We started dating two months later. He was eighteen and lived in the suburbs. He was a few inches taller than me, but built small. He had blue eyes and Buddy Holly glasses; his lips were full and red against his pale skin, and he gelled his blond hair up in a little swoop at the front. He spoke softly and always sat on his knees, even when he was in a chair. I made sure to sit on his left side, so he wouldn't lean over to kiss me and recoil at the sight of my stagnant left eye staring at him blankly. I smiled broadly when he took pictures of me, squinting both eyes so they would look the same. Sometimes I'd catch him through my blurry left eye, staring at me.

For our first date, he took me to his old high school, where a younger friend of his was playing in a battle of the bands. I sat with my good eye to him and he tried to hold my hand. I hesitated because my palms were hot and sweaty, but compromised by laying a few fingers over his. My heart pounded in my throat. Once his friend's band had finished, Noah got up and walked to the stage to say hello while I stayed in my seat. Watching him turn and point at me, smiling, showing his friend, I shivered with the joy of it, fragile and weak from so little self-esteem and so much ridicule. I overheard his friend say, "That weird-eyed girl?"

We spent a lot of time alone together in his room, listening to records. One day, I was going through his drawings as he worked on something in another room. His drawings were everywhere, in piles on the floor and spilling out of his bag and nightstand drawer. I loved them all, each one a window into his world, a world that seemed more complex and beautiful than the one I had known all my life.

I pulled a drawing from the bottom of his drawer, the paper thin and soft from age and crisscrossed with creases from so much folding. At the top, he had written "DREAM GIRL." It had drawings of three girls, meticulously detailed, with lines sprouting from different parts of their bodies that led to little notes, like an anatomy diagram. A line sprouting from one girl read, "needs to be shorter or the same size as me," and another, "short hair or long hair doesn't matter."

The third girl's face had one eye drawn as a delicate slit, almost like a wink. A line leading from the wink read: "must have lazy eye."

It didn't seem possible. Noah, hunched over his desk, had quietly conjured his ideal woman in ink before I came along. I was moved to discover that his vision included the very feature that had cursed and alienated me. Looking at the drawing, I felt I was seeing my face as it really was for the first time. This cartoon world was closer to the world I wanted to live in, closer to the real world than the oppressive one I had built for myself. This face with such delicate features was the face that Noah saw when he looked at me, not the face of my childhood scowling in the mirror.

He came back into the room and sat beside me on the bed, on my left side, and put his arm around me. Through my left eye I could see his blurry face staring and smiling. Then he took the drawing from my hands, stood up, and went to his closet. He stood on tiptoe, pushing the clutter from the top shelf to each side, pulling out a Polaroid camera. Taking it in his hands, he returned to the bed.

I didn't turn my head or squint my eyes. As his finger pushed down to release the shutter, I looked straight into the lens and smiled my own smile.