Serenity
Story Two: Kacey’s Rebellion
Foreword: This story is dedicated to one of my favourite authors on Bobby’s website: Hikari, or the author of “Serenity - The Eyes of Amy”. It’s an old one but quite a good one. I suggest reading it if you’ve never done so before. As I have never seen this author anywhere else, I have no way of showing my appreciation or asking for a sequel to what was clearly meant to be a serialized story, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. This is the fruit of that effort.
As you’ll no doubt notice, this story doesn’t stray far from the original either in terms of plot or style. That being said, this is clearly a work of my own. Enjoy.
I’m so annoyed! My name is Kacey Aims and I’m turning thirteen today. Just my luck though – it’s also the first day of school. Actually, it’s always the first day of school on my birthday, so it’s never any fun. But this year it’s even worse because it’s my first day at Serenity College, some random all-girls boarding school. It’s supposed to be one of the best in the country but I just know I’ll hate it here. In my last school, I was always the “problem child” and all my teachers hated me. I guess that’s why my parents paid a lot of money to send me here. They’re hoping the school will “change me” or something. So now I’m all alone here, away from all my friends. I’ll have to wear a stupid uniform too. Sometimes I think that my parents don’t want me around, and they’ve finally gone and sent me to a boarding school just to get me out of their hair.
I’m waiting in line with my bag now. I guess they’re going to be assigning us all a dorm room. There’s a lady wearing these stupid, thick, red-framed glasses who keeps giving me this phony little smile while she asks for my name. I mutter my name under my breath because I really don’t care about any of this. Her smile turns sour and she’s asking me to please speak up young lady in that annoying way adults have of telling you off. I make a show of saying my name louder and more defiantly this time. She hands me the envelope, shaking her head disapprovingly. The next stop is a nurse’s office. Why do I have to see a nurse? This is such a drag.
After some more waiting in line, I walk into the room. The nurse is some other lady with thick stupid glasses, only hers are white. What is with this school and these glasses? And who wears white glasses? She wouldn’t look so annoying without them, cause she’s actually pretty. She takes my measurements for the uniform which she then tells me I’m going to have to wear everywhere on campus, even in my dorm room. I feel like I’m about to puke.
I start heading for the door as soon as she said the measurements are done, but the nurse stops me as I’m leaving. “Do you wear glasses or contacts?” she asks. What? What is with all this glasses stuff? “No,” I reply monosyllabically with more than a bit of disgust. “Well, we’re going to have to give you an eye test.” I think to myself “Sure, whatever.” My vision’s always been perfect, and no one in my family needs any glasses. I used to have a friend back in my old school who suddenly showed up with glasses one day. I pitied her that she had such bad luck. Obviously we all still teased her for it, but even she only ever had to wear them when she had to copy things from the board. Anyway, so the nurse asks me to sit down and read from the eyechart. I can read everything perfectly, of course, except for the two last lines. Then again they are so small that it’s impossible anyone would be able to read them, so I thought everything should be fine. But then she placed this weird machine in front of my eyes that flashed some lights in front of my eyeballs and made me tear up a little.
“I’m afraid you’re nearsighted, miss Aims,” she says with her airhead, self-satisfied smile.
“What are you talking about? I can see perfectly!” I said, dumbfounded. What is going on here?!
“Perfectly? Oh, but what about the last two lines? In any case, I am quite sure, Kacey; I’m a professional. Your glasses may take a little getting used to, as they’re your first pair, but before you know it you’ll be wondering how you even lived without them at all.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. I would just not wear the glasses, I thought. It would be simple. It’s not like I needed them anyway. “Can I go now?”
“Yes, young lady. Your glasses will be ready this afternoon, along with your uniform. Remember that here at Serenity College, glasses are part of the uniform, so you’ll be expected to wear them all the time. And that includes in your dormitory. Now, head to the auditorium for the principal’s speech.”
I am too shocked to reply at this point. What is the deal with this school? I walk in the halls and I see that all the older students are wearing the same pair of blue glasses, which match with their blue skirts with their white shirts tucked into them. I am really shocked and angry at this point. I don’t listen to a word the principal says.
