I don’t wear my hearing aids at home for the rest of the day.
Nor the next day.
Nor the day after that.
I put them in for school, but as soon as I come off the bus and up the new path to the house, I take them out again.
It drives Mum crazy. At least four times the first afternoon she walks into my bedroom, talking, and realises I can’t hear her. She taps me on the shoulder. “Jazmine.” She mouths the words really wide, so I can lip read. “Put them in.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to,” I say, and my voice is all muffled in my head. I sign it instead. ‘I don’t want to.’
She makes a tense face at me and walks out again. I can feel the rush of air as she shuts the door hard.
I know I should feel bad for her, and I kind of do, inside, a little bit. But I don’t on the outside. Actually, I feel great. It’s almost like I’m free. I’m an eagle who’s been brought up by pigeons, and I’ve finally figured out how to soar and leave them behind.
I don’t tell Mum that, though. I’m not sure how she’d feel about being called a pigeon. Or about being left behind. She’s cranky with me. I can tell from the way she’s putting the plates down on the table at dinner time and refusing to look at me. I feel sorry for Geoff. He looks a bit lost, like he’s stuck in the middle of a problem he doesn’t even understand. At least he’s trying to be nice about it.
He leans over towards me and starts to talk to me, but I can’t hear him properly and his beard makes lip reading tricky. I shrug helpfully and sign at him. ‘I don’t have my hearing aids in.’ His face drops and his body seems to spring back to his place behind the table. I see him throw a look to Mum, like what am I supposed to do now? She rolls her eyes back at him and says something under her breath.
Eagle, pigeons, I think to myself, and smile.
Mum’s hand slaps the table in front of me, startling me.
‘What are you doing?’ she signs. It’s slow, but it’s clear. Her face is furious, and the rest of her signs are hard to read. ‘This - hard. You - silly.’ She stops to think. ‘No, naughty.’
I stand up and face her. I’m ready to sign back at her, to tell her what’s really hard, what’s really silly, and just for a clue, it’s not me, and it’s not my fault things are like this, and if you actually understood what I’m talking about, you might not be trying to crush me and control me, like Mia says, but Geoff stands up too. He puts his arm around Mum, and leads her away from the table for a moment. I can see him talking to her, and her crying a little and putting her head on his shoulder. For a second, that hurts my heart, because I was always the one Mum cried to, before. I was the one she was close to, and she was the one I was close to. Just the two of us, after Dad died. And now it’s different.
In the corner of my eye I see Mum wiping her face, and Geoff going off towards the study. Mum swallows a few times and comes back to the table. She sits, and I slowly sit as well. I take a bite of my dinner, and so does she: beef stroganoff with rice, cooked by Geoff. It’s nice. Grandma might even be impressed, if she tasted this. Mum throws me a tight half-smile and I give her back the same kind of face, and then Geoff comes back into the room.
He’s holding a clipboard, with a half-centimetre wad of paper clipped into it, and he has three pens in his hand. He says something to Mum, which I can’t hear, and I see her reply, and then Geoff starts writing on the paper. When he’s done, he pushes the clipboard towards me.
We can use this to communicate. His handwriting is a bit messier than I expected, which makes me smile. He keeps going. If you don’t want to wear your h.aids, that’s your choice. But I can’t sign, so maybe writing?
I shrug at him. ‘Okay,’ I sign.
He writes again. I also can’t understand your signs, so could you write it down?
Okay, I write. And I’m disappointed with how my handwriting looks next to his. It’s rounder, and neater, but definitely younger. I wanted it to be more mature.
Mum grabs a pen and starts in on the clipboard. Have you been wearing your H. Aids at school?
I shoot her a look, as if it’s any of her business, but I write, Yes.
She looks relieved. Good.
I’ve been talking to Miss Fraser though, I write. She’s getting me some support at school. When I’ve got an Auslan interpreter, or maybe some captioning or something, I’m going to not wear them.
Mum’s face goes down again. I can see her teeth clenching around her jaw. She’s breathing a bit faster too. Why are you doing this? she writes, and again, I see Geoff move towards her, as if to stop something.
I told you why, I write, and inside I feel strong. Almost victorious. Like I’ve broken out of something that was holding me back. A butterfly out of its chrysalis, if you want to make up clichés about it.
Geoff picks up the pen. You didn’t tell me, he writes. I’d actually like to hear it. He smiles, and beside him, Mum shakes her head, like she can’t even say anything else to me. I see Geoff put his hand across to her, as if he’s telling her to leave it to him. Can you explain it?
