Page 67 of A Good Book

“Can you even imagine what it must be like to not hear?”

I slowly shook my head.

“Well, I don’t know how he feels, but I can imagine just from my own experience with shitty tragedies that he’s feeling scared and lonely. Lost and confused. He may never hear anyone speak to him again. Sure, he’ll read words on a paper. He might even learn sign language. But he’ll never hear his favorite song or the whisper of a lover in his ear while making love. However, he can still see the beauty of a woman’s body. And he can feel her fingernails digging into his back and her breath on his cheek. He can see stars behind his eyes, and waves of pleasure as an orgasm rips through his body. And for a moment, he might even forget that he can’t hear.”

Fire ignited in my cheeks and down my neck. Eve talked about sex with the ease of reading off a grocery list.

I cleared my throat. “Just because you slept with my math teacher doesn’t mean I’m going to take advice from you.”

She giggled. “Your math teacher was so hot. I wonder what happened to him?”

I smirked. “I heard he got ran out of town after a sex scandal.”

Eve stood and held out her hand. “Come eat pie. You don’t have to choose between Heaven and Hell right now.”

* * *

On Friday,I shopped with my mom and sisters.

On Saturday, I returned to Ben’s house to see him one last time before going back to school.

“He ate Thanksgiving dinner with us, but since then, he’s been locked in his room again,” Carmen said as I slid off my wool jacket and hung it on the hook. “Did you and your family have a nice Thanksgiving?”

I smiled. “Yes. Thanks for asking.” I stepped toward the stairs with a lot more hesitation than I had the day he tossed me out of his room.

“Tillie is in her room. She’ll get him to open his door.”

I nodded nervously while mumbling a soft, “Okay.”

Madonna blared from Tillie’s room, and it broke my heart to think that Ben couldn’t hear it and yell at his sister to turn down her “stupid music,” because he wasn’t a Madonna fan. Ben preferred more sophisticated music.

I came prepared, pulling a paperclip out of my pocket and straightening it to open Ben’s door. There didn’t seem to be any point in knocking first. In hindsight, I should have announced my arrival with a note under his door. Ben’s back was to me, hair wet, green towel around his waist, and rivulets of water running down his back. He dropped his towel, and I slapped my hand over my mouth to muffle my gasp, realizing in the next second that he couldn’t hear me.

Having never seen a naked man, I had no comparison, but my best friend was hot. Broad shoulders, trim waist, tight butt, and defined muscles. He pulled on a pair of white briefs and turned. His eyebrows shot up his forehead as water dripped from his shaggy, wet bangs.

I jumped back into the hallway and closed his door. A few seconds later, Tillie emerged from her room.

“Oh, hey Gabby.” She grinned. “Just a second,” she said, stepping back into her messy bedroom then returning with a paperclip.

Before I could say anything, she jabbed it into the round hole, stabbing it in different directions. “Hmm …” she turned the knob. “Oh. Wow. He didn’t have it locked.” She pushed open the door.

Ben eyed both of us with a cautious expression. He had on gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Tillie waved at him and mouthed, “Be nice.”

Was he reading lips?

I was on the fence between stepping back into his room and running away. Ben broke eye contact first, sitting on his bed to put on his white tube socks. On a deep breath, I stepped into his room and closed his door behind me. There was no hiding the residual embarrassment that lingered like a warm washcloth over my face.

I navigated the minefield of Legos to get to his desk where I picked up a pen to write something. But what? Suddenly, I’d forgotten why I was there or what I wanted to say. Seeing my best friend naked messed with my train of thought. Was I there to apologize? It’s not like I did anything wrong. He’s the one who kicked me out of his room. Maybe I was there to tell him goodbye and good luck for … being deaf? Closing my eyes, I shook my head at that stupid thought.

Was I there to take off my clothes? If so, he beat me to it. My stripping would have felt like a copycat.

I started to write on the notebook paper.

I’m

That’s it. That was as much as I could think of. I was what? Never had I felt such a loss for words around Ben. Just the opposite. He was used to enduring my long spiels about everything from my sisters to how lucky he was to be a boy and therefore had no menstrual cycles. Everything came easily with Ben. He’d been an extension of myself. We had no secrets. No lines. In fact, nothing in life felt real until I told Ben, and I had always thought he felt the same.

But writing the words was different, and I don’t know why it felt so hard. Writing was easy for me. I wrote all my feelings in the margins of books or the blank pages of journals. My every emotion and entire existence had been recorded in ink.

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