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chose Hieronymus Rexaphin. Stay. Stay here. Its breath was older than the craters that had long since been filled with the water of melted comets.

chapter two
     
    She was an excellent friend of his.
    Her goggles were not as ugly or utilitarian as most — her frames were translucent and stylish.
    She also dyed her hair blue — as long as Hieronymus had known her, and that was since the third grade, she was the little girl with the electric blue hair.
    And through all the school years that followed, her hair never changed. It was always blue. And it rhymed with her name, which was Slue. Sometimes people called her Slue-Blue. A nickname.
    She was the girl with the blue hair.
    And it was secretly and deeply important to her that people noticed the electric blue hair first.
    It was the essential part of her fashion scheme to distract from the initial impression she was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl.
     
    Slue Memling was the same age as Hieronymus. They were both sixteen. There were only five kids in their entire school of two thousand students who were classified as bearing lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis, but none of them ever spoke to each other. By habit, or by force of nature, or by two hundred years of social engineering, the ones with the goggles habitually distrusted and avoided their own kind. And of course it was always in the back of their minds. The unspoken spectre. To look at each other without the goggles. Death in the neighborhood, in the area, whenever a pair of goggles pointed in the same direction. Final punishment for daring to imagine.
    They were all so ashamed of themselves. The inexplicable eye color hidden behind their goggles made them all desperately wary of who they really were.
     
    Slue was the exception. She succeeded, by way of her hair color, her fancy (imported from Earth, made in Italy) goggles, and her sheer enthusiastic force of personality, in putting her One Hundred Percent Lunar stigma several notches below the cosmetic attributes she invented. And it worked extremely well — the first thing everyone noticed was her blue hair. And her eyewear was too chic to be classified as anything but high fashion. Lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis was not the first thing people thought when encountering Slue.
    You’re kidding! Slue-Blue’s a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl? How about that! I had no idea!
    She was tall. She was very striking. She was very funny. An excellent student.
    All the boys were in love with her.
     
    Hieronymus had forgotten, but Ringo remembered the time his son came home from school back in the third grade.
    Da, there is this really beautiful girl in my class! She has blue hair, and she is just like me. She wears goggles too…
     
    Hieronymus himself was not immune to her undeniable charms, but he kept it tucked away and hidden, annoyed with himself that he had let their friendship slide into this confidential yet platonic, brother-sisterlike point of no return. He secretly, ever-so-slightly fancied her — but it was too late. The definitions were made: she was his excellent friend, and just a friend, and in that static zone it stayed. And probably for the better.
    Still, there were always those repressed thoughts whenever two One Hundred Percenters just happened to pass each other on the street or in a corridor or got stuck face to face on a crowded subway car. It entered his mind, phantom-like, every time he saw her.
     
    Of course it’s not true! We won’t die! We can look at each other! We can!
    And what would we see, if we did look at each other without the goggles?
     
    They may have both thought that, but the question never came up between Hieronymus and Slue. Whenever they were together in class or in the cafeteria or the library, the other students stared, but only for a few seconds.
How unusual — two goggle-freaks actually talking to each other.
    And except for the goggles — and what they meant — Hieronymus was almost a normal student. Almost a typical