Dear Diary III

Dear Diary III

1. January

Early in January, Kirsty sat on the bus: she was travelling homeward from the opticians with a little smile on her face. “At last,” she thought, “freedom from glasses.” Actually, that freedom hadn’t quite arrived, but she had been told, upon asking the optician tremulously about the possibility of wearing contact lenses, that she could come back and get herself checked out, with no quibbling, no concerned look or tone from the optician, just an unruffled “Yeah, I should think so.”

It appeared to her that one of the biggest, long-cherished dreams of her life would finally come true: no more looking at the world through thick spectacle lenses. No more having people being put off by them, especially the kind of people she most wanted to be with. No more coke bottles. She glanced at her dim reflection in the window of the bus, seeing just those facets of light that had plagued her for so long. No more having her face dominated by glasses, her eyes trapped behind them, shrunken and in her opinion looking ridiculous. Freedom, at last, just around the corner. A “Yippie!” was well justified.

In her Diary that night she wrote ‘Yippie, I can wear contacts! Well, actually I haven’t been told I can, but haven’t been told I can’t or there’s no point trying, which is pretty good. My mum is so pleased for me. As for my sisters, they are pleased too. I doubt Amy & Melissa will ever wear contacts, Emma probably will, Louise I don’t know because she has weird eyes. Yeah I know I have weird eyes, but although they’re strongly myopic, they aren’t mismatched. Lordy me, this time last year Louise was having a hellish time, up to her eyeballs (!) in patches here, there and everywhere. Of course, she hated it. But she’s been getting new lenses in her glasses more often than anyone, despite mum being penniless. At the moment her vision is stable with a thicker lens for her bad right eye. Says she can see fine out of it - I know her, maybe she’s just saying that to try to avoid another bout of patching! Poor Louise.’

She regarded her reflection in the mirror for a long moment, as she had done achingly so more times than she could remember. As always, the glasses she wore helped her to see so clearly, but conversely looked so ugly on her face. She had long had to pay this devil’s price in order to see, a price that escalated year by year, but now, at last, there seemed a way to break that agreement, and still see. She smiled, and her reflection smiled back. This time the increase in her lens strength was only half a dioptre or so; a puny amount compared with times past, but then she was all but finished growing at the fine old age of seventeen, going on eighteen in a few weeks. But this small amount was on top of many larger increases, all in all amounting to 13.25 of myopia, which meant a lot of lens. Yes, the contacts would make all the difference, she hoped. Santa Claus had signally failed to deliver a suitable boyfriend when all around her were fully engaged, so now she could avail herself of rather more reliable means of such. The previously dashed hopes of several years of frustration were banked on them.

The trip to the contact lens specialist during the following week was one of anxious anticipation. Occasionally during the last few days she’d been noticed acting a little strangely by the people at the fish & chip shop at which she had been working; where she was increasingly known as the “girl with the glasses”, for obvious reasons. She hoped that pretty soon she’d be known as the “girl in the chip shop”. Or the “girl without glasses who had a much better job than working in the chip shop”. Or whatever: as long as the glasses went, the rest was fine by her at the moment.

At last she was at the specialists, sitting while he talked about the pros and cons of contact lenses. Of course, for her, there was only one pro worth talking about, that being the impact on her looks. She ended up having to take off her thick glasses, clutching them over-tightly as she peered into a machine designed not to test her vision, as so many times before, but to test her eyes’ reaction to physical contact. For a moment she was just peering into the man’s eyes, not really seeing anything, her uncorrected vision seeming so useless and terrible to her, but then she felt an odd sensation, like an insect crawling around on her eye. She blinked involuntarily, and then he tried again, and despite the weird feeling and the knot in her stomach, she was able to cope with it.

After a similar experience with the other eye, he told her to put her glasses back on, and so Kirsty saw the smile on his face, which meant good news, she thought excitedly. ‘I’m pleased to say you can wear contacts, from a physical point of view. I usually like people to try before they buy them, so if you want, I can put a pair of blank lenses in and you can try them out.’ ‘What do you mean, blank?’ ‘They don’t have any corrective power, they are just so you know what you are getting into. You’ll have to wear your glasses while you do this. Just try them for an hour or so, come back and tell me what you think.’ Kirsty agreed, wanting to know what it would feel like. She soon knew: he asked her to take off her glasses, and then lean back in her chair so he could put them in for her. It was quite a bizarre feeling for Kirsty: she felt her eyes asking “what’s going on?” at the continued touch of these two bits of squishy stuff in her eyes. Her eyes clouded, then mostly cleared, and then she put her glasses on and the world was back to normal, more or less. She said, ‘it feels like I have something in my eyes.’ ‘Yes, that’s because you do, but these aren’t designed specifically for your eyes: the lenses we can supply for you will not feel like that, since they will be made to fit your eyes. If you can accept these, the proper ones should be fine.’

Kirsty went out the door for her prescribed “hour out and about”, still blinking more than she normally would, still feeling how weird they felt in her eyes. During the hour her eyes seemed OK at first, but then started to water a little in the wind, so she tried to stay out of it, turning her face away when it blew: “one advantage of glasses,” she thought. Eventually she returned, and was asked how she had got on. She replied, ‘fine, everything was OK. I’m sure I can get used to them.’ He took them out, and her eyes blinked a little more, still wondering what had happened, as they sat and talked turkey about costs and delivery times. To Kirsty the cost was all but irrelevant, at least compared to the benefits. It transpired that Kirsty’s new contact lenses would be delivered in 7-10 days; she’d get a call in order to arrange their collection, and then have her lesson in lens care and insertion. Kirsty went home full of unmistakable glee, even more so than that when she’d been informed that wearing contacts was a possibility during the previous week.

In her diary that night she noted ‘Well, it looks like I am getting contacts, those things I have dreamed about for so long. No more “Miss Nerdy Specs” for me…. Hooray! I ought to find a boyfriend now very easily.’ She paused, as she often did, glancing at herself in the mirror, then back at the diary ‘I wonder what my sisters really think about this. My twin sisters, Amy and Melissa, don’t seem to have any trouble finding boyfriends. I’ve never heard anyone call them pretty, well not like they do me. And they both have boys in tow, too. Neither of them are stunners, but I’d have them. Emma - well, Emma is more like me, although I think her glasses will end up thicker than mine. She is currently going through what I was a few years ago. Except that she is a bit - bigger than me up top, and I don’t mean her head. If she carries on like this she’ll be bigger than anyone I know. Mum will have another headache, not just supplying four daughters with thick glasses, but also buying Emma bras like hammocks. Perhaps with big boobs she’ll have less hassle with finding boys than I did.’

After another pause, she told the diary about Louise’s situation ‘Well, Louise won’t be worrying about contact lenses for a long time, I think. She got new lenses in her glasses yet again a few days ago, and for her joy just like mine - no more patching, for now, unless something else happens. She’s been patched all over, it seems like, and is utterly fed up with it. She’s only eight and the smartass school bullies decided to pick on her, oh what fun that wasn’t for her. Finally she can see through both eyes and the trouble seems to be settling down. Her right lens is about 1.5 times as thick and strong as the other one. I wouldn’t be surprised if she needs more patching later on, but I haven’t told her so in case it takes the shine off her generally happy mood. I can’t really see a way to patch contacts, so I think they’ll stay out of her reach for a bit.’

At the end of the month, Kirsty was on the bus home from town, having been to the contact lens specialist. She had made a similar trip many times in the past: wearing new glasses, looking around at her surroundings, noting how her view of the world had changed from fuzzy to sharp. But this time was different. This time it wasn’t her view of the world that had changed, it was the image of herself that was presented to the world. She was wearing her very own contact lenses for the first time: they irritated her eyes marginally, again as if her eyes were asking “what was going on?” Occasionally they got a bit more than irritated, thus she was forced to close them, only to find the irritation didn’t automatically go away. She covered her eyes briefly, then uncovered them and looked around. She wondered if this was this worth the trouble, to which her answer was “you bet it is!” Then she saw her face reflected in the window glass, albeit poorly since it wasn’t a proper mirror: what she saw made her jump a little, although not as much as the first time she’d seen it. “It’s me - wow!” She thought. The first time she’d seen herself clearly not with glasses, but instead with contacts, she’d not recognized the unfamiliar face in the mirror: this time, she told herself “it’s me, silly!”

Once home, her sisters came in in pairs or alone as they wished, talking to her, asking what it was like. Emma seemed more interested than any of them, openly wishing she was old enough to get rid of her thick glasses. Amy and Melissa were just curious, but neither of them were suitable for contacts: they’d been told that ages ago. Louise asked Kirsty jokingly, ‘where’s my big sister?’, Kirsty smiled, and pointed at herself, telling her happily, ‘here I am - in disguise!’ After most of them had left, Melissa sat and told her, ‘you know, I told you were pretty, now you can see, don’t you agree?’ Kirsty turned to her familiar mirror with a very unfamiliar face. She sat blinking at herself, tugging at her blonde hair rather pointlessly, turning her head slightly. She shrugged, and then said ‘I suppose so. I hope I can get a boyfriend now!’ ‘You know, you should have got one before now. You didn’t need to get contacts, I think. Amy and me both have boyfriends, and we still wear glasses stronger than yours.’ Melissa failed to mention that Amy’s boyfriend was blinder than either of them. Kirsty didn’t rise to that, so Melissa left her alone in her room, considering her new look: her new prettiness was unveiled for the first time, and she wondered where and how best to make use of it.

2. February

The first Saturday afternoon in February found Kirsty playing around with makeup and suchlike in her room, thoroughly enjoying her new unbespectacled look. She wore contacts whenever she could, only switching to glasses in circumstances of dire necessity. She smiled at herself in the mirror, glad of so many things about her new look: the way she could do eye makeup for herself, not having to rely on someone else’s assistance, or else risking poking herself in the eye because she couldn’t see. The blusher situation was considerably better, thanks to her no longer needing glasses: previously, that which she applied was split into two distinct portions: one small and shrunken, the other apparently on someone else’s face, larger and normal, but nowhere near her eyes. Everything seemed much better with contacts, not just her face, but her whole life, she thought dreamily without much consideration of the basic facts of the aforementioned life: she was still working at the fish & chip shop, still without a boyfriend, and still living with her mum and 4 younger sisters. Oddly, her thoughts turned to one particular boy a year or two older than her, a regular customer at the shop: he seemed to have smiled at her at lot until recently, but now he seemed a bit distant, unconcerned. Idly she shrugged, not sure when this had happened, and certainly unsure as to why “he probably found someone else to smile at,” she thought vaguely. If she’d realised that the lack of glasses had put him off her, she’d have been nearer the truth.

At a knock at the door, Emma came in, breaking her thoughts. She smiled at her big sister, although in one way she was the big one, and asked, as if it needed any explanation, ‘hi, Kirsty, what you doing?’ Kirsty glanced at her, and then returned to make-up, saying, ‘just playing around with makeup.’ Emma nodded, sat on the bed beside her, and picked up Kirsty’s glasses, which were lying around slightly forlorn and abandoned on her bedside table. Briefly she peered through the thick lenses, and then asked, ‘can I try them?’ Kirsty let her, so Emma swapped her own for Kirsty’s. ‘Yours aren’t that much stronger than mine - I can see clearly with them. What do I look like?’ This was true: Emma was only half a dioptre behind Kirsty, despite the four year age gap. Alas, her own glasses had fallen behind her myopia by some 1.25 dioptres. As so often in their family, she was having to put up with a bit of fuzzy vision. Kirsty told her, ‘sorry, you can’t have them, I need them when my contacts are being cleaned.’ Kirsty instantly regretted that remark: it was only two years ago that Emma had been palmed off with her hand-me-down glasses, a memory that gave neither of them any joy. And of course, Emma was envious of Kirsty’s new look. For the first time in years, though, Kirsty could make a comment on how someone looked in her glasses, other than “I can’t see.” She said in a conciliatory tone, ‘you look fine,’ hoping Emma wouldn’t get upset with her. Instead, Emma countered, ‘when I grow up, I’m getting contacts. I don’t want to wear glasses all my life, looking like a geek.’ Holding her glasses up, she continued, ’the boys will get scared off if these things get any thicker.’

Kirsty turned and smiled knowingly at her, and asked, ‘so you’ve got a boyfriend then?’ Emma’s eyebrows leaped in surprise and a little dismay: she’d hoped to keep that under wraps for now. After an embarrassed pause, Emma blurted out, ‘yeah, there’s these boys….’ ‘Boys? One not enough?’ Kirsty laughed a little, causing a little dark look to dart across Emma’s. Kirsty placated her by saying, ‘it’s OK - I think. I don’t think you’re too young to have a boyfriend. But I’d stick to one at a time, if I was you.’ Emma retorted, ‘if I was you, it’d be none at a time.’ She immediately regretted needling her big sister like that. There was an awkward pause, then Kirsty said flatly, ‘give me my glasses back.’ Without further comment, Emma did so. With her slightly fuzzy, uncertain vision restored, she looked up at Kirsty and said, ‘sorry, Big Sis. You won’t tell Mum will you?’ Kirsty shook her head, but then admonished her, ‘be careful, Emma.’ Emma got up, with a sheepish “see you later”, and went out. Kirsty shrugged and shook her head.

