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  “Sure.” He sits down in front of me, and then pushes off. Slowly at first, then faster, the red-and-black parka zips out of sight.

  I stretch my hand to the left and feel the edge. Danger on the left, I remind myself. Scooting forward, I feel for the wall on my right. My legs stretch out in front of me, poised to glide down an iceberg slide.

  A deep shiver travels down my spine. Relax, I tell myself. Stop being scared.

  The cliff, the slide, and the entire lake fuse into a shimmery white. I can’t see the edge of the slide. Facing the unknown usually doesn’t faze me. My inability to see the path ahead when I’m walking down a street with Maxine doesn’t scare me. Not in the slightest. I know that if I tripped or fell on the sidewalk, I’d just hop back up. Here, the slippery ice impairs my movement, creating a kind of mobility disability on top of my Deafblindness. If I slip, it’s a twenty-foot drop.

  Shouting reaches me from below.

  Maybe they’re cheering again. I smile.

  More shouting.

  What if they’re trying to warn me? What if the iceberg cracked? Heart pounding, I peer over the edge. Nothing. I listen with all my might. Nothing.

  My hands push off the ice, launching me forward. I go speeding, slipping, sliding. My body leans to the right as my hand presses against the wall, a wall once part of the grand glacier. My left hand, spread out flat along the slide, helps steer me away from the left edge. The ice levels, and I come to a stop.

  Maxine runs over with Sam right behind her.

  “Maxeeny! See, I told you not to worry.” I scratch her ears.

  Sam steps closer. “Didn’t you hear us yelling for you to stop?”

  “I couldn’t hear you.” Panic squeezes my lungs as I wait for his dire news.

  “We were telling you to wait until Gordon started filming.”

  My breath comes out in an extended, “Oh,” traveling from apprehension to relief. They just want to get a video. A video of this incredible ice slide. “That’s a great idea. Then I could show this place to my parents.” My gaze turns to the iceberg. Once it looked tall and terrifying, an icy fortress in a frozen lake. Now I know a path up and over it. “I could slide down again so you can film it.”

  “It’s getting dark,” Gordon says. “How important is the video?”

  Maxine nudges my hand with her nose. I move my hand over her head and start massaging her neck as she leans against me. The fact that she followed me up an iceberg both warms my heart and scares me. She’ll probably try to follow me again, but she’s too precious to make the climb.

  My world shifts with a new realization: this is how my parents would feel if they saw me climbing icebergs. This is how they felt when I told them I wanted to travel to Mali. They wanted to stop me, even though they themselves had traveled through Africa. Now here I am, worrying about Maxine’s safety with minimal concern for my own. Through Maxine, I’m starting to understand parental love and the paradox of taking personal risks while holding loved ones to a higher standard.

  “Yeah, let’s head back. We can do pictures another day.” I turn to Maxine, my voice becoming excited. “I’m ready to go! Are you ready to go?”

  Maxine hops up, twirls, and wags her tail. She won’t have to endure any more separation from me—not until the next time I visit a bathroom.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The First Deafblind Student at Harvard Law School

  Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fall 2010.

  “Can you hear me?”

  The loud voice coming through my earbuds sounds scratchy. The earbuds connect to an FM receiver, part of an assistive listening device. The receiver picks up sounds coming through the FM microphone. Harvard Law School hired American Sign Language interpreters with voice transliteration skills to provide access to audio and visual information in my classes. Celia Michau and Erin Foley sit in the back of the classroom whispering into a microphone covered by a small stenographer’s mask. The microphone has a wireless connection with the receiver, so I can sit anywhere in the classroom. I prefer to sit in the back, though, just in case I need to communicate with the interpreters.

  “[Mumble, mumble, static crackle.] How about now?” the voice asks.

  I shrug, then shake my head no.

  “Is this better?” Hissing static muffles the voice.

  I shake my head again.

  “Well, you’re responding, so you can kind of hear us, right?”

  Somewhere in front of me, the professor lectures us on contracts. Around him, seventy students sit in rows of desks facing forward. Using my voice would disrupt the class.

  Turning to the back of the room, I lift my hands, then pause. To communicate through signs, I need to distill my ideas into my limited sign language vocabulary, or otherwise spell out all the words. I sign, “C-O-M-P-L-I-C-A-T-E-D.”

  “It’s complicated? So you can hear us but it’s hard to hear us?”

  I sign, “Right.”

  “Okay. What can we do to help?”

  “I don’t know,” I sign.

  “The professor just looked at us. I think he was wondering if you raised your hand.”

  My face grows hot. I make a mental note to keep my signing as low as possible.

  “Do you want us to continue with class?”

  Nodding, I turn my chair to face the front.

  “Okay, back to class. The defendant’s [mumble mumble].”

  The lecture continues, and I strain to catch the words. The sounds twist and turn in my ear. Every way I listen, the words are gobbledygook. It’s not the volume—it’s turned to a high setting. It’s not comprehension, either; I’ve done the reading. It’s my hearing. My ever-decreasing, diminishing, disappointing hearing.

