For the longest time, she’s had this habit of looking people dead in the eyes. She figured that’s how you get them, the eyes, one instant of eye contact and you’d know.

Some are awkward and apprehensive about it. Some stare back like they own your ass. There are the kind of moments of eye contact where you know the person is looking, but acting like they’re not looking, And you look back, and you get them when they break cover. A conveyor belt of glances and fractions of seconds. Eventually every eye looks the same.

Hers were brown. Hazel, she liked to say, but we knew they were brown. The only fleck of green reflected off a blue sky, occasionally, at the top right corner by her right pupil. About two o’clock.

The shape was her mother’s, everything else about her face was decidedly her father’s, or so her mother liked to say.

When it was dark out, her eyes were like thick tapioca pearls in her bubble tea. She would get the green apple flavor and mute her cell so she couldn’t hear her mom call, again and again. When she’d get home her mother didn’t look at her.

That’s how you know, in the eye contact. If they don’t see yours, you’re safe.

Mother’s eyes were blue and looked like water. When she cried they flooded and sparkled like a freshwater spring. They were blue and round, like her own father’s, like her eldest daughter’s, but she knew the gene would lose itself in another generation.

When she wore green sweaters they had a translucent green tint to them. But she hasn’t worn green in years. Not since her father died. Not since her brother was hospitalized. Not since her husband left her.

She liked to say her youngest daughter reminded her of him. Their chins were identical and they both didn’t care. They had the same look of stupid fascination when they watched TV.

When she watched TV, her blue eyes got bluer. She often looked at the floor and squinted at the bright colors. When it was too sunny outside, she’d squint and miss it.

At night, her eyes would dim when she boiled some water for a cup of tea. She was often alone since the divorce and her girls left the house whenever they could. God only knew what they were out there doing: drugs, alcohol, sex, hanging out with unsavory gentlemen.

She met one of them once, a tall boy, about six foot three. She told her daughter he looked like a scumbag. You could tell by his eyes. All those men have the same looks in their eyes.

His eyes were black like his daddy’s. And his daddy’s before him, and his daddy’s, and so on, and so forth. His mom was white so there was a hint of green at the bottom right corner of his left eye, about five o’clock.

His pupil was black like a roach. It darted back and forth in the heavy shadows of his grey hoodie, contrasted by the bone white part of his eye. When he hustled on the weekends, he kept his eyes low to the ground. They stood still when he counted cash.

Weekdays they were planted on paper. Pre-law, he read cases and textbooks until his eyes shot blood. His girlfriend always thought it was the weed. He looked into her eyes and apologized. He knew she trusted him to tell the truth.

In her eyes he found a mirror, dark and lovely, same kind of deep-seated insecurities. When they hung out they’d spend their hours staring at each other or the sky. Looking up, their eyes would get swollen from swallowing it all, the huge expanse of stars on the hood of his car, the brittle moon, the pale almond of her face.

You can tell when they look into your eyes; it’s like they’re digging for something bigger than themselves. That’s how it’s love.

And she always thought it would be like this. When you walk around campus and lock eyes with a complete stranger. Except they’re not strangers and they’re not complete, and you can tell in that shock of a second when they let you in, and hop out of those mysterious spaces in their hoodies.

She always knew it would hit before class, or after, or at any random public place where we bounce across each other like gyrating atoms. Apart and together, those spots she sees dart across her eyes when she stares at the sun.

They spend hours eyes wide open in the park, drinking in the entirety of the sky like drunks in ecstasy. And it’s never enough, never enough, before her mom calls and demands she get home right away.

The shape of her eyes get angled; she’d never understand.

With the image of writhing bodies still tight in her eyes, skins and limbs like twisting keys on the piano, she could never look at her mother.

There’s something about the pain of a man that changes a woman’s eyes. The older you get, the more permanent the changes.

She’d rush to her room and shut the door. For the longest time, she’d study her own eyes in the mirror. You could learn something about the shape of things in them—that’s how you know.