She was the most beautiful girl she had ever seen, and she hated it.
Her hair was smooth and golden, shiny, sleek, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make it look messy or uncared for. Her face was heart-shaped and her complexion was perfect. She never used any products; she never even wore sunscreen, always hoping that she would get a sunburn that would leave her face wrinkled and damaged, but it never happened. Her eyes were turquoise and never stopped sparkling, no matter how little she slept. Her nose was nicely shaped, her mouth just the right size, her waist and hips in harmonized curves, her proportions perfect. She was gorgeous, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.
It wasn't fair, she thought, that everyone believed her to be perfect. Just because she looked wonderful didn't mean that she was wonderful. Her parents, the two people who supposedly knew her best, thought that she was as spectacular as she looked. She didn't have any friends. Everyone refused to look beyond the beauty.
Shiny black metal, smooth, polished, dangerous
When she was ten, she shouted at her six-year-old cousin and slapped her across the face, hard, leaving a harsh red mark. She waited for everyone to get mad, and everyone did, but not at her. They yelled at her cousin, why are you so annoying, why can't you behave? Her aunt and uncle apologized to her again and again. Her plan had failed.
lifted out of the drawer where it was hidden for years, untouched
But then again, she had only been ten at the time. She didn't know what really made people mad, what things were really unaccepted by society. When she was thirteen, she tried again. She brought a razor blade with her to school and began slashing the wooden desks in the science lab, waiting for her teacher to come over and see.
"Did you find that razor blade in the desk?" her teacher asked, and then, without waiting for a reply, said, "I'm sorry, you'll have to stop playing with it. It is against the rules. Who was chopping at this desk, anyway? It must have been someone from the last class." The teacher took the razor and didn't mention the incident to anyone. Off the hook again.
until now, when it has a use, a purpose,
And then, one year later, she took another student's research paper home to edit. She typed it all, word for word, into her computer, printed it out, and handed it in as her final draft. A month later, when the papers were handed back, she gleefully waited for her punishment. Plagiarism was not tolerated.
Instead, the other student was hauled to the main office for a meeting with the teacher, the principal, and his parents. Expelled. Ruined.
a role: to help
She tried to explain, but everyone assumed she had a crush on the boy, who was supposedly good-looking and that she was just trying to get him out of trouble. She was surprised. She didn't know that blind people were so creative.
She apologized to him over the phone, but he said it was all his fault. He said he didn't know how it had happened, but somehow her paper had ended up in his brain and he had handed it in. He asked her what he could do to make up for it.
She hung up on him and refused to speak to him again.
Later on, she overheard her parents telling someone about her, our daughter is perfect in every way, beautiful on both the outside and the inside. Our daughter has never done anything wrong in her life.
She calmly walked into the kitchen, poured oil onto the floor, dropped a lighted match, and walked back upstairs to tell her parents that the house was on fire.
people see. It is heavy, dangerous, a tool only used when
They congratulated her, brave girl, to walk back up the stairs instead of just leaving when she saw that a match had accidentally fallen onto the spilled oil. Her mother remembered spilling that oil earlier that day, and hadn't cleaned it up because the phone had rang. They called the fire department, and after a few weeks, the kitchen had been fixed.
It's physically impossible for her to do something wrong, her teacher said at parent-teacher conferences, and her parents agreed. Because logically, how could someone with such a face have any bad intentions?
someone is desperate.
She sat in her room and thought and thought, not knowing what to do, how to evade it. If they would only see one bad thing she did, just one, then she would be able to stop. But they wouldn't see it. All they saw was her face, her eyes, her hair, her perfect proportions,
It feels right to her, a desperate girl, so she lifts it up, places her hand in the right place,
her beauty.
and aims at the crowd in the busy street.
Her curse.
She pulls the trigger, and a noise rips through the air, even surprising her, the cause of it, and someone falls down, in plain view of everyone, of her parents, and the red begins to spread,
And she had an idea,
and people scream. And her father snatches the gun out of her hand and holds it out, and her mother shrieks, "John, how could you?" and her father shakes his head helplessly,
to get rid of the
and the police come, the people point to her father, and her father gives himself up, her mother crying and crying. But then her mother hugs her and says that her father will be okay, that it will all be okay. And she is still free to live in a world of
blindness.