Free Blind by Rachel Dewoskin

wouldn’t have fallen over. Leah wouldn’t even have to walk us all home every day. She’d be hanging out with her friends instead, like Sarah, who, when my mom asked if she could help with drop-off and pickup, just said, “No thank you.” Maybe I’d be in charge. I wonder if I’d be happier if I were in charge. Probably I’d be resentful of having to help so much, and not even realize how little I had to complain about. It’s not like I spent my whole sighted life being like, “This is so fabulous, to have my eyesight.”
    I wonder when I’ll be done with the what-ifs and if-onlys. I hate them, and they play in my mind on a loop, like the voice-over lady in my phone, screaming for a password I can’t type in fast enough. Will the questions ever stop?
    I held my white cane with my right hand and Spark’s leash with my left, trying to calm Spark down. Naomi’s walking was odd and jolty. She was probably either trying to avoid the cracks or to step on all of them. Benj was shouting: “Sometimes he, I mean she—you know, that rabbit—will come to my house when we have no school, because it will be my turn for Bigs!”
    “Ow,” Naomi said. “Stop pulling on my arm like that.”
    “It’s my house, too, Benj,” Jenna said. Scratch, click, scratch, click. I felt something—a stick, maybe—something in the way.
    “Careful,” Leah said, seeing me notice it. “There’s part of a tree branch there.”
    When an actual rabbit arrived the next day, which was a Friday, Jenna was almost as delighted as Benj, because the kindergarten gecko died and they haven’t replaced it yet. Naomi pretended for about six seconds to be above the excitement, but as soon as Bigs showed up, she immediately wrote a star vehicle play for the rabbit, mysteriously called “Buffalo Rabbit on the Jungle Shore.”
    I was in the living room, waiting for Logan, listening to cabinets opening, drawers sliding along their metal tracks, Jenna and Naomi fumbling and shuffling, drawers slamming shut. Then came the furious, thick snipping. Pop of the hole punch and Jenna’s, “Mom? Where’s the yarn? Nomi and I can’t find any yarn,” to the discovery that we were out of yarn and they’d have to use string or ribbon. To tie what they were making—construction paper ears—around Benj’s and Jenna’s heads, so they could be rabbits, too. The doorbell rang and I felt my way along the wall until I reached the foyer table. I opened the door.
    “Hi, Lo,” I said as she came in. She smelled like herself, candy with a faint chemical spritz. She took quick stock of the scene. “More animals joining the Silver circus?” She laughed. “Let’s go to your room.”
    But we hadn’t even sat down on my bed when Jenna screamed and we raced back into the living room with Spark, who didn’t know what to make of the chaos. “Bigs had a pee accident,” Jenna told us in her teacher voice, the one she uses when she’s trying to sound like Naomi, who’s trying to sound like her teacher. Jenna was calm now, but Benj was crying.
    “Gross,” Logan said.
    “Don’t cry,” I told Benj. “Just go get Bigs, and Logan and I will clean up the pee. Where is it? On the rug or the wood?”
    “The wood. Over here,” Jenna said. I leaned down to pet Spark, who was frozen in his warning position. “It’s just the rabbit,” I told him. “Don’t worry.”
    “If you have pee in your body, you have to go to the potty right then,” Benj told me and Logan, sniffling. “Don’t delay!”
    “Right,” Logan said. “I guess Bigs didn’t get that memo.”
    She had already picked the rabbit up and now she handed it to me, and I was surprised by how un-fluffy Bigs was. Maybe she was some hideous, short-haired, prickly rabbit breed. Logan saw my face and laughed until she snorted.
    “Ew, right?” she said. “And you should see her creepy-ass red eyes. Like a picture no one fixed.”
    “
Ass
is not a nice word, Logan,” Jenna said, drawing out the s’s