“Will, what color is your piece?” she asked.
“Red,” I answered, proud to be able to answer such a question.
“Why is your piece still at the starting area?”
“It’s not. Alexander moves it for me when it’s my turn.”
Her head swiveled to face Alexander so abruptly that I heard the rustle of her collar.
She didn’t speak, but something about her head swivel must have made Alexander know he should say something. “Who cares? He can’t see the pieces anyway!”
“How dare you—” blurted Mom.
“He doesn’t even know what red is. Do you, Will? Huh? What does red look like?”
He was right, of course. I didn’t know.
Mom snapped, “You’ve just been moving your own piece? On both your and Will’s turns?”
“Yeah. So? He can’t see the board!” Alexander said defiantly. “It doesn’t matter where his piece is.”
Mom sent him home. I never saw him again.
That day, two things happened: First, I learned it was dangerous to rely on anyone other than myself. And second, my parents decided it would be better for me to enroll in the school for the blind rather than the neighborhood elementary school. I didn’t particularly want to leave home. But Mom and Dad said I would have more fun at a place where everyone was more like me.
They were right, I guess. And yet…
Attending the school for the blind, day after day, year after year, it felt like I was trapped in the starting area of real life. Sure, I was safe there. But I was also bored. I wanted to break free and move forward on the winding rainbow road of life. I might not be able to experience those colors the way some people did, but I believed I could still make it. Make it, you know, to the Candy Castle. Or whatever. But for that to happen, I had to at least start playing the game.
CHAPTER 4
By my second day at my new school, I know all my routes. No more of Mr. Johnston moving me from class to class. I’m free to go as I please.
Before Honors English, Mrs. Everbrook asks me to come over to her desk. Usually, people assume it’s rude to make the blind kid walk across the room, but blindness is an eye problem, not a leg problem. Mrs. Everbrook clearly gets this, which I appreciate.
“Listen, Will, the librarians have everything on my syllabus ordered for you, but it will be about a week before the small forest of literature gets here.”
Braille books, I know, are pretty large. A single braille dictionary is composed of fifteen to twenty volumes.
Braille was a great invention for the world’s blind population, but not so great for its tree population.
“All right,” I say.
“In the meantime, I’ve arranged for you to have a digital audiobook of our first short story, ‘The Gift of the Magi.’”
“You paid for that out of your own pocket?”
She’s silent, which I take for a yes.
“You really didn’t have to do that, Mrs. Everbrook.”
“Now, don’t get all mushy on me, Will. I wasn’t trying to be nice. I just didn’t want you to have any excuses if you turned in your first paper late.”
? ? ?
After English is biology, and then journalism. There’s a restroom right outside Mrs. Everbrook’s classroom that Mr. Johnston showed me yesterday, and I stop to use it. I slip into my desk about ten seconds after the bell rings. At the school for the blind, our teachers didn’t mind if we arrived a little late. But that’s not the case with Mrs. Everbrook.
She stops midsentence and addresses me. “Will, do you have a note for being late?”
“No,” I say. “I was, uh, using the restroom.”
“For today, I’ll just give you a verbal warning. Next time, make it come out faster, or I will have to mark you as tardy.”
Mrs. Everbrook returns to discussing story assignments.
“We’ve got two events that need a photographer this week. The first is the touring Vincent van Gogh exhibit that just came to PU.”
PU is the unfortunate, but widely used, abbreviation for Plains University, the institution of higher learning that keeps the economy afloat in our little city. The marketing people at the school are always trying to “rebrand” it as PSU, as in PlainS University, but it never sticks. Everyone keeps calling it PU. It doesn’t help that the school has an agriculture department that does something with fertilizer and stinks up the whole town a few times per semester.
“I know none of you probably give a hoot about art, but Toano’s a pretty small place, and van Gogh’s a pretty big deal, so I think it’s worth covering. Cecily, you know more about art than the rest of your philistine classmates put together, so you’ll be shooting that.”
Cecily—the girl from yesterday. Who thought I was staring. The one I made cry.
“All right,” says Cecily. “Thanks.”
“We need a staff writer to accompany Cecily and cover the event. Volunteers?”