Chapter Eight

Gracie can't sleep. She's too excited about going to the Franklin Institute with Dad tomorrow. This is the first time he'll have taken her some place alone in months. Well, other than the grocery store.

She knows Dad's going to be kind of bored, probably, but not as bored as she is at the football games, and she goes to those all the time. She can tell him everything she's learned so far about Ancient Egypt, and he'll listen, because he always does, even when he's not interested. This is going to be so much fun.

But right now she can't sleep, so she makes her way to the kitchen for a drink. Not the orange juice, since Liam chugged that straight from the carton yesterday, the barbarian.

Barbarian isn't really the best term, she knows. Barbarians were just what Romans called everyone who wasn't Roman, you know, the Germans, Celts, Persians, whatever. Barbarians didn't necessarily drink orange juice from cartons. A lot of them wrote poetry. She's pretty sure Liam's never written a poem in his life.

When Gracie steps in the kitchen, there's a dim glow from the light over the stove, but everything else is bathed in darkness. She stops immediately with one foot on the tile when she hears the guttural sob and sees Liam sitting at the table, his back to the entryway, his body heaving.

He's crying. Like, really crying. Like she did in the car that day after those girls kept calling her ugly, and she tried not to, and she hoped Dad didn't overhear them, but then she just broke down, and then Dad lied to her and told her she was so, so, so, so beautiful, like all the so's made the lie better. That's not what Mom said. She said beauty is in the eye of the beholder and everyone has different aesthetic tastes and Gracie would find those girls' opinions didn't matter at all a year, two, three from now and that everything that seems huge right now won't seem quite so huge when she's twenty-five. But twenty-five is ancient. Julie's twenty-five.

Maybe it's because Liam's deaf and can't hear himself that the crying sounds so loud and so strange, or maybe it's because she didn't expect to walk in on this.

Gracie just stays frozen on the tile, trying to decide what to do. She thinks of tip toeing back, but why would she have to? He can't hear her. Even so, she instinctively steps quietly backwards, until she jabs her side on the corner of the counter and shouts, "Owww!"

Liam's phone, which he's lain on the table, catches her voice and flashes light, because of that ap he's got. He looks down at it and then turns back to her. He wipes his sleeve across his eyes, hastily and with obvious embarrassment.

"It's okay," she says. "I didn't see anything. I mean, hear anything. I mean. Okay, I did. So you're crying. So big deal. I do it." She means to turn and leave the kitchen but instead for some reason she steps forward.

Liam's face is all smeared and blotched. He swallows, then he turns his face away. She sits down at the table across from him, slowly, like this is all happening in a dream. It's not like her, but she does it. She doesn't know what else to do.

Liam's hands start flying angrily. He's shouting in signs. He's saying it isn't fair, how his mom died. He's saying he wants to wake up from all this, like it was a nightmare. He's saying Uncle Eric (that's what he calls Dad, even though he's not an uncle) expects him to try out for the Falcons but he doesn't want to.

Liam signs that he just wants to punch someone sometimes, just to punch someone, because none of this is fair. It's weird when people talk to themselves (she knows, she's been told when she's done it), but it's even weirder when they do it in signs. Gracie doesn't recognize a lot of the signs, and thinks maybe some of them are swear words. Finally, when he's done with his angry monologue, he signs, "Good thing she doesn't understand any of this."

"Oh," Gracie says, "I understood lots of it."

His eyes fixed on the lips he's reading, Liam's hands fall to the table. "Waahhh?" he says.

It's the first time she's heard him talk since he's been here.

"Waaah?" he repeats.

"Yeah," she says, "I've been teaching myself sign language. Don't worry. I won't tell anyone about all the crying. And the not wanting to play football thing? Yeah, Dad's not going to take it well. But you know what? He'll get over it eventually. Just don't expect him to get over it right away."

She stands up and opens the fridge. "Did you drink out of the milk jug too?"