A little later Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘Emma is stirring up some trouble for herself, that’s my thought. I’m so tempted to tell mum, but I doubt that will stop her. And I did say I wouldn’t tell. Oh, I really am like the 2nd Mum around here sometimes, my sisters come to me for all sorts that they wouldn’t dare go to Mum with.’ For a moment she stared into space, realising that at nearly 18 years old, she was quite capable of being a mum herself. The small problem was the lack of a boyfriend. She continued ‘I suppose it’s not all Emma’s fault. She didn’t ask to be 13 years old and have big boobs any more than I asked for thick glasses. The way her school uniform fits her is a bit tight too, I suppose all in all it brings the boys running after her. Oh, I think I envy her. Perhaps Louise will have contacts and big boobs and have it all, good luck to her if she does.’

Kirsty came home from work a few days later; a Thursday afternoon, tired after serving customers fish & chips that lunchtime and quite ready to chill out and relax. She let herself in, then heard a sound upstairs: a few footsteps, then a little stifled sob. Her mind raced: who had a problem this time? What was wrong? Softly she crept upstairs, curious, and stopped at the top of the stairs, listening. There was another sob, and Kirsty knew which door it came from: Her mother’s room. She wondered what was she doing here at that time of day, she was normally at work. “Must be something badly wrong,” she thought as she went to it, knocked, and then called out ‘Mum?’ There was no answer, so Kirsty called again, then her mother answered, her voice breaking a little ‘Kirsty?’

Kirsty went in, and found her mother sitting with an old, battered box of mementoes: pictures and suchlike from her family, some items from her various male “friends,” and also some things from her childhood. She looked up at Kirsty, pushing up her glasses to help her see: they didn’t help as much as usual, because her eyes were full of tears, her face streaked with them. Kirsty started to ask what was wrong, but then as she sat next to her, her mother showed her the photo she was holding. It was an old picture, of a group of four young children: two boys, two girls. Kirsty had seen it before: it was of her mother and her brothers and sister. All of them wore glasses of styles contemporary to the photo. Her mother gasped out, ‘he’s dead - my big brother’s dead!’

As Kirsty hugged her mother, and tried her best to comfort her, as she had in her turn done for her when things were bad, she remembered her Uncle Antony. He would have been, 50? She couldn’t remember. Well, it hardly mattered. There was nothing really that Kirsty could say: when someone is deeply in grief, there’s nothing really to be said. But the hugs help, as they did for her mother. After a while, Kirsty let her mother tell her what had happened: apparently he’d died of a heart attack after a car crash, that’s what her sister-in-law had said. Kirsty didn’t really know what to do, she felt a little strange and isolated, unable to relate to her mother’s loss. She offered to cook dinner, then went downstairs to get it underway anyway when her mum didn’t give a firm reply either way.

Some time later, when the rest of the family had arrived in dribs and drabs, her mother had collected herself and her wits to tell them all, and that they would have to go to the funeral. Emma looked at Louise, the Twins at nothing very much except their mother, trying to decipher her mood from too far away for them visually, whilst Kirsty got on with cooking.

That Sunday, Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘The last few days have been really weird. My Uncle Antony is dead, and Mum is very quiet, very sad. We have a funeral to go to. I wonder what that is like. None of us - I mean my sisters - have ever been to one. I think Mum went to one before any of us were around. I don’t know what it will be like, and I don’t really want to ask Mum, even if she does know, it’s hardly a good time to ask. Oh, all my relations will come too, that will be fun. No, not fun. It is a funeral, isn’t it?’

The following Wednesday Kirsty and her mother took a day off work, and made sure her daughters were all ready and suitably attired to attend a funeral. Kirsty looked strangely ravishing in her dark trouser suit bought for rather more hopeful occasions, such as job interviews; her younger sisters had to make do with whatever they had that seemed sombre enough for the occasion. At just after 10pm a car arrived to take them to the church: of course, it had to be a big one, being as it had to fit six people.

As the car pulled up outside the church, Kirsty noted that there were a number of cars both parked and in the process of disgorging their passengers, who were mostly attired in dark, muted, sombre colours. Emma and the Twins were talking about something, then Emma broke off as she saw some, and then more of the fellow mourners. Amy asked irritably, ’eh? What’s going on? Are we there?' After a long moment, Emma said distractedly, ’errr - yeah…' Melissa said, ‘well, tell us what’s going on, then.’ This was a common question from her and her twin sister: but then their vision was pretty terrible, even fully corrected. They could get an idea of landscape and fairly gross landmarks if they’d seen them before, but this was unfamiliar territory, and of course they were hopeless with reading signs.

There were at least a couple of dozen mourners, either walking toward the church doorway, standing around in small clumps or getting out of cars. Some were young, some old, some male, some female: as to be expected from any group of people, funeral goers or not. But what Kirsty and then Emma noticed was quite obvious: there were so many of them wearing glasses. It seemed as if about three quarters of them were bespectacled. There seemed to be groups of myopic people, also a few with thick pebble-like plus lenses. All around, glasses, glasses, and not many of them particularly thin or weak. Kirsty had never realised what a poor-sighted family she came from. Over there was a young couple, some relatives she might meet twice in a lifetime if she was lucky: she wore glasses not as thick as the ones she’d dumped a few weeks ago, he didn’t, but gazed briefly, longingly at her. The car came to a halt, and they all got out. Kirsty began to feel a little strange: she would be a minority here, being as she wore no glasses. They walked up to the church, her mother guiding the twins with a gentle “this way.”

There was no standing around outside for them, they went straight in. There was the expected organ music playing, but Kirsty wasn’t listening: instead, she was looking around. Already the church was filling up, and as outside, the glasses were everywhere, and in the majority. Mentally she pinched herself, and told herself “This is a funeral, you haven’t come to gawp at people.” She stopped doing so, and simply watched. As she did, the last stragglers came in. One of them was a small group: what she thought were a middle-aged married couple, bespectacled, and a young lad of about her age, nineteen or so, she guessed. He didn’t wear glasses, but she did like the look of him. She desperately fought the urge to gawp.

The service got under way, with the expected things associated with a funeral: eventually it came to hymns. Someone had thoughtlessly forgotten to tell everyone the hymns, so they had to put them up at the front. Naturally Amy and Melissa, being partially blind had an excuse for not seeing that far, so Emma had to help them, Mum was busy trying to choke the words out, and Kirsty, well she started singing, and then her eyes fell on the young lad she’d seen earlier. He was in a bit of a muddle, and then Kirsty knew why: she saw him squinting into the distance. She smiled knowingly, being as he was in such a family of myopes, the chances were he was too, but too vain or whatever else to wear glasses. Somehow he twigged the right tune. Kirsty found herself totally detached from the funeral, her eyes and thoughts drawn to him. She thought to herself “He looks a nice boy. I hope I can meet him later.”

The service flew by almost unnoticed by Kirsty: perhaps that was cruel for her mother, but Kirsty did her best to stay in touch with proceedings, however tenuously. Then it was over, and she was escorting her distraught mother outside again and then toward the burial plot. Such things are never easy, and this was no exception. Kirsty fought to keep her focus on the job in hand, namely that of comforting her mother. After that, they all went off to the wake for a short time. As soon as they were there, Kirsty looked around for the young man she’d espied in the church, but there was no sign of him. Quite soon, it was time to go. Kirsty was silently regretful that she’d not had a chance to say hello. She had hoped that she might just get a chance to meet him and talk to him. Alas, it was not to be.

3. March

A few days into March, Kirsty sat watching TV late at night with her mother. Yet again the Twins were out with their respective boyfriends. Kirsty didn’t see as much of them as she did formerly, what with her being at work, and those two being out seemingly more often than not. Kirsty glanced over to her mum, who looked perpetually tired and worn out by the cares of the world: she was 47 years old, with a reasonable looking face, but lacking Kirsty’s relatively gentle curviness or Emma’s burgeoning bustline, nor the tall willowiness of the twins. Instead she was just a bit overweight; perhaps in her youth she was more shapely, but not so now, but Kirsty hadn’t known her then. Overwork, anxiety and stress did that, built up over years of unremitting struggle, and the loss of her Brother had hardly helped.

Kirsty’s contacts were beginning to irritate her after a long day’s wear, and she wanted them out for comfort’s sake. But looking at her mother’s glasses, cheap, ugly plastic frames with lenses thicker than her fingers or thumb, served to remind her of her own thick glasses, those things she’d banished from her face at all times save late at night and early mornings. Her mother looked down through her glasses at the newspaper, twitching her head up and down oddly. This was because she was now in bifocals: she could see clearly into the distance, Kirsty mused, albeit with thick lenses, but closeup was getting harder and harder. She’d had them since for a few months now, and still wasn’t entirely used to them. Kirsty shuddered at the thought of bifocals: they’d been suggested for her, in order to slow down her myopia, to which she’d said “no way.” Her mother had a little segment in the bottom of each lens - which Kirsty thought looked horrible. To think that this was the fate that awaited her! She hoped that she would have at least thirty years of contact lenses, no geeky look, no specs. Surely that was enough to find a suitable boyfriend? She hoped silently that this would be sufficient time.

On the Saturday following that, Kirsty decided to work all day at the chip shop: at least thus she got a free meal there. The place opened all day Saturday, from about 11 pm till late. It was during the afternoon Kirsty noticed a strange smell that was certainly not fishy, nor indeed chippy. Too late she realised what it was: burning. One of the chip ovens was belching foul-smelling smoke, causing the the owner to cry out in alarm and dash in quickly to find out what was going on. It wasn’t Kirsty’s fault, of course. The oven had overheated - he said it sometimes did that - and although the chips were overdone and had to be thrown away, and the windows opened for a while, no harm was done. But he saw that she was crying - not with any great emotion, but got a bit confused by that and said, ‘sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault.’ Kirsty dabbed at her eyes, shaking her head, ’no, it’s just my eyes, they sting a bit. They don’t like the smoke with the contacts.' He nodded, trying to appear as if he knew what she meant, when the fact was that he had no idea what this was like at all.

Slowly the smoke cleared, but Kirsty’s eyes still stung a bit and watered a lot: she was in fact quite alarmed at how much they did. She was unable to serve behind the counter, so the owner let her sit in the back room for a while to help her recover. Even after quite a while Kirsty’s eyes still felt yukky, and watered far more than she’d ever known them to, and this effect wasn’t going away. Blearily, tearily, and with great reluctance but with resignation, she reached for her bag, took out a hard spectacle case, and the little bottle-shaped thing that held her contacts while she was cleaning them. Now this was a delicate operation, even at the best of times: thankfully she was yet to lose a contact lens despite her terrible uncorrected vision.

Firstly, she took out her glasses: for her, trusty, dependable, dead easy to look after, but horrible to look at. She opened them and lay them on the bench next to her, where she could just drop her hand on them and thus find them hopefully instantly and without inordinate groping and fumbling. Then she leaned forward, and pulled the contact lens from her left eye. Instantly her naked eye blinked and seemed to sigh with relief: it felt a whole lot better already, but saw a whole lot worse. She put the contact lens in the holder, and then pulled the other one out and put that in the holder too. The feeling of relief was a pleasure, the blur a reminder of her past. Holding the contact lens holder and bottle very close, she carefully slipped the former into the latter, then screwed the top tightly shut. Then her hand fell onto her glasses, felt them and lifted them to her face, and put them on. Once again she had a clear view of the world: except this time, it was just like it used to be. This was an unwelcome reminder of the situation she’d thought had gone forever: wearing glasses outside her house. She put the contact lens holder and glasses case back in her bag, stood up and straightened her hair a little in her hand mirror, whilst trying to ignore her glasses. She frowned, and then sighed, grateful she had glasses with her, sad she had to wear them when she didn’t want to. Blinking, her eyes soon recovered their normal unwateryness, with only a little lingering irritation. After a few minutes she went back to serving.

That night she noted in her Diary ‘I had a scare today, the cooker at work went wrong and the place went smoky. My eyes didn’t like it, which is weird because normally they don’t water much at anything. They are OK now. I have been a good girl wearing my thick, ugly glasses all day, and they feel fine. If they don’t feel right tomorrow, I’ll go and see the contact lens specialist again.’

About a week later Kirsty pulled on her baseball cap - for no real reason other than to look cool, and walked out of her bedroom carrying her sunglasses. She bumped into Emma, who spotted her carrying her sunglasses, and exclaimed, giggling a little, ‘what do you want those for? It’s not sunny, it’s all cold and cloudy outside!’ Kirsty stopped for a moment, pushed them onto her face, then explained, ‘it’s for when I ride my bicycle, to stop the bits of dust blowing into my eyes and irritating them.’ Now that was a problem no-one in her immediate family had had for some years, being as all of them had to wear glasses in order to see. One of the few advantages to glasses was that they tended to shield the eyes from such problems. Kirsty’s were now very much exposed, and with contact lenses there, sensitive to any irritants that might fly into them. Emma put her hands on her broadening hips, and said, ’that’s silly… it’s just like you’re wearing glasses still.' ’no, because these look a million times cooler.' Emma shrugged, imperfectly convinced by Kirsty’s eyewear, so Kirsty left her to it and went out.

One day during the third week of March, Kirsty’s mum came home a little later than usual, her knees scraped: she’d fallen off her bike. Kirsty looked quite shocked to see her like this: people of her age didn’t usually fall off bikes much. Her mum complained ‘I hit the kerb, the stupid bike hit the kerb.’ Kirsty made her sit down, then she found a plaster for the worst scrape, and after dinner which Kirsty had cooked, her mother slowly confided to Kirsty her vision “might not be what it was.”

Admittedly with 14 dioptres of myopia, it wasn’t much anyway, but could be corrected to 20/20 without any problem. After a few checks and comparisons along the lines of “can you read that over there” between Kirsty and her mother, it turned out her mother wasn’t seeing that well. She complained, ’everything is a little bit blurry - I can’t understand it, it’s like my vision’s getting worse again and it’s only a few months since I last got new glasses. My eyes haven’t got this bad so quick for years, since I was your age.' Kirsty said, ‘maybe you should go and get it checked out.’ Her mother demurred a little, and then the next day agreed with her eldest daughter.

