Walker feels that she changed quite a bit after being struck in the eye with a pellet from her brother's gun. Afraid of only being looked at because of her scar, she keeps her head down for six years. She is bullied at school and changes schools in order to find a place more welcoming. When her mother gets sick, her father becomes less "jolly," her brothers still have guns, and she is sent away, and yet, they tell her, "You did not change." She wonders if she imagined "the anguish of never looking up."

Time passes, and she "pray[s] for beauty" rather than sight, yelling at her eye every night. Still, they tell her that she "did not change." She feels as though she has changed monumentally—that her beauty has decreased, that her life has been diminished, that she found a way to persevere—and yet, her experience is contrasted with their repetition of this idea. When she learns to look up again, she gets the boyfriend she's always wanted and can "hardly believ[e] [her] luck"; still, people tell her that she did not change. She has felt herself enduring all sorts of personal ups and downs, and for decades, she has felt significant changes take place within herself. Nonetheless, her family has not noticed these changes. This discrepancy in their views and the repetition of her family's perception seem to point to the idea that things which seem so significant to us and changes that feel so monumental in our own heads will often barely register with other people—perhaps because they, too, are dealing with their own head full of significant personal events.