Love Blind (2 page)

Yes. Maybe. God, that question was way too loaded for my current state of mind. And then, like he somehow saw me floundering, the silent guy at the board made a
wrap it up
signal with his hand, and the twins started in on promoting their next show.

“Sorry, that's all we have for today, everyone. We've had such a great time with Blinders On and hope great things
happen for them! Be sure to tune in next week when we're doing a special show on local hip-hop artists.” The twins even finished each other's sentences, which was obscenely clichéd and impossibly true.

So I guess we survived the interview unscathed, aside from my ears aching a bit at Muffy and Buffy's high-pitched voices. I needed to get to Individual Music Tutoring, which meant I was about to lock myself in a practice room in the music building for an hour and get a grade for it.

“Crap, Hailey. I totally forgot, I have a pair of your glasses.” Tess, our drummer, and probably the only girl I'd call an actual friend, groped in her bag and slid glasses into my hands.

“Thanks.” I owned a million pairs of glasses—all quirky enough to hopefully hide the way my eyes darted around trying to see, but I never knew where they all were.

I wasn't black-blind, just legally blind. Degenerative and “old-person” eyes as my ophthalmologist called it. “Legally blind” is a really professional way of saying one day I'll probably be black-blind. In-a-cave blind. Wave-my-hand-in-front-of-my-face-and-not-see-it blind.

Some days I shrugged that off. I could still see, and usually I could latch on to that. Besides, playing the campus radio station was supposed to be a good day.

Instead, as I slid on my glasses, I hated my eyes. The interview was officially over, but the twins, Mira, and Tess were still chatting. Screw patience—I'd pretty much run out of nice.
When I glanced around again, the fuzzy blur of the silent guy was gone.

The familiar weight of the Les Paul on my shoulder helped me relax as I stepped back into the hall. I waved and gave what I hoped was a smile to the two deejays, whose faces were still split from their embarrassing fangirling.

I cringed away from the light when I got outside, blinking over and over, willing my eyes to adjust. All I needed was to get to music class. From this side of our divided campus, it should have been easy.

Until my shoulder slammed into someone.

“Shit. Sorry.” I scanned his face to see him better.

“Uh . . .” He held his hand between us, but no words came out.

“Hey. Disappearing guy.” Good thing he was close or I'd have never recognized him in the bright light. Plain gray T-shirt. Jeans. Dirty white shoes. Like he was designed to blend. I breathed in, wondering why I was still standing there. Citrus tickled my nostrils. At least he was clean. For a guy, that really said something.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. So, thanks for putting up with the bullshit twins in there.”

He looked down and his too-long hair hid his eyes. Nice eyes. Too bad.

“I'm Hailey.” I thought about sticking out my hand, but
that sort of sucked, and anyway, he tucked his hands deeper into his pockets.

“ 'Kay.”

We stood there for another beat. Me waiting for something from him and him apparently waiting for a large hole to swallow him. When nothing more happened, he shuffled his feet and darted off.

Guess he not only liked to disappear, but wasn't much for talking either. Kind of an odd guy. Something I could definitely appreciate.

◊ ◊ ◊

I stepped into my mom's detached garage–turned–pottery shop. Rox had replaced all the garage door panels with windows, and added shelves across the new panes.

Every horizontal surface was lined with pottery. I squinted, but only fuzzy shadowed shapes appeared in front of the sunlight. She'd done some really great blue bowls the other day, but . . .

I squinted again at the pottery backdropped by the windows, and could still only see shapes. No colors. When had that happened? Had I lost colors when they were backlit?

“Hailey? Is that you?” Rox called from her workroom.

“Yup.”

“How did it go?” she asked, still yelling from the back.

Rox sold tons of pottery out here, but she made it even faster. The extras ended up in our house—on every bookshelf, storage bin, and window ledge. There were days when
the house looked more like a pottery shop than the pottery shop did.