I arrive in my room later, and on one of the two beds I see a card with my name on it, and my uniform neatly folded on the sheets, with a glasses case on top. I know I have to put my uniform on before 2:00 for our orientation, but I don’t want to do it, so I waste time before then. When I do put the uniform on, I do a messy job of it on purpose. I leave my shirt half-untucked, I don’t tie my hair, and I put on some makeup I stole from my mom earlier. Then, out of curiosity, I open the stupid glasses case. Sure enough, there’s the same blue frames everyone else is wearing. I snort a little under my breath. Fat chance I’ll be wearing these. I close the case, toss it back on my bed, and leave for orientation.
Well, my homeroom teacher is getting angry at me now on the first day of class. Apparently my uniform wasn’t “proper” enough. She starts to lecture the whole class about how important it is to stick to the uniform, and how makeup is forbidden for being “distracting.” She says we’re in middle school now, and you’d be given detention for not wearing your uniform. She is also ranting to us about how important it is to stick to the glasses-wearing uniform. According to her rant, in other schools, students were made fun of for needing to wear glasses. She’s saying this as if it were about to make her cry. Pfft. I laugh under my breath, making a few students turn around to look at me. “No one gets bullied at Serenity, though,” she proudly continues telling us. “Here, even students with perfect vision have to wear their clear-lens glasses every day with pride. This way, no one would be punished for their vision problems, and everyone would be on an equal playing field.”
What a sham! Then and there, I decide I’m never going to wear those glasses. I don’t want to be just another cog in the machine, another brick in the wall, obediently wearing some stupid glasses I don’t need. When I get to my dorm room, I smash the lenses of my glasses under the soles of my shoes in protest.
So you can guess this wasn’t what the teachers wanted to hear, and they didn’t believe my story about my glasses falling and breaking. They are still telling me every day that I’ll be getting some really bad detention starting next week if I don’t wear the glasses. That doesn’t scare me, it’s not like there’s anything fun to do in the school anyway. What’s a little detention?
On Saturday of the first week, my dorm-mate finally arrives. I can see all her stuff on the bed next to mine. There’s also a new glasses case on my own bed. I guess they replaced my glasses. “Fat chance I’ll be wearing those,” I think to myself as I throw the case under the bed.
When I meet my dorm mate later that evening I find out she’s just the dorkiest possible girl and I know she’ll fit right into this lame school. She’s shy and obedient, and she’s wearing her own glasses, not the students’ blue pair. She says that there was a problem with the glasses the school gave her, so she has to wait a bit longer to get hers. Something about the prescription not being right or something. She tells me her name is Rachel Koch and I start laughing in my head. Yeah, she’s definitely Koch-bottles all right. Laughing, I tell her about the nickname I came up for her. She forces a laugh with me, but then doesn’t say a word for the rest of the evening and just buries her head in a book. Geez, what a sorry case.
It’s now the Monday of the second week, and my teacher’s handing me this pink detention slip. She says I’ll get one every day I show up without my uniform. After class, I go to the room to see what this detention is all about. I find out I’m the only girl in the room. Great. The teacher in there lectures me again about behaving and scolds me for not even wearing the uniform to the detention. That means I’ll be getting another pink slip, she says. I shrug.
She then pulls up a projector, puts a page on the lens and tells me I have to copy the text from the slide. After that, I have to do the reading comprehension questions successfully in one hour, otherwise I’ll have to stay for a whole two hours. She then turns off the lights and tells me to start. The idiot teacher doesn’t even realize that the text on the screen is way too small for me to copy. I mean, who just copies a whole book onto one slide of a projector? I squint a little, but then I just give up and start slouching in my chair. The teacher tells me that I should really be wearing my glasses if I can’t see the board. I shout back at her that I don’t need any stupid glasses!
