I sleep well, and in the morning, when Freya tugs at my sleeping bag, my eyes are thick with fog. I automatically go to reach for my hearing aid, before I realise that I don’t need it. I sit up and blink.
‘Get up, lazy,’ signs Freya. ‘It’s nearly brekky.’
I look at my watch. She’s right. Breakfast is at eight, and it’s ten to now. I bounce out of bed, rummage for clothes - denim shorts and a pink t-shirt - and pull them on as quickly as I can. Next to me, Charlotte is already dressed: white shorts, a tie-dyed t-shirt and black Converse on her feet. She’s fixing her hair, the same long braid as yesterday. It covers one of her ears completely.
‘Your hair is so long,’ I sign. I feel proud of myself. My signs seem faster, and smoother. Maybe I’m going to manage all of this Auslan after all.
‘She’s never cut it,’ Freya signs to me. She tugs at my shoulder to get my attention, so I can see her.
‘Never?’ It seems unbelievable to me.
‘Not really.’ Charlotte grins.
Freya winks at her and grins at me. ‘She hides her implant underneath it.’
‘Implant?’ I make the sign back at her, not understanding.
“Cochlear implant,” she says with her voice.
“What’s that?” I ask, because I don’t know.
‘It helps her hear,’ signs Freya.
‘Like a hearing aid?’ I ask.
‘Different,’ signs Freya. ‘The sounds go past your ear. Straight to the auditory nerve.’ She says the words “auditory nerve” out loud. To be honest, it doesn’t make it much clearer for me.
‘Is it implanted? Like, in your head?’ I sign to Charlotte, but then I feel bad. Her face is not happy.
‘Don’t.’ Her sign is to Freya, not to me, but Freya doesn’t seem to mind the anger that comes with it.
‘She won’t tell you about it,’ signs Freya to me. ‘But she does have one. She turns it off when she’s at Deaf Camp.’
Charlotte makes a face. ‘I’m allowed.’
I don’t know what to say, so I shrug and try a smile. ‘I don’t mind.’
Freya immediately makes a laughing face and Charlotte stops being grumpy and looks at me. ‘You’re so cute,’ she says. ‘Really. Just cute.’
I still have no idea what’s going on, so I look at my watch again. ‘Will we miss breakfast?’
‘Bacon and eggs,’ signs Freya, together with another word I don’t know. As she makes for the door, I follow her with Charlotte. ‘What’s this?’ I ask Charlotte, and do Freya’s sign from before.
‘You know, don’t you?’ signs Charlotte. And she says a word. “Pancakes.”
The pancakes are delicious. Syrupy and fluffy and steaming and I eat about four of them before Freya makes me follow her and get eggs and bacon as well. When breakfast finishes I’m full of food, and happy.
‘Brush your teeth?’ signs Charlotte. ‘Come back to the cabin.’
We head up the pathway together, avoiding some of the younger kids, and trying to look cool as we pass the Year Tens.
When we’re in the cabin, Charlotte shuts the door. Then she turns to me and makes me stop. ‘You know that stuff about the implant,’ she signs.
‘Yes?’ I’m curious.
She takes a breath in, and lets it out quickly, looking around her, like she’s scared someone’s going to see her. Then she pulls her braid away from her head so I can see. There’s a small round button thing behind her ear, like a plug. ‘I don’t have it in right now. It’s in my bag. I take it off at camp.’
‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before. My hearing aids just sit behind my ear. There’s nothing that plugs into my head.
She looks around again, like she’s considering something else, but she’s not sure. Then she touches my arm to get my attention. ‘I’m going to get another implant.’ She breathes in and out, like she’s nervous. ‘This year. In about two months.’
Again, I don’t really know what to say. ‘That’s good,’ I sign, but I’m not sure if she’s happy or sad about it, so I don’t know if I should be smiling or looking disappointed for her.
To my surprise, she starts to cry.
‘Are you okay?’ I sign, but her eyes are kind of closed with tears, and I’m not sure she can see me clearly. She sits on my bunk, so I sit beside her until she swipes the tears off her face and sniffs the rest of them back.
‘Sorry,’ she signs. ‘That was embarrassing.’
‘It’s okay,’ I begin, but she keeps going. ‘I don’t have anyone else I can tell, you see. I mean, yeah, my family knows.’ She rolls her eyes a little bit. ‘Obviously, but they don’t know how it is.’
I’m confused. ‘How what is?’ I ask.
‘You really don’t know, do you? You really don’t understand what deaf people think about implants.’ Charlotte’s face is smiling, but it’s the kind of smile people give a small child, when they’ve just said something funny but they have no idea what it is.
I put my hands up, like, so help me out and she explains.
‘Like, to my parents, it seems really obvious that I should get them, because with them I can hear everything they can hear. And that’s normal, right?’
I nod. ‘Yeah, so?’
