Summary

Studying the guard, the narrator was unsure he was handsome. She knew how to identify age, but not beauty. She realized he was the first young guard she had seen, which meant “something had changed” (40). However, she was powerless to determine when, why, or how the change had occurred. Although she watched the guard constantly, he never looked at her or altered his expression. Occupied with this task, she “stopped telling [her]self stories” (41). She was creating a new one by watching the guard (41).

Watching the guard also made the narrator realize she had no sense of time. She remembered Anthea telling her the heart beats “between seventy and seventy-four times a minute” (42). She set to counting her heartbeats to trace time. When she told Anthea, they discovered if they performed the right calculations, they could determine how much time was passing based...