Prologue

"No mask like open truth to cover lies, as to go naked is the best disguise." William Congreve

Jason had a brilliant green eye that captured people and refused to let go. It stood out prominently from under his sun kissed brown hair, sharp and clear, flashing about and taking everything in with only a moment’s glance. Sometimes it seemed his mind operated in that eye, a restless motion behind it like an ocean wave. When he flashed his lopsided grin, it narrowed into an impish, almost devious, angle.

But it was the bandage that covered his other eye that always drew people’s attention first. He refused to take it off, even for school pictures as a child. Everyday he wore it, completely concealing his right eye. His golden honey hair hung long and messy over the bandage in a pathetic attempt to hide it. Many asked him if his eye was injured, some even went as far to think it was missing completely.

Jason would only grin back.

With his right eye covered, Jason lacked any depth perception. It made him perform poorly in sports, despite his tendency to climb any semi-vertical surface available. His knees were forever scarred from his many falls, but his young mother never told him to stop as she bandaged up another limb.

“Nothing is an excuse,” she told him often as she loving kissed his bandaged eye, “Only an obstacle to overcome.”

But growing up, it was hard to keep his mother’s words in mind as kids teased him and adults pitied him. Once in a while, alone in front of the mirror in the small apartment he and his mother shared, Jason would work up the courage and remove the bandage. He would stare in disgust, and replace the bandage in a matter of moments.

It was the repulsiveness he saw in himself through that eye that made him avoid people. He laughed and joined in the games on the playground, but he never brought schoolmates home and never went to another’s house.

Sometimes, Jason felt nothing more than hollow.