Free The One Thing by Marci Lyn Curtis

little, he slowed his pace, letting the kid gain ground on him.
    I couldn’t believe it. He was deliberately letting the kid beat him.
    This really shouldn’t have surprised me. Not really. Ben was just...good-hearted. CEO of the National Society of Encyclopedia Britannica Readers, president of the Department of Constant
Bucktoothed Smiles, grand pooh-bah of Letting the Fat Kid Win.
    Who was I? I didn’t know.

O nce I allowed myself to harbor the hope that I might completely regain my vision, the idea possessed me. That evening, my mind hopscotched between
the ways my life would stitch back together if my sight fully returned, how I’d reclaim the soccer field, the hallways at my old school, the afternoons with Sophie and Lauren. How my troubles
with my mother would dissolve.
    Doubts snuck in there, too. I worried that my newfound sight was temporary, transient. That maybe nature would realize its mistake and return me to complete blindness. That if I didn’t
hurry up and figure out all the whys and the hows and the wheres, my little island of eyesight, along with the explanation for it, would disappear just as quickly as it had come.
    Best I could guess, the crack I’d taken on my head had been the catalyst. Yet I wasn’t exactly dying to field-test this theory. Bashing myself on the skull with a hammer for another
inch of vision? No, thank you. My luck, I would knock myself right back into complete blindness. Besides, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was overlooking something crucial. I felt oddly
as though I were a moth stuck in a lamp shade, bumping around the light but missing the bigger picture.
    By the time I wandered into the living room, where Gramps and Dad were listening to an ancient Beatles album and swapping conspiracy stories about John Lennon’s death, I was complete
wreckage. I felt compelled to see Ben again, which then made me feel guilty because he was just a good-hearted ten-year-old kid who didn’t deserve to get used just so I could see, which then
made me feel frustrated because currently I
could not see
one freaking thing, which then made me long to see Ben again, which then made me feel guilty for wanting to see Ben again, which
then made me realize why I usually ignored my goddamn feelings. I groaned quietly and buried my face in a couch pillow.
    “What’s wrong, honey?” Dad asked.
    I was so close to telling him the truth—honest, I was—but the words seemed too twisted to make sense coming out of my mouth, so in the end I replied that everything was fine, that I
had a headache, and I walked back to my room and shut the door.
    I paced a little. Sat on the edge of my bed a little. Listened to the radio a little. And then I lurched up, unloaded in front of my computer, and signed on to Dr. Darren’s website.
    This wasn’t the first time I’d turned to Dr. Darren. I’d always skewed a bit toward the hypochondriac side of the wellness scale. Back in the fourth grade I’d had
imaginary thumb cancer for a while. And then flesh-eating disease of the ankle. In middle school I’d acquired a touch of fabricated tuberculosis, which, given my track record for medical
misadventures, my parents had not taken seriously. I’d therefore done what most paranoid quasi-tuberculosis sufferers would do: I’d signed on to the Ask Dr. Darren website and requested
advice.
    From what I remembered of his website photo, Dr. Darren was a gray-haired, leather-skinned man who had long, scraggly eyebrows that must’ve grown tired of lying down flat because they
stuck straight out of his forehead. He had a strong, direct manner of answering questions—a convincing sort of approach that always managed to help me sort out my preoccupations. And that was
what I needed right now.
    It took me forever to navigate through his website. When I finally located the Q and A section, my fingers hovered over the keys for a moment before I typed in my question: “Hello, Dr.
Darren. I was wondering