  I’m twenty-two years old, and every year my hearing and vision have dimmed. The changes are too gradual to notice, until all of the sudden my old coping strategies no longer work. Since I wore sleepshades during blindness training, adjusting to my ongoing vision loss has been straightforward—I already have all the blindness skills. Adjusting to hearing loss feels more challenging. My low-frequency hearing has vanished. My limited high-frequency hearing has shrunk to a tiny sliver on my audiogram. The inaccessibility of the hearing world constantly threatens to isolate me.

  My mind has developed a blueprint for English speech sounds. The blueprint sometimes converts the high-frequency sounds I manage to hear into an English word. The words I catch suggest sentences. The sentences suggest ideas. Lessons from the reading fill in the blanks. Reading got me through middle school, high school, and college; reading caught the ideas that slipped past my plummeting hearing. After class, a student will email class notes to the disability office; the office will then forward those notes to me. If I manage to survive law school, it’s going to be because of reading.

  The voice in my ear says, “This is Celia. Maxine has four paws in the air. So many questions!”

  My shoulders shake. My fingers spell, “H-A H-A.” Reaching down for Maxine, I discover her stretched out with all four paws in the air. I give her a belly rub.

  “Okay, the professor is writing on the board. Webb v. McGowin. When we return from our break I want us to [mumble mumble].”

  The room erupts in noise. The student next to me stands up and walks to the door.

  Spinning around in my seat, I turn to Celia and Erin. “I can always tell when you’re talking, but sometimes it’s too muffled to understand the words. Sometimes there are static sounds. Other times I just can’t hear the words and I don’t know why.”

  Garbled speech comes through the earbuds.

  “Sorry.” I blush. “Now it’s too loud in here.”

  Celia kneels in front of me. She slips her right hand under my left hand and starts signing.

  “Sorry, I don’t know those signs.” My blush deepens. Interpreters spend years studying American Sign Language so they can easily communicate with Deaf people. My lack of fluency makes me feel like a difficult Deaf person—a person with communication
challenges that even the experts can’t solve.

  Celia points to the door and fingerspells, “L-E-T-S T-A-L-K O-U-T-S-I-D-E.”

  “Okay.” Carrying the FM receiver, I stand up and walk to the door. The three of us huddle in the quiet hall.

  “Can you hear me now?” Erin asks.

  I smile. “Yes. It’s easier to hear you when you’re not whispering.”

  “I bet. We’ve been trying to keep our voices down so that we don’t distract the other students.”

  “I know. I don’t want you to distract the other students, either.”

  Erin passes the microphone. “This is Celia. Do you have any idea what we could do to make it easier for you to hear us in the classroom?”

  “I’m not sure. I hear you best when you speak loudly, clearly, and there is no background noise. I think the microphone is picking up the professor’s voice. Maybe your voice is echoing in the stenographer mask. Plus, you have to whisper.”

  “That’s a lot of variables. It’s also possible that the radio frequency the FM system is using is experiencing interference with something in the room.”

  I nod. “Maybe.”

  “Gosh, I don’t know, Haben. I’ll keep thinking. Erin has something to say.”

  Erin takes the mic. “Before we go back in, I just wanted to let you know that this guy two rows in front of us has been texting under the table. He’s trying to be subtle. It’s hilarious. Every few minutes he looks down at his phone with this gleeful smile.”

  “Who?” While I’ve been making a supreme effort to hear, other students have been sprinkling mini visual breaks throughout class. Maybe I should find a way to reduce classroom stress, too.

  “I don’t know his name. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.”

  The mic changes hands. “This is Celia. Just let us know if there is anything specific you’re curious about. Obviously we’re going to focus on the lecture, but if there are specific visual descriptions you want us to give you, just let us know.”

  “I’m interested in social descriptions—the little details that create personality, the little quirks that make people human.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. We’ll try to do that. Shall we go back in?”

  We walk back into the classroom and take our seats.

  Loud conversations ricochet around the room. The exact words stay beyond my reach. Several students stand beside the table in the next row. The group bursts into laughter. I can hear the merriment, can see the merriment, and still feel that old glass wall keeping me on the outside looking in.

  I turn on my braille computer and begin reading case notes.

  The sound of chattering students continues to bombard my ears. There’s laughter. More conversation. Laughter again. My inner ear hears four devastating little words: you’re being left out.

  I start petting Maxine.

  The buzzing persists, pounding my eardrums. You’re being left out. Massaging Maxine’s neck, I struggle to tune out the noise.

  A hand touches my arm. I turn. Celia, kneeling in front of me, slips her right hand under my left. I reach out with my right hand and place it on top of her left. She starts signing.

  “Slow down.” My fingers probe her hand shapes as I drag sign language lessons out of the deep recesses of my memory. “L-I-Q-I-N Liqin I-S is…Sorry, I don’t know that sign. A-S-K-I-N-G asking…I’m sorry, I don’t know that one.” My face burns from embarrassment. “W-H-A-T Oh, right! I did know that sign. Sorry, go on. What…is your dog’s name, question mark.”

  I look around. Someone is standing to the right of Celia. Liqin. I address him. “My dog’s name is Maxine.”

