Yet again I found myself glad that American Sign Language was my preferred method of communication—it was short, sweet, to the point, and nowhere near as formal as English. I doubted I would have been able to string together any one sentence that would make an ounce of sense in English right then.

Mom gave an overly bright smile as she unfastened her seatbelt and opened the car door. DON’T WORRY, I saw her sign as I unbuckled my own seatbelt.

It was kind of hard not to worry when I knew I was about to become the weird new girl with the interpreter following her around all day. Talk about making an impression. I’d never had to worry about an interpreter before, because at the Pratt School for the Deaf—the school I’d gone to back in Jersey—90 percent of the staff were Deaf or Hard of Hearing, and those that weren’t knew ASL and could communicate effectively.

At Engelmann High, I was going to be the one and only Deaf student—an honor I wasn’t so sure I was ready to accept.

I grabbed my backpack and hoisted it up on my shoulder as Mom locked the car, and we began the slow walk toward my certain doom.

Okay, so maybe that was a bit dramatic, but the last time I’d gone to a hearing school, I’d actually been, you know, hearing. I’d gone to Pratt for so long and gotten used to being around Deaf or HOH people—people who spoke my language—and now I was going to have to resort to lipreading and struggling to follow basic conversation.

And then there was the matter of using my voice, which had me all but paralyzed with fear. I was oral because I’d lost my hearing long after I acquired basic language skills, but the issue was that I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore.

Using my voice was sometimes a knee-jerk reaction when I was around people who didn’t sign, like the home health care nurses that used to come over a few times a week back in New Jersey to help take care of Connor while Mom was busy working as an associate for a company that specializes in harnessing wind energy.

Even though there was nothing wrong with my voice—I hoped—using it was just downright weird. I couldn’t hear myself speak, but I could feel the sound reverberating in my skull whenever I spoke. It was a sensation I wasn’t all that fond of.