Free The One Thing by Marci Lyn Curtis Page B

gotten into a fender bender with his barbershop. As he’d pulled into the
shop’s parking lot, he’d hit the gas instead of the brake. It had ended up being a very expensive haircut.
    “Mom at work?” I asked Gramps as we pulled out of the driveway.
    “Yup,” Gramps said. “Left at dawn and said she’d be working late tonight.”
    My chest knotted up reflexively, like it always did when Mom spent long days away from home. It was childish and paranoid, but ever since she’d disappeared while I was in the hospital, I
wondered whether this would be the time she wouldn’t come home, whether my blindness had scared her away for good. I cleared my throat and said, “What about Dad?”
    “Left for work at five thirty.” This didn’t surprise me. Dad got up with the chickens to commute to Manhattan. He was an intellectual property lawyer. Whatever that was.
He’d dutifully explained it to me one day, and I’d dutifully forgotten.
    It took only a couple of minutes in Gramps’s passenger seat for me to start to yawn. When I first lost my sight, I spent a lot of time yawning, and in turn I spent a lot of time wondering
why I was yawning, which just made me yawn all the more. It took a doctor to explain this phenomenon: I was yawning because of my sudden lack of visual stimulation. My brain thought that nothing
was going on, so it figured it must be nighttime. In other words, my life was so freaking boring that my brain thought it was time to sleep.
    I figured that I was yawning now because all Gramps talked about was the weather and the weather and the weather some more. And after that he gave me an update on his trick knee, which, for
those who do not speak Prehistoric Doofus, is not a magical knee but a knee that locks up once in a while. Finally he said, “So. Why are you hanging out with the crippled kid? A bit young for
you, if you ask me.”
    Gramps didn’t have a batter-up circle for his thoughts. He just opened his mouth and struck out. Swing and a miss. No political correctness whatsoever.
    “Gramps,” I chastised, suddenly the moral one in our relationship. “He’s not crippled—he has spina bifida. And as far as his age goes, he’s actually pretty
mature.”
    Gramps harrumphed. “I hear he sucks at swimming.”
    “Who told you that?” I asked, feeling weirdly protective of Ben.
    “Hank.” Hank was Gramps’s friend. Without fail, the two of them met for coffee and donuts every morning.
    Pinching the bridge of my nose, I said, “How would Hank know about Ben’s swimming?” Though I already knew the answer to this question. Hank was the town gossip.
    “Hank’s mailman’s son told him,” Gramps said, and I rolled my eyes. “The whole family has had a rough go. The older boy? Mason? A hothead. Suspended from school a
couple years back. After his dad died. In some local rock band called the Squeaky Guns.”
    “The Loose Cannons,” I muttered, not appreciating the reminder of Mason.
    I was quiet for the remainder of the ride. And now, as I stood stranded in Target, Mason Milton was still on my mind. Which was to say that I was standing there like a complete mindless idiot.
Huffing out a monstrous gust of air, I reached up, miscalculating the location of the shelves and knocking what sounded like a thousand boxes off the Great Wall of Tampons. I squatted to pick them
up, grumbling under my breath. Gramps’s dumping me off here felt more than a little premature. Hilda had yet to teach me how to navigate in stores. Hell, I’d barely walked down the
sidewalk yesterday without breaking my face.
    Footsteps rounded the corner behind me. And then a girl’s voice: “Oh wow. That’s...wow. Want some help picking those up?” There was an awkward pause in which I
deliberated whether to decline the offer, a pause just long enough for her to discover she knew me.
“Maggie?”
she said, clearly surprised.
    Now, if I were the observant type, I would have already recognized Sophie’s