February bristles. Not the time for grandstanding, she knows, but she has to say something.
I’m concerned for the students’ welfare, she says. As I would be for any missing teenager.
But if they can’t hear—
The students are intellectual equals to their hearing peers.
Are they implanted?
February is taken aback by the unabashed way he demands this information, but tries not to show it.
I’m not authorized to divulge a minor’s medical history on television, sir, she says.
The reporter reddens, but isn’t ready to surrender the limelight:
Any evidence of foul play? Do you anticipate charges of a criminal nature?
He pushes the microphone against her chin and gives her a sympathetic look that rings false around the eyes.
If you’ll excuse me, I have to go speak with the police, she says.
She steps away from the podium, but the reporter’s face will not leave her. He’s right—Eliot and Austin are not as safe as they would be if they were hearing, though not in the way the man had meant it. What if a patrolman finds them and shouts for them to stop, but they keep running? Or if they do need help but have no way to call the police? What if everything ends well and they return unscathed, but Child Protective Services uses the incident as an in to throw their weight around in the cochlear implant debate? She’s read about it happening in other states. February has to bite her lip to cut the panic short—she’s getting ahead of herself again. She checks her phone. The text was from Mel: u ok? She doesn’t know how to respond. She shoves the phone back in her pocket, and looks up to find another parent, Charlie Serrano’s father, leaning against the police RV.
Dr. Waters? he says, his voice much smaller than his frame suggests.
Not now! she wants to scream. Yours is a mess for another day. But she holds it together, says instead:
Mr. Serrano, we’re in a bit of a situation. The campus is closed today, so you can take Charlie on home.
He blanches.
You mean, she’s not here?
No—is everything okay?
It’s just, it looks like she snuck out last night, and she’s not with my ex, so I thought, maybe—
He sweeps his eyes across the quad.
Holy shit, she says under her breath. Three cellphones.
What? says Charlie’s father.
He shifts his bulk against the vehicle, wrings his hands.
I’m just going to—February points to the police insignia plastered above them—give them a quick update.
Wait—
Just a moment, sir, really, she says. Then she rounds the camper and vomits her coffee onto its front tire.
six months earlier
the summer before her sophomore year, as her parents’ divorce limped to a close, Charlie’s father won the custody battle and signed her up for Deaf school.
Colson, Ohio, in August was so muggy and laden with gnats it felt almost tropical, and they all broke a sweat on the short walk from the parking lot into family court, her father peeling off his suit jacket in the atrium, her mother dabbing at her brow with a paisley handkerchief. In the courtroom, the judge delivered his ruling, but Charlie could hear only the industrial-grade box fan propped on the windowsill beside them. It pulled flyaways from her ponytail, and eventually she gave up trying to smooth them and settled for counting the boards in the wood paneling.
When the judge finished speaking, it took everything in her not to shout WHAT HAPPENED? Instead she followed her parents outside, where, it turned out, she didn’t have to ask. Both her mother’s and her father’s eyes were glassy with tears, but her father was smiling.
His and Hers teams of expensive lawyers had been evenly matched, and in the end, Charlie figured it was her lousy report card—another semester squeaked by on social promotion—that convinced the judge more than anything. There was also a ream of behavior infractions from her elementary school days, though on paper they looked long resolved. In reality they weren’t, not exactly, but most grown-ups cared little about the real world, except when they were threatening teenagers about their impending expulsion out into it. Whatever pushed the judge to his decision, she was just happy to get out. At Jefferson High, even a small misstep could get you bullied for years. As far as she could tell they were still teasing some kid for a lethal fart he’d let fly back in sixth-grade gym class, so whatever you imagine a deaf-voiced cyborg girl caught, it was worse. The things that happened to girls always were.
It’ll be different now, her father said on their way back to his apartment.
Of course, the ruling came with stipulations. Charlie would still have to wear her implant during instruction hours, even though it gave her a headache, even though its uselessness was half the reason her parents were getting divorced in the first place, though they’d never admit it. It’s No One’s Fault: the mantra in their house. But no one believed it.
* * *
—
When she was younger, Charlie’s father once listened to a series of cochlear implant simulations on YouTube. Charlie stood beside him as he clicked through video after video, but the sound through the computer speakers was indistinct.
It’s terrifying, he said. Everything sounds like the demons in The Exorcist.
It’s not scary to her, her mother said. She doesn’t know any better.
She was right, to a point. What scared Charlie more was her mother talking about her like she wasn’t there at all.
* * *
—
Charlie’s mother was a pageant coach and a musician who’d never had her Mr. Holland’s Opus moment, though that would’ve been bad in a different way. Charlie’s father was a software engineer, whose constant proximity to technology was probably the reason why he was more willing to accept its shortcomings. He’d also grown up with a deaf cousin who had what Charlie considered the good fortune of being been born in the seventies, and to a family of seasonal farm workers. Antonio’s parents, new to the country and still learning English themselves, weren’t consumed with fears of what would happen if he couldn’t pass, or how bilingualism might do him harm. His family learned a few of the signs he brought home from school; he graduated and learned a trade, soldering or something, and one-upped his parents, ears be damned, American Dream style.
Charlie wondered whether her parents had reached out to Antonio when they found out she was deaf, asked him what he thought about implants and deaf education, or if those first years were ruled autocratically by her mother’s fear. Either way, the window for such a conversation had long passed—Antonio died in a car wreck when Charlie was four, and his memory was invoked almost exclusively by Charlie’s mother, when she wanted to curse her husband’s genes. Charlie hadn’t met another deaf person since. Isolation was a requirement of the implant, her doctor cautioned; she needed to be one hundred percent dependent on it to learn how to listen. The device could only bring sound to her brain—it couldn’t decipher it, or even do much to sift through what was important and what was just noise. Still, sign language had always been off the table—that would’ve been a cheat code, a crutch. If she had learned sign and could communicate her needs and understand others, what would motivate her to learn English?
Countless experts confirmed that the best way to ensure she reached maximum implant potential was to practice, and a mainstream setting was where she’d practice the most, albeit in a sink-or-swim kind of way. This combined with the therapy appointments would equip her with the tools to parse the meaning hidden within the sound.