‘So the point is that, like Mia says, being deaf isn’t having something wrong with you. So, maybe we can’t speak English, but we can speak Auslan. It’s our language.’ She shifts next to me on the bed, and turns so I can see her more easily. ‘She says we have to embrace being Deaf. She says when there’s so much discrimination, that’s when people think implants are the answer. So we can be ‘normal’, according to them. Instead, Mia says we should say ‘no’ to implants. Stand up and fight for ourselves, she says. Stop the discrimination. And I want to.’ Charlotte looks away. ‘But I also want my second implant.’
Her face is sad, and I don’t know what to say. I open my mouth, and position my hands to try to say something - anything that might help - but before I can get anything out, there’s a gust of wind from the door.
Freya.
Immediately, Charlotte leaps up from my bunk and rummages for her toothbrush, her face hidden. I try to cover for her. ‘Hey.’
‘Are you guys coming?’ Freya looks around at us with a frown. ‘They’re about to start the session in the hall.’
‘Oh.’ I stand up, guiltily. ‘Sorry.’
‘One minute,’ signs Charlotte, backing into the bathroom.
‘We’ll go,’ signs Freya back at her. ‘See you.’ She looks around her. ‘You need a book and a pen, Shannon says.’
Down in the hall, the group is gathering for a talk. The room has been set up with chairs in a horse shoe, facing the front. There’s a table, a projector, and two women dressed in black standing around chatting to each other.
‘Find a chair, ladies,’ signs Shannon to us. ‘Take a seat.’ We choose seats in one of the middle rows. I put my book on the one next to me, saving it for Charlotte. Nick and Truck throw themselves down heavily next to Freya.
Truck bends over her, towards me. ‘Hey.’
‘Hey,’ I sign back.
The talk is by some grown-up - a man, with an impressive sounding job title that they tell us about three times when they’re introducing him, but I can’t really remember the details, because I don’t know all the signs for it exactly. He stands up at the front of the room and talks into a microphone while one of the black-wearing women stands a few metres away from him and interprets into Auslan. As he talks, the words he’s saying go up on to a screen behind him. It’s incredible. I can watch, or I can read, or I can listen. At least, I could have listened if I’d had my hearing aids in. At first, I experiment, my eyes darting back and forth from the guy to the translator to the words, but that gets a bit crazy for my brain, so in the end I choose to focus on the interpreter. And I feel excited. Imagine me - being able to follow along with every word, in a talk!
The whole talk is called ‘My Life at School’ which I guess is kind of relevant to us, seeing as all of the kids here probably go to school. The guy starts out telling us about his family and where he grew up, but pretty soon he gets to the school bit, and that’s where, as they say, my ears start to prick up. Except of course, my ears had nothing to do with it today. Perhaps it’s more like my eyes start to open, and my brain starts to spark.
‘…I missed out on a lot of things,’ the interpreter signs. ‘I never really had the time - or the energy to be social, so I didn’t have a lot of friends.’
I’m amazed. I write a quick, messy note to Charlotte. It sounds like me. She makes a face at me, like, I know, right? And then, I stay amazed as he talks about constantly being tired, constantly having to try, try, try, just to stay on top of things.
‘I did okay at school,’ he says. ‘They all thought I could do better, and they said things like, “If you tried harder, you’d get better results.” But I couldn’t try any harder. I was doing my best.’
My eyes open even wider. This is me. This guy is me.
I watch the interpreter more closely. She goes on tell the next part of the guy’s story: how he got himself some resources, some help. How he asked the school for an interpreter, how they said no, and then, after a bit of fighting and advocacy (a new sign for me), yes. How he found ways to travel, to study further, to become a lawyer.
And then he says some words that stick in my brain.
“When you’re deaf, you can…” he says. I lip read them. And the interpreter signs them.
‘When you’re deaf, you can…’
She doesn’t need to sign any more.
That little phrase is enough for me.
Because I’ve never thought of it that way before.
For me, it’s mostly been, ‘When you’re deaf, you can’t.’ Full stop. End of sentence. And okay, maybe not too many people have said, ‘you can’t’ to my face. But I’ve known it anyway.
Jazmine can’t do that.
Jazmine can’t be that.
Jazmine can’t.
Apart from Miss Fraser, no one’s ever said, ‘you can’. In the bottom of my stomach, I feel something change. It’s like someone has lit a match. The small beginning of a fire.
When you’re deaf, you can.
At the end of the talk, I want to run to the front of the room and talk to the guy, whose name I still can’t remember, but it doesn’t really matter. He’s done what he came here to do. He’s told his story. And he’s changed mine. I’m standing up, ready to find a space in the crowd of kids, to get myself through and over to him, when there’s a tug at my arm.
It’s Charlotte.
‘Come here,’ she signs, and she pulls me away from Freya, Nick and Truck, through the door of the big room, and out onto a corner of the concrete breezeway.
‘You okay?’ I sign, and she bites her lip.
‘That thing I told you before, about the implant?’ she signs. ‘Please. Please don’t tell her.’
I shake my head in confusion. ‘Tell who?’
Charlotte’s face looks desperate. She signs it all again. ‘Please, just don’t tell anyone. And especially, don’t tell Mia.’