Read Online Blind Sight by Meg Howrey - Free Book Online

either. Mark’s father left when Mark was four. I don’t know if his father is alive. I don’t know if Mark even knows.
    I guess it’s best not to get stuck on what you think things are, or how they happened, or why. We should remain as detached as possible. Maybe for a second, when a caterpillar emerges from its cocoon,there is a moment when it freaks out and thinks, “Hey, what’s happened? What are these wing things for? What happened to all my little legs?” but then it just flies away. That’s how we should be, as people. We should be ready for everything to change.
    After we finished at the gym today, we went back to the house so Mark could shower and make phone calls. I met Carmen, Mark’s cleaning lady, and tried out my Spanish on her. Then we went for lunch. When we are out in public Mark always wears a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. At the restaurant he sat with his back to the other diners, facing me. After lunch, we visited the Griffith Park Observatory. I’m glad he’s also someone who likes to take his time looking at things, and reading about them.
    “I’m a closet nerd,” he said.
    “Me too,” I told him. “Well, maybe not a closet nerd. I’m probably an obvious nerd.”
    “You’re obviously cool,” he said. “They get that, right? At your school? They get how cool you are?”
    “Well, it’s easy for me,” I assured him. “Because of my sisters. Everybody wanted to be friends with Aurora because she’s so nice. And everybody wanted to be friends with Pearl because she’s scary. So by the time I showed up for stuff everybody just figured I was okay too.”
    I think this is mostly true. Sometimes girls will tell me that I’m not like “other guys,” but that’s probably a product of my sisters too. The whole not-being-a-Chad thing. I wonder what kind of guy Mark was in school.
    I told Mark that when I was little, I thought the sky was the ceiling of the planet, like a dome that protected the planet from outer space, and us from falling into it. And that I kept on thinking of it like that for a long time, even after I understood some basic science. Then one day, I looked up into the sky and REALLY understood thatthe only thing between outer space and me was space. And that we are glued to the earth because of gravity and that gravity is a constant force. There was never any dome at all, just a perception of a dome.
    “What do you mean?” he asked. “Are you saying there’s not a dome? Shit!”
    I couldn’t help noticing that in spite of the baseball cap there was a certain amount of double takes, nudges, whispered conversations—“Is that …?”—happening around us. A couple of times I thought people were going to come up to Mark, but nobody did.
    “God, a totally normal day,” he said during the car ride back to the house. “Great, huh? Let’s get Slurpees. I haven’t had a Slurpee in forever.”
    I agreed that it had been great although almost nothing about it had really been normal for me. Two weeks ago, I had never sat in a jade steam room, never experienced valet parking, never been taught about the enlivening powers of Tabasco Sauce from my father, never been taught anything by a father. I had never spoken Spanish with someone from Mexico, never stared at live images of the sun, never known how much I weigh on Jupiter, never been sent into a 7-Eleven to get two Slurpees.
    “You know,” Mark said, when I got back to the car, “back to what you said about gravity? I have to admit gravity kind of freaks me out. I don’t get it. I mean, I get it, but it seems impossible, sort of. I would have been one of the people saying, ‘Hell no. The earth is flat.’ ”
    “Me too,” I said. “Although you have to go with the idea that makes sense of A LOT of things, not just what makes sense for you personally, right? People tell you to trust your instincts, but …”
    “When people tell you to trust your instincts it just means they have no clue either,”