The Window by Jeanette Ingold Read Free Book Online Page A

this is about as good a time as I'm going to get to ask Ted to the holiday dance. I wish my hands weren't so clammy. I hope my face isn't getting blotchy red, the way it does sometimes when I'm nervous.
    "Ted, the dance that's coming up ... Would you like to go?" I say, the words spilling out.
    I should have said it differently. What if he doesn't understand that I'm inviting him?
    I add, "With me, I mean?"
    "So everyone can watch the blind girl being led around by the deaf boy who can't hear the music?" But he's laughing as he says it, a friendly laugh.
    "Something like that," I answer.
    For the briefest moment, Ted takes my hand, and I don't know if he's holding it or shaking it. Actually, the way he does it, so fumbling and awkward, I doubt if he knows.
    Ted says, "I accept with pleasure."
    I go inside and my itinerant teacher, Ms. Thorn, wants to work with me on a new set of braille exercises that Ms. Z. is generating.
    "Things going OK, Mandy?" Ms. Thorn asks while we wait for the embosser to finish the page of bumps and spaces. "Did you get the math tapes we ordered?"
    She goes over what I'm doing, class by class, before she says, "All right. Now, let's see how you and your braillewriter are getting along."
    The brailler reminds me of an old typewriter, the kind people had before electric ones and before computers. There's just one row of keys, three on the left and three on the right, that you press to form the six dots of a braille cell. In the middle is a space bar that you work with your thumbs.
    I feed in a sheet of paper and get started on today's exercise, which is a page full of words like
cap, cat, can, pan.
I'm to read them off the sheet from the embosser and then duplicate them on the braillewriter.
    Grade-one braille, Ms. Thorn calls what I'm doing, working letter by letter rather than with the code for common words and letter combinations; that is grade two.
    It may be called grade one, but what I'm struggling with is worse than it was learning to read print when I was six years old and really in the first grade.
    "I don't know why I have to learn this stuff, anyway," I say. "I can type my work on a computer like everyone else and then just listen to it."
    Ms. Thorn adjusts the way my left hand is positioned on the brailler keys. "But Mandy," she says, "how are you going to check your writing with a speech synthesizer? Or revise it? Do it letter by letter? Word by word? You won't be able to see punctuation or word spacing."
    "I can't see this, either."
    "You will, Mandy," Ms. Thorn says. "One day you'll be able to see braille the way I see print on a page. That's what braille does, Mandy. It lets you see."
    Promises and hype, I think. I wonder how much is just sales pitch.
    But Ms. Thorn doesn't sound like a salesperson, and I want to believe.
    "OK," I tell her. "But I may be ancient before I get it learned."
    Ms. Thorn coaches me for a while as I make
cat
and
can
with the braillewriter. Then she tells me she's going to check on Marissa and I should call if I need help.
    Pan.
My fingers hover over the keys as I try to picture the dot pattern that makes the letter
p.
A is easy: one dot, top left in the braille cell. Four dots for
n
. I pull the lever to ratchet my paper up one line and go back to the exercise page.
    What I find seems too wide a pattern for the domino-like braille cell. I start to call, "Ms. Thorn, there's a mistake." But then I remember about the number sign, how a backward
L
of dots changes what follows from a letter to a number. I find the backward
L
and then the single dot that it turns from
a
into
1
.
    I'm pleased I figured it out, but I don't think my teachers should be throwing me trick problems that I might take for mistakes.
    I hunch over the brailler and think about Ted and me. About Gwen and Paul. About that ice-cream trip that was really a drive into woods by a lake.
    What have I gotten myself into?
    I asked Ted. Actually asked him. And he said he'd go.
    My stomach knots up. How am