I pulled my glasses off and set them on her sales counter, rubbing my nose and eyes. The yellow walls were supposed to be happy, but some days they were headache-inducing. “It's high school. Exactly how was it supposed to go?” I called.

“Oh, for goodness' sake.” The irritation in her voice made me smile. “I was asking about the radio station.”

“Fine.” Such a great answer for so many situations.

Rox's wild black hair and tattooed arms appeared around the small door behind the sales counter. She scraped at her mud-covered hands in a gesture I'd seen a million times.

She pulled off her apron. I squinted at her jeans and black concert tee. No chance I could guess the band. My eyes were wrecked. My other mom, Lila, wore yoga gear.
A lot.
Ran a studio about a block away. The cliché of pottery-and-yoga lesbian moms did not go unnoticed, by basically everyone, but they always laughed about it and kept on being who they were, including being hoverers. Having one mom to smother me was a bit much, but two? Two who'd worked their asses off to adopt a little girl who'd come to them already damaged? Their smother-mothering could be a lot to take.

Rox frowned as she stepped toward me. “Your glasses are on the counter. Bad day?”

“No. Yes. I don't know.” Why did she have to be so observant? It always brought out a weird, weighted feeling in my stomach, as if I was responsible for her.

“Let me get cleaned up and we can talk for a bit, okay?” Her smooth voice didn't match her rough exterior, but it was from Rox that I got my love of music.

I touched the guitar, still resting in its case on my back. “I'm gonna play for a bit. And besides, the doc says it's good for me to go without my glasses once in a while. Gives me practice.”
For the day they won't do me any good.

Rox let out a sigh she totally meant and wanted me to hear. Neither she nor Lila believed there would ever be a day when I couldn't see, but that's only because they didn't know what it was like to look through my eyes.

I opened my mouth to tell her I thought my eyes were worse again, but it would mean more ophthalmologist appointments, and maybe another small surgery. All the fighting against my terrible eyes was getting old.

“What's up?” she said more quietly.

I gestured toward all the rows of pottery on the shelves in front of the window. My lips pressed together.

“Hailey?”

“I can't . . .” I didn't want to do it. To say it out loud. “I can't really see what color they are anymore.”

Rox walked around the counter and rested her hand on my shoulder. “Is it that way with everything, or . . . ?”

Her voice was the low cautious one the moms used when I had some new vision thing going on. It was the voice that was intended to calm me but really did the opposite.

“No.” I shook my head, but my voice was sort of a whisper. “Just with the light behind them, I guess.”

“Well.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze before dropping her arm. “It's really bright out today.”

“Yeah.”

Her lips pursed for a moment, but after studying my face, she smiled—a sign that she was about to jump ship and change the subject.

Thank God
.

“Lila will for sure be home for dinner. I'll let you know when she gets here.” That was her nice way of telling me I would be joining them for dinner. Like every night. Family dinner. Mandatory. Grilling session of fifteen-year-old daughter. Not mandatory. Just a perk.

The gripping feeling in my chest over my vision started to dissipate, now replaced by what I'd tell the moms about my school day that didn't include anything about my eyes.

Maybe I could learn a lesson from the skinny guy in the sound booth and disappear.

I
left money for dinner,” Mom said as I dropped books into my bag. Calculus. History.
Beowulf.
My mom was a nurse. Mostly the night shift, although some days she covered for other nurses and was gone even longer. She was supposed to only work forty hours, but she had a second job as an in-home care nurse, so I was alone a lot. Which didn't always suck.

“ 'Kay. Thanks.”

“Did you get my meds?”

“Yes.”

I set her bag on the counter.

Mom hummed, sighed, and rifled through the bag to check. “And the other stuff I left for you to do?”

“Folded the laundry. The dishwasher isn't full enough to run.”

“You should've run it anyway. The food will cake on otherwise.” Her voice shook in that way that made me feel like shit. She looked at me, and her face changed, softened.
Damn
. The roller coaster of her emotions was not something I wanted to deal with today. “Thanks for picking up my things, Kyle. Sorry. I'm so sorry. It's
my
job to take care of
you
.”

