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continued to crash into poles, fences, and classmates, even losing consciousness in a head-on collision with a football goalpost. Kids wondered how he could charge so fearlessly knowing it was just a matter of time before he bashed into something else, but to Mike that was just the point—he already knew the worst that could happen, and it didn’t seem bad at all compared to the feeling he got from running.
             
    By 1965, the five May children were old hat at minding themselves. Ori Jean left early on weekday mornings to teach eighth-grade Spanish, while Bill slept off benders between jobs he couldn’t keep. Diane and Mike babysat their younger siblings, cleaned the house, and prepared meals. Mike’s specialties included casseroles, spaghetti, and tacos, the messy fruits of the cooking course Ori Jean had insisted he take.
    The kids got along well, considering they shared two bedrooms and a single bathroom. Each believed that the others received favored treatment; all watched vigilantly to make sure Mike didn’t invoke blindness to do less than his full share. No matter how many times Ori Jean asked, the kids seemed not to remember to keep the floors clean or to put things back where they belonged. Much of Mike’s home life was spent sprawled over toys or demanding to know, “Who moved my stuff?” His siblings had a collective response: “Not me.”
    They also knew the best ways to have fun with a brother who couldn’t see. Diane, Theri, and Patrick mixed up Mike’s blue and red socks, sending him to school with mismatched feet. They gave him dog food and told him it was breakfast cereal. They mastered the silent arts of pushing their brussels sprouts onto Mike’s plate during dinner and stealing bites of his pie at dessert. In hide-and-seek they were not above pointing him in the wrong direction; in Monopoly they paid pennies on the dollar when he passed Go. Soon Mike developed countermeasures, such as taking inventory of his dinner and asking for seconds on dog food.
    As he neared the end of junior high in 1967, Mike could feel his home life start to shake. Bill was out of work and drinking more than ever. Sometimes he didn’t come home. The family’s priest urged Ori Jean to divorce him. She tried four times but was never able to see it through.
    Bill’s fuse shortened with each of her false starts. The kids tried not to hear the fights, but already they knew the dialogue by heart, especially the part about how shameful it was to give up. One night, Bill threatened to hit Ori Jean. Mike ran into the room, stepped between them, and went into his boxing stance, his fists turned upward in the style of the old bare-knuckles fighters.
    “Don’t you dare hit my mother!” Mike screamed.
    The display shocked Bill. He stood there for a moment, taking in Mike’s scrawny body and quivering lip. Mike remained in his stance. Finally, Bill backed off and walked away. Ori Jean threw him out and filed for divorce days later. She was thirty-nine years old and the mother of five children, ages five through fifteen.
    In the months after Bill had gone Ori Jean blew up occasionally. Tears streaming down her face, she’d yell at her kids, “You guys, your rooms aren’t clean, the kitchen’s dirty, you’re fighting, I’m trying to go to work and take care of you all, but I’m not going to be able to keep it together unless you do better to help me.” Mike thought about his mom a lot during those days, about how she drove the kids to four different schools, how she kept finding ways to send him to camp, how clean she kept the house even when he could hear her crying. And even then, he thought, “She’s brave.”
             
    After graduating from junior high, Mike announced his intention to attend the local public high school. Las Lomas High, however, did not accept blind students. Administrators said that Mike would be better served by a school fifteen miles away that had resources and staff for