A terrible heaviness. Sinking downward. Surface of the water far overhead, no agitation of my numbed limbs could bring me to it. Comfort in the dark cloudy water like many tongues licking together.

Violet! Open your eyes, try to sit up—the voice came from a distance, alarmed.

Shaking me, and shaking me. Bruising my shoulders with his hard fingers, naked inside the silk robe. My skin still warm from the bath, not yet beginning to cool into the chill of death. Slick creamy lotion caressed into my skin, smelling of lilac. Talcum powder on all the parts of my body that would be covered by my clothes, when I was clothed again.

Except: he could not wake me.

Did not dare call 911 (Mr. Sandman would confess) for then he’d be discovered, arrested. His secret life exposed.

Yet, he did not want the girl to die.

Well, yes—(Mr. Sandman would confess)—the desperate thought came to him, he might let the girl die, he would never succeed in waking the girl and so there was no alternative, he would let her die, and in that way he would be spared exposure and arrest, the outrage and loathing of the community of decent persons, he would be spared prison, how many years in prison, of which he could not bear even a few days. Yet, he did not want Violet Rue to die for (he would insist) he loved her . . .

Or this he would claim, afterward.

His solution was to dress me hurriedly, haphazardly, in the clothes he’d removed from me, and had partly laundered, and partly dried, and to wrap me in a blanket snatched from a cedar closet, and carry me out to his car, stumbling and sobbing; in the car, he drove me to the Port Oriskany hospital, to the ER which was at the side entrance of the building; half-carried, half-dragged me inside the plate-glass doors that parted automatically, and left me there, slumped on a chair; hurried back outside even as a hospital security guard was calling after him—“Mister! Hey mister!” He’d left the car running. Key in the ignition. He would make a quick getaway, was the reasoning. But he was so agitated, within seconds Mr. Sandman collided with a van turning into the hospital drive as he tried to escape.

In the telling it would become a story to provoke outrage, and yet mirth.

For, outside the tyranny of the math teacher’s classroom and house, the math teacher was revealed as bumbling, foolish. Bringing an unconscious fourteen-year-old to the brightly lit emergency room of a hospital, a hastily clothed and (seemingly) dying girl, believing that he might abandon the girl there, might simply run back out to his car idling just outside the entrance and drive away undetected, and then, so agitated, such a fool, colliding head-on with the first vehicle that approached him as if in his desperation he’d failed to see . . .

But mostly, the story provoked outrage. Of course!