A few days later - the day before Kirsty’s birthday, her mother went to the optician to see what was going on. Naturally she’d imagined that new glasses were all that were needed and all would be well again. Upon sitting down and telling him what had occurred, the optician looked a little more concerned than would normally make her Mum feel comfortable. He did an eye exam, and found that her visual acuity with glasses was around 20/30 in each eye. This was not terrible by any means, but surprising since it was only about nine months ago that she had received new glasses. He started looking into her eyes, looking at her retinas with a ophthalmoscope. Pretty soon he was sure what was happening to her: her retinas were thinning, thanks to years of being stretched around the back of abnormally long eyeballs. Of course, Kirsty’s Mum wanted to know all about it, what that meant, and was pretty shocked to be told it wasn’t going to get better, in fact it was progressive. She looked at him, and after a bit of pressure from her, he let her try a weak test lens, to convince her that it wasn’t just a bit more myopia like all the other times. No, it wasn’t, of course.

That evening Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘Tomorrow is my birthday, I’ll be 18 and officially an adult. But poor Mum is hardly in the mood to celebrate. She has been told today that she’s going to gradually lose her sight, it will be slow but the optician said about 10 years, maybe 20, she’ll be registered blind. Poor, poor Mum. She just seemed so glum tonight. I was thinking, and I know she was too, that it was just a bit more myopia, as if she needed any more anyway, but this is far worse. The optician can’t give her a lens to correct it. There is nothing at all he can do for her.’ After a short pause, she finished ‘I hope that won’t happen to me when I’m her age.’

On the last day of March, the phone rang and her mother called her down to talk, saying ‘Kirsty, it’s your friend Alice!’ Kirsty spoke at length to her friend Alice, about her life since leaving school, about Jessica, all sorts really. Now that they were all 18, Alice suggested that they meet up sometime soon and have a laugh like old times. Kirsty readily agreed, began to say goodbye, then hurriedly said, ‘oh yeah, Alice, I have a surprise to show you and Jessica.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh, you’ll see!’ ‘Oh, OK - Look, I gotta go, see yah!’ And that was that. Of course, the “surprise” that Kirsty had promised were the contact lenses she was wearing in place of thick glasses. She smiled inwardly at the thought of showing them what she now looked like, no thick lenses, no squinting, no falling over and looking ridiculous. What a prospect that was!

4. April

Kirsty came home on the first Thursday in March, feeling especially tired and drained by serving fish & chips. Mercifully the oven hadn’t gone wrong again, so she hadn’t needed to switch back to glasses where people might see, especially handsome, available young men. Sadly there seemed to be a notable shortage of them around, and Kirsty moaned in her Diary that night ‘Where are all the boys? I can’t understand it! Typical, I go to all the trouble of getting contacts and there’s nobody to see my new look. Perhaps tomorrow I might see someone. Lordy me, there’s enough people coming in some days, but they are either ugly or taken.’

The following morning Kirsty woke up with a throat so sore that it felt like she’d been drinking acid all night long, and then stuck a really big chicken bone in, just to make sure it was really really sore. She had to rummage around the medicine cabinet, and within a few minutes she’d collected a bewildering array of cold remedies that, if they didn’t promise to cure the cold, they’d at least make it more bearable. After dosing herself with what she thought might help, she went to work, her throat aching to varying degrees during the day. Drinking cups of water helped a little, and being busy also helped in the sense that the time went quickly and that there was something to think about other than how ill she felt. She just wanted to go home and die peacefully, not run around after customers. Predictably, once home she flopped in bed after telling everyone how she felt, and sat with her diary, telling it ‘I feel like shit today, OMG my throat hurts. I have a shitty cold and I hate it. I hope it goes away.’

Unfortunately, the next day was worse. She woke with a stuffed head, feeling as if it were crammed full of cotton wool, and her hearing seemed very strange: when Emma came in to say hello and ask how she was, her voice seemed far away, faint and distorted, like a bad telephone line. She felt so tired, her joints seemed to ache, and as soon as she got out of bed she started shivering. Her mother told her to stay in bed and not go to work. Kirsty wearily, but readily agreed, and let her phone work to tell them the news. Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘I’ve got the flu. It feels horrible. There isn’t a bit of me that feels good. I can’t be bothered to put my contacts in yet. That is how bad I feel. '

Louise started being nursemaid to her, but then one of her friends turned up and she disappeared to play with her, thus Kirsty was left alone, staring up at the ceiling through her glasses. “‘Being ill is weird,”she mused pointlessly, “I’m bored, but I don’t feel like doing anything. What a pain.” She glanced over at her contact lenses, sitting innocently in their holder, considered putting them in, and then decided not to bother.

Later on, her mother and Emma went out to buy Emma some new clothes. Emma was rapidly growing in the chest department and the bras she had, although not small, were steadily becoming uncomfortable for her, and also she she needed bigger school uniform too. That left Kirsty with just the rather less than attentive care of Louise and her friend. Quite soon Kirsty took off her glasses and fell asleep, being as there was nothing much else better to do that she felt like attempting.

She was woken by a knock at the door. Despite her vision being a meaningless blur, she could tell it was later by the fact it was starting to get dark outside. A blur stood in the doorway, and spoke with Emma’s voice ‘Kirsty! Are you awake?’ ‘I am now,’ she croaked irritably. Kirsty felt for her glasses on the bedside table as Emma came in, who turned on the light without bothering to ask what Kirsty thought about such an imposition, and in a moment her vision went from useless blur to sharp thanks to her glasses. Emma stood there in her new school uniform, holding a bag of other stuff. She wasn’t wearing her coat, so her ample curves were plain to see. Emma was at that time slightly shorter than Kirsty at that age, namely 13 years old, was fairly pretty, but her bustsize beat Kirsty’s of 5 years further on, 36F to 32DD. Emma showed her the new clothes, mostly for school and necessary, a couple of new bras - Kirsty’s eyes opened at the size of them, and a couple of casual things too. Kirsty was pleased for her, telling her how great it all looked on her, then gratefully sank back into as near oblivion as she could achieve as soon as she left.

The next day, Sunday, wasn’t noticeably different: she drifted from sleep to a bit of reading and the odd visit from her sisters, including Amy and Melissa, who happened to be around at different times. They’d all asked her if she felt better, to which the answer was “no”. Before she went to sleep that night she felt a strange intermittent tickling feeling in her eyes, as if she’d left her contacts in too long. But she hadn’t worn them for two days, so she thought it couldn’t be that.

She woke around eight-thirty Monday morning, and for a moment thought she felt better. Yes, the aches and pains were fading, and the sore throat felt less sore, merely uncomfortable in comparison. Her head still felt stuffed and her hearing weird, but what was new was that her nose was now running. She had to find her tissues quickly and blow it, which she did to no avail: it just made her head hurt and generally demand she not do that again. She sat up in bed, reading and otherwise trying to pass the time of illness as best she could, but after a while she realised her eyes felt irritated: it was like someone was peeling ten tons of onions right in front of her, and they wanted to cry. Slowly her reading efforts ground to a halt as her eyes filled with tears. She had to push up her glasses to dab them dry, but within a couple of minutes, they were watering again and five minutes later she couldn’t see anything with glasses or no, not without another dab.

That was a horrible day for her: she imagined the virus trying to kill her slowly and horribly, and if it couldn’t, it would make her feel as lousy as it possibly could. She suddenly realised she’d never felt this bad before, certainly not with eyes watering all the time. Her mother appeared at lunchtime to check on her, found her apparently weeping, and asked her, ‘what’s wrong?’ To which Kirsty replied, ‘my eyes keep watering. They won’t stop.’ ‘Ahhh, I know. Your father’s brother was like that when he had a cold. When I first met him, I had a cold and he told me about it.’ Kirsty didn’t answer, as her vision was a swimming blur again and needed a dab from a tissue in each eye.

The next day, Tuesday, was about the same, but started off with her eyes watering badly, and ended by nightfall with them only needing to be dried with a tissue every 15 minutes. Her head seemed a little clearer, her throat was feeling better, even the shivering and tiredness were abating. Wednesday morning dawned and Kirsty felt a whole lot better, if a bit drained. Her eyes had even stopped watering, even if they felt a little strange. She was able to get out of bed and do a little light housework, and said to her mother she’d go back to work tomorrow, and later on, as she sat looking at herself in the mirror stuck on her battered old wardrobe, promised herself she would be back in contacts and pretty again, just like before.

And so Thursday came, almost a week after Kirsty had first fell ill, and Kirsty now felt more or less OK. She even put her contacts in just before going to work, and they felt OK. And then later on, during the lunchtime feeding frenzy, she noticed her eyes becoming more and more irritated, and then by about 2:00 pm they were starting to water. She had to face the fact that her eyes weren’t fully recovered yet. She went into the back room and changed back to glasses, and carried on like that for the rest of the day.

On the Friday, she didn’t bother with contacts, hoping another day would bring full recovery. It wasn’t to be. On Saturday she tried again, and after an hour her eyes were weeping again. She was getting anxious by now, so wrote in her diary ‘Something’s not right with my eyes. They don’t like my contacts. They keep weeping. I can’t wear contacts at the moment, it’s not fair. Perhaps tomorrow, it’ll be OK.’ But tomorrow came, then another, then a few more, each with an attempt at wearing contacts that failed within about an hour at most.

Finally, Kirsty had to go make an appointment with the contact lens specialist, with the intention of finding out what was wrong. He listened attentively to her story, then did some tests on her eyes, her guts twisted with anxiety. Using the same contact machine as he’d used before, he was soon able to make her eyes flood. As she sat drying her eyes with no glasses, he waited, then when she had replaced her thick glasses, she could thus see that he didn’t have good news for her, and this impression was confirmed when told her, ‘your tear outflow ducts have been affected by the virus, so that they cannot drain tears from your eyes, and wearing contacts makes this worse.’ Nervously, Kirsty asked, ‘what can be done about it?’ ‘well, we could trying blocking your tear ducts, but then you’d still need to use artificial tears instead.’ She gulped, then shakily asked the question she’d been really wanting but also fearing to ask, ‘could I still wear contacts if that was done?’ ‘I would most strongly recommend you didn’t. The tear levels in your eyes would be very hard to control with the added complication of contacts.’ Kirsty’s shoulders slumped at that news. When she got home, she sobbed all over her mum, then later on, when she’d collected herself, wrote in her Diary ‘Today I got the worst news I’ve ever had. I cannot wear contact lenses anymore! I am so fucked off about that…. Fuck! Life is SHIT! SHIT!!!!’ She collected herself again, and then wrote ‘Back to ugly Miss Geek for me, no more pretty little Kirsty. Oh, SHIT! Oh, FUCKING HELL!!!’ She had to stop writing just so that she didn’t rip the paper.

5. May

On the Friday night of the first week in May, Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘Tomorrow I’m going to get an identity card photo of myself. As you know, I am now stuck with glasses again because my eyes have gone weird, and I can’t wear my contact lenses anymore. So I shall get a photo of me in glasses, like I was before, and like I probably will be forever. Great news, eh?’

She glanced up at her contact lenses, stuck in their cleaning bottle, now unused and useless to her since she’d had the bad news about three weeks ago, sitting on the window ledge: she’d almost thrown them away, but had relented. They seemed to silently mock her efforts to look pretty: even normal would have been acceptable for Kirsty and quite happily. But no, this was not to be. She glanced at herself in the mirror, and saw her glum, bespectacled face looking back at her.

Then she continued writing ‘I bet I’ll be wearing thick glasses all my life like mum. That is a horrible thought for me, but I can’t see any other way out. I need and want to see clearly, I don’t have the option of going without - by a long way. So, I’ll just have to get used to being Little Miss Geek again. And all those dreams I had of finding a nice boyfriend, they’re going to stay dreams too I bet. With glasses like mine, that will put most of them off right away. Perhaps I should try to find one of those strange men who like girls in glasses? Yes, nice idea, but they are thin on the ground and don’t let on about it so easily.’ She sighed with exasperation, and shut the diary.

The next day she went out to the local Supermarket, where she’d seen a passport photo machine sitting waiting to be used. She plopped herself into it, shut the curtain, and rapidly read the instructions, before checking herself. Her bespectacled gaze looked back at her, examining her hair and face. With a little brushing, combing and patting, the hair came under control and thus quite acceptable to her. If only the glasses could be made attractive so easily: all she could do was push them on a bit more, straighten them and that was all. The lenses looked horribly thick to her, as they always did, shrinking her eyes and ringing them with bands of light - coke bottle rings. Yet without that thickness she couldn’t see so well. She leant forward, put the money in, and let the machine take her picture.

She got up and waited outside, instantly bored by the lack of interest in her surroundings, but after a moment she realised there were people to look at; maybe they’d look at her. Maybe a boy would look at her, but then she thought sourly “no, I’m dreaming again.” She stopped that train of thought, and sat around waiting. After a few minutes the resultant photos popped out: she picked them up, and instantly her face fell into disapproval, this state only slowly lifting as she realised that this was what she looked like. The instructions for sending away for the Identity Card said she should wear glasses if she needed them, which was true. The implication was she’d be needing them and nothing else for a long time, which did nothing to please her.