  Celia stands up, pulls a chair over, and sits down. She starts signing into my hands. Again, I voice as she signs. “How…” My eyebrows shoot up in exhausted confusion. “O-L-D old is M-A-X-I-N-E Maxine, question mark.” I turn to Liqin. “She’s three. I’ve had her since she was two. That’s when she graduated from guide dog school.”

  Celia starts signing.

  My brain feels fried. Barbecued. Blasted. I can’t process any more sign language.

  I give Celia an apologetic look, then lift my hands off hers. “Liqin, can I show you something?” I gesture for him to come over to the table. When he stands by the table, I turn my braille computer so that the QWERTY keyboard faces him. “Type your question.” He says something. I point at the keyboard. “I can’t hear you, but if you type it I can read it.” He starts typing. “When you’re done, pass the computer back to me.”

  He hands me the computer. I turn it around so that the braille faces me. My fingers glide over the line of text: how does this work?

  “When you hit a key, pins pop up to form braille letters,” I respond aloud. “This is a braille computer called a BrailleNote. It’s basically a computer with a tactile screen instead of a visual screen.” I turn the computer around and push it toward him.

  He types, then pushes the computer back to me. The text reads: This computer is very cool. Oh, I think class is starting now, TTYL.

  I put my earbuds on. “Okay, class is starting. Who can tell me about [mumble mumble].”

  My mind whirs with ideas. If I bring a wireless keyboard to class with me, then I could read as Liqin types, allowing me to respond in real-time. We wouldn’t have to pass the computer back and forth. Maybe, just maybe, other students would talk to me, too.

  Connecting with classmates and professors is important to me, but it’s not the only reason I moved from Oregon to Massachusetts. My personal experiences with discrimination, as well as those I heard from others, sparked my desire to develop legal advocacy skills. My pre-law advisor urged me to strive for the highest ranked school so I could gain access to the most employment opportunities. Even lawyers with disabilities face employment discrimination.

  After I spent months crafting a competitive law school application, offers came pouring in from all across the country. And then came the big one: Harvard Law School. Harvard offered me admission with a financial aid package that included grants and loans. Leaving the Best Coast for the East Coast didn’t appeal to me, but I knew I had to do everything in my power to increase my chances of becoming a successful lawyer. My parents supported the move, especially after I promised to return to California post-graduation.

  In some ways, Harvard feels a lot like my other schools. The written word serves as my lifeline through the learning process. The disability office works with professors to convert all written materials into an accessible format. Studying the reading materials and class notes has served me well in the past. I suspect it will work here, too. My biggest struggle will be finding a better way to communicate with classmates and professors.

  Gordon braved a cross country move to join me in Cambridge. He started a small business here helping families, students, and organizations with their technology. He’s really good with computers. He has solved problems for me that Harvard IT couldn’t solve.

  Earlier in the year I proposed creating a communication system by connecting a Bluetooth keyboard to my braille computer. Braille computers have been around for decades, their capabilities evolving over time. This year, HumanWare released the BrailleNote Apex, the very first BrailleNote with Bluetooth capabilities. The California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation purchased two of these computers for me to support my education and employment goals. Gordon and I paired the BrailleNote with several different Bluetooth keyboards, seeking the most portable, functional, and comfortable combination.

  After class I meet up with Gordon at Asmara Restaurant in Central Square. The keyboard and braille computer are on the table between us. “I’m thinking about using this keyboard to talk with classmates.” My left hand rests on the braille display, waiting for his response. My right hand reaches for my cup of cinnamon spice tea.

  His words pop up on the braille display as he types, “How come you’re not already using it in class?”

  “Because…” I hesitate. I often suppress my worries beca
use most people blow them out of proportion. Gordon listens to my concerns without exaggerating them, though, so I tell him. “People might think it’s weird.”

  “This is 2010. Everybody types. There’s nothing weird about typing.”

  “True…One of my classmates typed on the BrailleNote today. He said it was cool.”

  “It is cool! All someone has to do is hit a key and voilà! Braille. Other than the fact that it’s in braille, it’s just like texting and instant messaging.”

  I already know all of this; I’m the one who came up with the idea for this system. And yet…Sometimes lining up a series of known facts uncovers a hidden one. Gordon is reminding me, in his own kind way, to discard ableist and constraining ideas. “Thanks, I needed to hear that.” While society expects lawyers to communicate in a certain way, I ultimately shape the type of lawyer I become.

  Two weeks into the semester, I present my braille communication system at a meeting with Jody Steiner, the university’s coordinator of Deaf and hard of hearing services; Cathleen Segal, the law school’s director of disability services; and Jennifer Perrigo from the office of career services. The four of us have gathered around a conference table in Pound Hall. The law school has scheduled a workshop to help students master the art of networking, and I want to try using my braille communication system at the workshop.

  “Let me make sure I have this straight.” Jody speaks into the FM mic. “You’re suggesting people would type on this keyboard and you would read it in braille?”

  I nod.

  “Okay, that sounds easy enough. Would you want to be sitting or standing?”

  “What do people normally do at networking events?” I ask.

  “I’ll let Jen answer that. Passing this to Jen.”

  The mic changes hands. “We usually have people standing and milling about. We’ll have a few reception tables around the room. They’re tall round tables.”