We had to take our screens off for gym class. It always left us feeling weird and numb, or muffled; how much could you get from facial expression and body language? Barely anything. So many cues for communication were lost when you couldn’t see how someone’s nervous system was responding in real time. It was like trying to speak underwater.
My mom got so mad any time she thought about it. “Gym class is practically when you need your monitors the most, Ellie!” she would say, her own screen lighting up silver-gold with the rush of indignant adrenaline. “How is the teacher supposed to know if someone is hurt without it? It’s pure negligence.”
“Screens are expensive,” my sister Kate always pointed out, like this argument was ever going to change. “They don’t want them to get broken and have parents asking the school to pay for replacements.”
“Then they shouldn’t do high-impact activities,” Mom would snap. “What’s more important, dodge ball or adequately monitoring children’s health?”
For now the school was still prioritizing dodge ball, so we took our screens off for gym.
Putting them back on afterward was always a relief. They came back online and lit up like bright flowers scattered around the locker room. We could really see each other again; Megan Phillips’ ADHD showed up as intermittent flashes of green as her neurons fired, Jenna Abrams showed a low constant orangey glow of pain from the shoulder she’d messed leading the volleyball team to state, Liz Rogers had a gray-washed tinge of fatigue over everything.
My screen showed mostly neutral, with some shivering gold around the edges whenever I remembered my upcoming pre-calc test. “Calm your yellows,” my friend Becca told me, bumping me with her shoulder. “It’s going to be fine.”
I did my best, but having your neurology out on display didn’t make it controllable. I almost envied Sandhya Walker, who had for-real anxiety, the disorder kind; she kept Xanax in her purse and whenever she took one we all watched her screen fade from a field of shivering gold to blank neutrality, while the lines eased from her forehead and the edges of her mouth relaxed. Lucky. It was just like watching Jenna’s screen when she took a painkiller, or Liz’s when she drank coffee. We could all watch them feel better.
Of course, screens also meant that after pre-calc everyone was broadcasting who had come prepared and who got blown out of the water. Jeff Horman’s screen was dark blue with red pulses, to nobody’s surprise; he was never prepared but somehow still always disappointed. A screen like that screamed an undiagnosed learning disability, my mom always said, and then got indignant about the school not intervening.
“They have the data right in front of them! They should do something!” she would say, and Kate and I would look for the nearest exit, because once Mom went off Dad was going to jump in and we’d heard the argument fifty billion times.
“There is still such a thing as a right to privacy, Helen,” Dad would say, shaking his head. “Just because your biometrics can be put out there for everybody to see doesn’t mean there’s an inherent right to—”
And she would tell him to stop living in the dark ages, and he would say that kids these days didn’t learn how to communicate with others at all, that we would be a crippled generation, and she would tell him to watch the slurs. Fifty billion times. Kate and I were over it.
Our dad was in a different world about this stuff. The Visibility Movement had won everything a few years before I was born, and Kate didn’t come along for another two years after that. The protests, the speeches, all of it was history to us, not reality like it was for our parents. The first screens came out when I was four and Kate was two; they were basically always part of our worlds. Dad’s ranting about privacy never made sense to us. How could biometrics be private? Everyone deserved to have their story known, and the best way to do that was to make it visual. Visibility was the key to maintaining respect in a diverse population.
The first time I ever thought that Dad might have a point was the week after that math test, when Ms. Ellison handed back the results. Jeff got a D, of course, but he expected that as much as anybody else. His screen was blue and red, but he laughed and shrugged it off. Dan Pelgin slipped him a buzz patch hand-to-hand under the desk, and Jeff’s screen flashed bright orange joy. We all looked away. He was fine.
It wasn’t Jeff that made everything weird. It was Stella Marshall.
Stella and I had been good friends in elementary school, and then she’d been really popular in seventh grade—one of the queen bees, really. Something had changed, though, gradually enough that nobody really noticed, and at some point she’d slipped down from the pinnacle to not even the bottom, but outside of the world at all. Nobody picked on Stella, because picking on her would require that anybody acknowledge she existed.
Ms. Ellison called out names one by one and we made out way to the front of the classroom, taking back out tests and glancing at the grade, a corresponding burst of satisfaction or disappointment going across our screens. Those sitting at the desks tracked those colors closely, if they weren’t busy with buzz patches or sneaking in a few minutes of SMS while Ms. Ellison was distracted. Kids who cared about grades cared about each other’s colors.