A few days later Kirsty was in her room pulling her baseball cap onto her head: she was in the middle of yet another attempt to disguise her glasses. She pulled the peak down over the front of them, perfectly disguising her glasses, but also perfectly blocking her view of anything save her feet. She felt obliged to lift the peak a little in order to see more, but that defeated the purpose. On impulse, she grabbed her recently put aside sunglasses, those things she had hoped to wear around town looking oh-so-cool in. She lifted them to her face, and tried to push them over her glasses. Of course, the effect was far from cool, in fact more like utterly ridiculous. They didn’t fit over her glasses, naturally, the best she could do was push them on at an angle. That was no good, so she pulled them off again, trying not to take her glasses off with them. She shrugged, and thought sadly “Sunglasses? No good to me now!” Then she tossed them aside carelessly, and started readjusting her baseball cap as if she might eventually find some worthwhile compromise. After some more fruitless attempts, she ripped if off and dumped it on the floor. It may have hidden her glasses to an extent, but it hid her hair too: she considered that it was one of her best features. Whatever faint chances she now had of finding a nice boyfriend, these would be enhanced by having her hair on show, not stuffed under a baseball cap.

The next day she got a letter from a local computer shop asking her to attend a job interview. In her opinion, this was more like it! To her, going from chip shop to silicone chips seemed like a mighty step up in the world. It seemed a bit of a shame to her, being as that when she had written in reply to their advert in the local newspaper, she wasn’t in glasses, and now was: that could hardly be helped, though. She regarded this as her first serious job opportunity, even though it was really just being a general office assistant and dogsbody. She tried on her interview suit again, just to make sure it fitted.

Pretty soon the big day arrived. She got off the bus, feeling special not because she wore contacts, but because she felt as if she had a good job already, and was feeling confident about getting on in life. Perhaps the glasses would help as Emma said suggested, by means of making her look more serious. “More seriously ugly,” she thought. She walked into the place and was greeted by someone there, and quite soon she was sitting waiting for the manager to come and meet her. It was a bit smaller and distinctly less grand than she’d imagined, and a little tatty here and there, but for a first decent job, not really too terrible.

Presently the manager came in, and didn’t really seem to mind that she wore thick glasses, although he said nothing to confirm or deny it: instead he led her off into his office, and talked to her about the company, the job, asked her about what she’d done previously, all the sort of usual things. He did seem to like her, which helped. Oddly, she imagined herself being a little more intimate with him, then stopped herself as she told herself, “no, too old, he must be, 40? 45?” Despite this, she still got the distinct impression he was interested in her for employment at least, so she left feeling happy and hopeful, and once home settled down to await an answer.

At the end of the third week in May, Kirsty found herself talking on the phone to her old school friend Alice, who again proposed a meeting with her and Jessica. Kirsty was certainly amenable to that, so they agreed to meet the next day at lunchtime at a local pub called the White Horse near the river.

The next day came, so Kirsty went to the pub and found them there, sitting on a bench outside, laughing. They waved and called to Kirsty, Jessica calling out rather injudiciously, ‘hey, Kirsty, didn’t you see us? Need new glasses?’ Kirsty rolled her eyes. Nevertheless, she sat down and let them buy her a drink, before they fell to some serious chatting. Of course, both of them had boyfriends: they had for ages. Kirsty had to admit, after some hedging, she still hadn’t got a boyfriend. Jessica pulled her leg about it, saying she’d be an old woman before long, and shouldn’t she get started before it was too late? Kirsty thought to herself “if only!”

Alice then tried again, not really trying to make fun of her, but saying, ‘seriously, Kirsty, you ought to dump those glasses and get contacts. How long have I been telling you that?’ The irony of that remark, and all the rest of it, hit her hard: she fell silent for a moment, then she tried to explain that she really had tried. Her explanations were caught up and lost in a lot of other general banter, so she gave up. Finally, Alice remembered that Kirsty had mentioned to her something about a surprise in a recent conversation, so asked, ‘oh yeah, Kirsty, what’s the big deal, the big surprise?’ Jessica joined in, ‘yeah, what’s it all about? Spill it, then.’ Kirsty gave a little sigh of exasperation, wishing she’d never mentioned the surprise a few weeks ago when she’d spoken to Alice. She’d had other very unpleasant surprises since, so irritably she changed the subject: she really didn’t want to talk about contact lenses. They just made her cry, in more ways than one.

Once home again, she promptly lay face down on the bed sobbing. Her friends seemed to have it all, looks, good luck and boyfriends. What did she have? Thick glasses and nothing else. It wasn’t her friends’ fault, but she did envy them like mad. She pushed her face into the pillow, glasses and all, sobbing, her fingers intermittently wiping away tears which were quickly replaced by more.

6. June

On the Wednesday in the first week of June, Kirsty wrote in her Diary

‘Let me tell you about my twin sisters, Amy and Melissa. They are both very nice sisters, well all my sisters are in various ways, but they really are good and kind. It’s just a shame they’ve been handed such terrible eyesight. They wear these really horrible glasses, they make mine look, well, less ugly next to them, they’re at least twice as strong as mine, but not that much thicker because they are ‘myodisks’. I suppose they are 15mm thick. They give me shivers just thinking about them. They can see about 20/100 or so, I think, which is about 2 lines on the normal eyechart. I can’t quite imagine wearing glasses and only seeing that much! Somehow - this confuses me - they both have boyfriends! I cannot quite understand this myself. Admittedly one of them, Amy’s boyfriend Steve is blinder than she is - imagine Amy being the eyes of any outfit! But the other one, Mark, well he’s as normal as they come, I suppose, and not bad looking either. I really can’t understand it.’

For a moment Kirsty considered getting herself a pair of myodisks, just to see if that might help on the boyfriend front, then immediately rejected the idea. She continued ’they’ve invited me out with them to the local nightclub. Oh, I should be so excited, thinking of all those young men waiting to chat me up. Of course, I know what will happen, I’ll just be a gooseberry, just hanging around propping up the wall feeling lonely and wanting to go home early because I can’t get anyone to look at me. Sheesh, my Twin sisters are so lucky - they’ve got nice boyfriends, and they’re brainier than me too! And they’re getting new glasses again - it seems to come round so soon. Was it really only 2 years ago there was all that trauma for poor Mum over them becoming partially blind? That’s all forgotten now, well I know their vision is still getting worse, but Mum’s getting used to it now.’

On the Thursday evening of the following week, Kirsty’s twin sisters came home wearing their brand new glasses. She hadn’t seen them much for weeks. She honestly couldn’t tell that they had new glasses, except that perhaps they shone a little more, being as they were new. Amy stared at Kirsty for a long moment through her seemingly horribly thick and strong lenses, and remarked, ‘you look a little clearer,’ whilst peering at her from a couple of feet away. Kirsty said, ’that’s good.’ Amy nodded her head over to the corner, and went over, leading Kirsty. Whispering, she said, ‘are you sure you want to come tomorrow night? I - we - don’t want you to feel lonely.’ ‘I’ll be OK. Maybe I might find the boy of my dreams.’

Amy considered, and then said, ‘you know, you should have found him long ago. You’re prettier than me and Melissa, for starters, and that’s not including glasses.’ ‘I wish I didn’t have to include them.’ With a sigh, Amy touched hers, and said, ‘oh, I know all about that.’ Melissa came over, and overheard Amy. She asked gently, ‘are you OK Kirsty? You were all upset and crying, mum said, about your contact lenses?’ ‘Yeah, major pain in the backside, eh?’ Melissa shrugged, and declared, ‘you don’t need to worry about glasses, Kirsty. Don’t worry about anything, you’ll be OK with us, you’ll see. We’ll look after our big sister, yeah, Amy?’ Amy nodded, and added a ‘yeah’ of her own for good measure.

Tomorrow came, and Kirsty spent that which seemed, for anyone else, an eternity and a little bit more getting ready. She’d taken a day off from the chipshop to go with her Twin sisters. Outfits for going out she had relatively few that were worth bothering with, but that wasn’t the problem: the makeup was the problem. She desperately wanted to do her eyes herself, but with a thick lens in front of each, that was impossible for her. She didn’t dare do it without glasses, being as that might mean poking herself in the eye. Doing her lashes with her myopia was bound to leave them looking terrible. She did her lips quite easily, and then press-ganged Emma into helping her with her eyes. Emma proved quite good at doing Kirsty’s eye-makeup, a little slow perhaps, with a tendency to ignore or reinterpret Kirsty’s requests. Eventually she put her glasses back on, and saw the result. The eyes were pretty good, blackened and outlined in order to make them look bigger, giving them something to combat the shrinking effect of her lenses. She’d done her cheeks too, once heavily the way Emma liked it, and once again like Kirsty actually wanted, light so the split didn’t look quite so silly. All around her eyes was a sort of darkish red eyeshadow: Kirsty decided it would do. It matched her lipstick quite well, as well as her stretchy red top, pulled over her short, tight black skirt, and highish heels. She saw herself in the mirror, and declared ‘If I can’t pull tonight, I probably never will.’ Emma wished her good luck, and left for her room, followed by Kirsty who went downstairs to find her twin sisters and their boyfriends, who were patiently waiting for her.

Mark, Melissa’s boyfriend simply said, ‘wow!’ At the sight of Kirsty, and his eyes followed her. His taste was myodisked girls, so wouldn’t easily give up Melissa. Besides, Kirsty wouldn’t dream of taking her sister’s boyfriend, not under any circumstances. Her two younger sisters drew in close to see, and nodded approval of what they could see. Amy said ‘Steve, come and look at our pretty big sister!’ Steve was of moderate height, well-built, muscular, but wore thick myodisk glasses stronger than any thereabouts, and had difficulty seeing much with them anyway. He came close to Kirsty, she met his tiny-eyed gaze for a moment, and saw him smile at her. He said, ‘yes, she’s very beautiful.’ Amy giggled mischievously, knowing how little he could see.

Off they went, and soon were at the nightclub after getting the bus into town. Mark actually had a car, but had left it outside Kirsty’s home, unwilling to search for parking in the town centre. They all paid and went in, and were soon sitting at a table talking and laughing. Melissa asked ‘Kirsty, you OK?’ Kirsty had just been to the toilet, and on the way back she’d smiled rather experimentally at some nice boy, to no effect: unsurprisingly, her mood was wavering toward glum. Melissa asked her boyfriend Mark, ‘can you see any nice boys out there?’ It was rather variably lit in places, and Melissa wasn’t the best at seeing. Alas Mark didn’t really quite know what she meant, as he was interested in nice girls, not nice boys. After a bit they all went up and had a bit of a dance - Steve needed a bit of guidance, and Amy and Melissa didn’t quite get there unaided either. Kirsty had a sinking feeling about this, as she began to feel resigned about what sort of a night this would be: the most exciting thing she would do would be a guidedog to her sisters.

Kirsty looked around a little later, for no real reason other than curiosity, and suddenly saw a nice boy. Her eyes fixed on him, he turned, and as he did so her eyes went a little wider in recognition. He was the young man from the funeral! Here! Well, he had every right to be, after all. Kirsty seemed to come alive, and Melissa sensed it. ‘what’s up, Kirsty?’ ‘Shush…’ Then she said to her, ‘it’s that boy I saw at the funeral.’ ‘Here? Really?’ Melissa seemed quite excited, but not as much as Kirsty felt. A wave of tiny tremors went through her, and she felt happy yet nervous all at the same time. Then she sighed, and spoke her thoughts aloud, ‘how do I get him to notice me?’ There then followed a sort of improvised brainstorming session from her sisters and their boyfriends. Some of the suggestions seemed scary, inappropriate or impractical. But one stood out as worth a try: stand behind him at the bar, and let him step on your foot. Amy said, ’that should break the ice.’ Kirsty replied ‘I hope it doesn’t break my toe!’ But a broken toe seemed a small price to pay, in her opinion. They all waited for what seemed ages, Mark and Kirsty watching his movements, and the rest asking what was going on every so often.

Presently, he made a beeline for the bar, so Kirsty quickly got up and walked straight up to him, hoping he wouldn’t turn around and see her, and also hoping he wouldn’t change his mind. He did neither: instead he joined the slowly milling rugby scrum around the bar. He had to wait a moment, and then let someone pass him laden with drinks, which caused him to walk ll-advisedly backwards. He bumped into Kirsty, knocking her glasses awry and standing on the side of her shoe, just missing her toes. She squealed in alarm, not aware that she had been setting herself up to be potentially deprived of glasses. He heard her distress, turned, and saw her. Kirsty adjusted her precious glasses, then looked up at him rather more angrily than she’d planned on doing. He met her bespectacled gaze, and didn’t look away in horror. He said, ‘sorry…. did I stand on your foot?’ Kirsty feigned that he had; looking aggrieved and unhappy, hoping it might work, saying with a touch of mock ire, ‘yeah, thanks a lot, try looking where you’re going?’ Kirsty turned her back on him, and pretended to limp away in disgust. She felt him touch her arm, and let him help her to a table. He looked so cute and so apologetic that she wanted to smile, but dared not. At least not yet, anyway. Once sat down, she gazed up at him, and he asked, ‘can I get you a drink?’ ‘Yeah, orange juice please.’ Dutifully he went to get it, leaving her sitting there thinking to herself “getting somewhere here… I’m getting somewhere… Question is where exactly? Oh, please, please let him be unattached!!!”

Once she knew he was coming back and could see her, she turned sideways, took off her shoe and rubbed it, trying to look pained and unhappy, although actually she felt OK, at least in terms of her foot. He sat with her, and asked carefully, ‘is your foot hurting? Perhaps it might be broken?’ Kirsty didn’t fancy taking her act as far as the local casualty ward, so told him, ’no, it’s just a bit sore.’ ‘Oh…’ Vaguely he realised that he was peering down her top, so looked at something else: the top and side of her head, and her thick shiny glasses, glinting and flashing around as she moved. A little hesitatingly, he asked, ‘did… I break your glasses?’ Kirsty glanced sideways at him through the thickest part of her lenses, and said, ’no, they’re OK.’

