When she got home, there was only one thing that helped. She would soak in the bathtub for half an hour every day, with her ears under the water's surface. She let her inner ears soak, as deeply as the water could go. Just like when she swam at the pool, when she was too busy having fun to notice. She concentrated on her breathing, until her whole body felt like it was tingling. When she got out, she put a drop of lavender oil in each ear. Over time, the pain became understanding.
She had to go back to school, for the last month of the year. It was boring, and she found that nobody else had grown up very much at all. The teacher's softness and caution was once a sanctioned comfort, but now it felt condescending. To be treated so gently became an insult, because she no longer needed it. She'd never had a hearing aid, but she told everyone she'd gotten one – an implant, highly experimental. She did''t know why she lied... mostly, she supposed, to make sure her friends didn't feel bad for her; nor themselves. If her disability could become an ability over the last year or so, she worried it would make them jealous, or it'd make them look lazy for not 'trying hard enough'... like somehow it was 'their fault'. That was the last thing she wanted them to think about themselves. Or worse, that it would make her seem like she'd been lying all along. So, she wore a pair of D-Jock headphones everywhere, plugged into nothing – she'd gotten them for five dollars at the thrift store, with a missing audio cable. She never took them off, so nobody could see that she was lying, and to dampen any and all noises that might accost her. She found, however, that the noises would get worse if she wore them too much. She chose to save them for the noisiest places, like the bus to school, or the train.

May of 1961 was almost over, and her class was practicing vocalization. There were at least three dialects of Sign Language to blend together, to make up the full breadth of what language was, in the modern day. The more-skilled or less-hard-of-hearing would help the others figure out if they sounded 'right', signing things like a pinched throat or full lungs, to help them find physical indicators for certain sounds. Lan-Yung had begun to lead these activities. She was armed with a sense of hearing that now rivaled her able-eared instructors, and almost eight months of daily training in identifying sounds, strengthening her posture, and tuning her vocal muscles (like the jaw, mouth, neck, tongue, shoulders, and throat). She was a quick learner, and as her Uncle Dang taught her, she celebrated her failures as the foundation for her success. Lan-Yung was shooting for the stars, and approaching them fast. Her only regrets were that it felt like she was going alone, and that her father had no idea how much she'd improved at all. He'd spent so much time at work, and she was embarrassed to demonstrate until she was confident he'd be impressed. Her other regret was that her peers couldn't come with, because she had no idea whether her problems and theirs were the same... nor if they'd be willing to go through what she did, to solve them.

Another week had passed. It was almost the last day of school, and everyone had given up on trying to improve. The world would just have to take them as they were, they joked. Lan-Yung was still primed, and had been since she got back. She read from a book, to the rest of the class. It was a collection of poems, this one about fishing. So of course, she had to be the one read it.

THE CATCH
by Fleming Jimess Owelton

Tie it up, let it drop
the hooked worm begs forth
a noble friend, with a hop
that little twist 'fore

the piercing deed is done.
The glittered beast the wiser,
for he is painless and numb
to death's strings as he rises.

He thrashes round and round, in laps,
as I, gloved, might contain him
most cleverly of all, perhaps,
he allows my entertainment.

Now dead as ice, in a box.
The devil's boat sails home.
Blood of good, by evil's lock
may teach him to atone.

Her classmates clapped for her, in astonishment. Her work was clearly paying off – they could barely tell she'd been deaf at all. But she also saw how sad they were, at the same time. Couldn't she give them hope? She wanted to help them, but none of them seemed to share her exact condition... they were deaf for other reasons. Some of them already shared the same diet, to no effect. Their regular treatments only aided them in comfort, and little more. There were two kids she felt had never bothered to try her advice, that she felt could benefit the most: Shelly and Niles. She found ways to work her hot tips into warm conversations, but it only chased them off. The truth was, they'd realized a long time ago that she was lying. Shelly had caught a plain view of her ears not a day after Lan-Yung's claim of an 'implant', and saw no redness, no soreness, no swelling, no stitches, or anything. She'd even poked the ear, to check, but Lan-Yung didn't react. From then on, they tested her by clapping, or dropping things, and by instinct, Lan-Yung always looked, never catching on to their game. They played the radio at a low volume, and she'd start humming along without thinking. And when everyone else was struggling to grasp the very basics of speech – she giggled, under her breath. Assuming that nobody else could hear her snerk. Lan-Yung was outgrowing them, and she was beginning to remind them of the abled kids who made fun of them in the grocery stores and at the park. They wanted her gone.
So, Shelly and Niles came up with a plan: on the day of the Parent/Teacher Interviews, they blew up a bunch of balloons, and hid them in the storage closet down the hall. Lan-Yung was asked to remove her headphones on that day, so she was more sensitive than usual. When Lan-Yung and Han sat across from the instructor, Niles popped the balloons from behind the closet door. She looked, but nobody else heard a thing. The adults noticed that. Then, Niles came out, and started dropping pins down the hall. Lan-Yung stared at him, trying her hardest to pretend it wasn't bothering her. That was when Shelly's phone rang, and the vibration had been turned off. Shelly let it ring for three whole minutes, straight, on low volume... but with a very annoying ringtone. A crappy pop song, full of obscene words and remarks. Nobody else heard it, nobody else even knew it was there. It was Niles who was calling her, and he'd made certain not to stop for a single moment. Even the teacher hadn't noticed it, busy grading papers and snacking on mint-chocolate.
Lan-Yung tried to ignore it, but after the fourth minute, she became so annoyed, she shouted, "IS SOMEONE GONNA GET THAT?!"
That was when everyone began to suspect that Lan-Yung's hearing was actually much better than she claimed... and they felt betrayed. It made Lan-Yung look like a liar, which she had been, and it made Han look like a fool. The teachers were no longer impressed with her, as they finally figured out they'd been disrespected this entire time... taken for idiots. Lan-Yung was holding herself back for better scores at school, which was basically considered cheating. The other students, who'd long since denied the 'rumors' that Lan-Yung could be laughing at them, glared at her.
They signed the words, 'Get out, bitch.'

And just like that, Lan-Yung had graduated. Once a little deaf girl, now a big jerk. She was really moving up in the world, wasn't she? Her mother would have been so, so proud. She thought back to the look on her mother's face, when the doctors told her that Lan-Yung would never be able to hear. She was only five years old, and all of her therapies and treaments had failed. Lauren became a canvas of displeasure. The disgust. The anger. The hatred. Disappointment. Oh, but it was gone now, wasn't it? That thing that made her imperfect, inviable. That made her less than a daughter. Maybe Lauren was still out there, somewhere. Maybe they could be a family again. It made Lan-Yung's blood boil, just to think of it. If Lauren didn't love her before, she wasn't allowed to love her now. She didn't care for the work-in-progress, now she didn't get to see the final result. It was hers, and hers alone. Even her father would have to see her from across a pane of glass, just like the colorful schools of fish, and the sharks; at the aquarium that he used to take her to. Above the rest, she would be... the perfect specimen.