I cared about grades a lot, so I was watching when Stella took her paper from Ms. Ellison’s hand.
Stella’s screen was usually a muddy mix of dark blues and grays, brown around the edges. She didn’t seem to feel much, as far as anyone could tell; of course, maybe that was because none of us were looking.
When she took her paper, a bright line crossed her screen, a genuine, visible burst of happiness blooming up and out like a flower. The other kids who were watching seemed indifferent—Stella was smart, everyone knew that, her brains were as invisible as the rest of her—but I kept watching. The happy-flower was nice to see, even though her face stayed resolutely blank.
“Hey, Stella,” I said when she sat down again. “What did you get?”
She glanced up, then looked down again, putting her paper away in her binder. Pretending not to hear me. That was kind of shitty, but I wasn’t going to push her; what would be the point of that?
Becca saw the flash of embarrassment cross my face and my screen. “She probably wrecked the curve again,” she said, rolling her eyes. “She’s such a nerd, she always ruins it for the rest of us.”
Stella’s face was blank, but her screen flickered in a rush of colors, embarrassment and anger and low, dull, throbbing shades of pain. I didn’t know where those were coming from—Becca hadn’t even touched her—but they were undeniably there.
I opened my mouth to say something; I don’t know what, just something to distract Becca and take her attention off Stella, but before I managed to get anything out, Becca sneered and said, “Oh, are you going to cry about it? There’s no point getting all pissed off that nobody likes you. If you weren’t so fucking boring and gray all the time, maybe somebody would.”
Everybody was watching now, the whole class, eyes going to Stella’s screen to see if Becca’s words had hit home. What Stella said in response was way less important than knowing how she really felt, if Becca had really managed to hurt her.
“Fucking gray,” Becca said. “Your screen is a fucking diagnostic readout of major depression, you know. Everybody can see it. Why don’t you do something about it? They have meds for people like you, you know.”
Stella wrapped her left arm across her body, covering most of the screen with her sleeve. “Don’t fucking look at me,” she shouted, her voice cracking. “God, why can’t you just back the fuck off, all of you?”
“Stella,” Ms. Ellison said, “language—”
But nobody really heard her, because Stella was ripping her leads out. The wires that connected the screens to our bodies were hair-thin and delicate, to be as minimally invasive as possible, but they were still wires and getting them caught on something hurt a lot. I couldn’t imagine the pain of ripping them out the way Stella was doing, wrapping them in her fist and just yanking. Blood spots blossomed on her skin and somebody on the far side of the room shrieked.
“Stella!” Ms. Ellison shouted. “That is not appropriate!”
“Fuck you,” Stella said, but her voice was low now, still angry but with no defiance. “I’m done with this.”
“You’re going to be written up!” Ms. Ellison called as Stella walked out of the room. “Go to the nurse’s office right away! You can’t bleed here!”
Whispers and nervous laughter rushed around the room, the loudest laughter from Becca. I could see the flickers of gold-edged worry across her screen, so I knew she didn’t feel as cool as she was acting, but nobody else seemed to notice.
Everybody forgot about it within a day, of course. Stella went back to being invisible. I seemed to be the only one who noticed that she didn’t wear her screen anymore.
It was weird to see someone without a screen, just blank space across their chests. She pinned the screen openings in her shirts closed and wore scarves. I couldn’t read her at all. Her face, her body language, they were both a mystery without the biometrics onscreen as a starting point.
It threw the teachers off a little, I could tell. Their eyes would scan the classrooms, looking for the telltale colors of distraction or someone actually enjoying themselves, which meant they weren’t paying attention, and when they got to Stella they’d just kind of stop. Then they would look away again, and things would go on.
I knew I should just shrug it off and forget about it like everybody else, but it kept coming back to me, a nagging distraction. I thought about it one night when I was supposed to be writing my essay for Civics on the Visibility Movement. Since I had written some version of that same essay every year since fifth grade, it wasn’t hard to let my attention wander.
I made myself drag up the video of Sana Tayadi’s speech before Congress again. The peak moment of Visibility, just three days before the legislation was passed.
Tayadi was held in a moment of time, forever before the podium, balanced against her mobility frame as she spoke. Her hands had a constant tremor that broke through the neurological controllers of the day. The screen set up on the podium before her—tiny and crude compared to the ones of today, and not yet portable—showed the impulses of epileptic seizures firing in her brain and being diffused by the controllers. Her voice was clear and had the edge of anger that had caught my attention the first time I heard it as a kid, and left me never able to ignore it no matter how many times it was recycled through school and the evening news.