I’ve been forced all week to sit through this two-hour snooze fest where I can’t even do anything. They don’t even let me sleep! And my teachers just keep waving all these pink slips in front of me. I must already have enough to be in detention for a whole month. Thinking about this alone in my room one evening, I start crying. It’s too much. I can’t imagine spending the next week, much less the whole year, doing this. I’m so isolated and bored.
The next day, before leaving for class, I fetch my glasses case from under the bed. It was the new glasses that I hadn’t even opened yet. I take them out to get a better look at them. They feel a little heavier than I thought they would, so I change my mind about trying them on. Instead, I just go to class with the case in my bag.
The whole day passes like usual, with the teacher handing me another detention slip. Unlike usual, though, I don’t feel angry and combative. I just feel depressed. All day I think about the two hours of torture I’ll have to go through after school, and how I haven’t even made one friend here yet. I miss Becky and my other friends at my old school. I think about the glasses in my bag. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad to just wear them – I mean everyone else in the school is already a four-eyed geek, it’s not like they’d make fun of me or anything. But my pride stops me and I keep brooding in class.
When I get to the detention room that day, the teacher repeats to me once again that if I just wore my glasses and copied from the board, I could leave a whole hour early. I wouldn’t have to keep doing this for two hours every day. I make a show of ignoring her like usual, but I really don’t have any fight left in me. I don’t have a choice. A few minutes later, I take out the glasses from the case and put them on.
I expected I’d be able to just see the board clearly, but I’m not prepared for what is now happening to me. Everything around me is really blurry all of a sudden, and I can’t even read the piece of paper in front of me. I’m getting a little dizzy and I feel a headache coming on, so I take off them off immediately. That’s when I notice the teacher is looking at me with interest.
“These things don’t work!” I blurt out with frustration at her. “They just give me a headache. I can’t wear them.”
“Well, it’s normal to have a little headache with a new pair of glasses. It’ll pass in a few days,” she tells me dismissively. “Now put them on and do your work, Ms. Aims.” She turns back to reading her newspaper.
“But I can’t see!” I protest.
She sighs and gets up to come to my desk. She then asks me to read the first line from the projector without my glasses. I tell her I can’t read it at all. Then, she takes the glasses and puts them on my face and asks me to try again. After a few seconds of straining my eyes through the glasses, to my surprise, I can actually see the lines and I read them out to her.
“There. You see? You’re actually quite nearsighted, young lady. If you weren’t so stubborn you’d see that and just wear your glasses.”
“But…” I start to mount a protest. She cuts me off, telling me to get started with the work, otherwise I won’t have time to finish.
I’m still fuming with anger. I have no choice but to get started on the work, though. While it’s true that I can see the tiny text on the projector perfectly now, the piece of paper in front of me is impossible to see with these dumb glasses, so I have to write almost blindly. I feel like my writing is barely making it on the lines. Also, the glasses are heavy and keep slipping down my nose, which is annoying cause I have to push them up all the time. After a full hour of doing this, I have a huge headache and my eyes feel like they are swollen, but the work is done and she allows me to leave.
“Now keep them on all day young lady. It’s the school rules. If you do that, I might even be convinced to cancel a few of your detention days. Besides, a girl with your poor vision has no business going anywhere without her glasses,” the teacher scolds me one last time before I leave.
Feeling dizzy, sick, and defeated, I decide to wear the glasses back to my dorm. I almost trip in the staircase and a few girls notice and giggle under their breath. I feel terrible.
As soon as I get back to my dorm I start crying. Thankfully, I’m alone and Koch-bottles isn’t here yet. Wiping my eyes under the glasses, and calming myself down, I start to look around my room. The view from the window is really clear. I can see details like leaves on trees and street signs much clearer than I had ever seen before. “I guess I do need these glasses after all,” I think to myself, now feeling just empty and broken. I can also sort of focus on my hands in front of me if I try really hard, something I couldn’t do at all an hour ago. It seems like that stupid teacher was right after all. I just need to get used to them, but these are really my glasses.
Then, Koch-bottles walks in. By now, I can tell she doesn’t really like me. Actually she’s scared of me cause everyone in class started calling her Koch-bottles after I started it. That’s why one of my pink slips says “bullying classmates” on it. But when she sees me with the glasses and sees me wiping off my tears, she hesitates for a bit before talking.
