Free The One Thing by Marci Lyn Curtis Page A

whether it’s possible for a blind person to get their sight back from a head trauma?”
    I gnawed on my thumbnail while I waited.
    And waited.
    And waited.
    Jerking out of my chair, I paced back and forth in front of my desk, shaking out my hands and trying my best to keep from becoming too optimistic. Finally: a little ding of an incoming message.
I collapsed in my seat and tabbed down the screen to find his reply: “Good evening, Maggie. I’m afraid the answer is no.”
    I rubbed the back of my neck for a moment and then typed my response: “Not even part of their sight?”
    Dr. Darren: “Part of their sight?”
    Me: “Just around one person. Like, if I hit my head and then afterward I could see someone.”
    Dr. Darren: “If you hit your head and you’re suddenly seeing things, you’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury and you are hallucinating. Or”—the screen reader
paused for some time, so long that I bolted to my feet again and crossed my arms—“you have a psychiatric disorder.”
    I collapsed on my bed and threw my forearm over my eyes. This was exactly what I’d feared would happen if I turned somewhere for answers. I was on my own.

T he feminine hygiene aisle in Target wasn’t the best place to be marooned. Gramps was in the store somewhere. He’d shoved me into this
aisle, muttering that “the sort of things” I was looking for were right in front of me. And then he informed me that he’d be right back, that he needed fishing supplies and also
something that had sounded like toenail clippers, but I couldn’t be certain. His words generally came out a little muffled, so half the time I didn’t know what he was saying.
    In contrast, my other grandfather, Grandpa Brian—whom I called Repeat Grandpa because everything he said came out of his mouth twice (“How was school? How was
school?”)—made his words difficult to miss. Repeat Grandpa lived in California and was not very grandpa-ish because he was tall and skinny, and he rarely cussed. In order to be a
grandpa, you should be old and grumpy and bald and opinionated and fat, like Gramps. Or at the very least, you should have a big potbelly, the tendency to grouse about people who drive too fast,
and an affinity for the phrase “goddamn it all to hell.” But that was just me.
    Gramps had been my best friend since I lost my sight. He offered me a couple of things that girls my age could not. One, he didn’t feel sorry for me, and two, he wasn’t about to
treat me differently because I couldn’t see. I could not say the same for my old friends.
    Anyway, a half hour earlier, Gramps had hollered into my room, “Going to Target. Need anything?” At the time, I’d been camped on the Internet for a good three hours, first
trying to figure out the Big Secret by, as Tommy X had suggested, looking “beyond the surface” (i.e. going all the way back to the band’s first official website post and then
picking through it for clues), and then, after coming up empty, moving on to listening to my screen reader recite entries from an online encyclopedia. I’d started with the
D
s rather
than the
A
s to pay homage to the Dead Eddies. Back in the day, the Dead Eddies were the band that had first gotten me into music. I mean, their song, coincidentally enough called
“The Beginning of It All,” was singularly responsible for transforming my life. And so: the
D
s, out of respect. At any rate, I was cursing Tommy X and perusing the
D
s
when Gramps came into my room and asked me the Target question. Naturally, I was in dire need of some girly things. And naturally, Gramps wasn’t about to set foot in the girly aisle for me.
So I’d had to go along.
    Gramps drove a Ford truck that was so old it had probably driven Moses to church. But he refused to replace it. He claimed the old stuff was sturdier than the new. Which was probably a good
thing, because Gramps’s driving skills were a little on the sketchy side. Just last year, he’d