? How could a girl with so much going for her—simply lose her sight?

The fingers of Natalie’s left hand gathered and squeezed the fingers of her right. She thought back to what people had told her:
The pressure is up again . . . this isn’t good . . . surely you’re struggling . . . the loss of peripheral vision is only the beginning . . . you’ve got to prepare yourself.

But there was always hope. Wasn’t there? It’s why her father bought her the little pink stone. It’s why she did her stupid eyedrops faithfully, twice a day. Even Dr. Rose once told her there was always hope.
Anything is possible,
he had admitted.
Miracles do happen . . .
So wasn’t it possible that his own diagnosis was wrong? And no different from all the other times when naysayers had filled her ears with their dire predictions?

She was fourteen now, on the brink of so much, and maybe, from now on, she would have to get through it by doing what she had always done: tune out the naysayers, like turning off a radio station with too much static.

And hope for the miracle.

I
n the morning, Natalie moved an empty box and made sure there was nothing else of hers on the roommate’s bed or bureau top. In the bathroom, she shifted her two towels to one rack so that the other was free, and slid her toothbrush, toothpaste, and bottle of eyedrops all the way to one side of the narrow glass shelf above the sink. All halfhearted efforts. At another time, another place, Natalie might have loved the companionship of a roommate. But not then. Not when there was so much turmoil and uncertainty. Natalie dreaded having another human being foisted into her private space.

Quickly, she made up her bed, and then reached up to rip the humiliating sign off the wall above her pillow. MAKES OWN BED. It was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? She tore it up and threw it in the trash.

Sighing, she jammed the books she needed that day into her backpack. When her foot stumbled over the cane, Natalie picked it up from the floor and heaved it into the back of her closet where it landed with a loud thud.

What if her new roommate talked all the time? Or snored at night? Or was so blind she walked into everything?

Natalie zipped up her purse. The schedule. Where was that new schedule? She rolled her eyes, recalling how she had thrown it across the room, then got on her hands and knees and felt around on the floor until she found it.

What if this new roommate was messy and left gooey toothpaste and stuff all over the sink? What if she used Natalie’s towel by mistake? Or her hairbrush—
or her ChapStick?!
Natalie figured she’d have to start keeping those things in a drawer now.

She hoisted her backpack and started to walk out.

Yeah. And what if this new roommate was the type who borrowed things without asking? Or
stole
? Natalie’s new iPod might be pretty tempting, and it was so small.

Natalie paused at the door with her hand on the knob. . . . She held the doorknob so long it made her hand cold. . . . What if her new roommate didn’t want to be here either?

Slowly, she walked back to her bed, where she let the heavy backpack fall off her shoulders onto the mattress. Tearing a sheet of paper out of a notebook, she sat down and began writing in large letters with her black felt-tip pen:
Welcome to 202. My name is Natalie. I’m new, too.

What else? Natalie bit her lip again. She hoped her roommate could see well enough to read the note.
I’ll see you later
, she added, then stopped and blacked it all out. Phrases like that were always popping up. People didn’t mean anything cruel by them, but those prickly everyday sayings could be as mood-altering as a vague stomachache.

She started over again with a new piece of paper, ending it with:
Can’t wait to meet you
.

After placing the note on the empty bed, she joined the others in the lobby and took Serena’s elbow for the long trek to the dining hall.

In English, they were studying Shakespearean sonnets, and the teacher, a young woman named Miss Amelia, had written Sonnet 116 on the blackboard.

“There is a beat behind every poem, a cadence of words in a patterned sequence,” she told the class. “Shakespeare used a lot of iambic pentameter. The
iamb
is the stress and the unstress, the
metric foot
.
Let ME not TO . . . Penta
means five—so five feet, five beats to the line.”

While she spoke, three students pounded on their Braillers, which were like typewriters except that instead of keys they had six tabs that corresponded to the six dots in a Braille cell. Others tapped on Braille notebooks, which were like laptop computers except that they also had the six tabs corresponding to the six dots in a Braille cell. Serena and Natalie were the only two who actually wrote by hand. They took their notes with thick, black felt-tip pens on paper with wide, dark lines.

“Who wants to come up and mark in the stress and the unstress?” the teacher asked in a loud voice so she could be heard above the noisy Braillers. “How about you, Sheldon?”

Sheldon, who had just put his head down in his arms (a habit of his apparently), reluctantly pushed himself up and walked to the blackboard. He stood with his face about an inch from the words the teacher had written in chalk. Slowly, he moved his head in a circle. Natalie was fascinated. She knew that Sheldon had lost his central vision, so that he saw only peripherally, around the edges—the exact opposite of Natalie’s problem. And she suddenly realized why he often seemed aloof, looking off into space, even when he was talking to you. He was just trying to see what was right in front of him.

 

In American government, the teacher’s name was Mr. Joe (it was almost like kindergarten, Natalie thought, the way they addressed their teachers: Miss Amelia, Mr. Joe, Miss Audra, Miss Karen). Mr. Joe told class they would be studying the separation of powers in the three branches of government. “What are those three branches?”

Eve raised her hand to answer and for some reason stood up. Natalie, sitting behind her, noticed the huge red stain on the back of her white denim shorts. Her period?

Natalie felt embarrassed for her. She knew she would quietly say something to Eve at the end of class. But what if no one told her? How did blind people deal with this?