What I Want

  What I Want

  A Companion Novel to the Chop, Chop Series

  By L.N. Cronk

  Published by Rivulet Publishing

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition License Note:

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2013 by L.N. Cronk. All rights reserved.

  Cover Photography by PlushStudios.

  Spanish translations provided by Vicki Oliver Krueger and Melanie Ward.

  Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984

  by International Bible Society.

  Used by permission of Zondervan.

  All rights reserved.

  Author’s Note:

  Despite the way this story is written, many of the conversations at the beginning of this book – especially those with Bizzy – would actually have been spoken in Spanish. While I’m sure my great friend Vicki Krueger would have been willing to translate for me as she always has (thank you, Vicki!), using so much Spanish dialogue would have significantly distracted from the novel. Therefore, for the sake of the story, only a few lines of Spanish are actually included.

  I hope you enjoy it ~ many blessings to you!

  L.N. Cronk

  This book is dedicated to each person who has read the Chop, Chop series and is still asking for more—I am so thankful for each of you! I hope everyone enjoys this stand-alone novel (with a few glimpses of some of your favorite Chop, Chop characters). If you have never read Chop, Chop, please consider downloading it. It is a FREE, stand-alone novel available on the same site from which you just purchased this book.

  I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people – for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 1 Timothy 2:1–4

  ~ ~ ~

  Feisímo.

  My entire life, people have called me this.

  Most often, my sister Grace – hissing it into my ear whenever she thought she could get away with it. Other times it was my classmates, counting on their words to be drowned out by the noise of other children on the playground during recess. Sometimes it would be a little kid at a restaurant, blurting out the truth before a mortified parent could shush them into silence. Occasionally it might be a stranger on the street, not actually saying anything, but glancing away in embarrassment for me, saying it all the same, even without any words.

  Throughout the years, many different people have told me in many different ways, and despite my parents’ constant attempts to convince me otherwise, I know exactly what I am . . . what I’ve always been.

  I have always known.

  Feisímo . . .

  Ugly as sin.

  ~ ~ ~

  FIRST OF ALL, let me make it perfectly clear that it wasn’t just because she’s blind that Bizzy and I got together.

  I’ll admit that it helped . . . I never would have gotten up the nerve to even talk to Bizzy on my own if she’d been able to see what I looked like right off.

  I’d seen a movie one time with a blind person feeling somebody’s face so they could “see” what that person looked like with their sense of touch. So the first time I laid eyes on Bizzy, I immediately reached my hand to my upper lip and felt my scar, trying to determine what it would feel like to her if I ever let her touch my face.

  I decided that it didn’t feel as bad as it looked.

  I was born with a cleft palate. Not just a hare lip or something, mind you, but a severe cleft palate. Go right now to your nearest search engine and type in “complete bilateral cleft.” Pick out the worst picture you see. That was me.

  I’m nothing like that anymore of course. I’ve had reconstructive surgeries, and if you saw me you might not notice the scar and the asymmetry of my nose and lip right away . . .

  What you’d notice right off is my hands.

  Now type into your search engine “symbrachydactyly.” Find a picture of a pair of hands that look pretty normal, but with no fingers – just little nubs.

  I didn’t have reconstructive surgery for that.

  And by the way, I absolutely hate that word. Nubs. I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t have to, but sometimes I don’t have a choice.

  Anyway, I do actually have one finger . . . a thumb really. It’s not a great thumb, but it’s all I’ve got. And if it sounds like I feel really sorry for myself, I want you to know that I don’t. Not at all. I don’t wish anything was any different about any part of my life. Everything that has ever happened to me has made me who I am today, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I really like my thumb . . . it comes in very handy.

  So, anyhow, after I felt my scar, I thought about my hands. I thought about how Bizzy was bound to find out about them eventually, but that since she was blind she might actually get to know me a little bit first . . . before she found out.

  That intrigued me.

  And so, as soon as I saw Bizzy that very first day and thought about all this, I decided to go for it.

  For some reason, despite the way I look, I had never really doubted that there was someone out there for me. I had also always known that the person I was going to end up with one day would probably have something wrong with them, but it had never occurred to me that the “something” wrong with them might be that they were blind.

  Deformed is what I had always imagined actually . . . another person like myself. Someone better suited for the Island of Misfit Toys.

  But Bizzy wasn’t deformed at all. She was pretty. Her hair was black and shiny and her skin was smooth and clear and her smile was the prettiest that I’d ever seen. The only thing wrong with her was that her pupils were milky white instead of black . . . and someone like me had no right to complain about something like that.

