“Is that a mirror joke?”
“What?”
“The other way around. Because isn’t everything flipped in mirrors? Like upside down?”
“Close. Wrong axis. Everything is flipped left to right. It’s backward, not upside down. But no, that wasn’t a joke. I mean, I think it works the opposite of what you’re saying: Mirrors make everyone more worried about their appearance.”
I hear the swish of a waitress walking by on the other side of the counter. (And yes, I infer her gender based on the sound of her footsteps, an educated guess I’m usually right about.) I want to get the waitress’s attention to ask for menus. It’s silly, but part of me hopes this will impress Cecily—that she will notice how sensitive my hearing is, or at least that she’ll feel like she’s hanging out with a normal person who knows when a waitress is walking by, not a helpless blind kid who needs someone else to flag down a server for him.
“Excuse me, can we get some menus?” I ask.
“What are you, blind?” the waitress snaps.
I squirm. Her tone implies that she was using that word blind to mean my question was stupid.
She wouldn’t be the first, unfortunately. One time, for a paper at my old school, I searched blind in the thesaurus app on my phone. The synonyms included ignorant, oblivious, irrational, mindless, reckless, and violent. Kind of rude if you are actually, you know, blind. But her accusation also happens to be factual enough to stand up in a court of law: I am 100 percent legally blind.
“Yes, actually, I am blind.”
“Oh my God, I am so sorry!” she says, realizing. “Holy… oh, wow… I am the worst person ever. I am so sorry. God. That was so rude. I’m just having the worst day—not that that’s any excuse—I just wasn’t thinking.”
“It happens,” I say.
“The menu is already on the counter. I’m sorry we don’t have it in braille or anything. Do you want me to, like, read it to you?”
“I’ll read it for him,” Cecily says coolly.
Cecily talks me through the menu. A few minutes later, the waitress returns for our orders.
“I’m not really hungry,” says Cecily. “I’ll just have a Diet Coke, please.”
“And what will he be having?” the waitress asks Cecily.
“I will be having the grilled cheese,” I say.
“Oh, get it cut into triangles instead of rectangles,” suggests Cecily. “It tastes so much better that way.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Please prepare the sandwich as the lady suggests.”
“One grilled cheese, sliced into triangles,” repeats the waitress, making audible scratches with a pen.
After the waitress walks away, Cecily asks, “So how come you signed up for journalism class?”
“I want to be a writer. Seemed like good practice. You?”
“Same. Except I want to be a photographer.”
“Of nature, I assume?”
“Yeah. I want to see the world through the lens of my camera. That’s everything to me, everything I want.”
“No house with a white picket fence and two-point-four babies?”
“Well… it’s not like I don’t want those things. It’s just that I’ve always assumed…” She trails off.
“What?”
“That I will never be in a relationship,” she says. And then she adds quickly, “If I was, you know, traveling that much.”
A few seconds later, the grilled cheese arrives. Cecily is right. It does taste better this way.
“Are you going to audition for the morning announcements show?” I ask, mouth still partially full of grilled cheese.
“On the school TVs?” she asks. “Definitely not.”
“Not your thing?”
“No. I mean, there’s a vote. You know that, right? The school elects the next semester’s hosts based on the audition.”
“So?”
“I just don’t think I could ever win a vote like that.”
“How come?”
“Weren’t there popular kids at the school for the blind?”
“Sure, there were.” In fact, I was one of them. But I don’t tell her that. “That doesn’t matter, though. I think you have… well, a really nice voice. I would vote for you.”
“Why don’t you audition?” she says.
“Me?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“I can’t read printed text. I mean, I assume they are reading scripts or something, right?”
“Oh,” she says, her voice dropping. “You’re right. They read off teleprompters that scroll the words in front of the camera.”
“So yeah, there’s that. I mean, it would be cool and all, but I just don’t think it would work.”
“But what if—what if we could find a way to make it work?”
“Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know. I could read the announcements into a little microphone that would play them into an earpiece you were wearing. Something like that?”
“No way,” I say, imagining all the ways that could go wrong. “It would never work.”