I grunted because what was I supposed to say? I'd like to interview other, more qualified candidates for the job.

She pressed out the creases of her uniform, her hands fluttering over her too-thin frame. Nothing fit her anymore. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her eat for real, not just standing in the kitchen scooping three spoonfuls of whatever into her mouth to get her through the next shift. She was definitely running toward another slip. Only thing worse than a pushy mom was one laid up, depressed and near catatonic, on the couch.

“Why don't you invite a friend over for dinner?” Flutter, smooth, flutter. “I hate that you're alone so much.”

I hate that you are too
. I didn't say it. Never would or could. But I felt it every minute we were together.

“I'll think about it.”

“You haven't seen Pavel in a long time.”

Pavel was pretty much my only friend, but I didn't see him with any sort of regularity. Homeschooled, Russian, a hell of a soccer player. And because he was a guy, he didn't ask me too many questions. Didn't talk about things in the past. Plus, he
liked the right kind of music or at least pretended to.

“Yeah. Maybe I'll call him.” I wouldn't. Pavel called me, mostly. Would send a random text with a half-naked girl or an obscure question about a song or an artist. And I usually texted back. But seeing him regularly was a different thing.

Mom pulled her salt-and-pepper hair into a ponytail at the back of her neck. She looked tired. Always. And sad. And sometimes angry. I wanted to make things better for her, but how the hell was I supposed to do that?

All the words we never said pounded in my head. Her sadness somehow seemed quieter, even though she cried in bed at night when she thought I was sleeping. Muffled sobs that split me apart until I had to put the Kinks too loud on my headphones and start reading Sartre's
Being and Nothingness
to make it go away.

“I saw the school is doing college testing prep classes.” She'd gone from fluttering over her uniform to swiping at the kitchen counters in too-wide, too-hard strokes. “Did you want me to sign you up for them?”

More classes. More people. More questions to answer. Pass.

“I'm okay without them.”

“Of course you are. But college is important, Kyle.” The hardness was back in her clipped words. An almost unexplainable anger, except I could explain it.

God, I need to get out.
I was such a dick for even thinking it, but there it was. The thought didn't matter. I wasn't leaving
my mom. We both knew it. She talked about my future like she expected great things from me. Like I'd go off into the world and make her proud. But she withered every time she saw a catalogue come in the mail for an out-of-state college. So college was important, as long as it was close to home. Push-pull, push-pull.

◊ ◊ ◊

“Hey. The guy with no name. Do you remember me?” Hailey asked as she stepped into the radio station control room.

Yes.
“Uh.”

She pushed some of her hair behind her ear and pressed her glasses back on her nose. Cute blue glasses with diamonds on the edges. Kind of fancy for the Converse she was wearing, but fuck if I get girls and their clothes.

I hadn't seen Hailey since the interview—a few days? A week? Our high school had two campuses, one for freshmen and sophomores, one for juniors and seniors. I was a junior and Hailey was a sophomore, so we never passed each other in the halls at school. And I
was
looking for her, even braved the main hallway after the final bell one day in hopes that she'd be practicing in one of the music rooms.

“Was that an answer?” she asked, head tilted to the side like she was trying to figure out what she was dealing with.

Crap.
I hated that I couldn't say anything without wanting to curl inside and hide. I was like the sad turtle from that kids' book, the one not even the hippo wanted to hang around. Owen or Mzee. Whichever. I never understood that book.

“Can I help you?” Four words. Choked from the back of my throat, probably spoken too soft and too fast, but still. Four words.

She took a step closer. “Yeah. So what's your name?”

“Kyle,” I mumbled because really, it was sort of the best I could do. The heat in the room was already getting uncomfortable.

I'd heard her voice in my head this week more than I wanted to admit—especially when I didn't want to think about other stuff. When my eyes twitched from reading. When I'd gone over my dumb life too many times. Her gravelly voice was like a whisper in my ear.