There followed a rather awkward pause, with Kirsty wondering what exactly to do next: carry on feigning injury, or give up. She was starting to wonder what to say, whether she could say what she felt about him, when thankfully he stepped in, and said, ‘you know, you look very pretty.’ Kirsty had to fight to keep her eyes from popping out. Suddenly her “injured” foot lost its interest, so she put it away under the table, then turned to face him. She couldn’t quite think what to say, nor what to do. She smiled vaguely, gratified that he found her attractive. Eventually she murmured, ’thank you.' There followed another awkward pause, neither knowing quite what to do. Then he pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen, wrote on it and gave it to her. ‘Here’s my phone number… if you want to call me, ask for Mike.’ ‘Mike…. My name is Kirsty.’

Kirsty pushed her foot into its shoe, got up and walked back to her sisters. Mark remarked, on seeing her, ‘wow, what a smile, did it go well?’ Kirsty nodded, and sat with her sisters, and looked over to see Mike was. He was gone; hiding in the toilet, shaken by his good fortune, saying to himself in varied repetition, “oh my God! What a girl!” And “She’s a dream on legs!” And suchlike. Kirsty sat with her clenched fists raised in triumph. Amy asked, ‘well, tell us all about it.’ Kirsty told them, and they all congratulated her on her achievement, Melissa saying ‘It’s about time someone noticed you, you are so pretty, glasses or no glasses.’ She gave Kirsty a hug just to make sure.

That night, once home, Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘YES! YES! I DID IT!!!!’ After a pause, during which she sat smiling into her faithful mirror, she continued ‘Old foureyes has done it at last, she’s found a boyfriend! This is such a weird feeling for me. All those years of being ignored and teased. All that fooling around with crappy contact lenses, and now this Mike, he doesn’t seem concerned about my glasses at all. Wow! I’ve found myself a boy!’

The next day brought further good news in the post. She’d got the job at the computer shop. Oh, this was all pleasure and success, she’d never had so much go right all at once. Then she had to go to the fish & chip shop and work another shift, so had to try and forget about it all, at least for the present. She had to wait until the next day to phone him, but there was no answer. On Monday she went shopping for clothes suitable for office work - rather sombre skirts and tops, not the sort of things she normally wore. When she came home, she tried again, and he answered the phone. Kirsty’s knees shook a little, but after a while the nerves went and she started to talk more and more. She arranged to meet him the following Saturday afternoon, in town, for a coffee.

On the Sunday morning she wrote in her diary ‘Oh, you wouldn’t believe how dishy and tasty Mike is. And he is so kind to me, telling me how pretty and beautiful I am. Oh, this is crazy, this falling in love thing, but I love it. I’m dreaming. Life is a bit strange, I still don’t see what’s so lovely with me in 12mm thick lenses, and tiny little eyes peeking out from behind them, but I don’t care about that anymore.’ She lay back on her bed, staring at the ceiling, seeing clearly thanks to her much-bemoaned thick glasses, but thinking mistily about her new boyfriend.

7. July

At nine o’clock in the morning of the 1st of July, Kirsty was at her new place of employment, ready to start her new job. There were a few people there, two salesmen, a spotty youth who fixed the computers and ensured they were working, and the Manager. She was there to help with all manner of things from paperwork, filing, accounts, making the tea, and anything else they could think of. He was very nice and kind to her, and so were the rest of the male staff there, although they didn’t really look at her much, at least not in the way of someone who was sexually interested in her. It didn’t bother her at all: she had a boyfriend, and she had achieved that feat whilst wearing her glasses! Apart from learning the ropes, there wasn’t much exciting going on. The manager was a bit fed up with doing all the paperwork himself, and needed time to deal with more important customers. And so a week went by for Kirsty very fast.

Saturday came: it was a relief and a delight to realise that she had the whole weekend free, no standing around selling fish & chips, instead she was just going out to meet Mike in town. They soon found each other, and kissed: this was a new thing for Kirsty, too. A little later they were sitting in a coffee bar together, and she was looking at him. There was a sound which caught his attention, so he turned to look. Kirsty saw something flash on the front of his nearest eyeball, and wondered what it was. She peered closer, and then when he looked back at her, she demanded that he look aside again. Peering closely, she asked softly, uncertainly, ‘your eyes look funny…’ Then she realised why, and asked, ‘you wear contact lenses? He nodded, saying with a sheepish look on his face, ’errr…. Yeah. I was meaning to tell you, honest! Kirsty rolled her eyes, thinking about the irony of this news. Quite quickly it came out that he’d been wearing them the first time they’d met, but she’d been rather distracted then.

After a couple of meetings, Kirsty had intimated that she couldn’t wear contacts, not ever, no way. He’d felt a little uncomfortable wearing them around her, feeling he was doing something bad, so he’d met her the last two times bareeyed. He said ‘I didn’t like the blur, so decided to try contacts again…. I hoped you might not notice again!’ Kirsty silently chewed over this little morsel for a few moments, and then said, looking angrier than she’d have dared a few weeks ago, ‘yes, I did notice, I’m not blind with these on…’ He looked extremely guilty, and then gently asked, ‘if I wear my glasses tomorrow, will you still go out with me?’ Kirsty appeared to think about it a moment, thinking of the pleasure of contact lenses given her and then rudely snatched away from her, and then flaunted in front of her by her new boyfriend. Looking less heated, she said ‘OK, let’s see you in glasses tomorrow.’ ‘Yeah, OK.’

The next day came and they met at the same place. He turned to face her, and smiled: he was as good as his word. Kirsty smiled weakly, and in response, he asked, ‘well, what do you think?’ Kirsty considered, and then blurted out, ’they’re a bit thin and weak, aren’t they?’ Silently, they went to sit at a convenient bench. He said to her, ’they’re minus 5 and a half each eye, you know.' That they were, but were also rather more modern, and styled to appear thinner and weaker than they were. Kirsty laughed in derision, then replied, ‘mine are about minus 13 in each eye.’ He looked a little shocked, having never dared ask exactly how poor her vision was. One thing led to another, and soon they were swapping glasses. He couldn’t get hers onto his head properly - but what he saw of the world through them “made the world swim and my head ache.” Kirsty found his a little big, and when she blinked her eyes, she found the usual fuzzy blur she had without glasses noticeably relieved, but not greatly so. She exclaimed, ’they’re feeble… So, so weak, almost like plate glass. For me, anyway.' It was hardly his fault his myopia was less than half hers.

Later on, she noted in her diary ‘I saw Mike today in glasses for the first time. He looks just as cute and sexy as before, even more so, because he is sharing in what I have to put up with, namely, no contacts. Yet his glasses are pretty weak and feeble compared with mine. Oh, how I wish I could have vision like his!’

A few days later Kirsty was asleep, dreaming. Her severely myopic eyes moved under her eyelids, but she saw clearly with her mind’s eye. She saw herself, older; perhaps thirty, maybe more. She was surrounded by children of all ages between four-ish and ten-ish, all of them wearing thick glasses of a myriad of designs and styles. One of them called out “Mummy” to her, and then another, and then within moments, the whole crowd of them were pressing in and calling “Mummy! We need new glasses! We can’t see very well! Mummy! Help us!” With a start, she was awake, her heart pounding, the vivid dream still in her mind. It was pretty much dark, and what little light permeated past the curtains was scattered into a foggy, misty blur by her severe myopia. She looked over at the clock, but it was invisible to her. It took her a while to go back to sleep, as she kept wondering if this was her fate, too.

The following weekend it was the twins’ birthday. Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘My twin sisters are seventeen today! That seems incredible to me, I feel so old now myself. The best bit is that we all have boyfriends, all three of us, and we are all happy. All of us wear thick ugly glasses of one sort or another, but that doesn’t seem to matter. They will be going to college soon - they are so clever, those two! Amy is into computers and stuff, she wants mum to buy her one. I bet she’s going to be waiting a while for that one. Perhaps she might get one from the council or something because she’s partially blind. Then there’s Melissa, she’s so caring and wonderful, she wants to be a nurse or something like that. Now that IS a challenge. I doubt I’d want to do that, even if I could see clearly. I’m sure they can do it. Good luck to them both.’

Near the end of the month Kirsty met her mum as she came in the door from work one evening. Since falling off her bike, she’d been using the bus more and more. Kirsty noticed a strange expression on her face, a change from the gravity she’d seen for so many weeks now. She smiled a little, and then sighed rather oddly, as if what she was smiling at was pointless. Kirsty asked, ‘what’s up, Mum?’ She didn’t reply immediately, and then said wearily, ‘I’ll tell you later.’

A couple of days later Kirsty found a small envelope lying on the doormat, not very big nor fat; it had been pushed through the letterbox, addressed rather mysteriously to “The lady on the bus in the grey coat.” Kirsty blinked at it, wondering who it meant. With a little surprise, she realised it was her mum: none of her sisters owned such a coat. Then she started wondering what it meant. Why was someone writing to her mother? And with no address? With a gentle smile, and a knowing nod, she figured it out. Her mum had an admirer! She shrugged and took it upstairs. Politely she knocked, and her mother answered sleepily. ‘Mum, something came for you!’ ‘What? Bring it in, Kirsty, dear.’ Kirsty pushed the door open, and there her mother sat, watching her with just as much wonderment as she had upon first seeing the envelope that she now handed to her. Her mother looked at it in surprise, and then looked vaguely at Kirsty with a glance that said “you can go.” Kirsty went out, leaving her mother to open the envelope. Part of Kirsty ached to know what it said, the other part said “it’s your Mum’s business, keep your nose out!”

She didn’t have to wait long to discover the gist of the letter. Her mother told her about it the next evening: basically it was from someone she’d never met before, and made some extremely flattering remarks about her. No wonder she was pleased, if more than a little mystified. The letter was “signed” by “the man in blue”. Kirsty asked, ‘do you know who it is?’ ‘Someone on the bus, yes, but who?’ She sat thinking for a while, with a mixture of pleasure at what might be and sadness at what she imagined probably would be. Then with a slow shock of realisation, it came to her. She shook her head in disbelief. At that, Kirsty asked, ‘whats wrong?’ ‘Oh, it can’t be him. Can’t be.’ ‘Why?’ ‘He’s too young. Way too young.’ She then thought to herself “can he really find me attractive, at my age?”

Kirsty didn’t quite know what to suggest: she was more used to getting advice from her mother on such matters rather than issuing it. And this was a situation she had nothing coherent to say about. It was beyond her experience. Eventually she plumped for a rather meaningless “if you want to be happy, go for it.” Her mother said nothing. She’d “gone for it” enough times and had ended up far from happy. Subsequently they both got on with something else in an earnest attempt at forgetting about it all. They both hoped things would become clearer in the morning.

Kirsty’s mum evaded the man for a week, by using different buses than which she normally used, and then used the normal bus, saw him and smiled at him rather experimentally. She ended up talking to him briefly, telling him that she wasn’t interested. It saddened him, but she was adamant. She didn’t feel she had time for men at that moment, with her poor, decaying vision. But she thanked him for his kind words: that was all she could do. With a shake of his head, he walked away rather frustrated and angry. She gave a long sigh, wishing the world were a different, better place.

8. August

Early in August it was Louise’s ninth birthday. Kirsty thought to herself “can it really be a year since the last one?” Last year’s was in the middle of Louise’s “Patch-o-rama,” as Kirsty referred to it in her Diary. She had worn the patch on her left lens for six months, while the other eye did some work and started seeing more clearly, going from 20/100 down to 20/40. It then took another month of patching the other eye to get her good eye down again to 20/30: finally a much-relieved Louise was able to do without patches in May of the previous year. Unfortunately her bad eye started getting worse, in terms of myopia, and her visual acuity quickly shot up to 20/60, the optician noticed, of course, and the patch went back on in August for another 4 months. Since that point her vision hadn’t been too bad, but the optician had been monitoring her situation closely. He was waiting for her to hit puberty; if she was anything like her older sisters, her myopia would go up and up - and in her case, probably assymetrically. Louise herself had been asked, or told, to tell her mother if she had problems. She was at that point thoroughly fed up with patches and teasing: glasses were quite bad enough, but patches were an added dimension for the bullies and teasers. She hated them.

Kirsty noted in her Diary, after an evening of fun, cake, television and more fun ‘We did have such a lot of fun today. We played some great party games. I suppose “Blindman’s Bluff” is a little strange when you wear glasses. All of us except Louise is pretty blind without glasses, so you might say we don’t need the blindfold. Actually Amy and Melissa are halfway there without doing anything. Louise herself, well, she has better vision than anyone, about minus 5 I think in her left eye, and minus 7.5 in the right. Her problem is that mum doesn’t like seeing her without glasses, because her left eye will take over and she’ll be patched again. So Louise only got to be “blind man” once. Hide and seek was better, no blindfolding people. Hey I wonder what “Blindman’s Bluff” is like for deaf people? Sort of impossible I bet.’

Towards the following weekend, Kirsty was feeling fed up with her bespectacled state again. It wasn’t because she thought it would hinder her chances of getting a boyfriend, she was just fed up with wearing them, not liking the way she looked in them. Solemnly she pulled them from her face, and her untainted prettiness was revealed as it was few months back when she wore contact lenses. Now, however, there were no contact lenses, no correction at all, so when she looked at the mirror across the room, all she saw of herself was a yellow and blue blur for her clothes, and a yellowish-brown blob for her hair, and a vaguely pink one for her face. She gathered herself, and started to walk around, trying to kid herself she could see well enough, that all was normal, and she was fine. Surely nothing could happen in her room? It wasn’t big enough to cause trouble!

