“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? ’Cause you’re friends with him?”
Jackson laughs. “Um, not really.” He then starts telling me something about a soccer match—but his words are going a mile a minute,like he’d rather not be sharing this. There’s “and after the game,” “I tripped,” and “cost us” somewhere in his story. Jackson takes a deep breath, ending with “They don’t seem to want me around right now.”
“Oof. Well.” I try to come up with something reassuring. “You’re better off not being around an ableist jerk anyway.”
“A what?” It’s Jackson’s turn to question what he heard from something I’ve said.
“Ableist. You know, someone who discriminates against disabled people.”
“That makes sense.”
“The type of person who spews some crap and doesn’t understand that anyone can become disabled at any time.” I instinctively reach out to sign one-handed, flicking my middle finger out from against my thumb. “Awful.”
Jackson’s eyes go wide.
“I don’t mean that as, like, a threat,” I clarify, realizing that, to non-disabled people, what I just said could be construed as fairly morbid. “Just a fact of life.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice low. He mumbles something else. “I mean, we all get old eventually,” he concludes.
“That, too.” I’m not sure he fully gets my point, but I won’t belabor it.
“If I hear people bringing up that nonsense rumor again, I’ll tell them to cut it out. I wasn’t sure if I should let you know, but I thought, if it were me, I’d want to be aware.”
Maybe it’s better that I know, but it stings all the same. “I’m not sure it’ll help you with the team to be seen sitting with me, then.”
He waves a hand like it’s nothing. After finishing a few bites of his chicken, he says something about “bigger dreams out there.”
“Like what?”
“Studying business at—” he says, losing me at the college name, then mentions something about joining his dad’s company, which I think he says was founded by his grandpa, and another tidbit I miss entirely.
“Wow, it’s all planned out. Are those your dreams or your parents’?”
He’s taken aback, like he’s never considered this. “Both, I think.”
“What’d you say the family business was?”
“Manufacturing plastics.” Jackson shrugs, clearly not passionate about this at all. “My dad is trying to be more hands-off these days, but he has a hard time stepping back. Until he hands it over to me one day, I guess.”
“And what? You’re, like, the heir to this plastics company? The prince of plastics?”
I’m delighted when he laughs, an amused, full-chest response. “Please never call me the prince of plastics ever again,” he says. “But what about you?”
“My plans?”
I honestly haven’t thought that far ahead. I’m still in my whole “reconfiguring my future” stage. When you’ve got everything plotted out and it blows up in your face, it makes you hesitant to commit yourself to too many future endeavors. “First things first, I’m counting down my days here, for sure.”
“And where were you before this?”
“Brandview. It was a Deaf school. So, like, classes in ASL and such.”
“That’s cool.” His response is neutral. “I bet it was hard leaving your friends.”
I shrug with indifference. But the more I think about it, who was I actually close to there? Since breaking up with Cody, no one has been in touch. I lost our shared friends in the breakup. They were morehis than mine, apparently. I probably should’ve spent time with other people, like my roommate, Kayla. I wonder how she’s doing living at home now.
“The worst part is being back with my parents,” I admit. “They were happy to ship me off to the Deaf institute, but now that I’m back here, they act like all the years they missed while I was away weremyfault.”
