"There was no such thing as safe anymore"

“We have to go”

THANK YOU.

It’s the end of a week, and I truly want to thank the Word Nerds who make this work possible.

Part of what Word Nerds do here is make endless scholarships possible- a promise from me to them, and me to you.

So if you don’t want to miss a piece of this story or any columns to come, kindly reach out and I can add your name to the list that becomes a Word Nerd for free. It’s a special gift from us to you!

You can go back to the beginning here… and please let me know if you would want to continue reading Senseless one day as a novel, or share this with someone who loves books.

Thank you for being willing to go off on a new and unexpected journey and for gifting me this recovery time!

See you next week for an update, some memoir-essays, and a fresh hello.

SEVEN

“What if we use bells?”

Theo looked at me.

“The batteries are going to run out and it will only get harder and harder,” I said, mostly to myself, “We can’t sign close enough to their faces. Not really. The risk is too high.”

It had become an obsession of mine to figure out how to overcome the inevitable demise of Pearl’s hearing aid batteries and her future inability to navigate a building without touching.

“Maybe a tactile wire technique?” I kept on, “But I wonder if the act of touching is chancy on its own. What if she touched the wrong thing? What if…”

“Rose!” Theo said (saying my name in that way they say my name when it really meant something more than just saying my name), “We need to talk.”

We were going through the lockers again, for what felt like fiftieth time. We had already found nearly anything and everything that one could leave behind and separated it into the pile of supplies stored in the break room, which was quickly becoming the makeshift stock room instead of the makeshift clinic room. Most was useless- the mood ring collection of one of my Deaf students, a dystopian YA novel in braille feeling too close to home at the moment- but some felt as if buried treasure (hair ties, AA batteries, a lighter).

“Sorry,” I mumbled, not at all sorry because coming up with ingenious ways to help people navigate their world is literally my job, “I just can’t get the bells out of my mind. Maybe I could construct some within her audiological range, and we could have a system….”

Theo was still looking at me.

“If I put the right type of metal on the end of her white stick, the combination of the two…”

I stopped.

“What is it?”

“We are going to run out in a week.” Theo was standing in front of the last locker in our row, and wasn’t referencing anything in particular, but I already knew what they meant. Our food supplies were wearing thin, and so were we. We had only been there but for a month and half, but I could already feel my ribs through the corners of my shirt if I pressed my arms to my sides without thinking.

In less than two months, we had run through our entire stock of available food, in part because some had gone bad. At that time, it was whatever we’d been locked in with, but food often was the last thing on my mind.

Watching Madlena get run over by a car, while dying from the hands of another, in front of my face, was the only thing I could think about.

I replayed it again and again without even trying; like an old VHS, tangled tape. I wondered if the parent who did it were just trying to get out of there before more attacks hit, endangering their own child, or if they no longer viewed them as people anymore at all. Either way… it worked. What remained on the concrete and what remained in my head were, discernably, not people any more.

“All the vending is gone. The locker supplies are almost out. And the break fridge has been scraped clean,” Theo was saying.

We had thrashed the vending machine on the second floor by week two in the hopes of dragging out what resources we’d compiled from leftover staff lunches and fridge finds, locker room snack piles, and of course the ever mythological dorm room contraband hidden upstairs. But with thirteen mouths to feed (technically only twelve if considering PJ), stale Cheetos and fruit snacks went by fast, and we had little else to fall back on. It had been meticulously divided and carefully maintained… but still wasn’t good enough. Nothing is enough.

“We have to go.”

I knew exactly what they meant since it wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. The cafeteria was located directly across campus, through a series of adjoining buildings and then slightly down a hill of sorts. It was maybe three hundred yards away, which once felt like the best part of my day, and now seemed a consuming nightmare.

I used to love leading a student across campus between periods; talking, breathing the fresh air, getting out of the incandescent lighting. We dragged our feet a little, always… wanting just another moment before the cacophony of cafeteria and paradoxical smells.

Hux loved lunch hour. He thrived in that sort of setting. I’d watch him, sometimes, absentmindedly from across the room. He’d be carrying on multiple conversations at once- one with his hands, one with peripheral vision, one with eyes and a wayward grin- rarely phased. I guess his Deafness was an advantage in the sense that the deafening noise of crowds of Deaf people (who are extremely loud if you didn’t already know this) didn’t deter focus or facilitation in the fray… but it was also just him. He didn’t squirrel away in a corner, anxious to eat his meal without students around as I was tempted to do. He savored the time to work with them, talk with them, be part. Sometimes I wondered if he even remembered to eat.

“Today,” Theo tells me, “We need to go today.”

I blinked a few times and closed the locker I’d been canvasing.

“It’s as good as any, I guess,” I said in return.

We turned and started walking back to the main floor. The electricity was still humming along at this point and we thought it might go on forever. When it didn’t, we knew it was likely something catastrophic. A pole that was destroyed or a power plant fail of some kind. It didn’t make sense really… but nothing did any more. I wanted answers; science. I wanted to know why we lost power so soon, and why – when the generator kicked in – it didn’t go as long as we’d been told it would and then I had to fix it. Of course, we didn’t know any of this then, nor how pointless it would all seem eventually.

We hadn’t left the building since the last school day that turned out to be our first day locked-in.

We didn’t know what was out there, but from the remaining media updates and contacts with dwindling family and friends… we knew it wasn’t optimistic. Staying where we were wasn’t just the safest option… it felt like the only one.

I used to imagine making my escape with all of the students somehow. PJ was the most somatically tenuous and couldn’t move very fast; only 11. Monica was in a wheelchair and had low vision too, though she was about fifteen now. So was Pearl, who was moderately deaf blind, while the others – Timothy and Steve - were Deaf with no other disability (although Steve insisting on being called Low Key could possibly be considered one).

“You’re white Steve,” I remember pointing out to him once, though this may seem an oddly frank conversation for staff and student (clearly you’ve never worked at a residential school if you think so), “You don’t need a rap name.”

But he loved it. The boys couldn’t have been more opposite in race and background (Steve from the lower caste, Timothy higher), but both of equally uninvolved parentage. I still remember when Steve’s step-father called him “deaf-mute” repeatedly at his eighth grade IEP meeting and I wanted to crawl across the table and slap him.

“Who’s going with us?” I said as Theo and I walked closely but not too closely, “Just us?”

“We need one more,” they replied, clearly having thought this over for a while, “Uneven numbers feel safer.”

There was no such thing as safe anymore, but I closed my mouth and kept walking.

THANK YOU! If you wish for more of this novel, definitely let me (or anyone you know who is a Word Nerd), and I’ll keep it in mind as I continue to fight for ways to keep my writer brain alive while my body has other, more painful ideas.

xo

** Thumbnail Credit: Jonah Gillen **