“Well… yeah,” I say. But really, it’s not cool.
“You don’t sound happy, Will,” says Dad. “When you were little, you used to love mechanical gadgets. I thought you would be impressed.”
“Oh, no, I am,” I stammer. “I mean, zero emissions, that’s great.”
“But?” prods Dad.
I came home to prove that I could live outside the blind bubble without burdening anyone. But here I am, already being an inconvenience.
“Well, electric motors are silent.”
When I walk to an intersection, I decide whether it’s safe to cross by listening to the flow of traffic. If an electric car is coming down the street, I might as well be blind and deaf.
Mom says, “Don’t worry. I told the salesman—didn’t you hear me ask him, Henry?”
“Yes, dear,” says Dad.
“I said to him, ‘Sir, I have a son who is visually impaired. Will he be safe with this vehicle?’ And the salesman told me, ‘Ma’am, don’t worry, I don’t think his condition will affect the performance of the air bags or the seat belts. And if your son is sitting in the driveway playing’”—Jeez. Sounds like she described me as a child or something—“‘it comes with a’… Hold on, I wrote this down.” She smooths out a slip of folded paper. “The engine emits a ‘sound like a gentle breeze’ that should alert pedestrians to the car.”
I say, “I was standing at the curb just now, and I didn’t hear any gentle breeze.”
After an awkward pause, Mom asks, “So how was your first day?”
“It was okay, I guess.”
Parents ask you questions about your life the way police officers interrogate subjects on TV cop shows. No matter how much information you provide, they will always follow up a hundred times with slightly reworded questions. So you might as well give short answers and let them pry out the facts incrementally so they feel they are making conversational progress.
“Was Vice Principal Johnston helpful? He seemed so nice,” says Mom.
“Sure,” I say.
“What about journalism class? You’re such a good writer, you must’ve had a ball.”
I think about third period—the girl crying and running out of the room, my burning-hot face.
“Totally.”
“Oh, good. I knew you would love it!” says Mom.
I feel us slow down, turn right, and then slow down again to wait for the gate to rise so we can enter our neighborhood. Despite how far away my mom imagines the “other side of town” to be, Toano, Kansas, is actually quite small. It only seems large to her because when she looks at it, all she sees is the giant divide created by this gate.
“Did you make any friends?” asks Dad.
“A few,” I say.
“Nice kids?” he asks.
“Not bad.”
“Right on,” says Dad, a little too loudly.
My father is an uptight surgeon. He fools no one by using phrases he thinks are cool.
“Did your new friends like your sweater?” asks Mom. “It looks so perfect on you!”
“They failed to mention it,” I say.
“Was it tough getting around?” asks Mom. “So much new territory. I mean, after ten years at the school for the blind—”
“It was okay. Mrs. Chin trained me well.”
Mrs. Chin was the “orienteering and mobility” guide at the school for the blind, where I used to go. She taught us how to walk with an adult-size white cane, how to cross an intersection, how to orient in a new building using cardinal directions—almost everything we needed to know about living independently. I can’t say for sure since we didn’t talk about that kind of stuff, but I think Mrs. Chin was Chinese American. I assume so because I once heard a joke about a fat person having “more chins than a Chinese phone book.”
It’s amazing how jokes can teach you the things people think but are too polite to say aloud, prejudices I assume other kids absorb with the help of their eyes—racism, sexism, and the like. In the case of Mrs. Chin, I figured she was probably Chinese after I heard the phone book line. In fact, that very same joke also taught me that fat people have multiple chins. Why this is, I don’t know. I mean, why chins? Why not extra cheeks? Or foreheads?
“You didn’t meet any mean kids, did you?” Mom asks.
I know why she’s asking. It’s the same reason she and Dad sent me off to the school for the blind in the first place: the Incident.
It happened back when I was around five years old.
My best friend at the time was a boy from the neighborhood named Alexander. He always helped me when I couldn’t do something. He’d explain a playground or take my turn for me in a game. Like that day, when we were playing Candy Land at the kitchen table. Alexander offered to move my piece for me. I would flip a card, then he would say which color it was and move me down the rainbow road to that square. We played a few rounds, and he kept winning every single time. I was annoyed, but I didn’t complain, because Mom had said I had to be nice to him.
Then Mom came into the kitchen.