Heard your mom had the baby.
He nodded.
Congratulations.
Thanks.
Gabriella smiled, but her eyes narrowed, a tell Austin knew meant she was about to strike. He waited for a moment, then gave in.
What?
I heard someone failed her deaf test.
And?
Nothing. Just fun to see the mighty topple is all.
What are you talking about?
Come on—the poster family for Deafhood has a hearing kid? You have to admit it’s kind of funny.
What does that even mean?
Of course Austin knew there was clout embedded into his family’s Deafness, but he wasn’t sure about “poster family.” It wasn’t as if he walked around policing people the way Gabriella sometimes did, making snide comments about someone who used English word order, or mouthed English words as they signed. Most days—at least before Charlie and Sky—he’d rarely thought about an “ideal” version of deafness at all. He was hardly marching around like some reverse Alexander Graham Bell. Then again, maybe standing for something wasn’t always a choice.
Hello? Gabriella was cackling now. Anybody home?
I—
Whatever, say hi to the baby for me.
She batted her eyes, looking demure.
I mean, if you can.
Oh, fuck off, he said.
She only laughed harder. He slammed his locker door and went to lunch, directly to the corner of the cafeteria where he knew he’d find Charlie.
You can sit with us, if you want, he said.
now Charlie’s language was burgeoning. During the school day, she sat on the edge of her chair, eyes tracking wildly between her teachers’ hands and whatever clues she could glean from the whiteboard or PowerPoint. The night classes were still useful, chugging along with their methodical repetition, she and her father working as partners and slowly recounting to one another the day’s events. Then, in the cafeteria, the other ASL.
Charlie had always been fond of curse words. In hearing school, kids would teach her strings of vile things to say and she’d parrot them back as best she could to make them laugh. She was willing to be the butt of this kind of joke if it diverted their attention from other ways to hurt her.
Here, too, curse words were an easy bridge. Since the incident with his ex, nothing more had happened between her and Austin, or her and Gabriella. But after a while he had invited Charlie to sit with him at lunch. On the far end of the table, Gabriella and another blonde spent a lot of time staring pointedly and then laughing at Charlie, but the rest of Austin’s tablemates—a pair of brawny football players, two gangly boys who looked like they’d never played a sport of any kind, plus Alisha and another girl from Drama—had quickly descended upon the language gap and offered up their favorites: “shit,” “fuck,” “slut,” “bitch,” “asshole,” and several variations on the theme of “motherfucker.”
She saw English, rigid and brittle, crack before her eyes—concepts that took up whole spoken phrases encapsulated in a single sign. Other signs were untranslatable even with multiple words: a sign that sometimes meant I see and sometimes I understand or that’s interesting, or an affirmation that you were paying attention; another that seemed to be a more emphatic version of “real talk,” and which was transliterated for her alternately as true business and true biz.
There were sign names for every social media and internet abbreviation, emoticons enfolded into signed puns and, along with them, she learned about an array of technology she hadn’t even known existed. In the past, her phone had felt mostly useless, good only for exchanging text messages with her parents or playing arcade games when she was bored. But now there was a way to co-opt nearly every platform—ASL on any app that could handle video, or even GIFs.
Kevin, one of the gangly boys, commandeered her phone and downloaded things for her—one app that flashed a light to alert her to loud sounds, another to send video messages without clogging up phone memory, and several that translated speech to text with accuracy ranging from passable to hilarious. Charlie thought about how these things would’ve come in handy at Jefferson, but of course there had been no one there to show them to her.
There were, too, a series of secret signs among the girls that happened behind backs and below tables. The first time Charlie found one directed at her, it had come from Kayla, who’d crossed the cafeteria with such a purposeful stride Charlie was convinced she’d unknowingly done something terrible to her roommate. But when Kayla got close enough, her demeanor shifted, and she produced a few furtive signs below the rest of the table’s sight line.
What? Charlie said, I don’t understand.
After the third try, Kayla gave up and said the same series of signs to Alisha. Charlie watched their covert exchange from the corner of her eye and realized she’d been asking for a tampon.
Sorry, she said, as Kayla turned to go.
No worries.
Part of Charlie remained on the defensive, expecting that at any second her River Valley classmates might level her hopes for friendship, turn hostile at her invasion of their territory, or be fatigued by her shoddy ASL and rally behind Gabriella to make her life miserable. In the beginning, people had snickered at her when she said something clunky in class, and a girl once popped her implant magnet off in the bathroom and giggled. As the girl walked away, Charlie had noticed that she, too, had an implant—she saw a fair amount of them around campus—but she knew the hardware itself wasn’t the target on her back. The other implanted kids were all fluent signers, or at least fluent compared to Charlie. It was annoying that people would make fun of her about this, as if it had been her choice not to learn. But after a few days of sitting beside Austin in the cafeteria, most of the teasing subsided. Now they were patient with her, an unflappability uncharacteristic of other teenagers she’d known, herself included.
Slowly she was becoming aware of how much she had believed the hearing world, the thousand little hatreds that had leeched into her being. It disgusted her now—when she looked across the table at Austin, or whenever someone was nice to her, really—the unworthiness that still washed over her, and the memories of how she’d behaved at Jeff to chase down the sensation of belonging. But with each successful social interaction, Charlie accrued new slivers of self-confidence. After a while she even got up the nerve （and the receptive skills） to ask her lunchmates about the verb “to be.”
What that? she signed, pointing to one boy’s lunch tray.
Pizza, someone said.
What i-s that? she said. She fingerspelled emphatically, question-marked her eyebrows. Austin understood first. With a flash of recognition, he scrunched up his face and gave her a scolding finger wag.
I-s. Finger wag, he said.
Charlie was disappointed—so “is,” and “am” and “are” just…weren’t? How could a language exist without so fundamental a concept? Perhaps, she thought grudgingly, her mother and doctors were right about the limitations of signing. Could you have a real language without the notion of being?
But Austin just pointed to Charlie’s hand, then made his own gesture, sweeping up from his stomach out into an arc across the room. Charlie copied the sign, but that didn’t seem to be what he wanted. She stared.