Blind Sight Read Free

been.
    “Then it doesn’t to you,” Sara said. “And that’s perfectly okay.”
    On a side note: I’ve done a little research on Abigail Perkins, accused witch of Salem. She’s listed in all of the books on the trials, usually with a little parenthetical statement after her name: (convicted, but not executed). There’s nothing to indicate whether she confessed or not, although they did let people go if they confessed. I also found out that most of the accused weren’t midwives or healers or anything like that. Mostly they were people in the town that no one else liked because they were troublemakers, or argued with their neighbors, or were involved in lawsuits with the parents of the accusers, stuff like that. I actually just read an interesting article suggesting that the hysterical symptoms of the accusers might have been caused by ergot poisoning from the rye bread that was a staple food of Salem.
    I don’t know that any of this will make a good essay, though. I know good writing is supposed to be showing, not telling, but for the essay it’s not really about showing or telling. It’s about selling. Selling myself as the possibly gender-confused descendent of a false confessor and victim of rye bread–munching hysterics isn’t going to get me into a good college.
    And with that thought, Luke pushes himself away from the desk where he has been typing.
    Luke slides back (the chair he’s sitting on has casters) to the desk, scrolls through what he has written, and makes a few grammatical changes. Luke does not consider himself to be a writer, but he has writers in his family. His Nana wrote a series of books for young adults called
The Mountjoy Girls
. His mother, Sara, is writing a book on alternative healing, and contributes articles to various journals. His aunt Nancy has written a book on Lucrezia de’ Medici. His sister Pearl has had her poetry published. His great-aunt Eileen has written a manual on the proper care and training of Dandie Dinmont terriers.
    Luke saves his writing under the title “Notes #1.”
    He wonders how accurately he has remembered that evening when they all looked at the Bible. Luke was the star pupil of his AP Biology class and is a subscriber to
Scientific American
, so he understands the basic synaptic principle of memory creation, and that the act of memory retrieval will—to some extent—alter the memory being retrieved. Deprived of the exact stimuli that produced a unique neuronal sequence, cells will reconsolidate in a new way, depending on where and what and who Luke is at the time he remembers. Luke’s brain—presupposing there is a “Luke” separate from his “brain”—can only remember a memory of the memory from the last time he remembered the memory.
    Example: Luke did not think of the Plinko game while lookingat the Bible that night. He constructed the analogy two years later, under totally different circumstances, but it so exactly suited the bouncing helplessness of looking at three hundred years’ worth of girls’ names that it seemed as if he had always made that connection: that he must have thought of the Plinko game at that moment, and forgotten about it, and that he was—two years later—remembering it at last.
    But he wasn’t.
    Also, Luke didn’t point at the names in Nana’s family Bible and tell Sara, “I don’t think it means anything.” What he said was, “Yeah,” and then, “Can I have a small piece of cake?” Luke was both alarmed and angered by the revelation of his family history. Luke knew Sara was worried about how he felt, along with feeling bad about losing her temper and yelling at Pearl. Luke wanted cake and knew that if he asked for a specifically small piece, he would get a larger one than if he had not specified the size. Luke could not stop himself from feeling alarm or anger. He could, however, and did, get dessert.
    Luke is on the move now, leaving the bedroom for the kitchen. He does not think of the bedroom as