I pointed them out to Mom and she gave me a smile and an encouraging nudge to get moving. Each step toward the group felt heavier than the last.

Why was I so nervous? This was going to be exciting. Maybe I’d even make a new friend or two. Making a new friend who was Deaf was long overdue since moving to Colorado.

A woman dressed in a knit sweater with a colorful Thanksgiving turkey on it got to her feet as Mom and I approached and said, “Hi! My name . . . and you . . . ?”

Mom shook the woman’s hand, smiling, saying something I didn’t quite catch.

“What’s . . . name?” the woman said to me next, shaking my free hand vigorously.

M-A-Y-A, I finger spelled, adding my sign name next.

The woman stared at me with her eyebrows pulled together and head tilted to the side until Mom stepped up and said my name aloud.

“Well, it’s good . . . you. Why don’t . . . there?” the woman said, gesturing to an empty spot on the couch next to some girl deeply engrossed in whatever was on her phone.

I guessed it wasn’t that unusual the woman didn’t understand what I was signing, but if she had a Deaf kid, shouldn’t she know ASL? My own mother had busted her butt learning ASL with me.

WHO? I signed to Mom, wanting to know who the woman was as she sat in a nearby chair.

Sitting on the floor next to the woman’s chair was a boy of probably fourteen or so, more interested in his tablet than his surroundings. His dark hair was cut short, so I could clearly see he had a cochlear implant, the one piece of assistive technology that was a hot topic of debate within the Deaf community.

Cochlear implants were kind of like hearing aids in that they worked to improve hearing, but the process of getting one involved an irreversible surgery and a lot of follow-up speech therapy if you were born Deaf and never developed oral skills. I remembered one history class back at Pratt where the girl who sat beside me had a cochlear implant, and she had it turned off a lot of the time, signing just as much as the rest of us. When I mustered up the courage to ask her why she never had her cochlear on, she told me it was because of how strange things sometimes sounded being filtered through it. Crackly, like the noise was being processed through a computer so everything sounded electronic. That’s the word she used—electronic.