No Matter What - Book 1

Chapter 5

Fawn sat silently at the breakfast table, one of the first of the Gladers to be up that morning. At first, she thought she had slept in and missed everyone else eating only for Frypan to inform her that she was just up early. She had barely slept, constantly thinking back to the day before when she had revealed her deepest, darkest secret to all the boys.

"I'm blind!" She cried, making the whole glade fall into deadly silence.

Alby, Minho and Gally all turned to Fawn as if she had grown two heads while Newt refused to look her in the eye, staring off into space with a look upon his face that made Fawn regret every making them suspect something was up with her.

"So... that is why you never mentioned it," Newt muttered. "You... you were afraid we wouldn't accept you..."

Fawn looked down at the ground, suddenly feeling guilty about the pain evident in Newt's voice. She had hurt him, by not trusting him, she had made it seem like she didn't trust or like him when really, she did. The boy reached up and ran his fingers through his brown hair before turning to face the girl, his brown eyes glistening with hurt.

"So... this whole time... you never actually knew what we were like... what we look like... that is why your eyes always locked on our chests and not on our faces," Minho whispered, more shock on his face than disbelief.

Fawn nodded, "I can tell you apart by your voices but... my hearing is not good enough that I can figure out exactly how tall you guys are... and I always end up a few inches off when I try to look you in the eye."

"Why didn't you just say so?" Gally whispered, the anger gone in his voice, but it was laced with confusion.

"After the way you railed at her the past few days," Alby interrupted. "I totally see where she is coming from."

"It isn't that" Fawn replied. "I... I woke up in a box, unable to see my surroundings but all I knew was that I was the only girl in a glade full of boys... I knew that being the only girl made me different... I was treated differently right from the start... I was given a choice as to what job I had... I was given my private area to sleep and to wash... and unlike the rest of you, I never remembered my real name, but I remembered things that should have been erased from my brain before I woke up in the box. Adding my blindness to the list would just make me an alien on a foreign planet."

Fawn hadn't heard a noise from Newt through the whole exchange and she had wondered if he was listening but when she heard a scoff escape his lips and his footfalls fading, she knew he had stormed off and, in that moment, her heart snapped in two.

"You're up early," a gentle, kind voice brought Fawn from her musings and she recognized the voice as that of Alby. "Couldn't sleep?"

Fawn shook her head, "I had this weird feeling that all eyes were on me the whole time I was sleeping. Makes for a long night."

Alby chuckled and sat down across from her with his food, Gally, Winston and Minho coming to sit on either side of her and across from her, acting like nothing had changed.

"We're...erm..." Gally started. "We're sorry if we made you feel different... or like you didn't fit in..."

"Yeah," Minho added. "If we had known you felt like we were treating you differently, we would have stopped."

Fawn smiled sadly at them and shook her head, "I should have just grown a backbone and told you... but I was liking how things were... feeling like I was one of you and I didn't want to change that."

Immediately an arm wrapped around her shoulders and she heard the familiar voice of Winston as he hugged her, "You will always be one of us Fawn, whether you are blind or not, doesn't matter. Besides, all of us are different. Alby was the first guy ever in the glade, Newt has a limp, Gally has only one lung... we all have our differences, but we have helped each other through that. We make sure Gally doesn't do too much running, so his lung doesn't give out and whenever Newt's limp is aching him when it rains, we help him."