The One Thing (26 page)

As he blew out a sympathetic breath, his leg, just barely, rested against mine. My heart stuttered.

He didn’t move.

Neither did I.

There’s something about a light, hesitant touch. It makes you ache for more.

I shook my head, attempting to reclaim my brain. Mason had a girlfriend. Probably didn’t even know he was touching me.

Still, though. The heat on the side of my leg was reaching nuclear. I was going to explode right here, combust all over my backyard. I shifted positions a little, moving away from him to lean
against the deck railing, equal parts relief and regret.

He let out a little sigh.

A sigh.

What did that even mean?

Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Have you considered telling anyone else?”

“Like who? My parents?” I scoffed. “They’d never believe me. But—what about your mom?”

I heard him take in a deep, shaky breath. “I think we should wait on telling Mom until we know for sure. Losing Dad was so hard on her. If your theory is wrong, we’d put her through
an awful lot for nothing.”

He was probably right. If I had a little more proof, something convincing, maybe my story wouldn’t be so far-fetched. “What about Ben?” I asked. “Are you going to tell
him?”

“He’s
ten
.” I nodded, feeling relieved. After a short pause, Mason said, “It’s just hard for me to swallow because Ben had a routine checkup a couple
months ago and he was fine. And he hasn’t been sick, hasn’t even had a cold. I mean, he’s been a little tired and grumpy, but that’s it.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Ya think?”

“He’ll forgive you, Maggie,” he said, a half smile hiding somewhere in his tone. “It’s not in his nature to stay angry.”

T
he next morning I told my parents I had a stomachache. It wasn’t a complete lie—indecision and stress had fused into a roiling lump in
my stomach, and I couldn’t seem to digest it no matter how hard I tried. And anyway, it was the only way to get out of my session with Hilda, who was due to show up at noon.

After my parents left for work, I agonized for a while. Cried for a while. Fidgeted for a while. And then I called Sophie. She’d been hovering in the back of my mind for the past couple
days, but with everything that had been going on, I’d put off calling her.

“Hey, Sophie. How’re you holding up?” I asked her as soon as she picked up.

A couple heartbeats’ worth of a pause on her end of the line. Finally she said, “Well, just about everything I own is getting carted into a moving van right now, I threw up five
times this morning, and I’m craving squid. So there’s that.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or bawl.

Silence spread between us, so bulky and dense I could feel it weighing down the phone.

“So you’re really moving?” I whispered.

“Yeah.”

My throat felt tight, like someone was jamming a fist into my windpipe. “When?”

“Tomorrow.”

Sitting on the very edge of my bed, I wrapped my arms around myself. I hated that she was pregnant. Hated that her parents were splitting up. Hated that she was moving to Ohio. Hated that
I’d hurt her.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted suddenly. It was all hurried and all shouty and all wrong, but I kept going anyway. I had to try to make this right. After all these years of friendship,
I owed Sophie that much. “For avoiding you when I first lost my sight. It was just so...awkward.” I twisted my hands together, gripped my toes down on my flip-flops, like maybe I was
getting ready to bolt, just run away from this conversation.

Sophie waited a moment before she spoke, and when she did, her voice was soft. “It was my fault, too. I’ve been busy fighting my own battles. I’ve been sort of avoiding
everyone—keeping people away from my house. I didn’t want everyone to know how bad it was at home. It was so embarrassing.”

“Well, maybe with a little distance, your parents will decide they want to stay together?” Even as it came out of my mouth, I knew it would never happen. That house had been a time
bomb that had detonated the night Sophie told her parents she was pregnant.

“Right,” she muttered. “And maybe my dad will offer to knit the baby some booties.”

Baby booties.

Wow.

That was when it really hit me: Sophie was actually going to have a baby. I’d always been a little leery of babies, what with their big heads and their inconsolable crying and their jerky
movements. I’d once seen a baby laugh and puke at the exact same time. It had been like something out of a horror movie. But if anyone could make it through this, it was Sophie. She just
didn’t know it yet.

Sophie cleared her throat. “Maggie?”

“Yeah?”

“I have to go.”

I knew she’d meant that she was just busy, that she had to finish packing and whatever, but it felt more like a final good-bye. A decade of friendship and laughter and familiarity slid
through my fingers, wisping away into nothingness. I whispered, “Bye, Soph.”

I was sitting on the back deck when the doorbell rang that afternoon. I made no move toward the front door, just stayed right where I was: butt on the edge of the chair, eyes closed, hands
gripping both sides of my head.

But when the doorbell sounded off a relentless couple thousand times in a row, I staggered to my feet and opened my eyes. Then I froze. I was standing in the murky outer ring of my sight. My
eyes traced slowly along a wooden deck slat toward the house, my vision becoming clearer with every foot. Trancelike, I walked to the slider and put one palm on the glass.

I could see inside my house.

There it was, just like it had always been, only...different. Furniture was lined up in a square, uniform manner. Mom’s vases, which used to live on the shelf just inside the door, were
gone, replaced by a line of books.
Independence Without Sight
and
Adjusting to Blindness
and
How to Cope with Loss
. There were no stray shoes on the floor, nothing that
made the space appear lived-in or homey or cozy. It was a page inside a catalog. A model home.

The house of a blind girl.

I flinched as the doorbell kicked in again.

Opening the slider and stepping inside, I felt guilty for some reason, like a trespasser or an unwelcome houseguest. I walked through the house in a daze, hitching to a stop in the hallway in
front of a huge picture of Mom and me after regionals last year. I was beaming, one hand holding a soccer ball and the other raised high above my head, knotted together with Mom’s.

My mother’s expression was triumphant.

