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hesitantly, probably
wondering about the sunglasses, since he wasn't in Mrs. Robellard's first-period class and hadn't heard about my breaking my regular glasses.
    Wow,
I thought.
What's the matter with me? He really IS good-looking.
    He faced back around and headed for the office, and that was when I noticed: His ears were long and pointed. I would have seen them—I would have
had
to have seen them—if they'd been there before, while he'd been kneeling in front of me feeling for evidence of a cracked skull.
    So these glasses let me see dead people still walking and talking, they let me see the gorgeous Tiffanie Mills looking like a century-old crone, they let me see blue guys who delighted in mayhem, and they let me see Julian York looking better then he did when I wasn't wearing the glasses, if you didn't mind ears that made him look like he was a refugee from a
Star Trek
convention.
    All in all, I would have felt better if I'd really had a concussion.

7. Conspiracy
    I decided I'd been mature about this long enough: It was time to call my mother and ask her to come pick me up right away on account of my blindness. Best not to mention the possible mental aberration. Not wanting to catch sight of any more weirdness, I took off the glasses and felt my way to the pay phone, down by the gym.
    When I dialed my mother's work number, her voice mail came on and told me she was in the Syracuse office for the day. Syracuse is slightly over an hour and a half away. She probably hadn't even arrived there yet. I tried to picture myself leaving a message for her to please turn right around and drive
another hour and a half back to pick me up from school because I'd broken my glasses.
    Hmmm. Naw, that wasn't something I wanted to picture.
    The recording went on to tell me that if this was an emergency and I needed to speak to someone in person, I was to dial Paula at extension 335.
    Considering I'd never met Paula, I decided she wasn't likely to pick me up, either.
    I was desperate enough to call my mother's current husband, Bill. The guy who answered said Bill was away from his desk and asked, "Is this his daughter?"
    Geez, a trick question. I said, "Uhh, this is Wendy." Let this guy make up his own mind about the relationship.
    He said, "Wendy, he's doing performance appraisals in building fifty-four. Do you need me to get him?"
    I remembered Bill obsessing about this at dinner the last couple nights. Performance appraisals are like report cards for the workers at his company, and Bill—being a supervisor—is like the teacher handing the report cards out.
    Probably not exactly a good time to interrupt him.
    "When will he be through?" I asked.
    "One o'clock," the guy told me. "Then he's
meeting our supervisor for lunch and to get
his
p.a. So, probably around two o'clock. Should I have him call you?"
    School would be almost over by then.
    "No, it's nothing important." Surely the lie came through in my voice.
    If so, this guy didn't have kids or wasn't good at picking up nuances—someone should probably mention that in
his
p.a. "Okay," he said, and hung up.
    I wouldn't meet up with Shelley till lunch, but I worked out a plan: Without explaining why—just in case I
was
simply losing my mind—I would have her try on the glasses while Julian and Tiffanie were in view. If they looked to Shelley the way they looked to me, that would prove something ... though
what,
exactly, I wasn't sure.
    Of course, Shelley would need convincing to even try the glasses on. She would point out that she didn't wear glasses. I would tell her: "Just put them on." But what if she couldn't make anything out through the lenses? After all, they fit
my
prescription. So didn't that mean everything would be a blur to her? And—come to think of it—how come they just happened to fit my prescription? Was that just a coincidence? Or had someone meant for me to find them? Had they, in fact, been made specifically for me?
    Yeah, right, I told myself. I was becoming