Violet had always worn glasses, for as long as she could remember. Being ten years old, it was possible she’d been wearing them for ten years. Maybe she was born with glasses!

Violet couldn’t see things that were far away from her, but she also had trouble reading. Her eyesight was very poor.

Sometimes, while she was doing her homework in study hall, her glasses would slide down to the tip of her nose. Once, they even fell off her face and landed on the floor.

“Violet, what’s going on?” her teacher, Mrs. Shellsworth, asked when she saw Violet crawling on the floor once with her hands stretched out.

“I can’t find my glasses,” replied Violet, shyly. The rest of the students looked up from their books and started to laugh.

When Violet found the brown specs behind her desk, she quickly put them back onto her face. But they wouldn’t stay on; they were broken.

Not wanting to draw any more attention to herself, Violet held her glasses onto her face with her index finger and pretended to read.

That night, she told her mother what had happened.

“We’re going to have to get you new glasses,” she said, sternly. Violet’s mother was a doctor, and she worked long hours. When she came home, she was often too tired to do much of anything other than watch television with Violet. Her father didn’t live with her. He’d moved out of the house when Violet was just a little girl. She visited her father on weekends, though. He lived in a nearby town and always took her to baseball games in the summer.

But it wasn’t summer yet. Violet still had three months left of school, and that meant three more months of being made fun of because of her silly loose glasses.

Violet hated her glasses.

The day after her glasses had fallen to the floor, Violet’s mother took her to the eye doctor. They did all sorts of tests to see whether she needed a new prescription. After the tests, which showed that her eyes had gotten worse since the last time she’d been there, it was time to pick out new glasses frames.

Violet looked at the shiny glass c