Suddenly I felt like the hallway was caving in on me, and I took off, hurrying toward the door. Everything around me was hospital-bright, and my insides were in revolt, churning and twisting as
I stepped to the door and swung it open.

Ben.

It was Ben.

There he was, wearing a scowl and a blue baseball-style hat that said
THINKING CAP
. At his feet was a fabric shopping bag. Like a nocturnal animal emerging into the
daylight, I squinted at Ben, then at the red-flowered cushion on our porch swing, then at the ancient maple in the front yard, then at Mason’s car idling in the driveway, and then back at Ben
again.

Ben used his crutches to propel the bag toward me. It crashed into my shins. “New flavor of Doritos,” he said tersely. “Thought you might want to try them.”

“Thanks,” I said, shocked.

“Why are you wearing pajamas?” he blurted. “It’s, like, three in the afternoon.”

I glanced at Mason, who beamed a gorgeous, white-toothed smile at me from the driver’s seat of his car. I’d seen him so many times in my own head lately that it was weird to
see
him
, see him. No, not weird: overwhelming. I glanced away, but I could feel him watching me regardless, could feel his eyes on my face, my shoulders, my pajamas, my everything.

I took in a deep breath.
Focus, Maggie. Focus.
I looked down at Ben. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

For a moment, Ben and I just stared at each other, then Ben said tightly, “So Mason told me that you told him that you can see when I’m around.”

I nodded robotically.

Ben let his head fall backward and he sighed heavily. “Okay, fine. Fine: Mason said I should come over to hear you out. So here I am. To hear you out.”

All I could think was that he was giving me another chance, and this time I was going to do it right. With complete honesty. Looking down at my feet, I said, “You were right. In some ways,
I did use you for my eyesight. I mean, when I first met you, my life was just...I was just...” My voice sounded loud and hurried, and I told myself to take a breath. “I was completely
off the rails.” I swallowed. The sound seemed loud in my ears. I glanced up at Ben for a moment. His lips were still tight, but there was a loosening in his eyes that encouraged me to go on.
“But you were always my friend. You were always the person who helped me realize that somewhere inside me, there’s still a
me
. I’ve been a crap friend, and I’m
truly sorry. I shouldn’t have left your house without saying good-bye the night of the Dead Eddies concert.” I cleared my throat. “And about Mason...” Instinctively, and
before I could stop myself, my eyes shot up to where Mason sat in his car.

He was still staring at me.

Heat crept up my chest and into my face.

“I didn’t—” I began, but cut myself off. Christ, this was degrading. My cheeks felt like they were purple now. They literally ached from the heat. Praying that Mason
couldn’t read lips, I whispered, “I promise you, I didn’t know Mason was your brother at first, not until you told me. And even after that, I didn’t hang out with you to get
near him.” I folded my arms over my stomach and shifted my weight, and then I went on. “But over the past few weeks I’ve...I’ve discovered that I have feelings for
him.” Ben’s brows were pulled together, and I couldn’t tell whether he was considering my admission or considering throttling me for crushing on his brother. My eyes shot to my
feet again. “And it isn’t because he’s ridiculously talented. It’s more than that. He...” I let out a breath. Did I really have to do this with Mason here? “He
stands up for what he believes in. He’s ferociously protective of the people he loves. He isn’t okay with doing things half-assed and he isn’t okay with insincerity, and...and I
guess I find that compelling.” I cleared my throat. “But he doesn’t know how I feel, and I would absolutely die—
die
—if you told him.”

I couldn’t look at Ben, couldn’t look at Mason. And for several miserable seconds, all I could hear was the squawk of birds overhead and a car starting up in a neighbor’s
driveway. Then, Ben’s voice: “Fine.”

My eyes jerked to his. “Fine?”

“Yes, fine. To all of it,” he said. His tone was indicating I was being extremely dense, but his mouth was starting to turn up at the corners. “Just don’t make me regret
it, Thera.”

Thera.

I felt a strong, visceral tug in my heart. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve him. “I won’t.”

Ben had been gone for about a half hour when my mom breezed through the front door and into the living room, where I was distracting myself from my problems by means of Ben’s Doritos and a
movie. Mom placed a palm on my forehead and said, “Are you feeling any better?” I wanted to lean into her touch, keep it there forever. But a second later her hand was gone, my forehead
cold.

“Maybe a little,” I said, which was true. Ben’s forgiveness had loosened the knot in my chest, just a little.

She collapsed on the couch beside me, all sighs, dropping what sounded like her coaching equipment bag on the floor. Then she cleared her throat. “
Titanic
, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I love this movie,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

Silence spread between us.

A handful of months ago I would’ve been thrilled to curl up on the couch with my mother and watch this movie. But now her presence felt threatening, suffocating—like she was
vacuuming up all the air in the house. She wasn’t exactly saying anything to me, but she wasn’t going away, either, so finally I grabbed my chips and stood. Taking a step forward, I
said, “So I think I’ll go work on my research paper until dinner? Clarissa and I are almost finished and—” My sentence came to a halt as my foot thumped into her equipment
bag.

An achingly familiar noise filled the room.

It seemed so loud, the sound of a soccer ball skipping across the floor, banging into a wall and then rolling back toward me. I heard the couch creak sharply as Mom jerked to her feet, heard the
ball come to a stop somewhere between the two of us.

I didn’t move.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted, and I didn’t even know why. What was I apologizing for? Everything, I guessed. Knocking the ball out of her bag. Ruining her dream. Screwing up
our relationship. I thought about that picture I’d seen on the wall. I thought about everything we’d had, everything we’d lost, and it all came down to this.

A ball between us.

“It’s okay,” Mom said quietly. “I didn’t mean to leave it so close to your feet. It’s just—
Titanic
was on when I walked in and I got
distracted.” There was an ache in her voice that I’d never heard before.