All his reservations toward his former music teacher were gone. Perhaps it was because he now knew that Miss Collins truly had understood him during his time at Webster Day School. He hadn't imagined her feelings of empathy toward him. Or perhaps it was because he'd been stripped of so much of himself over the past months that the part of him holding back was now lost. Whatever the reason, Jack felt no qualms in entering Miss Collins's house and sitting down in her living room with a mug of hot cocoa, marking how entirely beautiful she really was. Her soft blonde hair floated around her heart-shaped face like an ethereal mist, glittering almost as much as her strange, pale eyes. Her slender form seemed more to hover on the chair across from him and Grace rather than actually put weight onto it. Jack glanced at the woman's hands, remembering how they used to always clasp and unclasp during music classes, but now they were still and calm in her lap.

"See!" cried Grace, taking a swig of her hot chocolate and then making a face as the liquid burned her tongue a bit. Recovering, she added, "I told you you'd like her, Jack. Anne told me she knew you when I talked about you one time! I come over lots, here, because Anne is my mother's friend's daughter . . . or something like that. Right Anne? And I just happened to be talking about you one time and she heard me say your name, and when I said your full name, she knew who you were right away and said she'd been super worried about you since you'd left. Said she wanted to see you, so I said I could figure it out. But then for the longest time, you wouldn't even listen to me. Or talk to me, or anything. Because of your meds. Now that that's all over, though, I could finally get you to come."

Jack kept his eyes on Miss Collins while Grace talked. When his friend had finished her waterfall of words, he asked, "You were worried about me?"

To which the woman earnestly replied, "Of course." Miss Collins leaned forward toward the table, looking from Jack to Grace, and then back to Jack. "I knew you were special the moment I saw you, Jack. I've only been at Webster Day for two years, but I can spot someone with gifts similar to mine quite easily. I could tell at once that Grace was special, and I could tell at once with you, too. There's some hidden connection between us, Jack."

The boy felt heat flush through him, and he was fairly certain it wasn't the doing of the hot chocolate. "You and me?"

"Everyone like us. You, me, Grace . . . and I've met others. Others with the sort of gifts that we have."

"What do you mean?" asked Jack. He was beginning to feel as if he were in some sort of movie where the main character finds out he's a superhero without ever having known it before. "Gifts? I don't feel like I have those. Not in the good way that you sound like you mean."

Miss Collins smiled soft and quietly said, "No, I know you don't. Not yet, anyhow. It took me a long time to realize that what I had was a gift. For years, I thought that what I had was a curse."

"But you feel different now?"

"Yes, she said that!" Grace answered for Miss Collins. She was bouncing in her seat out of impatience. "Tell him about your eye, Anne—tell Jack about that!"

Jack looked from Grace to Miss Collins in wonder. Now that it'd been mentioned, he did vaguely recall hearing the girls at Webster Day whisper about their music teacher being partially blind—that she'd been a dancer before but had lost her eyesight and had had to leave her dream of dancing behind. Was it true? Were those strange rumors more than just speculation? He wanted to know, suddenly, more than he even realized.

Instead of explaining with words, Miss Collins bent her head, lifted her hands to her face. Her hair fell softly down across her forehead, so Jack couldn't quite make out what she was doing, but when she lifted her head back up, a gasp escaped him. While the woman's right eye was its normal pale blue, her left one was entirely white; not even a black pupil was against the iris. It was solid white.

Taking her glass of water off the table, Miss Collins dropped the colored contact she'd just removed into it.

Anyone else's reaction would have been to recoil from the music teacher in disgust, but Jack knew, somehow, that this was not horrifying but something of exquisite beauty, perhaps even sacred.

Even Grace, who had apparently seen Miss Collins's eyes, had stopped fidgeting on the couch beside him. The room had stilled. The worlds around them knew to revere. To hush. No whisperings fluttered through the air, no movements distracted attentions save for the slight tremblings of several specks of light clustered around the ceiling fan.

"Your story," breathed Grace. "Tell him how you got it."

Jack was all attentiveness. He'd never seen anything so fascinating in all his life. Without realizing he was speaking aloud, Jack said, "You are blind, then."

Miss Collins smiled. "Blind in the way most people know. I don't see out of this eye the things I see out of this one." She pointed first to her white eye and then to her normal one. "But I see other things. Things I only half-glimpsed before I lost my sight. This blind eye of mine sees more than I could ever dream existed.

