“What?” she asks.
“Let me put it this way: Try to imagine a color you’ve never seen before. Like, a brand-new color that was just invented and has never before existed. What would it look like?”
She is silent.
“Well?” I ask.
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s impossible.”
“That’s how it is for me. Except with all colors. And all two-dimensional shapes. And everything you see in these paintings. You have to understand that my mind developed differently because, unlike most blind people, I have never seen anything with my eyes.”
“You were completely blind from birth?”
“Right,” I say.
“So you’re trying to tell me you belong to a pretty exclusive club?” she says playfully.
“I’d show you the membership card, but you wouldn’t be able to read it. It’s written in braille.”
She laughs, but then says seriously, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That you have to live that way. It must be so frustrating.”
If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s people feeling sorry for me.
“What do you mean?” I say, trying to limit the irritability creeping into my voice. “You think my experience of the world is less rich because I’m blind?”
“Well, you’re missing out on so many—”
“That’s sightist, Cecily. Assuming that blind people can’t have a full life because they don’t have eyesight. My sensory experience isn’t less than yours. It’s just different.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Why don’t you take your pictures so we can get out of here? I’ll go interview the guard to get some quotes for my article.”
“Want me to guide you back to him?”
“No, I remember the route.”
CHAPTER 6
After I get home from the museum, I go to my bedroom and plop down on the bed to listen to music. It’s the bedroom I grew up in before I went to the school for the blind. Other kids, I guess, have posters on their walls with photos of stuff they like to look at. Cecily’s probably has paintings. No, forget Cecily. She was rude to me. I don’t care what her room looks like.
When I was a kid, Mom helped me decorate my bedroom walls with scratch-and-sniff stickers. Each wall has its own category. The wall with my closet is sweet food (fruit, desserts, and the like), the wall with my desk is savory food, and the one by my bed is scents of nature.
In total, I have 187 different fragrances on the walls of my room. When I was a kid, I wished I had that many fingers so I could scratch them simultaneously and find out what all the scents in the world smelled like together. (As it turns out, I’m able to experience this by simply walking into Toano High School’s cafeteria.)
My bedspread is covered in wispy threads like the fur of a freakishly fluffy pet. Lying on my back, I rub the pine-scented sticker on the wall and inhale through my nose. I moved away soon after we put the stickers up, so they’ve just been chilling here for ten years, waiting for their fragrance to be scratched open. The softness of the bed and the whiff of the sticker, however, keep getting interrupted by the echo of Cecily’s laugh. I keep thinking about how much I liked being with her at that gallery. Which is annoying, because I’m still mad about what she said. I claw at a grass-scented sticker in an attempt to drown her out with olfactory overload.
Seeking a different distraction, I open my laptop to write my article about the van Gogh exhibit. I don’t include anything about what it felt like to touch Cecily’s arm or how it felt to be insulted by her at the end, of course, because that’s not anyone’s business, but I do write about how the owner has a special-needs child, which meant I was allowed to touch the paintings. I describe the feel of the crackled paint under my fingertips. As for the museum itself, I note the way our footsteps reverberated through the museum’s reverent silence as we walked through its heavily air-conditioned and dehumidified climate.
The garage-door opener downstairs cranks to life. Mom and Dad must be back from their errands. I used to hear the car engine before the garage opened. Now it just starts to lift with no warning. Stupid Tesla.
A minute later, I hear Mom climbing the stairs and then there’s a knock at my door.
“Will, come down to the family room!” she says. “We have a surprise for you!”
“I’m doing homework.”
“Just finish it later.”
This is quite possibly the first time my mother has ever encouraged me to procrastinate on my homework. (Even at boarding school, the long arm of the mom-law followed my studies and grades with the utmost care.) So I leave my laptop and walk downstairs.
In a voice more appropriate for giving a speech to hundreds, she announces, “Your father and I wanted to be able to start going on family bike rides. So after your dad got home from the operating room today, we purchased a tandem bike for you and me to share!”