Kid Blink is one of the strangest boys Sarah has ever met. The collar of his shirt is stained with blood. His eyepatch is leather and would have cost a fortune, but she's pretty sure he stole it, and it looks like it was cut and sewn by another one of the newsies. He and Mush are always pressed against each other, tripping over their own feet.
He's so, so sweet with her. When he opens the door, he ducks his head and mutters about the honor to serve with her. He tells her once that her face is the prettiest he's ever seen. She'd almost think he was flirting, if it weren't for the way he sounded so sad.
Blink is the one who teaches Sarah to punch, to pack it with force and aim true. He's standing on the balcony when she gets up in the morning, making talk with Ima as she cooks. The way he grins makes her relax. The way he underestimates the distance from the window to the floor makes her wish she was never born.
It turns out that Blink has a lot of eyepatches. (He says to call him Kid like the other guys do, but it just doesn't make sense. They're practically the same age.) Most of them are made of softer cloth than the leather, so he uses them like spares. There's a funny one that looks like it's lace cut off a child's dress, which he says is what he wears to Vaudeville shows. She wants to laugh at his earnest smile, but she can't stop wondering where he got it from. How long has it been since Kid Blink lost his eye?
It's easy to forget in the quiet of Sarah's room (when the boys are out), what it would be like to say these things outside. The sweet fairy wearing her dresses can never set foot outside. If someone took off her hat when she snuck out to sell, she could end up in one of the back alleys her coworkers talked about. Blink shows her how to bind her chest and she laces up her dresses on his back. In the safety of the Jacobs apartment, in heavy disguise surrounded by the other newsies, in the darkest corners of the lodging house, they can simply live.
Nothing lasts forever. At the end of the day, Blink goes home and Sarah sits on her bed, thinking. When he returns, he will have a new cut to stitch and a story to tell. Maybe he'll finally take her to a fight, or maybe they'll just sit and talk. In the end, she is just a spinster and he is just a fairy.