“I know how hard it is to have to wear glasses, Kacey, especially strong ones like the ones we have to wear. I really understand what you’re going through. It took me a while to get used to it too,” she said. Well, I thought to myself, mine aren’t nearly as strong as yours, Koch-bottles. But I didn’t say that. I was more curious about the second part.
“Wearing glasses was hard for you too? In the beginning?” I ask her. It felt good to be able to relate with someone else about the weird, blurry situation I was in. I haven’t really been able to talk to anyone heart-to-heart in the three weeks that I’ve been here, so I’m kind of starved for attention at this point. Even talking to Koch-bottles feels nice.
“Yeah, definitely. It wasn’t easy at all. But you just got to keep wearing them. There’s no choice for people like us. Soon they’ll feel really good and natural, and you won’t wanna take them off at all,” she says, optimistically. I find myself really wanting to believe her.
“So what can I do to help it, Ko— I mean… Rachel? They’re really uncomfortable,” I confide in her.
She lights up instantly and jumps off her bed. “Oh, oh! I know! I have just the thing for that,” she says. I imagine she’s smiling from ear to ear, but I can’t really see her face so clearly.
She comes back with something in her hand and starts messing with the arms of my glasses behind my ears. After a while of fidgeting with something behind there, she says “Ta-da! Now your glasses won’t be as uncomfortable anymore. I noticed they were slipping. Mine did too, so I gave you a pair of those little plastic hook-thingies to make sure they don’t slip off as much,” she says while showing me her own the plastic earpieces behind her ears.
Although it doesn’t do anything about the headache and the blur, I have to admit the glasses do feel more comfortable on my face now. It feels like nothing can make them slip off at all now. I thank her.
Even though I can’t see her facial expression so well, I can tell she’s really happy. We talk for a few more hours that night and I cheer up a little too. Even though this place is still super lame, I guess I can’t just go at it alone all the time.
I noticed Rachel keeps her glasses on all the time, even in the shower and in bed. When it comes time for us to shower before sleep that night, I just do the same as her. I think part of me actually wants to be her friend. Weird, right?
After that day, the teachers seem really happy with me. I did only one more week of detention, where I was able to finish copying all the stuff from the projector and leave an hour early each time. Then, they told me that they talked to Rachel, my dorm mate, and I’ve been showing such good behavior with my uniform that they were willing to suspend the rest of my detention. That is, as long as I kept obeying the uniform rules. So I made extra sure to keep them on all the time, especially in our room in front of Rachel.
Things got a lot easier after that. A couple of weeks later, it stopped being hard to see people’s facial expressions. A week after that, reading books and doing homework didn’t give me massive headaches anymore. I also made friends with my classmates and started having fun at school. Everyone is so positive and focused all the time, I guess it really did rub off on me a little. I also started caring about my grades a bit more too. After a month, I had to admit that the nurse on the first day was right. The glasses felt really natural and I didn’t want to take them off at all.
This week we have a long weekend. Which means my parents are picking me up from school. I feel like I’m actually going to miss my “lame” friends here, but then again I’ll be able to see my cool friends back home, so that’s good. My parents pick me up and they both look shocked for some reason. They start asking me some questions about my glasses and stuff, which I avoid answering completely. Back home my mom tells me to take them off. She says that I don’t need to wear them outside of school. I scream at her that I actually need them and that it’s none of her business and lock myself in my room. My parents really make me angry sometimes. I wish I didn’t have to come back here.
The next day, I call my best friend Becky and we go hang out in the mall together. When I see her in the mall she barely even recognizes me. I didn’t think about the fact that she hadn’t seen me with my glasses yet.
“Oh my god, can you even see out of those coke-bottles? How did your eyesight get so bad?” she asks me, half curious and half making fun of me.
“My eyesight isn’t that bad,” I tell her back confidently. “It’s just a dumb school where there’s this rule that we all have to wear glasses, and they found out that I was a bit nearsighted, that’s all.”
