Today, a Friday, had been Caitlin’s first day back at school after gaining sight. “How was it?” her mother asked. There was only one chair in the bedroom, so she sat on the edge of the bed. “What did you see?”

“It was awesome,” Caitlin said. “I thought I’d had a handle on what was going on around me before, but…” She lifted her hands. “But there’s so much. I mean, to actually see hundreds of people in the corridors, in the cafeteria—it was overwhelming.”

Her mother made an odd expression—or, at least, one that Caitlin had never seen before, a quirking of the corners of her mouth, and—ah! She was trying not to grin. “Did people look like you expected them to?”

Even after all these years, her mom still didn’t really get it. It wasn’t as though Caitlin had had dim, or blurry, or black-and-white, or simplified mental pictures of people prior to this; she’d had no pictures of them. Color had meant nothing to her, and although she’d understood shapes and lines and angles, she hadn’t seen them in her mind’s eye; her mind had had no eye.

“Well,” said Caitlin, not exactly answering the question, “I’d already seen Bashira and Sunshine and Mr. Struys on Monday.”

“Sunshine—she’s the other American girl, right?”

“Yes,” Caitlin said.

“I’ve heard Bashira say she’s beautiful.”

What Bashira had actually said was that Sunshine looked like a skank: fake platinum-blond hair, low-cut tops, big boobs, long legs. But Sunshine had been very kind to Caitlin after the disastrous school dance a week ago. “I guess she is pretty,” Caitlin said. “I really don’t know.”

“Did you see Trevor?” her mother asked gently. The Hoser, as Caitlin called him in her blog, had taken her to that dance—but she had stormed out when he kept trying to feel her up.

“Oh, yes,” Caitlin said. “I told him off.”

“Good for you!”