Unfortunately, she couldn’t see the floor at all; well she could, but it was lacking all detail. A belt trailed across from under her bed in her way, and she was quite unaware of it. Her foot caught in it as she walked toward her bed, and she tripped up, landed on her bed, her nose hitting the bedhead near the bridge. She cried out in sudden pain and alarm, and felt her nose. It hurt, of course, but she couldn’t see the problem by the means of looking in her mirror, thanks to her myopia. Her glasses were the solution to that, so she put them on. She a little blood appearing from a small cut on her bridge of her nose. Quickly she grabbed a tissue, and dabbed it against the cut, but the blood kept coming. It was pretty difficult to get at the cut with glasses on, so she had to remove them again, reducing her vision the uncorrected blur she normally only had to put up with first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

At the weekend, Kirsty had got used to her nose with the scabby bit on it under the bridge piece of her glasses: it hadn’t bothered her much, nobody at work had said a word, and then her boyfriend Mike came along to see her at the weekend, wearing contact lenses - again. He took one look at Kirsty, and laughed. Rather irritably Kirsty told him how it happened, completely truthfully. He thought it was hilarious, and almost fell about laughing. Kirsty couldn’t believe he thought it was so funny, saying rather sourly, hands on hips, ‘if you had to wear glasses like mine, because I’m so short sighted, you’d want to get rid of them too and get contacts. It’s not my fault I can’t wear them, you know I can’t, yet I have to force you to wear glasses. It’s not fair on me.’ That was a beginning of a nasty row. Kirsty ended up sobbing, so he left her to it.

That evening Kirsty wrote in her Diary, after a lot of thought, ‘I’m going to have to get rid of Mike. He doesn’t help at all, yeah, he says the glasses don’t matter to him, that I look just as pretty with them on, but he never wears his. He has no idea what my sort of poor vision is like. I don’t just want to be told I look pretty despite the ugly glasses, I want to dump the stupid things and be normal like everyone else. Yeah, I know that’s impossible, but he could help me out a bit, and going around in contacts when he knows I can’t, well that’s not fair on me. It’s cruel.’ The next day she made a tearful phone call to Mike, telling him she didn’t want to see him again. Perhaps she was afraid of not having a boyfriend again, but having got there once, she considered that it could be done again.

After a few more days, Kirsty started on another project: learning to drive. She was getting a bit bored with all that waiting for buses and getting her feet squashed, being shoved around in the queue, freezing to death in winter, the unreliability; the list of reasons was very long. She wanted a car, her own car. She smiled at that thought. But first, there was the matter of learning to drive the thing. She found a driving instructor, who took her off to a quiet road, and first of all, tested her vision by asking her to read the number plate on a car in the distance. Kirsty found she could easily do so, which was one of the benefits of glasses: you could usually see clearly when wearing them. That’s if your eyes weren’t changing like mad and your mum couldn’t afford to change the lenses very often. Then it was just a matter of having a go at things like steering and gear changes. Oh, the gears, Kirsty thought she’d never get used to them. Before she knew it, her hour was up and she’d been delivered safely home.

Towards the end of the month, a Monday morning dawned at work, and Kirsty found that she was no longer the newest one there. The manager had hired a programmer named “Ed”. He was quite old, from her perspective of 18 years old; he must have been 5 or 6 years older than her. He was tall, skinny, not really attractive, but bordering on the cute in poor light. A bit like a pimply youth who’d grown up and lost most of the pimples. He wore a fairly fashionable blue-grey suit that seemed to meant for someone else - it was slightly ill-fitting on him, anyway. He seemed a little shy, a little distant talking to Kirsty, but she noticed him looking at her in much the same way that the man in the CD shop had a couple of years ago, although perhaps a little more nervously. Kirsty didn’t find him particularly attractive, nor much of a conversationalist, unless it was something computer-related, in which case he was rather more lucid.

At first, she didn’t really pay any attention to him; she wasn’t inclined to, but after a couple of days, Kirsty was sat at her workstation, sorting out payroll stuff, and in he came for work. Kirsty happened to glance at him, and then for a moment she gaped in surprise. He was wearing glasses! She hurriedly hid her surprise, and let her own bespectacled gaze meet his. Oh, but those glasses, they were so - thick! She’d seen her mum in lenses like that, and in latter years, on her own face, but never had she met a man so thickly bespectacled, well apart from the funeral a few months ago, but they were all family members, either too old, too closely related or just too horrible to contemplate. He said, rather nervously, ‘hello.’ Kirsty smiled mutely at him for a moment, before replying in kind. Then he left her alone to start work on something else.

All that day Kirsty’s mind was in turmoil. When she got home, she wrote in her Diary as a means to try to alleviate the problem ‘Wow! I got a surprise today. Ed, the new programmer, he wears the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen on a young man. They’re thicker than mine, thicker than my Mums, if that’s possible!’ She gave a little shiver, and continued ‘Oh, but you’ll be thinking I might be attracted to him. I’m not. He’s not very good looking, he doesn’t look after himself, he just looks like a geek in a suit. A mega-super-duper geek. Oh, I wish I could find some boy like that, with thick glasses just like mine, who knows exactly what I’ve been through. I want a boy who can’t wear contacts.’

9. September

One day early in September, Kirsty was at work, and had trouble with her workstation. It was the software: it was not set up right for her, so she called on Ed to assist her. He crouched by her side, tipped and tapped at the keyboard, all sort of system-related things came up on screen, and then, it was all fixed. He then explained what had happened, even if that knowledge wasn’t terribly useful to her. When she could get a word in, she tried to change the subject. Gently she said ‘Ed, I’ve never seen anyone wear glasses as thick as yours.’ He turned to her, looking at her through the big plasticky things. He smiled gently, and then said, ‘yeah, I’m blind as a bat without them.’

Close up, they seemed even bigger and thicker than her view of them from the distance. “My, they have be 3/4 of an inch thick at the sides,” she thought. Kirsty suddenly felt sorry for him, seeing him stuck with glasses like that. She then thought “and there was me thinking I had it bad.” Kindly, she asked, ‘do you wear contacts often?’ He shook his head, and replied, ’naw, they hurt too much. I try them every now and again, I can put up with the itching a day or so, then it’s back to these.’ Kirsty gave a knowing sigh, and said ‘I know what you mean. I can’t wear them at all.’ Briefly she outlined her experiences, to which he looked suitably sympathetic. He stuttered out, ‘you - you ought to be able to wear what you want - not worry about what people think. All those people who think you look ugly in glasses, they’re wrong. Just think about how pretty you are, and the glasses make you look more beautiful.’ Kirsty had never heard that before; not surprisingly, as no-one had ever said anything quite like it within her earshot. People had said nice things about her prettiness without directly referring to her glasses, and of course had tried to tell her how they didn’t make her look ugly, but that was a whole world away from what Ed had said. Then the manager came in, so Ed had to go back to programming, and she to payroll. She was lucky that she made no mistakes in the remainder of that day. Such was the impact of what he had said.

That evening, in her Diary she wrote ‘Can someone who puts glasses on become more beautiful? That is what Ed said to me, I think. I don’t understand that at all. Look at them, they are horrible. His are horrible, even horribler than mine! Is he mad? Don’t know.’ She shook her head, trying to convince herself that he hadn’t uttered those words, or else perhaps that she had misheard him. That wasn’t easy, so after a few minutes she had to admit to herself that he had. After some more thought, she told the diary ‘I think what he said, even if it makes no sense, well, it makes me feel kind of happy. Perhaps as a man with thick glasses, he sees more deeply than other men. And not just because the lenses correct his crap vision.’ After a further pause for thought, she wrote ‘I think I’d like to hear it again, and more. There’s more to him than meets the eye.’

Emma got taken to get new glasses the following morning. Her vision was now around minus 13 in each eye, and expected to get worse: she’d almost certainly beat Kirsty when it came to myopia. Kirsty wasn’t sad to let her win that race. Kirsty wrote in her diary that evening

‘I didn’t get a chance to talk to Ed at all today. He was out on a project. Damn! Anyway, I’ll tell you about Emma. She got new glasses today, big thick ones almost like mine, she’s going to overtake me soon I bet. The weird thing is, they don’t seem to bother her much, nowhere near like I was at her age, and mine were a bit weaker than hers, too. She told me straight the other day, she had the boys exactly where she wanted them. There was one boyfriend she had, then another, and she dumped the second one, got herself another one. If she’s not lying, and I don’t think she is, then I don’t know how she does it. Oh, yes I do. Big boobs, that’s what does it. Men are such suckers for big ones, and she’s got them. Told me she was the bustiest in the school. But also she told me they tease her about them, especially when she does sports and they bounce around.’ Kirsty looked down at her rather more normal-sized bust, which although not small, at least didn’t fly around like Emma’s when she ran around. She concluded ‘I think Emma’s going to cause some trouble, if she goes on like this.’

The next day at work, Wednesday, was like a dream for Kirsty. Again, Ed came in sporting his thick glasses. Kirsty smiled at him, and said, ‘hello, how are you?’ ‘Oh… not too bad. Looking forward to the weekend, got some serious surfing on the internet to do!’ There was a slight pause, and then he said, ‘see you later,’ and left.

Kirsty felt so sorry for him, due to those awful glasses he had to wear, and also that it seemed that he didn’t get out much, thus he appeared to have no friends outside the internet and work. She felt he was completely natural, and wore glasses because he had to, unlike Mike, who only wore them when she nagged him to do so. She resolved to be as nice as possible with Ed: perhaps he was right, there was something attractive about thick glasses, but only to those similarly endowed. Later on, she “found” a problem in the accounting system, and called upon Ed to help her fix it. He came through, all plano-fronted lenses flashing at her, in much the same way as her glasses did, and asked ‘what’s wrong?’

She explained what the trouble was, and he spent a good deal of time sorting it out. When he’d done it, she started asking him some other questions about the system, things she probably didn’t need to know: he thought she was just plugging him for information which he didn’t mind giving out to her, but what was really on her mind was raising the subject of glasses with him again. She asked, ’excuse me asking, I hope you don’t mind, but what’s your glasses prescription?’ He looked at, honestly taken aback, and then replied, ‘around minus 15.5 each eye. What’s yours?’ ‘Minus 13.25.’ ‘Sounds g…’ He was caught mid sentence by a phone call, so thus was obliged to help out another client. Kirsty didn’t see him come back till after lunch, and then she was busy too.

She was tapping away on her computer when she became aware of another sound. She looked up, and very briefly saw Ed looking at her through those thick glasses of his. She caught his gaze, and gave a slow, knowing smile. He smiled a little too, in the manner of someone guilty, then he turned and walked away. Kirsty wondered why, and then remembered why. She thought to herself “he’s a geek, like me. A shy geek, too.” She sat mulling for a while, then came to a stern resolution: she got up, walked through to Ed’s office, sauntering up to him whilst endeavouring to appear casual, and asked him, ‘are you doing anything tonight?’ Ed looked up at her in surprise, and said answered, ‘yes, surfing the… Oh…’ He looked surprised, as the meaning of what she’d asked sunk in. Stuttering slightly in confusion, he said, ‘you… You are asking me out?' ‘Yes, of course I am.’ He seemed to think a longer while than perhaps Kirsty would have really liked, but then said brightly, ‘yes, OK, yes I will… Where shall we go? What shall we do?’ Kirsty suspected nobody had ever asked him out before: that seemed hardly surprising to her, being as he wore glasses like that. She had ample experience of that problem!

He really had no idea about going out with girls: Kirsty got that impression pretty straight and very quickly. Despite that, he came around in a rather battered old car that evening, picked her up and then started off, and asked ‘where shall we go, then?’ Kirsty patiently guided him to a coffee bar, the one where she’d been with Mike a few times, although that didn’t matter. She sat across from him at the table, looking at his funny little blue eyes shrunken and lost in a sea of coke bottles, as he talked computer stuff. She tried to listen, even comprehend, but couldn’t. It struck her that he was a little boring really, but oh, those glasses, she found herself more and more attracted by them. She smiled politely, pretending to be attentive.

After going to the toilet, she gently moved the conversation back to glasses. She asked, ‘so, how long have you been wearing glasses?’ ‘Oh, since when I was a kid, 6 or 7 I think. They weren’t as thick as these, of course, They got stronger and stronger while I was in High School.’ His face darkened a little at that thought. He continued, ‘school! I hated some of those kids there, they used to tease me about my glasses. Once, one of them hit me in the face and broke them.’ Kirsty exclaimed in horror, ’that’s terrible!’ She instinctively touched her glasses with her fingers, just to make sure nobody had broken them while she wasn’t looking.

Then she asked, ‘can I look through your glasses?’ Kirsty took hers off, then he followed suit. They slightly gropingly swapped them, and Kirsty tried his on. As with Mike’s, they were too big for her, but unlike Mike’s, she could see clearly into the distance with them, close up was a bit different: her eyes complained a little. She looked at him looking at her through her glasses, and laughed. He laughed too, and commented, ’these are pretty strong glasses, Kirsty. I thought they would be, but thanks for letting me try them. This is very strange, I’ve never seen anyone with glasses this strong, apart from me in the mirror. Here…' He took them off, and handed them back to her. He got his on first, and saw her for just a moment without those belonging to her, and then with hers restored to her face, she saw clearly too. Genuine respect in his voice, he said ‘I’ve let people try my glasses a few times, but until now they just make people’s eyes water, and I can’t see what they look like. You’re the first girl in thick glasses I’ve ever seen, they look so lovely on you.’ He stared at her through his glasses. Kirsty leaned forward and kissed him.

