Marya was pitiless with herself, thought obsessively about herself. She wasn’t going to mind being ugly, she thought, if she could look distinctive. Her facial bones were too prominent, her eyes shadowed. “Didn’t you sleep last night, Marya?” Wilma often asked, looking at her critically, suspiciously. Marya’s eyebrows had begun to grow in thick and dark, nearly meeting across the bridge of her nose; her brown hair, so dark and lustrous as to appear black in certain lights, had to be tightly plaited to keep from frizzing in humid weather, and hung in a single heavy braid between her shoulder blades. It was her ill luck to seem older, near-adult: sometimes men stared at her in the street, mistaking her maybe for a high school girl, and she’d stare back coldly, unsmiling. Glimpsed by accident in mirrors and reflecting windows, her image struck her as simply unacceptable—she didn’t want that, she wouldn’t accept that.

Still, Marya was Marya. She sent her mind off daydreaming, telling strange little stories in her head, but there she was in her body, so often graceless, so tall, and when her first menstruation came in the middle of a school day she went white-faced and trembling to the girls’ gym teacher to say there was something wrong with her—she was bleeding, she didn’t know why—and the woman stared at her puzzled as if temporarily confusing her with one of the older girls. “Why are you so upset? Aren’t you used to this by now?” she asked, not unkindly.

Embarrassed, speaking in an uncharacteristically low voice, Wilma had tried to tell Marya something of what she might expect one day soon when “it” happened. Had Marya any questions, she’d asked afterward, but Marya hadn’t had any: too stubborn, too shocked. Her gym teacher, Miss Heinke, had asked her too had she any questions, and Marya said coldly, No. She didn’t want to know anything more.

THAT WAS THE year, the memorable year, of Mr. Schwilk. In fact it had been Mr. Schwilk’s English class Marya fled that November morning, to go to Miss Heinke for help: and she’d required a special pink slip afterward, from her, to be admitted fifteen minutes late into class. When Marya wanted to torment herself she thought of what Miss Heinke had scrawled in pencil at the bottom of the slip—personal health instruction—and wondered what Mr. Schwilk had made of it. If he’d thought about it, or her, at all.

WHY DID YOU hate him so much? the students were asked after Schwilk’s collapse, when rumors of his death circulated in the Innisfail school. And the question bewildered them—they hadn’t hated him, so far as they knew, at all.