This is What Goodbye Looks Like by Olivia Rivers

happiness doesn’t seem very important anymore. I’d settle for a sad life, as long as it didn’t involve my sister teetering on the brink of death and a boy who’s already fallen off the ledge.
    Seth leans back in his chair, a smug expression tilting up his lips. “I’m right. It’s my sixth sense, you know. Reading people. Everyone assumes I suck at it, since I can’t see them, but I think that just makes it easier for me. They let their guard down.”
    “We’ve gotten off track,” I say, pulling the backpack closer to my chest.
    “Were we ever on track? I think we’ve been off topic as soon as you got here and started asking questions about my sense of color.”
    “Okay, fine. Sorry about that. I’ll make sure to not ask anything personal anymore.”
    He brushes away my promise with a swish of his hand. “Don’t apologize. I don’t mind you chatting or asking questions or whatever. Tutoring gets so boring if you don’t.”
    “Okay. Well, um, thanks. But we really should get started.”
    “Yeah, sure.” He faces his laptop again and expertly taps a couple of the Braille keys. I can’t make sense of any of the patterned bumps or even how their arrangement works, so I just hope Seth doesn’t expect me to be able to figure it out.
    “Do you want to re-explain the acid-base equilibria to me?” he asks. “Because the explanation Mr. Bennet gave us made zero sense.”
    I’m finally able to relax a little as I rattle off an answer that requires all facts and zero emotions. After that, I manage to keep the conversation away from personal topics, and it doesn’t take long to figure out that tutoring Seth is going to be a lot easier than I expected. I mostly just have to explain in detail the graphs and charts that are in my textbook but missing from his audio edition. Numbers seem to be the key to explaining things. He’s incredible at mental math, and using numbers to illustrate my points makes the session move along swiftly.
    I find myself staring at Seth’s chest every few minutes, just marveling at the fact that it’s moving, that he’s breathing. Luckily, he never seems to notice when I zone out. He spends a lot of the session with his lower lip trapped between his teeth, his head tilted in concentration and his hair swished to the side. My brain flip-flops between thinking it’s cute that the ends of his hair curl slightly and thinking it’s creepy that he looks so damn much like his brother.
    We’re both exhausted by the time it’s four-thirty, but I’m strangely relaxed. I made it through over an hour of one-on-one tutoring without Seth figuring out who I am. Maybe that means I can keep up this charade better than I anticipated.
    I start packing up my notebook and say, “We should probably wrap this up for today.”
    He nods. “Yeah, I definitely think that’s enough for one day.”
    “How do you do that?” I ask, the question slipping out before I can stop it.
    He raises his eyebrows. “What?”
    “That,” I say. “Nodding, raising your eyebrows, all those sorts of little things. I’ve noticed you do it a lot, but if you’ve always been blind, how do you know to do it?”
    “My brother taught me,” he says, his voice suddenly quieter. “In elementary school, I used to get picked on for having strange facial expressions. Pretty much all the expressions I made naturally were a little different from a person who could see. The bullying got pretty bad, so my brother made it his mission to teach me how to use expressions like a sighted person.”
    He gives a soft, sad smile. “The first thing he taught me was how to roll my eyes, so if anyone ever made a nasty comment about my blindness, I could just roll my eyes and tell them to get over it.”
    “He sounds like a great brother,” I murmur.
    “The best,” Seth says with a nod. “He never let me use my blindness as an excuse for anything. And sometimes I’d get angry at him, but mostly I just loved him for it. He used to