It was time to start playing The Game. She had to. The Game was something she had learned from the doctors. "As you go up to someone, talk, make comments about the weather, anything you have to. The most important thing is make eye contact! If you don’t want the stares, make eye contact with them, and don’t break it until you’re past."

The Game was peculiar, but it worked. Sherry played The Game now as she walked up to the overly-tall boy of about 15 or so, the person who tears your tickets for you when you see a movie.

"Had one hell of a time getting here. I always take the wrong turn-off, whether I want to or not."

"Yeah. A lot of people have trouble finding their way here."

Eye contact. He was watching her the whole time. Eye contact. He didn’t even look down to his hands to watch as he tore her tickets. It was as if he were in a trance, with the eyes as the pocket watch, swinging back and forth, back and forth.

"Maybe next time I’ll get it right. I don’t want to be late next time I get here." She continued smiling, walking, keeping eye contact.

"Better luck next time," the too-tall teenager said.

He was the first one to break the contact. He looked back to his next customer. As he did so, he couldn’t remember clearly what had happened in the past few moments as well as he would have liked to. After tearing the tickets of the next customers, he glanced at the lady who had passed, now half way through the small lobby. There was another person with her. There hadn’t been before, had there? He remembered the plain looking lady with the glasses and the eyes. Yes, the alluring eyes. The hypnotist’s eyes, he remembered thinking.

But there was another person with her now. A much smaller person. A person with autism. Funny how he hadn’t noticed the autistic person before. He couldn’t guess the age. It had been a brief encounter, maybe fifteen seconds, and yet it seemed like eternity, and then some. He hadn’t noticed the autistic child/woman.

As she turned around, she wasn’t smiling any more. She was playing a game with me, he realized. A game of eye contact, of forgetting the small being walking next to her, of trying to keep all the misery, all the pain inside of her, and not to spill out and destroy another. A game to hide all the unfairness of it. And, oh yes, how unfair.

She went out of sight now, into the movie. She had lost The Game, she knew. She had seen the looks the high school student had given her, and worse, that look. That look that she knew so very well. That look as if he had just sat down to open his birthday present, and a snake had come out instead and bitten him on his arm. God, it was so unfair! Why me? How many times had she asked herself the same question? Why did it have to be her baby? She felt that if she saw that look on someone’s face once more, she would kill the person who made it. They’re looking at my baby as if she were an ape. Why me? I can’t handle it any more!

It was probably the hundredth time this week that these same thoughts shot through her head. It was always the same. The same feelings, the same thoughts.

Others were staring now; she could feel it. She could always feel the eyes boring into her child’s back, her child’s face. She could feel them as if they were needles boring into her flesh. She physically and mentally flinched from the pain.

The curtain went up and (Oh thank you God, Oh thank you) the lights went out. They couldn’t stare at her baby any more. At least for a while. Thank God, no more eyes.