Chapter Two
I met Cassie on the tenth of February the next year while listening to an audiobook on the steps leading up to the school library. I was alone when she approached me. I was almost always alone. After a full year of blindness I’d given up on ever swinging a bat again, watching a ball fly over the fence, seeing the moon and the stars, seeing someone smile at something I said. I’d given up on a lot of things. For most of that year, I’d given up on being happy.
Right after it happened, the baseball team, my high school, the whole town, rallied around me with school assemblies denouncing violence, fundraisers to help with medical expenses, articles written about me appeared in the local paper, the police publicly vowed to bring my assailants to justice, and I was even gifted a baseball signed by all the members of the Boston Red Sox. But what gave me the most hope and the most comfort in those initial days were the eye specialists who told my parents and me that the blindness might be temporary. For a while I held out hope, but days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and then somehow half a year had passed without even the slightest improvement. My sight was long gone.
Friends from the ball field stopped calling. Invites to dinners and parties and hangouts dwindled. Doctors no longer ended appointments with encouragement. My assault, once a subject of intense public outrage, became a sensitive topic to avoid and dodge, something spoken about in whispers. I realized that once everyone went through the motions of expressing their outrage, once they did something to prove they cared, people wanted life to go back to normal. But there was no going back to normal for me. I was alone in the darkness.
I don’t want to make it sound like I was shunned by the world. A few old friends and a few old coaches tried to keep in touch, but I pushed them away. I stopped taking calls, stopped talking to people at school, and when my parents asked how I felt I either ignored them or replied with sarcasm. I’m not proud of how I behaved. I was young, immature, and it wasn’t just my vision that was stolen. My identity, my future, my entire life had been taken away in a senseless act of violence by complete strangers. I became something of a loner, a ghost of that boy who wanted nothing more than to swing a bat and hear the crack of the baseball against it.
Towards the end of that year, something changed. Maybe I just got tired of being miserable, of feeling helpless, of wallowing in self-pity while millions of other people were out there living full and meaningful lives without sight. Those boys didn’t just take away my ability to see, what they took was my will, my drive, my desire to make something of myself, and I was determined to take it back.
It started with an urge to understand what happened to me. I don’t mean the motives of those boys from the field. Any interest I’d ever had in them had long ago dwindled into nothingness. No. I wanted to understand the biology behind what happened to my vision. I realized that I didn’t know the first thing about why staring into the sun had blinded me. What was the exact mechanism behind it? I wanted to understand the gears and circuits of it all.
When I asked Dad about it, he admitted he didn’t really know the science, but after a few days he gave me several audiobooks about the biology and physics of human vision. For hours and hours I laid on my bed and learned about rods and cones, the retina, the prefrontal cortex, that the human brain fills the blind spots in our vision with what it expects and predicts should be there, all kinds of fascinating things. Things my old teachers probably talked about while I daydreamed about the big leagues.
My parents were concerned when I locked myself away in my room, coming out only for meals and to ask for more audiobooks. Mom, who never before pushed me towards baseball, even suggested I try Beep Baseball, a version of the great game using beeps and buzzes to guide the blind to the ball and the bases. It was interesting. I tucked that idea away in the back of my mind, but it was too late. A new obsession held sway over me.
As I listened to that audiobook on the tenth of February, a memoir by a man slowly losing his sight to a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, someone tapped my shoulder, pulled back my headphones, and whispered in my ear.
“Would you be my Valentine?”
Her warm breath, her husky voice, tickled my inner ear and a pleasurable excitement rippled through my body. That was how I fell in love with her. At that age, that’s about all it takes.
“Who are you?” I asked, removing the headphones.
Her giggle was girly. A small, soft hand touched my forearm. She said her name was Cassie and that she had been working up the courage to talk to me for a long, long time.
***
Things moved fast with Cassie. Too fast. Not that I minded, at the time. We met in front of the library after school almost every day then went to her house where no one was home. Before I met Cassie I’d never even kissed a girl but after a couple of weeks there was very little left to the imagination. It was all I thought about. Every class was an eternity. I had no appetite for lunch. Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about seeing Cassie the next day, the feel of her body against mine, the low moans into my ear.
Ever since I lost my vision, Mom and Dad drove me everywhere I needed to go, which was mostly home, school, and the doctor. When I told them Cassie could drive me home after school so they wouldn’t have to leave work early, they were silent. I hated those silences in which they communicated in secret using facial expressions, mouthing words, maybe even jotting down notes on a napkin. Sometimes I heard whispers, an exasperated sigh, the click of my mom’s jewelry when she shook her head. I know they didn’t mean anything by it, but it hurt to have my blindness used against me. In the end they didn’t object. Maybe they thought a girlfriend would be good for me, or maybe they were tired of watching me mope around the house. Their only condition was that I bring Cassie over for dinner some evening.
I didn’t know it at the time but Cassie was never coming over for dinner.
***
The first time Cassie brought me home and pulled me into her bed I thought there was nothing else in the world that I needed to stay happy, but no matter how young a man is, eventually the all-consuming potency of sex dwindles and evaporates. Something deeper was needed if the relationship was going to survive, and I had some concerns about Cassie. I hardly knew anything about her. Our conversations felt superficial, distant, like talking to a stranger on an airplane or a relative who only appears on major holidays. Outside of those few hours after school we never spent time together. There were other things too, things she said that never made sense, things she didn’t seem to know about sports and music and politics, as if she lived someplace where the wider currents of the world never reached.
One Friday afternoon while I lay beside Cassie in her bed, I decided to get some answers.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“If it’s for another round, that’ll cost another shoulder rub.”
I forced a smile.
“No, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”
I felt her body tense. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath.
“Why um… why don’t we ever talk at school?”
Cassie sat up.
“Do you ever try to find me at school?” she asked.
“As best I can,” I said, tapping my eyes. “Do you ever try to find me?”
“Well,” Cassie said, pulling the blankets tight around her body as she lay back down, “I was worried you might be… ashamed. If anyone knew. I never mentioned it but I’m not what you would call a looker. That’s why it was so hard to talk to you.”
I laughed. A cruel thing to do but I couldn’t help it. She slapped my arm but it wasn’t hard and I suspected she was smiling.
“Why the hell would I care about that?”
“Men always care.”
“Well, I don’t care what other people say, you’re beautiful to me.”
For a long time we lay in silence. I felt good. Relieved. That was one concern that had a reasonable explanation, even if it was silly. The rest of my worries could wait for another day.
Cassie broke the silence.
“I hope this isn’t a terrible thing to ask, but would you like to see me?”
“Why? You have a spare set of eyes I could borrow?”
She didn’t laugh.
“I’m just curious. If there was a way you could see me, would you do it?”
“Well, yeah, but why even ask something like that?”
“There might be something I could do.”
I scoffed and rolled onto my side.
“I’m serious,” Cassie said, poking my back. “Don’t roll away from me, mister. If there was a way to get your vision back, would you do it? Even if it had some consequences?”
I didn’t like the question. The long silence that followed it was uncomfortable.
“You could play ball again,” Cassie said.
Less than a year ago, regaining my sight, returning to the field, would have been a dream come true. Not only did the idea no longer have the same appeal, it felt like stepping back into a life I’d already left behind.
“Sorry I asked about school, alright? Let’s just drop it.”
After a moment she pressed her warm naked body against mine. Her fingers swam through my hair. We didn’t talk much the rest of that afternoon.
