As the Darkness Approaches the Light

Chapter 4

A/N: Do authors still use bold dialogue to indicate a phone call? I've forgotten all of my fanfiction writing etiquette.

By 9:50 a.m. Monday morning, the majority of the one hundred students gathering in the lecture hall for "General Principles of Psychology" had arrived, save for a few stragglers or freshmen that still didn't know their way around the university. Some had coffee, others had tea, some were munching on last minute breakfast bagels or granola bars, others had been awake for hours or had even been to a class before this one. Some of them were talking, most of them were scrolling through their phones, others were grabbing their notebooks from their backpacks or writing in their planners.

At 9:51, their professor walked in, adorning a black pantsuit with a white blouse, black ankle boots with a three inch heel, and earrings that unbeknownst to any of them were made of real Swarovski crystals. Her long, curly hair piled into a neat bun and a smile on her face; she was pretty, and one of the youngest professors that most of them would have this semester.

What the students really noticed though was the silver cane she held out in front of her.

Caroline immediately heard the whispers, but ignored them and kept the smile on her face as she began getting logged into the classroom computer.

"Is she blind?" Someone whispered.

"Yeah, didn't you get the email she sent out?" Someone else whispered in return.

Caroline pulls up her Power Point presentation and adjusts the one Airpod she had in her left ear so that she could hear what her computer was saying, as the classroom computer also had accessibility functions on it specifically for her. Once she gets everything situated and believes her presentation is visible on the large screen that faced the students, she still feels the need to ask:

"Can you guys see this?"

Knowing what she means, a few yes's and yeah's chorus throughout the first couple of rows. Since there were going to be about a hundred students though, Caroline was given a microphone too that she had clipped to her blouse. She switches it on, then asks:

"People in the back, can you hear me?"

A few more yes's and yeah's.

"Does anyone have the time?" She asks.

"9:57," Someone says.

"Cool, we'll let the last minute stragglers get here and then we'll get started."

A couple minutes later, Caroline checks the time on her own phone, then she mutes it. She leans her cane up against the wall, then stands in the middle of the floor where everyone would be able to see her.

"Alright, good morning, everyone! Welcome to General Principles of Psychology. I'm Dr. Caroline Heights - you can call me Caroline, Dr. Heights, Dr. H, I really don't care, whatever you're comfortable with. Today's gonna be pretty easy, we're just gonna go over the syllabus and talk about what the rest of the semester is gonna look like, but before we do that, there's something kind of important that I feel the need to establish with you all. I'm sure you all got my email last week - and if you didn't, learn to start checking your emails or this is gonna be a long semester for you - but in that email, I disclosed to you all that I am blind. And by blind, I mean completely blind.

"So what does this mean for all of you? Well, for one thing, if you raise your hand to ask a question, I can't see it. So if you have a question, just shout out, 'I have a question!' Don't ever be afraid to interrupt me if I say something you don't understand. I also can't see my Power Points or my computer screen, so I will almost always have a single Air Pod in that's connected to my computer with Bluetooth because there's an accessibility function on the computer that's basically like Siri, but it tells me what I'm about to click on, what the words on the screen say, and so on, but I'll always have one ear free so that I can hear myself and obviously, you guys. I'd say by now, I've pretty much mastered Power Point, but every now and then I end up with a typo or something off-centered or not lined up right, so if that ever happens, please feel free to tell me and I'll try my best to fix it.