I take the clipboard and put it directly in front of me, pick up a pen, and consider for a moment what I’m going to say. Then, I start to write.
At the camp, it felt like I came home.
All those people signing. It was like they spoke my language. And no one had to interpret for me.
No one had to wait for me.
No one said I should hear more, or listen carefully.
No one got frustrated by me.
No one treated me differently from everyone else.
I shake my hand out a little bit, trying to get rid of the cramps. Behind my eyelids, I feel the beginning of tears, which I fiercely blink away.
The difference was, at camp, I was part of it all. I fitted in.
I guess, it was like, if I’d lived with fuzzy vision my whole life, and then put on a pair of glasses. I suddenly felt like I could see. Really, really, clearly.
I’m deaf. I never realised it before. Now I do.
I stop writing, turn the clipboard around and shoot it over the table towards Mum and Geoff. The look on Mum’s face is not great. She looks almost like she’s lost hope. It’s a look of depression. Geoff’s face is different. His look is more of trying to understand, but not really getting it. He says something to Mum, probably a question, and she just shrugs back at him. It’s a ‘dunno’ shrug.
Geoff picks up the pen, and then puts it down again. He furrows his brow and then picks it up once more.
How are we going to communicate? he writes. I can read the words, even though they’re upside down, across the table from me. Talking’s easiest, isn’t it? It’s quicker than this. He puts in a smiley face and grins at me as well. What do you want?
I shrug. To be honest, I hardly know. I guess I just want to feel normal, like I did at camp. Like I do when I’m chatting online with my deaf friends now. At camp we were all the same. We were all deaf. None of us had to be hearing. None of us had to look like we could hear, when we couldn’t. None of us had to try. It’s the trying that’s tiring. It’s the trying that makes me feel trapped.
What do I want? I want to feel happy. I don’t want to feel like everyone thinks there’s something wrong with me, like there’s something I have to fix.
What do I want? Just to be me.
But it’s hard to write that down, especially now the tears feel like they’re going to come harder than ever.
Can I go? I write on the paper. I want to text my friends.
Mum throws up her hands like I’m impossible, but Geoff nods at me. Sure. We can talk about this later, okay?
I push back my chair to leave the table without answering, but he taps my arm, and underlines the words about this later. He raises his eyebrows at me and mouths the words. Talk about this later, okay?
I give a hidden sigh, and make a thumbs-up sign at him. Okay.
In my bedroom, with the door firmly shut, I pick up my phone. It’s like a magic portal to my new life. I’ve got messages stacked up, waiting to be answered: texts from Freya and Charlotte, mostly just saying hi, how ya going? One of Charlotte’s texts is longer: her operation is coming up, and she’s feeling nervous about it. She hates hospitals, apparently, especially the smells. She also hates the idea of them shaving a bit of her hair off. I send her back a ‘be brave’ message and she texts back immediately. Remember not to tell Mia, okay? There’s a Face Time notification from Truck, which makes me sad to have missed because he’s so funny on Face Time. He called me the day after camp for the first time, and we propped up our phones and signed for ages, about nothing in particular.
There’s also a Facebook message from Mia. When I see it, I pounce on it.
Hey Jaz. All cool? School sux. Gotta laugh though.
I scrolled a little bit further and found a reason for her laughter: a puppy meme showing a dog with a pencil in its mouth, and glasses on its nose. “I did the math: we can’t afford the cat.” It’s cute, and I laugh, and then press reply.
Hey Mia. Cute dog. That’s funny.
Mia’s obviously online because the little bouncing button shows her typing back to me. A second or two later, her message pops up.
Recovering from camp?
I take a second or two to think, and then reply.
Loved camp. So great. When I got home I took out my hearing aids. My mum is going nuts.
She sends me an ‘oooh’ face immediately and a second later types a reply.
Ohmigosh. So cool. Yay Jaz. (Your mum is hearing, right?)
When I read it, I get a thrill.
They’re trying to get me to write notes to them. Mum only knows a bit of signing and Geoff knows nothing.
A mad emoji face pops up on my screen, and soon after a message. Sux. Stay strong. Don’t let them destroy you.
It’s a strong word, destroy, and I fiddle with my bracelet as I turn the word over in my mind for a moment. Then I dismiss it as nothing, and reply.
I’m deaf, sistah. Nobody messes with that.
About a million thumbs up, love heart and muscle emojis from Mia flood into my inbox. I feel the phone vibrate every time a new one pops up and I smile as I see each one.
Then there’s another vibration. I look down, expecting to see more from Mia, but it’s not from her. It’s from someone totally different.
Someone I don’t feel like talking to just now.
It’s from Gabby.