Page 7 of Saving You

“Put your ears on.”

Oz’s eye twitched, a sort of automatic reaction to that phrase now. It was something he could read off any lips, in any accent, in damn near any language. He could even recognize it through the thick beard and mustache on his father.

Put your ears on.

Since he could remember, it had been a command given to him at all hours of the day or night, regardless of how he was feeling. He’d once foolishly thought his parents would allow him to dictate his own method of navigating the world once he was old enough to decide for himself. But his mom had always treated him like an extension of her person, even long after he turned eighteen.

And it was sometime around high school that he’d started to realize the way she treated his deafness—with a level of shame and rushed explanations to total strangers who inquired about the devices he carried around so prominently on the sides of his head—was due to the fact that she blamed herself for it.

There had been no real medical reason for why he was deaf.

He’d failed his newborn screening but passed it a few hours later, still in the hospital. But when he was a year old and barelyeven babbling, his doctor suggested a visit to the audiologist, which confirmed his parents’ worst fears: he had profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss in both ears.

It prompted a flurry of visits to specialists who eventually set him up with testing, which led to the path of cochlear implants—his left side when he was eighteen months old, his right side six days after his second birthday.

His hearing issue was resolved. At least, according to his parents. The longer the months stretched on after his activation, the more he began to respond to sounds around him. He was fine, they told themselves. They just had to live with the glaring, rather obvious evidence that he was different attached to both sides of his head.

That was, of course, before his new, sleek CIs that blended in with his hair. The ones he could bejewel and bedazzle if he felt like it. Neither of his parents understood why he wanted to do that either. They’d gotten him special permission to wear hats in school to hide them, but he’d never absorbed his parents’ social shame surrounding his deafness.

They wanted to run from it. He’d always wanted to embrace it.

And he remembered the acute look of horror on their faces when he came home his sophomore year for Christmas break and announced his degree change: he was going into Deaf education and would spend the majority of his day with his processors off.

It had been a fight since then because that was also the year he started ASL 101 and began to set foot into a culture that had been denied him from birth. They dug their heels into the sand. He reminded them both of long stretches of months with total lack of communication and profound silence whenever his processors needed updating or broke down.

He reminded them of long afternoons when his batteries would die and he was left not only in total silence but without access to language. He had too many memories of being dragged about by his wrist and watching his parents’ loud body language as they attempted to pantomime to him.

Sign language would have made sense then, but they insisted they were too old to learn and not good with languages.

Never mind his mother spoke English, Spanish, and German fluently, with conversational French and Italian. Never mind his father mastered coding and DOS and three other tech languages that made Oz’s eyes cross when he attempted to read all the lines on his dad’s computers.

The only one who learned the basics was his sister, and only because she liked the idea of having a secret language their parents couldn’t understand. Signing had never been for him.

So now, at the very ripe age of twenty-eight, watching his mother’s lips tell him to put his fucking ears on sent him into a rage that was difficult to control.

He reached up and tugged at his lobes. ‘I feel them,’ he signed to her. ‘I think they’re on.’

She didn’t understand, but she got the gist and rolled her eyes. She tapped the side of her head—close enough to the proper sign for his CIs, but deliberately wrong also. It was like she was pointing out she got it, but she’d never put in the effort to learn the right way.

“My head hurts,” he told her aloud. He actually didn’t mind speaking without his processors on like some people. He didn’t give two flying fucks whether or not he had an accent.

She said something else, something he didn’t bother to follow. He was actually pretty damn good at lipreading, but he hated relying on it, so he refused to watch her mouth once it was clear she was going to push the issue. He caught something about his niece and party.

He’d been called over for a family emergency, which turned out to be a party planning event. Sarah was turning seven, and the first double digits were always the most important in their family. And it wasn’t like he was uninterested in Sarah’s birthday. He loved his nieces to death. But not only was he not the party planning kind of guy, but he was also busy.

His parents didn’t seem to understand that teaching went beyond standing in front of a classroom and giving a lecture—which was absurd, considering his mother had been a college professor before she became a historical archivist.

But maybe it was that they didn’t respect him as a high school teacher.

Or that he was teaching Deaf kids.

Or both.

Whatever the case, he was in their living room now, not bothering to follow along and pretending like he couldn’t understand what his mom was demanding. He didn’t wear his processors at school, so they were in their case in his glove box.

‘Repeat?’ he signed to his mom.

“Don’t,” she said back. “Osric, please….” He also recognized his full name on her lips, but he missed the last few words of her sentence, and he was absolutely not going to ask her to repeat herself again.

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