We will make the invisible disabilities visible. You will not be able to pretend we don’t exist. We will be here. We have always been here. But you will see us, each and every one of us. All of these lifetimes you have been telling us to speak up, to make ourselves heard if we want to be counted. No more. We will be seen, we will be known. The burden will be on you to believe your own eyes. Not on us.
Tayadi’s speech was a watershed moment. It was amazing. Everybody agreed; it was right there in my assigned reading. What else could I possibly have to say about it?
“Hey, kiddo.” My dad leaned over my shoulder, squinting at the screen. “Again? Didn’t you write about this last year?”
“Every year.” I tapped the screen to pause it. “It was a big deal, though, you know? The major civil rights victory of our time. Your time. I guess it was before my time.”
He pursed his lips and stepped back a little. “I wouldn’t call it a cut and dry victory, Ellie.”
“Why don’t you like it?” I’d been hearing him and Mom fight about this for years, but I had never asked him. “Why are you against visibility?”
“I’m not against visibility at all.”
“You’re against screens.” I waved my hand at the tablet. “You don’t think this was a victory.”
“It was absolutely a victory. But not a cut and dry one. It’s more complicated than that.”
“What’s complicated? Explain it to me.”
He sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Do you remember your grandmother?”
She died when I was four. I had vague impressions at most, but I couldn’t tell him that. “Yeah, of course.”
“She had multiple sclerosis. Do you remember that?”
“Kind of.” I remembered the words more than anything, hearing my parents say them. I didn’t really learn what it meant until Visibility Enhancement in fifth grade.
“Well, your grandmother was a very private person. She would never have wanted anyone to know how much pain she was in on a given day, much less every random stranger who walked by.”
“But why not? If people know how you feel, they can make accommodations. They can help.”
“They can also be intrusive and judgmental.” He folded his arms across his chest, still looking at the paused video. “When people can see things, they have a tendency to think that’s all there is, and they stop listening. Stop letting you speak for yourself.”
“Well, you don’t have to speak. It’s right there.”
“There’s something right there. But not everything. There are… unquantifiables. Things we only find out if we talk to each other like people, instead of thinking seeing is knowing, all the time.” He sighed and turned away. “But maybe you’re right, Ellie. Maybe I’m just out of touch and you and your mom and the school are right.”
I felt like I’d done something really wrong, though I didn’t have any idea what. “When is dinner?”
“Twenty minutes or so. I’ll let you know when it gets closer.” His footsteps faded down the hall and I sat there, looking from the video to my half-started essay. Probably no one would notice if I turned in last year’s essay all over again. If Dad was right, they would see what they wanted to see and think it was all there was.
I knew that wasn’t how he meant it. I sighed, tapped the screen to start the video again, and started typing.
The next day at school, my dad’s words were still following me around. They got louder at lunch when I saw Stella sitting by herself in the far corner, face blank, still without a screen.
I walked over and sat down next to her without knowing what I was going to say, or if I was going to say anything. She looked up, her face tightening. I stared at the scabs below her collarbone where her leads had gone in. Scabs and faint bruises. Our screens really showed our insides. Breaking the link left marks. I could never do it.
She stared at me, her eyes unreadable, her lips parted just a little. I could see her teeth. I cleared my throat twice before I managed to talk.
“Hey, Stella.”
She didn’t answer, just tilted her head a little in an unspoken What?
“How, um.” I cleared my throat again. “How are you doing?”
The silence stretched out for a really long moment. I could feel other eyes across the room drifting toward us, and I knew my screen was starting to flare with embarrassment and discomfort.
Stella knew it, too. Her eyes narrowed and her lip curled. “Fuck off.”
My screen lit up brighter and I heard the laughter start up somewhere across the room. I stood up and hurried away from her, stunned by how little I understood of what had just happened. What Dad said made me think that she would be secretly glad I asked, grateful. How was I supposed to tell if she was, deep down? How much could you hide when knowing things relied on everybody really paying attention? It wasn’t fair.
“Why did you do that?” Becca asked, frowning past me at Stella. “She’s not worth getting humiliated over.”
“Just forget it.”
Becca looked at me and her eyes widened. “Wow. You’re, like, actually upset. Over her? Why?”
I folded my arms over my screen and shook my head. “I don’t even want to talk about it. Let’s go outside, come on.”
She looked at me for a moment longer, frowning, but with my arms over the screen, I was invisible to her eyes.