It happened during the final hour of the State-wide University Entrance Exam—the moment I suddenly went blind. Rushed to the Emergency Room, the doctors ran every test imaginable, but they came back clean. “No discernible cause,” they said. My career as a high school English teacher was over. Driven by necessity, I earned a license as a therapeutic massage therapist, relying on the sensitivity of my hands. Then, one day during a session, I overheard a conversation between two clients. “That teacher who went blind, it was perfect timing,” a man’s voice boasted. “I copied one multiple-choice answer from the paper while she was distracted, and that was just enough. Two points over the cut-off for the Ivy-tier schools. It’s been twenty years, man. I wonder how she’s doing. Northwood High, the summer of '05, Exam Room 28. Man, my whole life was in that room.” The second man’s voice was a low, gravelly rasp. “I know exactly why she went blind. And the killer was right there in the exam room.” I froze, heart hammering against the massage table, breath held tight as I waited for them to continue. The silence stretched for what felt like minutes. Then, a sudden, ice-cold pressure pressed against my neck. A knife. I opened my eyes again. I was back. I was sitting in the exact same exam room, two decades in the past. 1 My eyes blinked, taking in the world in sharp, bright detail. The fluorescent lights hummed, the gray walls felt solid, the faces of the teenagers were perfectly clear. I was back in the final hour of the exam, the ticking clock the only difference between this life and the last. The killer... who is the killer? And right before the darkness consumed me that first time, who was it who actually killed me? But I had no time to process it. The familiar bell for the final ten minutes of the exam rang out, sharp and jarring. The awful clack-clack-clack of my co-monitor’s heels echoed across the linoleum floor. Ten minutes. In ten minutes, my vision would dissolve into blackness. I couldn’t risk it. Not again. Not for anything. But what if I just pretended to be sick and left? What if the killer simply targeted the substitute? I tossed all concerns about protocol and disruption out the window. “No one should be in this room!” I screamed, shooting out of my chair. “The teacher in this room, whoever it is, is going to be targeted! Someone here is going to make the teacher go blind!” It only took moments. I was immediately hauled out by a proctor and then the campus security, accused of disturbing the final, most crucial minutes of a major examination. As I was put into the back of a police cruiser, a huge, rattling sigh of relief escaped my lungs. I’m out. Now, it was out of my hands. At a temporary staging area in the school administration building, a Sergeant Miller interrogated me, his face a mask of furious disbelief. “Why the hell did you disrupt the exam, Ms. Sinclair? We’ve swept every single student in that room for abnormal materials. There’s nothing. What is your motive for slandering these students?” He slammed his hand hard on the metal table, the sound making me jump. I tried to keep my composure. “I told you, Sergeant. I heard a whisper right before I walked in—a student saying they wished the teacher would go blind.” I stared him down. “Losing your sight over something as senseless as monitoring an exam is too high a price to pay.” My explanation clearly did not satisfy him. “That sounds like a nervous kid joking, Ms. Sinclair. You’re a teacher. You actually believe that?” He leaned in closer. “Consider yourself lucky, the exam hadn’t formally ended yet. If you’d pulled this stunt minutes later, you’d be sitting in county jail right now.” I had been blacklisted from all future examinations, and my job was definitely on the line. But compared to two decades of blindness and degradation? It was nothing. As he escorted me out, I couldn’t help but stop at the gate. “Sergeant, what if they were serious? If another teacher loses their sight, it’ll be too late. You need to investigate this.” “One more word, Ms. Sinclair, and I will book you for harassment.” Free of the school grounds, I felt a rush of adrenaline mixed with pure dread. I drove straight to the best ophthalmologist in the city. The results, however, were an exact repeat of the last timeline. “Ms. Sinclair, your retina and optical nerve are pristine. You don’t have an ounce of astigmatism. This sudden blindness you mentioned is medically impossible.” I sat in the crowded hospital waiting room, watching a man with a cane and a guide dog navigate the lobby. I remembered the last twenty years: losing my job, my fiancé ending our engagement, the desperation that led me to the massage parlor, and the sleazy clients who would expose themselves, daring me to touch them. But I had been saved. I could see. My eyes could take the full measure of the world again. Then, a sudden burst of frantic sobs from the hallway pulled me back. My heart seized. Another teacher, clearly distraught, was being rushed into the eye clinic. It was Harper Rhodes, the co-monitor from my exam room. Inside the examination room, I could hear her frantic voice describing the terror to the doctor. “Doctor, I was just monitoring the room, and then suddenly I couldn’t see! My eyes are normally fine! What is happening to me?” After the examination, the doctor sighed. “Your retina and cornea are structurally fine, Ms. Rhodes. We simply can’t explain why you’ve lost your vision.” I stood outside the room, my hands trembling uncontrollably. Harper Rhodes was now blind. How? I had disrupted the exam, made a scene, screamed a warning. How had the killer still managed to execute their plan? The doctor sat by his machine, muttering, “This is bizarre. Just an hour ago, another woman came in, asking me if it was possible to suddenly go blind even if all her tests were normal.” He noticed me and called out my name. Harper, hearing the doctor, instantly recognized my voice. “You were the teacher