Almost you could hear a slip of a white girl. But Mr. Sandman had not said that.

The previous day after school Mr. Sandman had given me this very problem to solve. He’d checked my calculations, and helped me with them. So, I knew how to solve the problem and rapidly the chalk moved against the blackboard. Fascinating to observe how an algebra problem is solved. At first it seems hopelessly snarled, like hair. Then, if you are patient, and know the way, it is “solved”—“unsnarled.”

I felt how the class stared at me, resentful. Girls in particular hated me. White boys hated me. Tyrell Jones could not even raise his eyes to observe me, in ignominy seated back at his desk, surreptitiously spraying a medicinal liquid into his mouth out of the red plastic device he carried in his pocket.

For it seemed that I must be very smart. Also, I was spared the worst of Mr. Sandman’s teasing.

“Very good, Violet. You are a credit to your sex.”

Sex. The very word aroused a kind of spasmodic titter in the classroom. Though by uttering “sex” Mr. Sandman did not mean (it seemed) “sex” but something clinically neutral, like “gender.”

Mr. Sandman clapped, smiling at me. With a bully’s gesture he inveigled others to clap too, if but briefly, resentfully.

After the bell rang I tried to follow Tyrell Jones in the crowded hall but he eluded me. And later in the day, when I saw him again, and hurried to catch up with him, I did not know what to say.

Tyrell Jones was my height, though heavier. His eyes glared at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. Before I could draw breath to speak he turned away abruptly.

Our classmates were watching us, curious. Soon, some would burst into wide grins of wonderment, derision. Not with the usual mockery but with indignation. That phrase muttered in my wake.

“THIS ENDEARING LITTLE BLEMISH, VIOLET?—NOT A BIRTHMARK, I think, but a scar?”

Mr. Sandman drew his fat thumb over the star-shaped scar at my forehead. Involuntarily, I shivered.

“Futile to try to hide it, you know. And what caused it?”

“I—fell from a bicycle . . . When I was a little girl.”

“Ah! Tragic, in a female so young.”

Tragic. Mr. Sandman was joking, I supposed.

“Well, dear, if it’s any consolation—you were not destined to be a ‘beauty’ anyway. The scar gives you character. Other, merely pretty girls tend to be bland.”

Steeled myself to feel the fat lips against my forehead, to smell the hot meaty breath. Shut my eyes, shivering, waiting.

ONE DAY, DISCOVERING MR. SANDMAN’S (SECRET) ARCHIVE.

A door just beyond the bathroom. A closet, with shelves containing what appeared to be photography albums, dates neatly labeled on their spines. Daring to pull down one of the albums, 1986–87, stunned to see photographs of a dark-haired girl of thirteen or fourteen posed on Mr. Sandman’s sofa, and on the four-poster bed. In some photos the girl was fully clothed, in others partly clothed. In others, naked inside the royal blue silk robe that was so familiar to me.