Love and First Sight(48)

“Open your eyes,” I say.

She does, and with the tactile input of my fingers around them, I am able to quickly locate the perfect green circles of her irises surrounding the deep black of her pupils, and to see all this floating in the larger white space of cornea. Around her eyes and above them, on her forehead, her skin fades into a deep purple, darker than the skin on her jaw and cheeks and nose.

The green of her dual irises have tiny flakes of yellow in them, as if sprinkled with gold. I might not be able to see through the windows of Cecily’s house today, but I’ll happily settle for her soul.

“Green with specks of gold.”

“Yes,” she says.

I see her previously white corneas turn red and feel warm moisture pool against my thumbs. I swipe my thumbs to wipe the tears, and she pulls me around the neck and buries her face against my shoulder.





CHAPTER 23


When I get home, I am still high on the ecstatic rush of being so close to Cecily’s face. It almost felt like… like she wanted to touch my face, too, like maybe with her lips.

I demand that both of my parents stand in front of me for a thorough examination. I connect the field of brown on the bottom half of Dad’s head with the prickly bristles of his beard. I associate the thin horizontal lines on Mom’s forehead with the neat ridges of her eyebrows, but while doing so, it occurs to me I could go look in a mirror right now and find out what I look like, all of which suddenly makes me relatively uninterested in my mother.

I go to the upstairs bathroom and shut the door. It’s my first time seeing a mirror. It looks much like the rest of the world—or, at least, the way I see the world—a swirl of indistinguishable colors and undifferentiated lines. But from what I understand about mirrors, I know at least some of these colors in front of my eyes are my own reflection. A reflection of my face and my body. I am standing right in front of myself.

I bob my head to try to pick out my face in the mirror by its motion, but the movement also has the unwanted side effect of shifting my field of vision. Instinct tells me to instead reach my hand to touch the surface, and I am startled when my fingers collide with the hard glass of the mirror instead of the colors and shapes it’s reflecting. This strikes me as the funniest thing ever, and I burst out laughing.

Then an idea hits: perspective. If things get bigger the closer you move to them in real life, wouldn’t that be true in the mirror, too? Can I just put my eyes right up to the mirror and then slowly move my head to search it?

I move my face right up to the mirror, and as I do so, I see a yellowish mass explode in the center. I whip around, closing my eyes and reaching out my hands to find what is happening in the bathroom. But there’s nothing there. I turn to the mirror again and move in more slowly toward it. When my nose is up against the glass, I put my hand against my cheek, and I see a broad movement. That’s when I realize: It’s my face. My face is the yellowish mass. My face is what I see moving.

I find my eyes and stare into them. They are brown, as they have apparently been since the surgery. I wonder what they looked like before—“cloudy blue” or “milky blue” is how people always described them. My nose seems to be disproportionately large, which is disappointing. No one wants to discover they have a much larger nose than they expected. Or maybe that’s something that always happens in mirrors, or at least when you are only a couple of inches away from one? My hair is brown and short. My forehead is wide and uniform in color. My lips are a darker shade than the rest of my face, and I remember that this color, the color of my lips, is similar to the one I noticed on the upper half of Cecily’s face, around her eyes and forehead. I wonder why her skin changes color around those areas but mine does not.

Later that night, Mom asks, “Did you see Cecily’s face tonight?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did you think?”

Many words comes to mind: Beautiful. Perfect. Radiant. But I don’t feel like any of them are Mom’s business.

“It was nice,” I say flatly.

And it’s for this reason—Cecily’s face—that I don’t wear the eye mask underneath my glasses to school on Thursday. I keep my eyes closed while I’m walking so I don’t get dizzy, but I want to be able to open them during journalism class and examine her from afar for all of third period. Which is exactly what I am attempting to do, and I am reasonably certain I’ve finally located her when Mrs. Everbrook says, “Will?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think?”

“Um…” I consider bluffing with a vaguely generic answer (“I agree with what most people have been saying but disagree with others…”) but figure Mrs. Everbrook will see through it since she was apparently able to tell that I wasn’t paying attention in the first place. “Sorry, my mind was elsewhere.”

“Then consider this your mind’s formal invitation to rejoin the group,” says Mrs. Everbrook.

But I have no interest in class. I just want to be with Cecily, just look at her, head to toe, examine every inch of her appearance. I try to pay attention to Mrs. Everbrook, but can’t help searching the room at the same time with my eyes. I soon figure out how to locate Cecily’s desk. She’s like a magnet, drawing me in. And it’s not just Cecily. How does anyone ever pay attention in school, when there are so many other wonderful and confusing images—hundreds, thousands, millions of pixels—constantly surrounding them?