  The day I first met Bizzy, Grace and I had walked from school to the orphanage. Our mom worked there and it was where we had practically grown up, spending hours of our free time helping out with things or playing with the orphans.

  My least favorite job at the orphanage was doing the dishes. The plates and cups and silverware just had to be rinsed off and run through this automated thing, but the pots and pans had to be washed by hand in a sink with disgusting bits of food floating around in it and I hated that.

  Volunteering to take Grace’s place at the sink probably wasn’t the smartest move I’d ever made since it immediately made her suspicious, but I did it anyway because I needed a good excuse not to have to shake hands with Bizzy right off (should she decide that she wanted to). Grace went away with a perplexed look on her face after I shoved my hands into the dishwater and started furiously scrubbing a bread pan.

  “Hi,” I said to Bizzy, who was standing in front of the rinse sink. “My name’s Marco.”

  “Hi, Marco.” She smiled. “I’m Isabelita, but everybody calls me Bizzy.”

  “They didn’t waste any time putting you to work,” I noted as I set the pan into her sink so she could spray it off.

  “No,” she agreed as she rinsed. “I guess it’s better just to jump right in to everything.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Villa de Paz.”

  Villa de Paz was another orphanage on the other side of Mexico Cit
y. Sometimes, when their funding was running low, they would send kids to our orphanage.

  “How long have you lived here?” she asked, setting the pan on the drain board.

  “I don’t,” I said. “My mom works here.”

  “Oh . . . are you Grace’s brother?”

  “Um-hmm,” I admitted, hoping I didn’t sound too sour about it.

  “I just met her,” Bizzy said. “She seems really nice.”

  I rolled my eyes. Yeah. I’m sure she seemed really nice . . .

  We chatted through the rest of the pots and pans, and I told her all about how I was the youngest of six children and how all of us had been adopted – Doroteo and Lily and I right from this very orphanage in Mexico. Doroteo, who we called Dorito, was my only brother. Amber, Meredith, and Grace were half-sisters and had been born in the United States, where my parents were originally from. Dorito had just gotten married. Amber and Lily were attending college in the States.

  Bizzy told me that her parents had given her up as soon as they’d discovered she was blind, and she told me that she’d lived in one orphanage or another for her entire life.

  In my opinion, it’s hard to turn out normal when you’re not only handicapped, but you’ve been abandoned, too. I was turning out pretty good (if I do say so myself), but that was only because my parents were exceptional people. If it weren’t for them, I can’t even imagine where I’d be.

  So with that in mind, looking back, I think that one of the things that amazed me the most about Bizzy was how normal she was. She was blind, and she was an orphan, but she was brilliant and friendly and happy and fun and full of life and self-confidence . . .

  And I was always really glad that I’d decided to do the dishes that day.

  It’s possible that Grace saw the same things in Bizzy that I did and simply wanted her for a friend, but it’s also entirely possible that Grace just realized that I liked Bizzy and she couldn’t stand the thought of me having something she didn’t have for even one teeny, tiny second. Whatever the reason, Grace’s friendship with Bizzy grew as fast as mine did, and if Grace hadn’t had gymnastics two days a week after school, I never would have had any time alone with Bizzy at all.

  It was on one of my “alone” days with Bizzy that I decided I’d better tell her what I looked like because on TV shows and stuff, people always keep secrets over some little thing and then it winds up turning into a big, huge thing and they always end up with all sorts of problems that could have been avoided if they’d been honest right from the get-go. Bizzy and I had been spending time together every day for two weeks, and her first impressions of me were long gone. Either she liked me or she didn’t (and I was kind of thinking that maybe she did), but no matter what, I knew that she wasn’t the kind of person who was going to change how she felt about me just because she found out what I looked like. On the other hand, though, she might be really hurt if she found out that I’d been dishonest with her. Two weeks was pretty much the borderline between, “Oh, it just hasn’t come up yet,” and “Oh, I’ve pretty much been keeping a secret from you.”

  And so, on gymnastics day, I asked Bizzy if she wanted to go out front and sit on the steps.

  “The sun feels good,” Bizzy said, turning her face toward it once we got outside.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  We sat quietly for a moment until I got up the nerve to break the silence.

  “I want to tell you something,” I finally said.

  “What’s that?” she asked, turning her face from the sun to me instead.

  “I . . . I want you to know something about me,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “There . . . there were some things wrong with me when I was born,” I began. “I don’t look like everyone else.”

