Jasmin Ivankovic

Eng 105-Afternoon

Rose Toubus 

Sep. 18th, 2015

A Novelization of The Most Beautiful Thing,  

Beneath The Words

As Brandon looked out of his window, he saw the horizon’s blue velvet darkening in pace with the setting sun. He decided to leave the realm of middle school behind him as summer break came to a close. “Just how much will be different?” he wondered. Having nothing left to do that night in terms of making a schedule, preparing school supplies and clean clothes, or listening to one of Mom’s pep talks, Brandon was left with time to sulk.

Brandon failing to show up for dinner got Dad to go and knock on his bedroom door, where a silence ensued. Dad went in anyway. “Hey, bud?” Dad called, peeking his head out the double-hung window. “You okay? I hope you’re not feeling anxious about tomorrow.” Brandon’s window was on the second floor of their two story house, on the gable directly above the garage’s inclined roof. Ever since he was a child, Brandon would climb out the window at night to watch the stars or at day to read. It was not until middle school that he started to sit on the pitched roof in lapses of sadness or loneliness, which were predictable enough for his parents to know when something was wrong.

Brandon sniffed. “Well, yeah…,” he replied, deliberately not turning his head to see if it was genuine concern on Dad’s face. “My only two friends moved away. I’m going to feel like a loser with no friends tomorrow, starting all over.”

 Dad could hear the apprehension in his voice, and took a brief pause before he began to speak softly. “Listen, everything is going to be fine…,” Dad, being an architect, came prepared with a number of architecture metaphors, but he deployed only the most appropriate. He told Brandon that all his previous projects still stood tall, like how his old friends were still his friends. He said that every time he started a different project, he used new footing, new foundation, reminding him of the many exciting possibilities the future held in a voice that was careful with words and conveyed nothing but relatability.“You might even meet a cute girl,” Dad added, reminiscing about his time in high school. Although Brandon had at this point gotten tired of Dad’s architecture metaphors, this helped.

After many months had passed, Brandon’s friend situation was bothering him less because his focus had changed. Although his grades were good, he joined the recycling club, and made it on the baseball team...there was still something missing. It was that special intensity spreading through the halls that signaled the number of weeks before the Valentine's Day dance that made him see what that something was. 

Brandon did not personally connect with anyone yet, and the timeframe before the dance and getting to connect with someone, especially a girl he liked enough to ask to the dance, was narrowing. On the morning when Brandon realized this, he was sitting on a bench in the courtyard of Newton High School, trying to write in his daily journal but failing to come up with anything interesting due to distracting thoughts about finding a date. He ended up just tapping his fingers on the journal and watching the clouds hang; the clouds were sort of just hanging above him. 

He sat through class with the same finger-tapping concern. By the time the first period bell rang loudly, this dread of further exclusion and loneliness was only fortified. Brandon found a pink poster advertising the dance where he could not ignore it, hanging right over the neighboring lockers three gills. He hastily tucked the poster into his locker before reattaching the lock. 

During period two, he raised his hand and patiently waited to ask to go to the restroom. On his way there, he nearly walked right into a couple locking lips in the hall. They immediately stopped kissing and looked at him. The girl who was kissing the boy had on a bright red tank top, her hair a pretty brown color, wearing it straight down, which he found sexy. Her tinted eyes were either squinting directly at him or in his general direction, he couldn’t tell. 

Stupefied by the debilitating awkwardness of the whole situation, he stared back for probably longer than was called for, until he turned himself around, and shuffled the other direction with an audible sigh. 

Brandon was holding the back of his neck when he saw an opportunity to meet somebody new. “Hello.” he said, approaching the girl walking towards him in the hall, but she either failed to hear him or just did not want to. He went back to class feeling defeated. 

During lunch, Brandon followed the delta of laughter and conversations to the outdoor cafe that doubles as a recreation area, which was rather suspiciously full even before lunch began, it seemed. Brandon took a glance at different potential dates, but all the girls there in the cafe, sitting beneath yellow sun umbrellas, seemed to have a guy nearby and were engaged in intimate conversation with him. 

