“How long?” Malorie asks.

They’re moving fast, Malorie’s words are breathless, but Olympia knows what she means.

“Since I was six.”

Yes. At the school for the blind. It was her first time, and she can see it today, in her mind’s eye, as if it’s happening again. The man Rick who called the night Olympia and Tom were born, he’d just asked her to get a basket from the room everyone called “the supply shed.” Just a regular classroom down one of the many brick halls in the school she was just beginning to call home. They kept paper and tools and a ladder and scissors and just about everything in that room. Olympia was happy to be asked to do it.

Are you big enough to get me a basket? Rick had said. And Olympia was all smiles. It didn’t matter that Rick couldn’t see that smile or that most of the people in the building would never see her face at all. She was glad to play a part, any part, at all.

But on the way to the room, at the far end of the hall, she saw one.

She knew what it was right away. Even at six she understood it was the thing Malorie had raised her to fear. Yet, gazing upon it, she didn’t feel any worse than she did when she woke up that morning. She was scared. But that was all. And the fear never quite eclipsed any she’d known before. Not even the fear she felt when Malorie told her they were taking a river they’d never even swam in.

More importantly: she didn’t feel crazy. Nothing like that at all. Maybe she was too young to know what mad might feel like, but she wasn’t too young to think.

In fact, the only thing she was worried about, really, was the idea that someone else might see it, too. That someone else would come around the corner and go mad and hurt everybody. Malorie talked about that potentiality all the time.

Then someone did come.

Annette.

Olympia had long wondered about the red-haired woman who told everyone she was blind. She wondered because one night, late, Olympia left their bedroom (a converted classroom like all the rest) to use the bathroom alone. And there, in the stall, seated, she heard someone else enter. Someone who thought they were alone, too.

Olympia, embarrassed, already keeping secrets even then, though not of the magnitude she soon would, heard a match strike and saw a candle come to light, illuminating a sphere in the otherwise pitch-black darkness of the restroom. She peered through the stall door and saw the woman holding the candle to the mirror; saw Annette looking at herself.

Annette. Blind.

But looking.