Summary: Adam's thoughts after his first encounters with Mary Ingalls at the Iowa blind school. (338 words)
She was older than most the students who came through the school. That’s what Mr. Nash had told him. She was fifteen.
Her name was Mary Ingalls, and like other students when they first arrived, she was angry, resentful, and reluctant of her new situation. But within Mary lay a fierceness that Adam had never encountered. Adam did not yet know that this was because she was an Ingalls.
She was angry, so angry about her blindness. She did not understand that it didn’t mean the end of her life; that it opened things to her that she would have never considered otherwise.
He had never encountered a student who had resisted his efforts with so much passion. If Mary could only channel her anger into something better, she could make great strides.
He never told any of the students that he was blind—not when he first met them at least. He loved hearing the intake of a sharp breath when he revealed the truth, and the surprise in the voice when a student realized that blind people weren’t limited to being confined inside their homes and themselves. He wondered if any of them had ever suspected the truth about his blindness before he told them. If they did, they let on.
He knew for sure that Mary didn’t suspect it. When she threw her plate her first night there, it was because she wanted him to see her tantrum, to see the food splatter across the floor and the anger blazing in her eyes. He wondered what color her eyes were; maybe someday he would ask her.
Someday he would tell Mary the truth. But only after she had made progress. If he told her now she probably wouldn’t believe him, or think he had played a cruel trick on her, by making fun of her for being newly blind, while he had grown used to his loss of sight.
No, he wouldn’t tell her yet. If only she knew what blindness made her capable of.