He forgot all about eating during lunch and took a seat on a bench near the foyer to try to write in his journal. He described what he imagined all the Saturday night parties people had thrown were like, and how he might have met someone new had he gone. Then suddenly someone sat down next to him; it was the girl who’d ignored him in the hallway. 

After seconds of deliberation, he talked himself up to try and said “Hey.” Then again, he repeated himself because she did not respond the first time. She finally looked up after seeing Brandon in her peripheral vision. “You really didn’t hear me?” he asked. She then made a motion, curling her hand, running her right hand’s pinky in an elliptical path around her left ear that was so universal it took him less than a second to realize she could not hear. “You’re deaf…?” She nodded, again smiling at him. 

The smile to him felt that he had for the first time found someone who felt more alone than he did at a new school. “Oh, I didn’t mean to…,” he said with considerate apprehension, making sure she would not be insulted by his ignorance. “I’m sorry.” She just sort of shrugged and didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, wait…,” he said, reaching for his journal, opening it to a blank page. Brandon and Emily wrote messages back and forth until lunch was over. 

After finding out her name and feeling a real connection, Brandon walked away with an awkward smile that remained on his face the rest of the day, the kind of smile that everyone probably suffers from but never knows they had after their first-ever romantic experience. 

Brandon took the train home that day with the smile still there. He walked into his house’s main hall and called for his parents. A silence ensued. Brandon walked up the steps to his room, and unpacked his belongings and found the poster in his backpack, which made him smile even wider. He listened to music, daydreaming of seeing her again tomorrow, looking over at his journal that he had renamed as theirs, Brandon and Emily’s, notebook. He tried to imagine the things they would talk about and draw, falling asleep with the ceiling light burning and his iPod on shuffle.   

The next day, Brandon and Emily met on the same bench during lunch and took turns drawing people standing nearby. Emily did not find him very good at drawing, but lied and gave him a thumbs up and a reluctant sort of head nod that he thought was cute and not the least bit insulting. They laughed about how silly their attempts at drawing were, and made inside jokes about all sorts of things. Brandon felt especially happy. He did not for a second consider that dating someone who would never hear your voice was at all unappealing or unsustainable. To him, she was better than everyone else for it.

The next night, he came home and practiced ways of proposing, how to ask her to the dance that was evocative of their relationship. He did this in the mirror in the bathroom, “Go with me to the dance?” written on a piece of printer paper that was cut out like a heart. He found this way too cliche and trite at this point. He even researched and learned enough sign language, and practiced doing the hand motions fast enough to be understood clearly. 

The next day came around, and he had trouble finding the right time to ask. It occurred to Brandon that he had never heard Emily speak, and that although her hearing was impaired, she should have some ability to talk. “Have you ever tried to talk?” he wrote down for her to read.

“People laugh,” she wrote in response. She appeared affected by the question. 

“I’d never,” he wrote and gave her a look to show that it was a sincere promise he understood her discomfort. At the same time it was a nudge towards something she probably was not ready for, leaving an awkward feeling between them.
 
They both went off to class without exchanging any more notes that day. The clouds were hanging again, blocking sunlight; a kind of gloom grew throughout the rest of the day, dragging on to the next.
 
Tomorrow when Brandon went to their bench, another boy had taken his seat. She appeared to be laughing at what he was writing in her notebook. Brandon saw him going in for a kiss, but before she pushed him off her, Brandon turned away in shock. 

Miserable. That was the only word he could use to describe the feeling of seeing her cheat on him like that, he wrote in his notebook. Even when they were together, beneath the words, they were not speaking, he now felt. When she looked at him and waved, he turned away. He faked being sick, trying to resolve his heartache. He decided to read on his pitched roof throughout the day, feeling miserable.
 
Emily had never had a relationship with a boy before and did not consider what he felt based on the boy trying to kiss her. The next day, as she waved at him and he walked away, she began to speak: “Hee..y!” sort of muttering her words in a high, but surprisingly comprehensible and normal voice, “he tried to hit on me… so...I pu..shed him a..way.”
 
Brandon, for the first time hearing her speak, turned around and smiled, saying nothing, except making that same awkward smile after first meeting her. He then felt it was the right time and asked her to the dance in sign language gestures carried out quickly and accurately.

She replied immediately, saying “yes.”