The One Thing by Marci Lyn Curtis

Author:Marci Lyn Curtis [Curtis, Marci Lyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4847-1954-1
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2015-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

The next day I kept picking up my phone to call Ben for dumb, random stuff: to tell him that maybe chocolate Pop-Tarts were my Thing, and to ask him if he knew when the word anniversary was invented, because it seemed like one of those words we should be celebrating, oh, I don’t know...say, once a year. But then I’d realize he wasn’t speaking to me, so instead I’d just flop down on my bed and mope all the air out of my room. Once the evening rolled around and I was properly tired of moping, I checked out the post Clarissa had mentioned earlier.

They were still there, Cannon Dude’s pompous, self-righteous ramblings, and listening to my screen reader shout them into my room irritated me to no end. I wasn’t the only one annoyed. Several people had posted since, all telling him he was a complete, total, absolute raging jackass.

I dialed Clarissa’s number. “Hey,” I said when she picked up. “Cannon Dude is the douchiest of bags.”

She snorted. “Right? After I got off the phone with you yesterday, I checked out his profile. Age: thirty-five. Sex: male. Occupation: computer scientist at Apple. He works at Apple, for Pete’s sake! So—hello!—he’s a supersmart techy guy who probably hacked into Mason’s computer. Hence ‘the secret lies with the singer.’”

As she paused to take a breath, I realized that I’d just spent the past several seconds tapping my fingers to the cadence of her speech. That weird, manic way she spoke, the stopping and starting and stopping again, had a chaotic rhythm, an almost-melody.

“Anyway,” she went on, and I heard the rattle of her iced coffee and a pronounced swallow. “That flu! How are you feeling? Are you all right?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. Truth was, I wasn’t all right. Not in the slightest. And part of me wanted to tell her everything: how my life had cracked down the middle when I’d lost my sight, how my mother had disappeared while I was in the hospital, how I’d walked away from my old friendships, how I’d shattered my new ones. And my sometimes-eyesight, I wanted to tell her about that, too. But I didn’t trust my judgment or my mouth right then, so all I said was, “Couldn’t be all righter.”

“My soup! It helped, right? Was it good?”

I’d actually forgotten about her soup, and so after we got off the phone I took a bowl of it to the living room. It was a summer night, so Gramps and Dad were in their usual summer-night spot: in front of a baseball game, grousing about the Red Sox’s current losing streak. This went on for several minutes, their complaining, and then Dad cleared his throat, which was my first indication that the conversation was about to go south.

He said, “So, Maggie. I was talking to your mother this morning, and she mentioned that Merchant’s has a soccer team.”

“Yeah. I know,” I said, dubiously poking at the soup with a spoon.

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