What the fuck?
Charlie spun around, wrenching her hair from Gabriella’s grip.
Hope you know who you’re fucking with, Gabriella said.
A bitch in PJs? said Charlie.
Austin couldn’t help but smile at this. She was quick.
You don’t belong here.
What are you gonna do about it?
I’m warning you. Leave us alone.
She’d said “us,” but she was looking at Austin.
Hey—
You stay out of this, Gabriella said to Austin.
She turned back to Charlie.
Watch your back. Freak.
Gabriella stalked out of the wings, and Austin looked to Charlie, mortified.
Your e-x?
Yeah.
She seems fun.
I’m really sorry.
What was the last thing she said?
Austin shrugged, feigning forgetfulness, but Charlie made an approximation of the sign. He sighed.
F-r-e-a-k, he said.
Charlie said something with her mouth. She looked more pissed than wounded, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of wanting to comfort her. Even if she didn’t need his protection, he liked the way she needed him—sure, at the moment it was mostly as a walking ASL decoder ring, but wasn’t need close to desire?
Come with me? he said.
She nodded and Austin took her hand and led her to the emergency exit.
backstage was cavernous, bigger than she’d realized, and Charlie followed Austin deeper into the darkness until they came to an emergency exit. ALARM WILL SOUND was stamped on the door in orange and white but Austin opened it without flinching, laughed at her wide-eyed look.
Half of them don’t work, he said.
She followed him out, feeling foolish and a little impressed. It was one of the things Charlie was coming to like best about Austin—watching the comfort with which he moved around campus. He was perfectly attuned to the space, the way Charlie knew the loose floorboards and crooked hinges of the house she grew up in. He could show her each quirk and secret passageway River Valley had to offer.
This particular exit, though, released them only onto a concrete loading dock. They sat down on the edge of the platform and swung their legs over the lip. Beneath them was a ramp and a pair of parking spots, but beyond that there was only an open field, browning in that late October way. Fall in Colson was a wild, capricious thing—the weather shifted from muggy to cool without notice, and squalls often pushed in from the river. Charlie was struck by how much colder it was than it had been just that morning. Fat gray clouds hung above them now, and she pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt.
Sorry about her, he said.
Not your f-a-u-l-t.
Your fault, he said, demonstrating. Still, she shouldn’t have done that.
Charlie nodded and looked back out across the field, allowed Austin to put his arm around her. They didn’t say anything else for a long time.
She rested her head on his shoulder, again gripped by the feeling she’d had that first moment they met: an attraction not only to him but to the kind of person he was, the life that might have been hers if she had his stride and sureness and a hundred years of sign language coded right into her bones. When she nestled up closer against him, she undeniably felt desire—to be with him, sure, but also to sop up his knowledge, the confidence propelling his every sign, to absorb his good fortune and the flash in his eyes, swallow him whole.
time passes
Grammar note: In English, verb endings are conjugated to reflect tense. In ASL, markers of time are added as separate signs.
Past tense = Finish, both hands flicked outward at the wrist.
English: I went to school.
ASL: Finish go school.
Future tense = Will, a hand thrust forward from the side of the head.
English: I’m going to school tomorrow.
ASL: Go school tomorrow will.
NOW YOU TRY! Tell your partner about a past or future dentist trip.
february had repressed her anxiety in the lead-up to her mother’s move by maintaining a workload so large she had little time to worry about anything else. True to her word, she’d said nothing about River Valley’s impending closure, not even to Mel, though she wasn’t proud of it. At first, she told herself she was holding off until after the midterms—perhaps she could reverse the decision with some good old-fashioned civic action. For weeks she spent each spare moment drafting pleading letters to the state legislature, even phone banked for some progressive-leaning PAC. But the first week of November came and went, and the statehouse had only gotten redder.
It wasn’t as if she’d ever doubted Ohio could end up here—she knew fear to be a potent motivator, had witnessed how easily it could sway a person. As a child, she’d seen her parents’ presences rouse insults in the mouths of impatient bank tellers and clerks, which February always heard, always carried with her, even when she wasn’t yet tall enough to see over the counters. By the time she was in college, she had seen the body of a man killed on the stoop of a liquor store, and the city burned, and reconstruction delayed again and again until its smolder was internalized. Even here in the bluer slice of the county, someone had twice planted a God Hates Fags sign in Mel’s herb garden. So, while the conservative doubling down wasn’t necessarily surprising, it was still a disappointment.
In education, like everything in America, money ruled the day, and Deaf education had been hyperstratified by the rise of the cochlear implant. Wealthier kids whose parents could pay out-of-pocket for surgery and rehabilitative therapies often found success in the mainstream; kids whose families couldn’t pay stayed deaf. But even as a shift in Medicaid coverage meant access to the device itself increased, access to the therapies and educational resources didn’t. The hearing world was shocked to find that the working-class kid of a single mom who couldn’t stay home and funnel practice sounds into his head, or drive him to countless therapy appointments all day, was not “cured” as the implant sales reps had promised. Those kids often wound up back at Deaf schools, only now with vast cognitive deficits. The more vulnerable her student body was, the less politicians cared, or even pretended to care, about their fate. She wrote to the new legislators anyway, but seldom heard back.
At the same time, she was drafting backup plans—mini deaf programs that could operate in microcosm within the public schools. She wanted to have them ready, to be able to make her demands and implement a transition team. The move needed to be as seamless as possible for the kids, especially the youngest ones, who were still learning to read. How would they communicate with hearing teachers and peers without English as a fallback? Surely she could guilt Swall into procuring them an empty classroom where her teachers and students could hole up for a few periods.
But the details were difficult to nail down when she couldn’t collaborate with anyone, and anyway, her attention was so often usurped by the urgent matters of the day—grading and PowerPoints for her own class, Serrano and Quinn to keep an eye on, and a dozen other crises in miniature that crossed her desk each week: the third-grade boys who’d made a pact that had ended in them flushing their hearing aids down the toilet; a two-day phone call shouting match with the textbook people, who’d sent audio recordings instead of braille copies of the midterm materials for her DeafBlind kids.
Then there was the ream of paperwork for her mother’s admission to Spring Towers—questions about her needs and preferences so granular February was both heartened that they’d thought to ask and distressed that it had fallen to her to dictate her very opinionated mother’s answers. She had avoided that latent role reversal embedded in every parent-child relationship with her father—he was gone so suddenly—and despite her mother’s diagnosis she was unprepared for it now.