This is it! I’m about to see!
I try to slow down my excitement so I can soak in every detail. This is a moment I want to remember forever. This is the moment I go from blind to seeing. This is the moment I step into the light.
Dr. Bianchi has stopped peeling back the bandages. I feel his face move very close to mine.
“Why did you stop?” I ask. He says nothing. “Dr. Bianchi?” Still he doesn’t reply. “Can you finish taking off the bandages, please?”
He steps back. “I’m sorry, Will,” he says.
“What? Is something wrong?”
“The bandages are already removed several moments ago. Your eyes are open and blocked by nothing.”
I blink. I feel my eyelids move up and down, just as they always have done when I blink. And I sense that raging current of black noise that I have felt since yesterday. But there is nothing more. There’s nothing else that signals of color or movement. I close my eyes and press them tightly shut. Then I open them. Nothing different: It’s the same sensation whether my eyes are open or closed.
“Turn it off!” I say. “TURN IT OFF!”
“Do you hear the noise again?” asks Mom. “It’s quiet in—”
“No, the camera! Turn it off!”
“Oh, yes, sorry,” she says quietly.
I grab at the paper cover of the examination table with both hands, fingernails clawing through it, ripping it, balling it into my fists.
“Delete it, Mom! No one can ever see that video! Ever!”
“I already did.”
I feel my lower lip quiver. I’m about to cry. (My eyes may have never performed their primary function, but my tear ducts have always worked just fine.) No, I will not cry. I’m sixteen years old. I won’t cry in front of my mother and my doctor.
“Let’s go,” I say. I have to leave. I have to leave immediately and go home and lock my door and sit in the darkness and never come out.
“Wait for one minute, please,” says Dr. Bianchi. “You must allow me to examine you.”
“It didn’t work, can’t you see that?” I spit the words at him. “Can’t you see that with your eyes?”
“Will, I gave you the warning about how the cortex must take time—”
I stand and put my hand out, a signal for Mom to give me her arm as a guide.
“We’re leaving,” I say.
Mom is as upset as I am. I can hear it in the way she snatches her purse and jumps to my side, ready to lead me out of the office.
In the car ride home, I hear her sniffle.
“Are you crying?” I ask, rank hostility in my voice.
“Of course I am.”
“I’m the one who can’t see!” I say. “What are you crying about?”
“Don’t you know how hard this is for me?”
“How hard it is for you?” I demand. “For you? Why is everything always about you?”
“No, Will, it’s about you. It’s hard because I can’t do anything for you. It’s hard because I would give anything to be able to switch eyes with you, but I can’t.”
That wasn’t the response I expected, and it shuts me up. I want to be angry at Mom, but I can’t be. It’s not her fault. The surgery was her idea, sure, but I chose it. I wanted it.
Once we get home, I go to my room and shut the door. I cry and punch things for hours. I break some stuff. I don’t even know what. Just random stuff.
The absurd part of all this, I realize, is that I am now so much worse off than I was before the operation. I had convinced myself I wouldn’t be one of those people who got depressed when the sight of the world wasn’t what I expected. But I went through everything, two surgeries, and I didn’t even get that far. I was blind two weeks ago, and I’m still blind now, but at least before I was relatively happy with my life. I was adjusting to a mainstream school, had friends, a possible cohosting gig, good grades. I had it all, really. And then I got this fantasy that I could have sight, that I should have sight, and it made me feel like what I had wasn’t enough anymore.
That’s why I had the operation.
And guess what? It didn’t work. I’m still blind. And it’s worse, too, a more unbearable blindness. Before, my blindness felt like nothing, and now I have this loud static in my brain that offers only distraction and pain.
Dad was right. I’m a different person now. The operation did change me. It changed the way I see my life, from the inside. Now I know I will never be happy as a blind person. Now that I have had a sample—not of full eyesight, per se, but of believing that it could be mine—and then had it ripped away from me, I will be forever stuck in this twilight world of dissatisfaction.
My phone buzzes intermittently. Just-checking-in-on-you texts from Cecily, Ion, Whitford, and Nick. But I don’t want them to know. I’m not ready for them to know. I’m not sure I’ll ever be.
I spend the rest of the day wallowing on the floor with my door locked, not even coming out for meals.
CHAPTER 18