There were sign names for every social media and internet abbreviation, emoticons enfolded into signed puns and, along with them, she learned about an array of technology she hadn’t even known existed. In the past, her phone had felt mostly useless, good only for exchanging text messages with her parents or playing arcade games when she was bored. But now there was a way to co-opt nearly every platform—ASL on any app that could handle video, or even GIFs.
Kevin, one of the gangly boys, commandeered her phone and downloaded things for her—one app that flashed a light to alert her to loud sounds, another to send video messages without clogging up phone memory, and several that translated speech to text with accuracy ranging from passable to hilarious. Charlie thought about how these things would’ve come in handy at Jefferson, but of course there had been no one there to show them to her.
There were, too, a series of secret signs among the girls that happened behind backs and below tables. The first time Charlie found one directed at her, it had come from Kayla, who’d crossed the cafeteria with such a purposeful stride Charlie was convinced she’d unknowingly done something terrible to her roommate. But when Kayla got close enough, her demeanor shifted, and she produced a few furtive signs below the rest of the table’s sight line.
What? Charlie said, I don’t understand.
After the third try, Kayla gave up and said the same series of signs to Alisha. Charlie watched their covert exchange from the corner of her eye and realized she’d been asking for a tampon.
Sorry, she said, as Kayla turned to go.
No worries.
Part of Charlie remained on the defensive, expecting that at any second her River Valley classmates might level her hopes for friendship, turn hostile at her invasion of their territory, or be fatigued by her shoddy ASL and rally behind Gabriella to make her life miserable. In the beginning, people had snickered at her when she said something clunky in class, and a girl once popped her implant magnet off in the bathroom and giggled. As the girl walked away, Charlie had noticed that she, too, had an implant—she saw a fair amount of them around campus—but she knew the hardware itself wasn’t the target on her back. The other implanted kids were all fluent signers, or at least fluent compared to Charlie. It was annoying that people would make fun of her about this, as if it had been her choice not to learn. But after a few days of sitting beside Austin in the cafeteria, most of the teasing subsided. Now they were patient with her, an unflappability uncharacteristic of other teenagers she’d known, herself included.
Slowly she was becoming aware of how much she had believed the hearing world, the thousand little hatreds that had leeched into her being. It disgusted her now—when she looked across the table at Austin, or whenever someone was nice to her, really—the unworthiness that still washed over her, and the memories of how she’d behaved at Jeff to chase down the sensation of belonging. But with each successful social interaction, Charlie accrued new slivers of self-confidence. After a while she even got up the nerve (and the receptive skills) to ask her lunchmates about the verb “to be.”
What that? she signed, pointing to one boy’s lunch tray.
Pizza, someone said.
What i-s that? she said. She fingerspelled emphatically, question-marked her eyebrows. Austin understood first. With a flash of recognition, he scrunched up his face and gave her a scolding finger wag.
I-s. Finger wag, he said.
Charlie was disappointed—so “is,” and “am” and “are” just…weren’t? How could a language exist without so fundamental a concept? Perhaps, she thought grudgingly, her mother and doctors were right about the limitations of signing. Could you have a real language without the notion of being?
But Austin just pointed to Charlie’s hand, then made his own gesture, sweeping up from his stomach out into an arc across the room. Charlie copied the sign, but that didn’t seem to be what he wanted. She stared.
Me, said Austin, pointing to himself.
He patted his chest, then his arms, then held out his hands, flexed his fingers before her.
You, he said.
He took her by the wrists and held her own hands out before her. She looked down at her palms and understood—her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn’t yet, all in perpetual existence in her fingertips.
* * *
—
As the weeks passed, Charlie faded from the conversation’s focus to regular conversant—she had learned all the curse words there were to know, and was getting better at following along wherever the discussion went. Her shoulders relaxed, she allowed herself to smile.
When one of the football players made an English-ASL pun—a person standing upside down for understand—she laughed and Austin raised an eyebrow at her.
You got that?
Yeah.
Not bad, hearer.
It wasn’t until he said it that she realized she couldn’t hear anything at all, not even the normal static; it was like she’d taken off her CI for the night. She detached the processor and examined it, but the battery was good, or at least the indicator light still glowed “on.” She reattached it to her head and felt something unfamiliar flutter through her as the sound returned. It gave her the chills, but it didn’t hurt, exactly, and she’d forgotten about it by the time she got to play practice.
martha’s vineyard: case study of a real-life eyeth
In 1694, deaf carpenter Jonathan Lambert and his wife, Elizabeth, arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, part of a group of Massachusetts Bay colonists who moved to the island. The shared ancestry of many of the colonists tracing back to Kent in south England, in conjunction with the difficulty of travel between the Vineyard and the mainland, meant very little genetic diversity was introduced into the community for nearly a century. The result? A high incidence of hereditary deafness on the island.
THE NUMBERS
Martha’s Vineyard’s deaf population peaked in the 1850s.
At the time, 1 in approx. 5,700 Americans was deaf.
BUT
On the Vineyard, it was 1 in 155.
In town of Chilmark, it was 1 in 25.
THE NUMBERS (CONT’D)
1 in 25 is 4% of the town’s population.
1 in 155 is only 0.6% of the Vineyard’s population, but compared to the nation’s average at the time—0.018%—it made a big difference.
What do you think happened next?
LIFE ON REAL-LIFE EYETH
Deaf islanders developed their own language, “Chilmark Sign,” now called Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL).
Deaf and hearing islanders all signed.
Deaf and hearing people worked and socialized together without barriers.
Hearing people sometimes even signed without deaf people around!
Does MVSL still exist? Not exactly. In 1817, the American School for the Deaf opened in Connecticut, and many children from Martha’s Vineyard attended. They brought MVSL with them, and it mixed with French Sign Language (LSF) and other home signs to create the ASL we speak today.
Deaf people began staying on the mainland after graduation, and this, combined with easier transportation to and from the island, meant less genetic isolation and the decline of the deaf population. By 1952, MVSL was considered extinct.
ASK YOURSELF:
In a community where everyone knows sign language and things like employment discrimination aren’t a problem, is deafness a disability? Why or why not?
wraparound headache—pain slicing from ear to temple, across her vision, and down her neck. Pressure, as if someone had applied a tourniquet to her brain while she slept.
Charlie lay back down, squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again, but the do-over won her no relief.
Dad! she yelled, hoping she’d been loud enough for the sound to carry through her door. When he didn’t come, she felt around for her phone and tried to text him, but the letters melted before her eyes. Even worse, she realized through her squint, she wasn’t home at all. She rolled over to face Kayla’s bed. Mercifully her roommate was still there, pulling on her socks.
You’re gonna be late.
Then, when she actually looked at her:
You o-k?