Now You See It . . .

When her new glasses break, Wendy is all too happy to wear the dorky pair of sunglasses she finds on her lawn. They seem to match her prescription, but she soon begins to see such things as cheerful corpses and portals to other worlds.

GlassesOne way to look at what happened is that everything is the fault of my optometrist and his enthusiasm for those miserable eyedrops that make your eyes supersensitive to light. But if I've learned one thing from all this, it's that there's generally more than one way to look at anything.So, from the beginning, a few points to remember:(1) Without glasses, I can't see farther away than about a foot and a half beyond the tip of my nose.(2) Glasses may improve someone's seeing, but they've never improved anyone's looks.Sure, parents, grandparents, and eyeglass salesmen will assure you that you're cute as a button with your glasses on-if what you want to look like is a cute button, though that's not my idea of a big selling point. But in any case, what's the first thing a movie director does to a gorgeous actress when he needs her to look plain for a role?I've been bugging my mom for contact lenses since about when I was in kindergarten and realized exactly how stupid glasses made me look. That was when I got my first hint that boys don't go for girls who wear glasses-when Nicholas Bonafini, the most popular boy in kindergarten, ran into the LEGO tower I'd spent the last fifteen minutes building, turned around, looked at me, and said, "You're dumb."It was the glasses, I'm convinced.Mom is sure I wouldn't take proper care of contact lenses and is worried my eyeballs would rot and fall out as a result. She says I can get contact lenses when I'm eighteen, which is another three years. Eighteen. Big deal. At eighteen, people are considered old enough to vote, move away from home, get a credit card, join the army, and/or get married. Not that anybody wants to marry someone who wears stupid glasses.(3) I hate those eye doctor eyedrops.They sting. They make my eyes water, which makes my mascara run, which makes the doctor lecture against the evils of eye makeup (a lecture I've already gotten from Mom). And they make me look stupider than even glasses make me look.Eye doctors like eyedrops either because you have to be a certifiable sadist to go into the business (I'm convinced that's what half those certificates on their office walls say), or because the drops make your pupils big enough the doctor gets a chance to see to the back of your brain.While slightly big pupils give girls a kind of doe-eyed innocence, which-while not my first choice-isn't the worst of all possible looks, huge pupils that only leave a tiny rim of iris showing give girls a what-the-heck's-wrong-with-her? look that's only appealing to drug pushers and eye doctors.So the eyedrops sting going in, then they make you look and feel like you're auditioning for a role in Return of the Mole People, and-isn't this a nice touch?-the effects last a good ten or twelve hours. Even indoors in Rochester, New York-where, by the way, gray days were invented-the afternoon light is too bright for someone who's had eyedrops.Plus, as a bonus side effect, with your pupils

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Excerpted from Now You See It ... by Vivian Vande Velde
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