in my room, weren’t you? Are you here because you lost your sight too? You warned me! Did you know something? Which student did this to me?” She sounded terrified, manic. I knew she wouldn’t believe the truth—that I was a time traveler. I gave her the same line I used on the police. “Right before the exam started, I thought I heard a student say they wished the teacher would go blind. There were too many students around the door to see who it was, but they all ended up in that room. I know it sounds crazy, but…” Harper was hysterical. “Investigate! You have to investigate! Who used some kind of twisted trick to do this to me?” I felt a surge of cold relief. This was it. Now the case would be taken seriously. In the last timeline, I had no one. When I asked for an investigation, the parents had rallied against me: “You’re ruining our children’s chances! You can’t even find a cause—who knows if this is just a defect in your own body! Don’t push this on innocent kids!” But now, with two of us demanding answers, the police would have to listen. More importantly, I remembered the killer’s voice from the massage parlor. If I could just hear it again, I could identify him. I accompanied Harper to the police station. They immediately went back to Northwood High. But another sweep of the students, who were growing increasingly resentful, still revealed nothing. “We can’t disrupt the other two days of the exam,” the Sergeant insisted. “We’ll conduct a thorough review once the testing is complete.” The rumors, however, were already flying. “Why are they only searching our room? Who are they accusing of cheating?” “It’s not cheating. It’s about the blind teacher. They think one of us poisoned her.” Having faked an illness to pull out of the exam room, I spent the next three days monitoring the situation. My eyes remained perfectly fine. I learned that Harper, an art teacher, was near collapse. She couldn’t paint, and now she struggled with basic daily living—the same reality that had been mine. Three days of hospital visits, all ending with the same infuriating answer: No cause. Finally, the exam ended. As the students slowly dispersed, I nervously approached a holding room. Thirty students were crammed inside. Harper and the police were already waiting. “So, Ms. Sinclair, you said you heard a student say they hoped the teacher would go blind, correct?” I nodded, my voice catching in my throat. “Yes. And I remember the voice. It was a male student.” A wave of noise erupted from the boys in the room. “Alright, all the young men in this room, line up,” the detective instructed. “You will read this printed statement aloud, one at a time.” He held up a paper. “No one needs to be nervous. Do not attempt to alter your natural speaking voice.” One by one, the boys read the text and then left. I held my breath, straining to hear the low, raspy tone of the man who had spoken right before the knife slit my throat in the last life. The last male student finished reading the final word. My heart sank. I hadn’t heard either of the voices from the massage parlor. I had been blind for twenty years; I had developed the ability to identify people by their speech patterns. While a voice changes over time, the rhythm and cadence rarely do. I tried again. “Can I listen to the last three boys one more time?” I closed my eyes this time, concentrating on the sound, not the sight. And then, I found the flaw. One boy had deliberately altered his tone, making it sound unnaturally high. It was Ethan Keller, the boy who had confessed to copying a multiple-choice answer. If I had the voice of the cheater, I could eventually find the voice of the actual killer. “I remember you talking to another boy right before,” I accused, pointing at Ethan. Harper looked manic. “Good! Tell the police! How did you make me go blind?” Ethan, however, insisted he didn’t know anyone else in the room. “Teachers, I swear I didn’t do anything! I didn’t talk to anyone! I just… I just quickly glanced at an answer sheet after the other teacher suddenly went still.” He was immediately taken away for further questioning. As his confession aligned with the first man’s words from the last timeline, I knew he wasn’t the killer. It was also possible he simply hadn't met the killer yet. But where was the other man? “Why, why would he do this to me? I don’t even know him! Even if I went blind, another teacher would have taken my place—he still couldn’t have cheated!” Harper was nearing total hysteria. She dropped to her knees. “Please! I am begging you! Just tell me how you did this! If you tell me how to reverse it, I won’t press charges! I have a child! Please, let me live my life!” Her agony was a searing mirror of my own past. Then, a memory surfaced—something I felt during that fateful massage. On the back of the killer’s neck, I had felt a distinct, small, fleshy nodule. Ignoring the stares of the police and the students, I rushed down the line of remaining boys, my hands quickly but firmly brushing the back of their necks. Then, my heart hammered hard against my ribs. I closed my eyes and carefully felt the small bump—a tiny, pea-sized cyst. It was exactly as I remembered it. I spun around, pointing at the student, Preston Pierce. “It’s him! It was you talking that day, wasn't it?” I screamed, grabbing his shoulders. “Tell us what you did! How did you poison the teacher?” My face was flushed, my eyes welling up with tears. No one understood the sheer force of the two decades of trauma driving this breakdown. As a detective moved toward Preston, the boy flashed me a dark, knowing smirk. His lips formed a single, silent sentence: “You will never know who the killer is.” Then, to the collective horror of everyone in the room, he sprinted across the classroom and threw himself out the fifth-floor window. He landed head-first on the pavement below. He was dead instantly. Preston Pierce’s suicide threw the entire city into chaos.
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