I reach up and touch my sore cheek, wincing as my fingers graze the flesh. Tomorrow, Avery will lend me an ice bag, and I can hang out at her house for the day. It’s the one place I always feel welcome.
Over the years, Avery’s parents have tried reporting my dad to Child Protective Services at least twice, but it did nothing to help. My dad simply has too many connections for the reports to be taken seriously. CPS has assured Avery’s parents that my home is safe, and that I’m just a “troubled kid.” I don’t think either of them quite buy it, but they’re both people who are wary of the authorities and too scared to directly argue. I can’t blame them for their fear. They make up for it by letting me spend as much time as I want over at their house.
But I can’t go over there until the morning, so I pull out my phone and open up Google Chrome, figuring I’ll distract myself by reading some forum posts. I’ve been following the DeafClan forum for almost four years now—they have an entire sub-forum dedicated to bands, and it was how I first discovered that being deaf didn’t have to mean ditching music. A lot of classical music has lost its magic—the vibrations are more subtle, and the memories are too painful. But the DeafClan forum introduced me to the idea that feeling the vibrations of rock songs is almost as good as hearing them. Since then, I blast music whenever I get the chance, and it never fails to bring back good memories of dancing around the kitchen with my mom, listening to her sing along to her favorites by the Beatles.
I scroll through the newest forum posts, pausing to read a long message chain about the newly restored Elvis Presley album coming out in a few weeks. The excitement in the messages is contagious, and part of me is dying to join in on the online conversation. Even though I’ve gleaned hundreds of song recommendations off this forum, I’ve never actually posted anything. I tried making an account once, but I deleted it before I even finished registering.
Everyone else on the forum is Deaf—part of the non-hearing community and proud of it. Me? I’ve never even had a Deaf friend, let alone been part of their community. All through middle school, I worked with my school district’s ASL interpreters and speech therapists. Through hundreds of hours of tutoring, they made me fluent in ASL and a champion lip-reader. But I’ve only ever used those skills to make communicating with hearing people easier. I’ve never really had the chance to converse with Deaf individuals.
Sure, I’ve read practically every single forum thread on DeafClan, and spent way too much time daydreaming about attending Gallaudet University, where I could dive headfirst into Deaf culture. But those are just daydreams.
At least for now. As soon as I turn eighteen, I can hightail it out of this house and do whatever the hell I want with my education and my life. I glance at the clock at the top of my screen; it’s 12:37 a.m.
Only four months, two days, and five hours before my birthday.
5
ALI
AVERY RIPS OFF the last Tone Deaf poster from her wall and throws it in the corner of her room. There’s a pile of posters there, all ripped to pieces, with Jace’s face scribbled out on each one of them.
I sit at her desk, below a patch of glow-in-the-dark stars. It’s ten o’clock in the morning, and the stars have faded back to white plastic, but it’s still comforting to see them. The day we put them up there, Avery’s mom had invited me over and made us butter cookies, and we’d eaten them up in Avery’s room. I was still getting used to being deaf, and Avery was still getting used to having a deaf neighbor. We’d struggled to keep up a conversation made up of poor sign language and even poorer lip-reading, and giggled at all our mistranslations.
I had tried to tell her about my mom’s oatmeal cookies, how they were the best in the world, and how I missed them. But that made me burst out sobbing, a language we both understood. Avery had held my hand while I cried, and promised she’d tell her mom to make me oatmeal cookies next time I was over.
“I still cannot believe he did that,” Avery signs frantically, breaking me from my thoughts. She strides to the corner and kicks the pile of paper scraps. Then she stomps on one of the posters of Jace’s head. “What an asshole.”
I absently doodle on a piece of binder paper and try to ignore her outburst. I should have known better than to tell her what happened last night. As soon as I knocked on her door this morning, she’d burst into a fit of anger toward Tone Deaf. Then she noticed my face and burst into another fit. Thirty minutes later, she still can’t decide who she hates more: my dad or Jace Beckett. She seems to be leaning toward Jace at the moment.
I’m trying to draw a puppy—something cute and cuddly and comforting—but I keep focusing too much on the eyes. They turn piercing and light-colored. I crumple up the paper and throw it in the corner with the other scraps of uselessness.