Chapter 1
The sound was all wrong.
It wasn't the clean, dramatic smash you see in movies. It was a damp, crumpling sort of crunch, followed by the pitiful skitter of plastic arms sliding across linoleum. A soft, final tink as one lens settled face-down.
For a second, Lyra just stood there, her vision on her left side suddenly a blurry smear of locker banks and fluorescent lights. Her right eye showed everything in perfect, cruel clarity: the scuffed toe of a boot, the warped reflection of herself in the dull green metal, the three girls frozen in a half-circle around her.
The boot belonged to Mara. Of course it did. It was always Mara.
"Oops," Mara said. The word stretched out, slow and syrupy. "Clumsy me."
Lyra's ears felt hot. The heat spread down her neck, a prickling flush that had nothing to do with the stale school air. This was the heat of being seen. Really seen. Not as a person, but as a thing in the way. A thing that could be bumped, and whose parts could break.
She didn't look at them. Looking at them made it real. Made her have to see their faces—the mock concern, the glittering amusement. Instead, she watched her own hand, pale and steady, as it reached down. She picked up the frame first. One temple arm hung by a thread of bent wire. The left lens was a spiderweb of fractures, the world behind it splintered. The right lens, miraculously, was just popped out. She found it near her foot, a perfect circle of clarity in all this mess.
The girls were waiting. They wanted a reaction. Tears, maybe. A stammered accusation. Something to chew on for the rest of the day.
Lyra's mind didn't race. It got very, very cold and still. It did the math. Seventh period was over. The final bell had rung. The hallway was emptying. No teachers. Witnesses were already shuffling away, heads down, relieved it wasn't them. Crying would waste energy. Arguing would give them fuel. The equation was simple: minimize loss. Extract herself.
She slung her backpack onto one shoulder. She tucked the broken frame and the lone lens into the front pocket, carefully, like handling evidence. She did not look for the screw. It was gone, swallowed by the floor, and searching for it on her hands and knees was a cost she refused to pay.
"Aren't you gonna say anything?" This from Chloe, Mara's shadow. Her voice was trying for tough, but it came out a little disappointed, like Lyra had skipped a line in a familiar script.
Lyra adjusted her backpack strap. She turned, not toward them, but toward the stairwell door at the end of the hall. Her good eye fixed on the EXIT sign.
"I see you're blind to irony, Mara," she said, her voice flat, a stone dropped in a puddle. "Since you clearly didn't see me standing here."
She walked. She didn't hurry. Hurrying was a kind of flight. She walked with the deliberate pace of someone who had somewhere to be, even if that somewhere was just away. The back of her neck tingled, waiting for the follow-up—a shove, a thrown book, a shouted insult. It didn't come. Her silence had been a door slammed in their face. Uninteresting. No fun to pry open.
The walk home was two miles. The world was lopsided. On her left, everything melted together—a car was a blur of color, a tree a green smear, faces were pale ovals with no features. On her right, the world was achingly sharp: every crack in the sidewalk, every discarded gum wrapper, the judgmental stare of a squirrel. The imbalance gave her a low-grade headache, a throbbing behind her left eyebrow.
She thought about the glasses. They were old. Wire-framed, practical. Her mom had called them "sensible" when they'd picked them out two years ago. They cost one hundred and seventy-eight dollars. With the anti-glare coating. That number sat in the cold, still part of her mind. One-seven-eight. Her mom had sighed, a soft, tired sound, but swiped the card. "Just be careful with them, Lyra."
Careful.
The house was empty. Mom at work until six. The quiet was a relief. She dumped her backpack on the kitchen floor and laid the pieces on the table like a surgeon assessing a patient.
The tape was in the junk drawer. Silver duct tape, because they never had the clear kind when you needed it. She worked methodically. First, she popped the good lens back into its groove. It fit snug, a small victory. The broken lens… she couldn't see out of it anyway. She carefully picked out the little triangles of loose glass, letting them fall into the trash with a sound like falling needles. She left the cracked web in the frame. It was mostly held in.
The arm was the real problem. It needed to be functional, not pretty. She wrapped the tape around the hinge, once, twice, a third time. A thick, silver bandage. She did the same where the frame had bent near the nose bridge, reinforcing it. She used scissors to trim the messy edges. When she was done, she held them up.
They were monstrous. The tape glared under the kitchen light, shiny and brutal. The left lens was a fractured mosaic. But they would sit on her face. They would hold.
She put them on.
The world was still lopsided, but now it was also marked. The fracture lines in the lens cut across her vision, a permanent reminder. The tape pinched the skin behind her left ear. Good. Let it pinch.
She didn't cry. Crying was for the shock, for the hot shame in the hallway. That was over. This was the aftermath. This was logistics. She made a peanut butter sandwich and ate it standing at the sink, looking out at the blurry backyard. The tape smelled, a faint metallic-chemical scent she'd taste for hours.
When her mom's key turned in the lock, Lyra was at the table, homework spread out. She didn't look up.
"Hey, honey. How was school?"
"Fine."
Her mom bustled in, dropping bags, the familiar soundtrack of her return. The rustle of groceries, the sigh of relief to be home. Lyra kept her pencil moving, solving for x.
A pause. The soundtrack stopped. Lyra could feel her mom's eyes on the side of her head.
"Lyra… your glasses."
Lyra finally looked up. She met her mom's gaze through one clear lens and one cracked one. She saw the instant progression of emotions: confusion, dawning understanding, a flash of anger, then the swift, familiar tide of helpless worry.
"What happened?"
"I dropped them." The lie was automatic. Easier than the truth. The truth was a long, dark corridor she'd have to walk her mom down. The truth ended with her mom wanting to call the school, to do something, and Lyra knowing, with a cold certainty, that it would only make it worse. It would add fuel. It would make her a problem, not just a target.
"Dropped them? Lyra, they're destroyed! And that tape…" Her mom came closer, her hand reaching out, then hovering, not sure where to touch the damage. "Honey, we can't afford a new pair right now. Not after the car repair. Maybe… maybe we can get the lens replaced. Just the one. But the frame…"
"They're fine, Mom," Lyra said, her voice firmer than she felt. "They work. See?" She gestured at her homework. "I can do my work."
Her mom's face crumpled a little around the edges. It was the look she got when the calculator came out at bill time. A look of quiet erosion. "You can't walk around like that. It looks… people will stare."
Let them stare, Lyra thought. But she said, "It's temporary. Just until… until we can figure it out."
She went to bed early. She placed the taped glasses carefully on her nightstand. In the dark, without them, both eyes saw the same blur. The world was soft and indistinguishable. Maybe that was better.
But as she lay there, the memory wasn't of Mara's laugh or the crunch. It was of her own cold, clear mind in the hallway. The calculation. The retreat. It was the feeling of the tape, snug and binding on the broken joint.
It wasn't a fix. It was a patch. A way to hold the pieces together just long enough to keep going. She fell asleep with the faint, metallic smell of the tape on her skin, and the unspoken knowledge that some breaks don't heal. You just learn to see around the cracks.