It wasn’t long before Kirsty was seeing him again: in fact, it was the next morning at work. Kirsty spent every possible moment with him, except when she wasn’t doing something ultra-important. He did still try to go on about the computer stuff, part of Kirsty was interested, because she found it useful if not as fascinating as he found it, but the bigger part of her was just interested in him, and in particular his glasses. They spent the lunch break together, parted for to go home, then met again that evening.

Some time during the rest of that week, Kirsty found time to tell him about her sisters with their various glasses and visual problems, and her mother. He was interested and sympathetic about her mum and her twin sisters. But he did say ‘I’m sure I’ll still like you the best.’ Kirsty smiled graciously at that.

On Saturday, Kirsty got him to go to the cinema with her, after stopping at home to meet her mother, and whichever of her sisters happened to be around. Telling people about her family usually wasn’t the same as letting them see it, and this was the case with him too. Most of them came and went and got introduced, although she had to go and find Emma, who was feeling a bit grumpy about something: Ed said that didn’t matter. Afterwards at the cinema, Kirsty sat beside him, as would naturally be expected, glanced at him, watching the film reflected in miniature on the front of his glasses. Rather dismissively, she thought to herself “who needs contact lenses anyway?”

10. October

Early on in October Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Diary, I haven’t told you anything at all what’s going on for days and days, I haven’t had time. I’ve been so busy with Ed. He is such a lovely man, I don’t know how or why I couldn’t have met him long ago, and saved myself a lot of heartache and trouble chasing after men who were turned off by my thick glasses, or that weren’t worth having. He is so clever, he knows all about computers and stuff, and he’s showing me how to do stuff. Yeah he was a bit odd at first, but then nobody had ever taken any notice of him, due to his thick glasses. Who does that sound like? I feel like a whole woman at last. I know that sounds stupid, I should be whole on my own, but he is just what I need to feel right. Not some weird bloke after me because my glasses turn him on. Not some creep who is after whatever’s on offer, glasses or not. And definitely he’s not into contact lenses. Horrid things, what a waste of time they were! I feel I have so much in common with him. He’s had most of the problems I had growing up. “Four-eyes” was only the start of it. Oh Ed, thank you for existing and becoming my work mate and boyfriend!’

A few days later Kirsty was sat on the bus going to work: it was pretty full up, as usual, also as usual she had to do without a window seat. She usually sat upstairs, since the bus took a meandering and time-consuming path into town. This time, however, she sat near the staircase leading down. At one particular stop a couple of people come upstairs: one went forward, whereupon Kirsty’s bespectacled gaze followed him, diverting her attention from the nearer one, who was a young male student type carrying a heavy bag over one shoulder. He walked past her carelessly, the bag moved at her head height, knocking into her glasses and pushing them awry on her face. Kirsty immediately “jumped”, then straightened her precious, vital glasses, and then nervously checked them for damage. She felt a bit too shy to get upset about the incident, but it panicked her a little. A little harder, and little further over, she might have lost a lens, either knocked out or broken; or worse still, her glasses might have caught on the straps and been inadvertently pulled from her face, and perhaps then fallen and even smashed. That thought filled her with horror.

Once at work, she told Ed about the incident, who did much to calm her fears, saying he would pick her up from home and take her to work, and then asked, ‘haven’t you got a spare pair?’ Kirsty shook her head. ‘I’ll buy you a pair.’ Kirsty gasped, then said he didn’t need to, but he was insistent, so she smiled and acquiesced graciously. She sat thinking about that: a spare pair of glasses! Her mother barely had enough money to buy one pair each. This was luxury!

A few days later Louise had her eyes tested again, and Kirsty told her Diary about it ‘Louise got new lenses in her glasses yet again today. Her vision is still getting worse - she’d be the odd one out in this family if it didn’t. The optician told her to watch out if she can’t see clearly into the distance. A little is acceptable, but a lot, like last time she had patches, that’s a problem. Louise told me she didn’t want patches again, but I’m not sure she’s going to pipe up in time. Poor Louise. I have this horrible feeling she’s going to go through it all again and worse.’

A week later Kirsty lay on her bed staring at the ceiling in her bedroom, as she had done countless times before. Her vision, corrected by thick glasses, was nearly right: perhaps a quarter of a dioptre out, barely noticeable to her. It was a change from past times, when ten months from changing her glasses or lenses, the detail on the ceiling had started to vanish, at least from her viewpoint. What was really different was that her beloved boyfriend Ed lay next to her; it was a pretty tight fit, but neither of them cared about that problem. He looked up at the ceiling, too. She told him about the time her mother couldn’t afford new glasses for her because the washing machine broke down, and how that mark on the ceiling gradually blurred then vanished. Of course, both of them could see it now without any especial difficulty. For some reason, Kirsty moved him onto the topic of comparing uncorrected vision. There their respective vision differed; she had better vision than he, although in the teens of myopia it seemed all but immaterial. It wasn’t so much a question of reading this or that, being as they didn’t have anything printed or written large enough to read at a worthwhile distance. So the questions were along the lines of “do you see the books on the cupboard, do you see my fingers, how many fingers?” Neither of them were particularly good at counting fingers, Kirsty being able manage it about 4-5 inches away from her nose, Ed a little less.

Kirsty then asked pointedly, holding her glasses carefully from her face, ‘what do I look like?’ He squinted, but could only see her poorly. He still said, ‘beautiful!’ She put on her glasses, and repeated the question, and the answer was, ‘beautiful with glasses!’ She smiled, then embraced and kissed him. Then she pulled his glasses from his hand, and put them aside, and challenged him, ‘find me, shortsighted boy!’ He felt her mouth with his fingers and aimed a kiss at her lips. After that, she looked at his eyes. He blinked, and something glistened in them, something she’d seen before. Softly she pushed his head around.

She blinked, and saw - contact lenses. She exclaimed, ‘you’re wearing contacts…?’ He felt for his glasses, took them from her, pushed them on, then after collecting himself, told her all about it ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, Kirsty, but I thought you’d be angry with me, especially since you’re a failed contact lens wearer. You see, I can wear contact lenses, but only really weak and feeble ones. I’ve been experimenting with them for a few weeks now, wearing them with this pair of glasses, which are thinner than my full-strength glasses.’ He paused, waiting for a reaction: Kirsty just looked rather stunned by it. He continued, ‘please don’t be angry with me, I didn’t want to upset you.’ Kirsty quivered a little, and then hugged him again, whispering in his ear, ‘don’t worry, shortsighted boy, I’ll be your girlfriend no matter what. I’ll look after you, OK?’ He gave a sigh of relief. He’d been worrying about this ever since she told him about her experiences with contacts, both on her and others.

Later on Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘My poor shortsighted boy, that’s Ed, sorry I didn’t tell you about that, is even more poor sighted than I thought. No, not poor sighted, it’s just I thought his glasses were the final word on thickness, well now he tells me he’s got a pair stashed away somewhere even thicker than those he normally wears! I don’t mind at all that he wears contact lenses to make his glasses a little thinner. He needs everything he can get there. He’s not like Mike at all, in feeble glasses, covering up his short sight completely. Poor Ed, having to wear such thick glasses. I promise to look after you, Ed, forever and ever. If you lose your glasses, I’ll be there to guide you.’

Towards the end of the month Kirsty noted in her diary ‘Emma turned 14 yesterday, and is also turning into a proper little madam, a bit of a tearaway these last few months. She flouts school rules about makeup and clothes without caring about it at all. She is never without a boy now. And you should hear the way she talks to them, she has no respect for them. Well, if they’re just after a quick feel of her boobs, perhaps that’s right, but one of them recently was quite nice, the sort I would have liked to have met when I was that age. It’s not just her boobs that are getting bigger and bigger, it’s her head too. I don’t know where she’s going, but I don’t think a normal job like I have is on the agenda for her. She isn’t much interested in school anymore, other than as a place to flaunt her chest and herself, then hook the next unsuspecting boy. She used to be such a sweet girl, now look at her, she seems so disillusioned by school, by living here with us and trying to get somewhere when she leaves school. She told me that it’s just all completely pointless, a waste of time and effort. I think I might have to talk to Mum about her, otherwise who knows what might happen. Maybe she can do something to bring her down to Earth.’

11. November

On the first Friday evening of November, Kirsty sat on her bed with Ed. In one hand, she held his glasses, and in the other, a soft tissue; she was carefully cleaning them for him. Ed “watched” her, and then said, ’that’s really kind of you, I know you’ll make a good job of it.' ‘well, I do know something about cleaning glasses. I’ll make sure you can see really, really clearly.’ After she’d finished, she gently put them on for her, and he asked her, ‘can I do the same for you?’ Kirsty wasn’t anywhere near as loath to do this as before. Previously, she had only one pair of glasses; now she had a spare pair, although finding the other pair might well have been a small problem with uncorrected vision. Finding anything usually was, unless it happened to be in a place where she knew where it was anyway. And, of course, she wouldn’t trusted anyone to clean her glasses for her, certainly not a boy. She sat patiently in her blurred world for a few minutes, seeing vaguely the movements of Ed’s hands and arms. Then he told her to move her head a little to the right, then stay still, allowing him to gently replace her glasses on her face. Her vision was restored: it was a little streaky from rubbing, but she didn’t mind. An abundance of kisses and hugs soon followed.

The next day, Saturday, was certainly not what Kirsty would call a good day. It started off with Kirsty deciding to actually go to her mother and tell her what Emma was doing at school and elsewhere; it was hardly the diligent work that she and her sisters had done or were endeavouring to do. Kirsty told her all about the boyfriends, the makeup, the flaunting of herself, the way she had ignored and ridiculed her advice a few days ago. Her mother looked very shocked and upset, but resolved to talk to Emma. Kirsty was in the next room when her mother confronted her in the kitchen, and it wasn’t pleasant listening. Within a few minutes Emma was shouting at her, calling her all sorts of things that Kirsty would have never dreamt of saying. Kirsty peeped through the crack in the doorjamb at the altercation, just in time to hear Emma say something particularly spiteful to her mother; as a response to that, her mother slapped her. Emma didn’t care: instantly she slapped her back harder, and told her vitriolically ‘I hate you!’ Then she pushed her out of the way and out the door, hardly noticing Kirsty as she stomped angrily up the stairs.

Kirsty could hear her mother sobbing in the kitchen, so entered with the intention of helping and comforting her. She was sitting on the floor, her glasses knocked awry, but she seemed to hardly care about them. Kirsty looked down on her, and saw her mother looking up at her with a rather shattered, scared expression on her face. Her jaw and bottom lip quivered, tears streaked her face, and indeed were still running from her eyes. In a quiet, plaintively voice, she asked ‘Kirsty, what did I do wrong?’ Kirsty didn’t answer, but instead helped her up, then helped her to a chair by the kitchen table. She drew up a chair for herself, then did her best to comfort her poor beleaguered mother. She wept profusely, and after a while said again, ‘what did I do wrong? I did my best for you, all of you!’ Another flood of tears followed, with Kirsty holding her tightly. For her own part, she sat there simply thinking “I can’t believe this is happening - this happens to other people, not us.”

Kirsty could hear some angry clumping around upstairs, amid other sounds. It was Emma, up to what exactly, she didn’t know. She heard Louise asking rather innocently, ‘what’s going on?’ But with no reply, being as Emma wasn’t in a talking mood anymore. Kirsty looked at her mum, and said ‘I’ll have to see what Emma’s doing. She might be thinking of doing something stupid.’ Her mother nodded, mutely, helplessly. Kirsty didn’t know if she could stop Emma doing whatever she might want to do, but she felt she ought to make the attempt. She went out and ran upstairs, knocked on Emma’s door; as there was no reply, she pushed the door open.

Emma turned to her and screamed, ‘get out! Get out!’ Kirsty ignored her, so she calmed down a little. Instead of going completely nuts again, she carried on doing something in a very quickly yet careful and oddly calm manner, which was packing a small suitcase. Kirsty didn’t waste any time at all, sharply asking her, ‘you’re not leaving, are you?’ Emma stopped, looking at Kirsty as if she were stupid, then she carried as before without comment. Kirsty asked, ‘where will you go?’ ‘I don’t care. Just not here, where people are telling me what to do and how to do it all the time.’ ‘You can’t go. You’re too young, people would exploit you, use you, what would you do for food, where would you live?’ Emma looked at her, for a moment wishing she didn’t have to tell her eldest sister like this. Then she said firmly, ‘it’s none of your business. I want out of here.’

She dropped a few more possessions into the suitcase and snapped it shut. Kirsty braced herself: she didn’t want Emma to leave. Reasoning with her wasn’t working, she didn’t want to plead with her, so there seemed to be no other option left. She stood in the doorway, endeavouring to look as much as possible like a scary, worthy-of-respect big sister. The problem was that Emma wasn’t one for giving respect. Emma stopped a couple of feet from her. She said ‘Kirsty, get out of my way. Please. Don’t make me hurt you.’ Kirsty shook her head softly. She wasn’t going to let Emma out without a fight, if that what it was required to keep her at home. Emma saw this, and for a moment changed her mind, then her face hardened as she walked forward, pushing Kirsty out of her way, causing Kirsty to cry out in alarm.

For her part, Kirsty didn’t do any hitting, She did her best to block the way, but Emma had a slight edge on her in height and weight, and appeared to know far better how to use it. She’d “beaten up” boys bigger than herself, so her sister was fairly easy. Emma moved with surprising agility, putting her foot behind Kirsty’s and pushing her over. Kirsty flailed her arms, fell over and banged her head on the wall, giving her good cause to cry out again. She felt her head with her fingers, and saw a little blood on them when she looked at them. Her ankle hurt too: as Emma walked past her, she tried to get up. Her right ankle seemed to explode in pain, and then collapse under her. Despite her best efforts, she was forced to sit down again.