"I know you want to ask me how I lost this eye. I'll tell you, Jack, but you must promise not to be afraid."

The boy nodded, slowly.

"I was like you when I was younger. All my life, I saw and heard and felt things that I couldn't understand or explain. My parents thought I was imaginative, but when I grew older and still spoke of things only I could sense, they began to seek help for me. I became afraid and stopped telling them what I saw and heard. I learned to keep everything to myself, even when it frightened me."

Jack frowned without realizing he was doing so. Knew exactly what Miss Collins must have felt like.

"As time passed, I graduated from high school and went away to college. I wanted to dance—to be a famous ballet dancer! That had always been my dream. While I was there, I met another student. He, too, was a dancer, and he was far more passionate than I about his craft. He was brilliant on the stage, full of life and fire; he was an absolute enchantment to watch. Those who saw him couldn't help feeling as if they were there with him, feeling every movement he made, sensing how the music resonated inside him. And you felt so sad, strangely, to see him, because you knew that he must truly feel the music deep, deep inside, rushing through him like some liquid life force, and you realized that you'd never be so fortunate. Most of us cannot feel music that way. Most of us only catch its power in small glimpses and long to actually understand it. But he . . . he truly, absolutely, knew it. It spoke to him, and anyone watching, anyone in the audience, sensed that he was the music in those moments he let it consume him. He became the medium through which the music spoke and showed it through his movements.

"I didn't know him well, at first. He was so quiet, so removed from all the rest of the students. I was always someone who kept to myself, too, not because I was shy, but because I was afraid of what others would think if they knew my secrets. I had come to realize, by that time, that nobody else in the world (that I knew of) was like me. That caused me to isolate myself, because I was alone. When I met him, however, I knew immediately that he was different. He wasn't like the rest. I don't know how I knew; I didn't even realize at the time that I knew it. But there was just something about him . . . something . . ."

Jack took in his breath. The something. It was what he had felt toward Grace. What he had felt toward Miss Collins without entirely realizing it. He'd sensed that they were somehow different, though he hadn't understood at the time what that sense of differentness meant.

"It was some time before I gained the courage to speak with him. Some while before I was actually in a situation where I could really talk. When I did get that chance, I realized that he was different, and, most remarkably, that he was like me in many ways. He'd always sensed and felt things he couldn't understand. Things that separated him from the real world but at the same time kept him from fully knowing what else was out there. I didn't entirely understand him. He felt things far more powerfully than I did. Although I tried my hardest to really know him, to make him feel that he was not alone, it didn't work. He was far too unbalanced by the constant stimulation he received from his senses. By the time I thought our friendship was beginning to solidify, I underestimated his suffering; it was too much for him—he ended it by taking his own life."

Her words slowed. Her voice lowered, as did her eyes. For only a moment, Miss Collins was lost in a drifting memory. Her eyes glazed.

"Afterward," she began again, a slight tremor in her words, "I felt deep sorrow. So deep that I wasn't sure how to deal with it. I became reclusive. I myself began to fall. He'd been the only one I'd known similar to myself. His fire was so strong—too strong; he hadn't been able to control it, and so it controlled him.

"There are times, Jack, when we don't know ourselves. When we become vague shadows of who we really are. That is what I became in the weeks and months after my friend's death. I wasn't myself. I couldn't understand anything, wasn't even certain I wanted to. I fell away from dancing and school in general, because none of it held worth, anymore. I felt such pain . . . . such bitterness. But I did, at last, overcome it. I managed to find myself in that vast loneliness, and when I did, I woke up one morning from a brilliant, fleeting dream and realized that my eye had become this."

She pointed to her face.

"And now, although I'm half-blind by most people's standards, I realize that I was actually entirely blind before, because this eye knows and comprehends far more of what really exists than I ever saw with both eyes. It took some time for me to figure out what exactly had happened to me and why I'd been given such a gift (I call it a gift, because I can understand what I never did while I was growing up). Now, though, I know the reason I've been given it.

"I'm afraid that sometimes, it takes a period of intense pain to discover who you really are, and what you are capable of becoming. My friend was unable to surpass that period, but I, by means that to this day I don't understand, managed to overcome it."