Part of my job as a Deaf Services Specialist at an Independent Living Center in Colorado is to address the needs of the Deaf or Hard of Hearing consumers I work with, but also to inform the community about the issues facing the Deaf community, how we may better work alongside each other, and how people who are Deaf are perfectly capable of living independent, successful lives.

In The Silence Between Us, Maya makes it known that she does not consider herself disabled because of her hearing loss, and that same belief is held by many in the Deaf community. There is nothing wrong with having difficulty hearing, and that’s something I struggled to accept while I was in school. I used to be teased and picked on because I’m Hard of Hearing. This continued well into college, and I even got in trouble at work because I tried to hide the fact that I wear a hearing aid. Even now I still sometimes get people poking or touching my hearing aid or getting angry with me because I can’t understand what they’re saying.

Hearing loss doesn’t make you any less of a person though, and it shouldn’t be something to fear, however scary it might seem. It’s something that can be embraced as simply as anything else in life. All it really takes is an open mind and the notion that people who may seem “different” aren’t so different at all.

There is a gap between the Deaf and hearing worlds, but there doesn’t have to be. The Deaf have a community, culture, and language—just like you.

An Excerpt From In 27 Days

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The Day Of

There was something off. I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was, but it was definitely there.

Yes, something was out of balance, I decided as I stepped off the bus and onto the sidewalk outside John F. Kennedy Prep. The place looked like it did almost every other day, with its red bricks, bright-colored banners strung up everywhere, and the jumble of students lingering around outside the front doors. The school had been around for more than a century, and it had that Old New York feel. Nothing was ever out of the ordinary.

Yet the gray clouds rolling in across the sky felt smothering, bringing with them a feeling of suspicion and . . . sadness. An almost suffocating sadness. New York was the city that never slept, the place that had a thousand different attitudes. But I’d never felt one like this before.

“C’mon, Hadley, you’re in the way.”

I quickly moved to the side as Taylor Lewis, my best friend, sauntered off the bus.