Emma looked down at her big sister: an unusual sensation for her. Gently she said, ‘sorry, Kirsty. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ Kirsty watched her turn and trot down the stairs, tears in her eyes, induced not just by her injuries, but also by what was then occurring. She then dragged herself over to watch as Emma put on her coat, opened the front door, and then turned to look up at her and say, ‘goodbye, Kirsty.’ Then she shut the door, and was gone.

Kirsty gave a shudder; the pain of her ankle and head was hitting her hard, causing her to feel dizzy and helpless. She wanted her mum to help, but she wanted to find her mum and help her, too. This she did, again trying to rise. Her right foot wouldn’t take her weight at all, causing her to almost fall down the stairs, but after some determined hobbling, she managed to get herself down and into the kitchen. Her mother looked blankly at her: they spent some time helping each other, trying to ease each other’s pain.

A couple of weeks later, Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘We’ve still heard nothing about Emma. It’s as if she’s vanished. The police have been looking for her, you would have thought it would easy to find her and bring her back to us: she’s a fourteen-year-old girl with big boobs and thick glasses, fairly distinctive I’d have thought, but there’s no trace. Probably she doesn’t want to be found. I’m praying she’s OK, wherever she is, whatever she is doing right now, that she’s not in trouble or hurt.’ At that, she felt the bump on her head, and thought about her ankle. ‘I’m feeling better now, physically at least. I can walk about again, and my headaches have gone.’ She paused, then continued ‘I hope she’s not lying dead in a ditch somewhere, but I haven’t dared say that to Mum. She’s off sick from work at the moment, she can’t cope with the stress. The doctor’s put her on sleeping pills. Now I’m walking about, I’m helping her out as best I can. She just can’t seem to get head around what happened, it’s beyond her experience. It’s also beyond mine. Oh, how could Emma do that to us? We are her family, we love her. I feel really sick about this. And I’m scared what’s going to happen to her. She thinks she’s so clever, so streetwise, but I’m frightened one day soon we’ll being going to something like what we did in February. Emma, please come home, we love you, you’re our sister. I don’t care that you beat me up, I still love you.’ At that, she burst into tears, as she had done several times in the last two weeks.

12. December

In the first week of December, Kirsty was of course still worried about Emma, desperate to hear from her, hoping she was OK, having no idea where she was, just like everyone else. Ed persuaded her to go and get her hair done, as she’d mentioned it a few weeks ago to him, but in the confusion of the Emma situation, she’d just about forgotten it. He said it might be better not to think about it too hard, at least not for a bit. So, taking his advice, she went along that Saturday morning. After a while sitting in the waiting area, someone came along and took her to be done. She sat in the chair, described what she wanted done: a sort of bouncier, curlier style.

Then it came to the glasses - of course, they couldn’t stay on. They’d get in the way as soon as the hairdresser started cutting. She pulled them from her face, and her prettiness was at once unbridled, for all to see, even for those who didn’t care to look past thick glasses. But now, she was the only one who couldn’t see her good looks, because for her they had dissolved into a meaningless, detailless pinky-yellow blob, staring back at her apparently eyelessly in the mirror. Cautiously she put her glasses on the shelf in front of her, leant back and watched them all but vanish: to be deprived of glasses was one thing, but to not know where they were, well, that was quite another. She blinked, and resigned herself to seeing the world without glasses for a while.

Despite her severe myopia, she found that she could see some things, like chairs, mirrors and things like that, but her view of such wasn’t much to get excited about: she saw insufficient detail to hold her interest for long. In the next mirror she could see the window and a piece of the outside world: as she looked, she saw someone walk past, of indeterminate sex. Then she noticed a couple of fuzzy grey patches, and realised that was what her uncorrected vision made of the lettering stuck on the window; it was the name of the hairdressers. They were six inches high, but for her, they were unreadable, barely recognisable as letters. Other things around her were noticeable, if not particularly easy to identify, for example, the tariff chart on the far wall and some of the pictures on the walls. Then someone came in; Kirsty saw them in the mirror but couldn’t say who they were from their appearance, even what they were beyond being human. After some time that seemed like forever, Kirsty got her glasses back in order to check on the progress. It occurred to her that she would not like to be deprived of her glasses, despite their thickness and ugliness. Quite soon she was finished, and walking out of the hairdresser, feeling happy because she looked as good as thought she could, at least in her circumstances.

That evening she wrote in her diary ‘This afternoon I was with Louise, watching TV, there was this cartoon on that had a girl with glasses as one of the characters, she lost her glasses. I felt very strange watching that, as today I had my hair done, and had to do without my glasses for a long time. I hadn’t realised quite what a blur my vision was, I don’t usually bother going without glasses because I can’t see! At home when I’m in my bedroom it doesn’t matter, I know not to leave things lying about, at least after bumping my nose! Outside, I don’t think I ever go without glasses except for the hairdresser, and with Ed, but that’s different, I trust him completely to guide me. He knows exactly what it’s like to be shortsighted!

‘But there’s no news on Emma yet. Mum is beginning to calm a little bit, I suppose because if someone had taken her and done something terrible to her, news of that might possibly have come to us by now. I know she hated school, at least the learning bit of it, and didn’t like living here either, because she got the short end of the stick when it came to glasses, like me but a bit worse. I wish she hadn’t had to wear secondhand glasses. Poor Emma, in some ways I can’t blame her, but it’s not all Mum’s fault either, it’s nobody’s fault she’s alone and trying to look after us all. We are all desperate for Emma to come back and be our sister again.’

The next weekend Kirsty was out Christmas shopping with Ed. They were in one particular store, when suddenly Kirsty caught a glimpse of someone familiar. It was her friend, Alice. She called out to her ‘Alice! Alice! Hey, Alice!’ Alice turned and saw her, then waved. Kirsty grabbed Ed’s unsuspecting hand and pulled him with her towards her friend. Halfway there, she noticed her sidekick, Jessica. She spotted Kirsty and waved, and pointed, looking curious, at Ed. They met up, and Kirsty gushed out, ‘hey, you two, how you doing?’ They were both fine, they said. Then Kirsty glanced at Ed, and said, with a little note of triumph in her voice, ’this is Ed. We’re, err, together.' Jessica’s eyes nearly popped out. Alice said, ‘you mean you’ve finally - oh, well done, Kirsty, I mean it - I hope you’re very happy…’ After some more congratulations, Jessica asked, ‘any news about Emma?’ Kirsty shook her head, and her face darkened, as did her voice, ‘still nothing.’ ‘How is your Mum taking it?’ ‘She’s struggling, I suppose you could say. She’s hoping to get back to work again, but also more than anything hoping Emma will come back safe and sound.’ They all went to have a coffee for a rest from shopping, whereupon they talked about many things, including Emma and glasses, then went their separate ways.

Christmas day was quite definitely the most low-key Kirsty had ever witnessed: they had managed to buy each other some small presents, swapped them, wished each other “Merry Christmas”, even if that wasn’t very appropriate. Her mother vanished back into her bedroom quite soon, so Kirsty got the washing up done with Amy and Melissa. On a table sat Emma’s presents, bought in hope, but as yet unseen by her and unopened.

The next day Kirsty went to see Ed again. It took a long while for the pair of them to get interested in each other than as two worried people, thinking about the missing Emma, but eventually they sat on the sofa, Kirsty watching TV, Ed watching her, touching her face and then, her glasses. Kirsty reminded him ‘I need those to see.’ ‘I know, I just like them. You look beautiful.’ Kirsty turned to face him, and saw his eyes floating behind his chunky lenses, for a moment wondering how anyone could see anything through them. She reached out, and touched the perfectly flat, hard, smooth front of his left lens, and said softly, ‘yours are good to look at too’ Quite soon they were busy feeling each other’s softer parts. Kirsty really wanted to take her glasses off in case they got broken, but then remembered she now had a spare pair, so considered that this wasn’t such a big problem. They seemed to add to her excitement, matching his big thick shiny glasses, moving so close to hers, occasionally bumping and clacking into them. Then she felt something in her stomach, a great wave of pleasure, and then a wet feeling down below - so that was sex? She smiled gently, and Ed saw her do so. After a brief moment’s consideration, she asked, ‘can you do that again, please, Ed? That’s if you’re not too tired?’

New Year’s Eve came along, and for once Kirsty had someone to take her out for the evening. They went pubbing, clubbing and all sorts of things, Kirsty got a little more drunk than she meant to, but at least no harm was done. Finally they all went outside to listen to the clock chiming, and then a great cheer went up, and that was the cue for more partying. About an hour later Kirsty told Ed she was tired: he looked a little disappointed, but then she said, ’tomorrow we’ll do this.' She waggled her glasses gently, which between them meant “sex with glasses on!”

Dutifully Ed escorted her away from the main hubbub in the town square, quickly coming to a slightly darker and notably quieter area, although loud music could still be heard in the distance; the sound of a pair of high-heeled shoes was audible, coming from from a side street up ahead, then a female figure wearing a coat and not really much more appeared, being the source of the footsteps, then crossed their path some distance ahead. Despite it being night, the figure not facing them, and Kirsty being tired and a little drunk, her eyes followed the young woman. Something flashed from the front of her face, and an instant later, Kirsty recognised who she was looking at. Excitedly, she ran over, crying out ‘Emma! Emma!’

The girl stopped, then turned to face Kirsty. It was Emma, still wearing her glasses, two pieces of crystal shining flatly back at Kirsty. But apart from her glasses, the rest was all but unrecognisable. She wore generously applied makeup, shiny red lipstick, and her hair was well styled to take advantage of her looks, as well as her glasses. From behind each lens blinked a shrunken and cleverly made-up eye, looking at Kirsty rather distantly. Kirsty was vaguely shocked at how old Emma looked, which was at least as old as she did. Her arms fell away from the front of the coat she was wearing, showing a little more of the tight, short, low-cut red dress she was wearing, showing off her curves, especially those that mattered to persons of the male persuasion. Her bust seemed bigger than ever. “Perhaps it was the bra?” That question didn’t really matter to Kirsty.

As Ed came running up, he innocently said, ‘who is…?’ He then recognised Emma, despite her disguise. Kirsty simply said to her ‘Emma, you don’t have to live like this. You shouldn’t have to. Come home with us, please. Mum is worried sick about you.’ That seemed to touch something in Emma: she wasn’t by nature a terrible, horrible person, she’d just wanted to start a new life before the old one got to her so much that she couldn’t cope with it anymore. Slowly, she shook her head, ’no, Kirsty, I’m not coming back. Tell Mum I’m sorry I upset her. But this is what I want. Amy and Melissa and you are doing what they and you want, I’m doing this. It suits me. I can make lots of money this way. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.' To emphasise this, Emma put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a few condoms, then put her other hand into her other pocket and pulled out some banknotes. ‘See, I’m not stupid. I can do this.’ Kirsty sighed, somehow naively hoping Emma wasn’t doing what she thought she was doing, but then realising the plain truth: Emma was selling herself. Admittedly, she was busty, pretty, smart and streetwise, and could make boys and men do as she wanted, even at her age, but still, what a way to make money!

Emma then said ‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Kirsty. You’re the best big sister anyone could have.’ Emma embraced her, and after a numb moment’s hesitation, Kirsty returned it, then they parted. She asked, ‘what are you going to do? Will you stay here?’ Emma replied, a note of derision in her voice, ’naw, there’s not much going on here. I’m going to London, don’t expect to find me here again. There’s lots of work for me there.' They stood silently for a long moment, and then Emma said, ‘well, goodbye.’ Kirsty nodded, accepting the inevitable. Possibly she and Ed could have dragged her home kicking and screaming, but she’d only have walked out again once let go. They would have had to tie her down to keep her at home, and that wouldn’t have done anyone any good either. As Emma started to walk away, Kirsty called out, ‘don’t forget, if you need help, just call me.’ Emma stopped, turned to look at Kirsty, nodded, then said, ‘yeah, OK. I know your number… Thanks, big sis.’ With that she turned and started off again, and within a couple of minutes she was gone around the corner.

When they got home, way, way after midnight, and after telling her mother all about their unexpected encounter with Emma, her mother was initially heartbroken and scared all over again, just as the night she left, but after a bit slowly realised that Emma was basically OK, as Kirsty had reported, and it seemed as if she might just be OK in future too, even if the future was one that appalled and scared her witless.

Much later, Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘I met Emma tonight, you should have seen her, she doesn’t look like a schoolgirl at all. She looked like a tart, a prostitute. That is because that is what she now is. I still cannot believe my little sister is doing this. Mum is still hoping she’ll suddenly change her mind… I don’t think she will, but I still hope so. I still don’t quite understand why she wants to do this. There are plenty of other, better ways to make a living without selling her body. Oh, Emma, what have you done to us? Things were getting better this year, I have a lovely boyfriend, Ed, sex with him is great, especially when we wear our glasses! That really turns him on, and me, too!

If there were any way I could rerun this year, I’d make sure Emma didn’t leave us to go on the game. And I’d not bother wasting my time with contact lenses. There you are, two things that make me cry. Trouble is I’m stuck with one and stuck without the other. One ultimately didn’t matter, the other matters a whole load. I suppose this is a waste of time, but I’d still like Emma to come home and all to be forgiven. Something tells me that’s something else that I can’t have.

I’ll have to carry on with this in my next Diary.’

Bye, love, Kirsty.’

https://vision-and-spex.com/dear-diary-iii-t612.html