She sighed, finished typing.
i was just remembering something. how i thought I’d grow up to be hearing b/c i never met a deaf grown-up.
Austin laughed. He wasn’t trying to hurt her feelings or anything, but it was all so evil.
happens more than u think, he wrote. Lots of kids show up here thinking same.
Do you ever talk?
What?
Sorry, she said, blushing again. I mean—
had speech therapy for a while
But?
i’m not very good, he wrote. do u…care about that?
No.
i think it’s great, she wrote.
She looked at him shyly, and now it was his turn to be embarrassed. It was rare that he was flustered by a compliment, if you could call this one. Charlie seemed to notice that she’d caught him off-guard. She flipped her hair over one shoulder.
O-k, he said. Cool.
Candy, she said.
No, c-o-o-l. Cool.
He reached for her hand, bent her finger into the “x” handshape, and guided it back up to her face. Her cheek was tan and silken and he let his hand linger there longer than he meant to, enchanted by the warmth radiating off her skin and across his fingertips.
Cool, she said.
You got a thing for that girl? Eliot said when Austin returned.
Eliot pulled his eyes almost reluctantly away from the window, as if Austin had been the one to initiate the conversation.
No. Which one?
The new one. With the spiky bracelets.
Headmistress made me give her a tour, that’s all.
“Made you.”
Eliot laughed.
She did!
She’s cute. You should make a move.
I don’t even know her.
Before someone beats you to it. Everyone loves a foreign exchange student.
Why, you gonna make a move?
Eliot rolled his eyes and took a long drag, gestured to the gnarled skin of his face. Here was the problem with an ASL conversation—it required eye contact and afforded little opportunity to hide one’s true feelings.
Sorry.
Whatever.
Eliot turned away and exhaled out onto the quad.
What makes you think I like her?
Eliot smirked.
Deaf, not blind, he said.
visual syntax and the art of storytelling
When forming phrases or narratives in ASL, ask yourself: What order makes the most sense visually? If you were to draw the scene on paper, what would you set up first?
Consider translating the sentence “The cup is on the table.” First establish your noun, then describe placement or action: First, the table:
Then, the cup:
Then the placement of the two together in space:
There is some flexibility to word order. For example, some signers might introduce both nouns, “cup” and “table,” first, then describe them after.
TEST YOURSELF: When thinking about visual grammar, why does it make sense to share information about the table before the cup?
NOW YOU TRY! Tell your partner about your childhood bedroom.
things were touch and go in the weeks after the Wandapocalypse, especially when, seventy-two hours post-blowup, February had referred to it as such aloud.
Now see, don’t do that, Mel said.
What? she said, trying to look innocent.
Put it on me like I’m crazy.
And it was easy to relapse from there. That was the thing about fights—it only took one big one to deplete the downy layer of goodwill they’d been building for months. They’d had their irksome moments, of course, but nothing that would call into question the underpinnings of their relationship, and with the cushion in place, they could quickly rebound out of a foul mood, or give one another the benefit of the doubt.
But now there was nothing to break their fall. Each little slight—the wrong lilt in a voice, a careless mistake with the laundry—could send them spiraling back to the depths, where Wanda was always waiting. February had posed the question to Mel—what would she have her do? It wasn’t as if there were a gaggle of qualified, certified high school science teachers fluent in ASL just lounging around the tri-state, waiting for her call, not to mention that Wanda hadn’t even done anything wrong. Mel knew this, but logic had gone the way of goodwill.
So February had moved on to the current tactic—ignoring the problem. She tried throwing herself into work, but as rocky as her home life was, River Valley was running so smoothly even she was surprised. Besides a few tantrums in the lower school and a report that the upper school boys’ dorm sometimes smelled of cigarettes, there’d been no infractions. They would catch the smoker soon enough, she wasn’t worried. In fact, she was grateful—without him, the semester’s calm would be downright suspicious.
She spent afternoons at school writing her new lesson plans, using the course as an excuse to stay late when she normally would have done the work at home. And though she was stoic in the face of Mel’s arsenal of jabs (all crafted with a litigator’s precision), February began to feel like the recipient of a slow-acting poison, each dose compounding the effects of the last. Still, she ignored it, and she ignored being ignored, until finally one night, after asking Mel what she wanted for dinner and receiving only a glowering look, she broke.
This is so ridiculous! she yelled. Then she laughed the way she was prone to when a situation was so frustrating she could not muster any other response—a wide-eyed cackle that made her look a bit unhinged, though Mel was on record as finding it endearing. That wasn’t why February was doing it; she didn’t have the acting chops to force herself into a fit for pity points, but Mel looked up from her paper stack, and, eventually, a light welled up in her irises and brimmed over until she was smiling too, albeit with less frenzy.
Come here, said Mel.
February, now with a wheeze and a cramp in her gut, went and put her head in Mel’s lap. Mel ran her fingers over February’s forehead until she quieted.
Jesus, February said after a while. And to think all I had to do to get you to love me again was have a complete mental breakdown.
I always love you, Feb. It doesn’t have an off switch. That’s the problem.
I know, she said.
For a while they sat without speaking, something they often did after a big fight, waiting to feel less awkward in the knowledge that they had bared their ugliest, most childish parts to one another.
How’s work? February ventured.
Then, the floodgates. They’d been so busy fighting, they’d had little time to talk, and they had a lot to catch up on. Mel detailed her latest cases as they’d played out in family court, each more harrowing than the next. Some were clear-cut instances of child or spousal abuse, but the ones that haunted February were always murkier—stories that left her questioning whether the court’s interventions into people’s private lives were actually making things worse. When it came to their work, Mel’s skin had thickened in a way February’s never had, and February was always equal parts surprised and jealous of the nonchalance with which Mel could speak of her cases.
What about you? said Mel. How’s your new course coming?
Good, I think. It’s nice being back in the classroom.
And the Serrano kid?
Too early to tell, said February.
ear vs. eye: deaf mythology
EYETH—GET IT?
In the Deaf storytelling tradition, utopia is called Eyeth because it’s a society that centers the eye, not the ear, like here on Earth.
In the Deaf world, there’s a famous story of a utopian planet where everyone signs and everything is designed for easy visual access. In some tellings, hearing people are the minority and learn to conform to the majority sign language, in others the planet is completely Deaf. Have any of you seen an Eyeth story?
Eyeth may be a pun, but it’s not a joke—it’s a myth.
MYTH (N):
a traditional story that reveals part of the worldview of a people, or embodies the ideals and institutions of a society
parable; short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or principle