In those years I’d grown taller and thinner but I had no idea if I looked very different. I had little sense of my appearance at all. My body felt disengaged and numb, transparent as our bodies in dreams. It was my instinct to shun mirrors to avoid an unpleasant jolt—Rat! Rat-face.

Mr. Sandman had said that I was beautiful. Yet, when I dared to study my face in a mirror, to see what he’d seen, I could not find it—the math teacher’s interest in me was like a mirror reflecting light but it was a distorting and blinding light. After Mr. Sandman’s arrest I’d been shown photographs he’d (allegedly) taken of me but the girl in the photographs (sleeping, slack-mouthed, partly clothed or naked) did not look like me.

Do you recognize this girl, Violet?

You don’t see that this is yourself, Violet?

Possibly it had been a trick. I did not trust the therapist, as I did not trust the police. Whatever I told them became their property, to be used as they wished. It was one of the great shocks of my life, how words uttered may be irretrievable, irrevocable.

All this I would explain to my parents. Try to explain. I had never been allowed. But now, today—maybe . . .

Seated alone in a pew at the rear of the church. Badly shivering for the church was damp and chilly. Yet, droplets of sweat like tiny ants ran down my sides inside my clothes for I’d been overheated by running. It was difficult for me to concentrate on the mass, which should have been familiar to me, the priest’s chanting of simple monosyllabic words, repeated pleas—Christ have mercy! Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy!

The chalice was raised, incense was released. Like a bird’s sudden cry a bell rang brightly. There came a shuffling of communicants to the communion rail. I’d forgotten—of course, the funeral mass would involve communion, and I would be excluded for I was not in a state of grace, it had been more than six years since my last confession.

No I did not believe. Not in any of it. I was seventeen!

Telling myself that I’d never believed, really. Even as a little girl . . .

Asking my mother what is sin and she’d said bad things you do that you should not.

It seemed to me now that the Catholic mass was a ceremony of begging, essentially. Humankind on its knees begging God for—what, exactly?