We start catching up a little about what happened since I left, but she keeps making comments about me being a four-eyes and my “thick” glasses. We go to the washroom together eventually and she starts touching up her make-up. I hadn’t thought about makeup in forever. Actually, I don’t think I even looked at myself in the mirror since I started wearing glasses a couple of months ago. I guess I’ve just been avoiding looking at myself. But now while Becky is doing her thing I have no choice but to look at my reflection.
What I see really surprises me. I actually do look like I’m wearing coke-bottles! The lenses have got the same white rings on the side as Rachel’s, and they seem to push the sides of my face in so that I can pretty much see behind my head. While I’m looking at my glasses, Becky suddenly asks:
“Hey, let me try those on.”
I nod. Slowly, I take off the glasses, which are hard to take off due to those plastic earpieces Rachel gave me. As soon as they’re off, I start to panic because I can’t see anything. Was my vision really this bad before? Practically everything around me has disappeared, and all I can see are blurry blobs. Meanwhile, Becky has my glasses. I hear (but can’t see) her say:
“Wow! You really are blind. How can you even see anything at all with these?” I don’t know what to say. I don’t even understand what’s happening. My heartrate skyrockets, and that’s when I fall down and lose consciousness.
She picks me up and puts the glasses back on my face, making a joke about how I need glasses so much now that I faint without them. I’m not in the mood anymore to laugh, much less to hang out with her, so I leave, telling her that I’m feeling sick.
Back home, I call Rachel. I really miss her. Things were so much simpler in Serenity. Crying, I ask her how it’s possible that my vision got so bad so soon. She tells me that it was always like that, you just notice it more when after you start wearing glasses. We talk all evening and she tells me all of her glasses stories. Somehow I manage to calm myself down.
We’ve been back to school now for a week. I still haven’t taken my glasses off again since the bathroom incident with Becky, even though my mom tried again to make me do it. I guess I’m a little scared to see how bad my vision is again. I’m thinking really hard about what happened – I know my vision wasn’t this bad, and I’m starting to think that the school gave me the wrong glasses. But why? And how? Then it hit me. On the first week, they must have given me Rachel’s glasses, and given Rachel my glasses. That’s why hers were wrong the first time.
It was a good theory, but how could I prove it? After some thought, I got the answer: if my glasses were really Rachel’s prescription, then I should be able to see just as well out of her glasses now. That evening, I found an excuse to ask Rachel for her glasses to test my theory. Sure enough, they are the exact same. I was thinking about telling her, but I decided I would just keep the secret to myself for a little while longer.
It’s winter break now and the first semester is over. I tried not to think so much about the glasses and just focus on my studies. I didn’t tell anyone about the mistake, actually, even though I probably should have. I guess it’s cause I don’t mind wearing thick glasses now. They feel a bit heavy sometimes but… there’s an upside: my mom absolutely hates them. She keeps trying to get me to wear contacts at home, and I can tell she’s embarrassed about it. That’s when I realize that I actually love wearing them. They make me special – certainly unrecognizable from my mom – and if it pisses her off that I have thick glasses then that’s even better.
It’s the first day of the new semester today, and we’ve just finished our eye test. The nurse tells me my prescription has gone up a little. It doesn’t bother me at all though. Actually I’m glad, because I’m sure it’ll annoy my parents even more.
When I get to my dorm that evening, our new uniforms and glasses are already on our beds. Excited, I open mine up and put them on. Everything is so crisp and nice through them. Then, out of curiosity, I open up Rachel’s unopened case. I can’t resist putting them on to see if her eyes got worse too. Unsurprisingly, they did, and they got much worse than mine. They make things even sharper than my new ones. I look at myself in the mirror and that’s when I decide I want to wear hers, not mine. So I swap mine out for hers and put the case back on her bed.
It’s been a few weeks and the headaches from her new glasses have stopped completely. I know my vision is even worse now. My parents will be horrified. But really it’s their fault after all – they’re the ones who wanted me to “change” here. I guess I’m just rebellious like that.
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