  “You mean your hands?” she asked.

  “How did you know about that?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “Grace told me,” she said, shrugging. “She told me about your cleft palate, too.”

  “She did,” I said flatly.

  “Yes.” Bizzy nodded.

  I hated Grace.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want to make you self-conscious or anything,” she explained, shrugging again. “I figured you’d tell me when you wanted to.”

  “Oh.”

  And that was when I suddenly realized that Bizzy had been purposely avoiding my hands for two weeks whenever I’d offered her my arm to guide her someplace. Until then, I’d just thought that I’d gotten incredibly lucky.

  “Are you mad at me because I knew and didn’t say anything?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Are you mad at me because I didn’t tell you before now?”

  “No,” she said with a smile.

  “Do you want to feel my face?” I asked her.

  “What?”

  “You know,” I said. “So you can see what I look like?”

  “That’s not going to help me know what you look like,” she laughed.

  “It’s not?”

  “No,” she said. “Where’d you get that from? Some movie?”

  I bit my lip.

  “Blind people don’t go around feeling other people’s faces,” she explained with another laugh. “Just tell me what you look like.”

  “Apparently Grace already told you.”

  “Not really,” Bizzy said. “I want you to tell me.”

  “Well, I’ve got this really bad scar where they closed up the gap between my nose and my mouth and my hands don’t really have any fingers, just these little . . .” – I sighed inwardly – “these little nubs that are kind of webbed together.”

  I paused and waited for her reaction.

  “No,” she said, giving me a big smile. “I mean tell me what you look like. What color is your hair and everything?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, my hair is dark and wavy and I keep trying to grow it longer and my dad keeps making me get it cut. I have really dark brown eyes and I’m fairly tall for my age. I’m skinny . . . too skinny. My mom says I should quit complaining about that.”

  She smiled again.

  “What about your skin?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m Latino like you. My skin’s a lot like yours.”

  “I don’t really know what I look like,” she reminded me.

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me what I look like.”

  “Oh,” I said again. “Well, umm, you’re Latino . . .”

  She laughed.

  “And your skin is fairly light. It’s like butterscotch and it looks really smooth and soft.”

  She gave me yet another smile.

  “And you have the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen,” I told her.

  “What about my eyes?” she asked.

  “They’re dark brown,” I said. “Like mine.”

  “Do they look like everyone else’s?” she asked.

  I hesitated for a moment. Was it possible that in thirteen years, no one ever told her what her eyes looked like?

  “No,” I said finally. “Most people have black pupils. Yours are white.”

  She seemed to be taking that in as she sat quietly for a moment.

  “You’re very pretty,” I told her. She smiled again, but it didn’t seem like her heart was in it this time.

  “Do you want to go in and play rummy?” she asked.

  Bizzy had a braille card deck and killer instincts. She was a lot of fun to play cards with.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “But I’m gonna beat you this time.”

  The next day, when Grace and I arrived at the orphanage after school, Bizzy was wearing sunglasses.

  “Cool shades,” Grace told her, but as soon as I had the chance, I pulled Bizzy aside and asked her why she had them on.

  “I wear them sometimes,” she said, shrugging.

  “No, you don’t,” I argued. “You’ve been he
re for over two weeks and you haven’t worn them once. The only reason you have them on is because of what I told you yesterday.”

  “I just want to look pretty.”

  “You do look pretty,” I said. “I already told you that you’re pretty.”

  “Well, then,” she said, shrugging again slightly, “I want to look even prettier.”

  “These don’t make you look prettier,” I told her, reaching to gently take them off.

  She didn’t answer.

  “When you smile,” I said, “it lights up your whole face. All these do is cover half of that up.”

  She still didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t wear these,” I said. “If you want to be prettier, just smile even more.”

  “Okay,” she said, and she did.

  Bizzy didn’t wear her sunglasses anymore after that, but I always felt really guilty that she’d ever put them on in the first place. The very last thing I had ever wanted to do was to make Bizzy feel for even one small second the way I had felt for my entire life.

  A few weeks later, Mom let me and Grace have Bizzy come over for dinner one evening. Of course Grace monopolized her like always, but during the meal, Dad asked us about our homework and found out that Grace still had algebra to do. After that, I got Bizzy all to myself for a bit while Grace and Dad fought about math.

  I took Bizzy around the house, describing everything to her that she couldn’t see, and eventually we ended up in my bedroom.

  “What’s that noise?” she asked.

  “What noise?”

  “It sounds like water,” she said. “And a motor.”