The contact with my sisters was like that. Withered, desiccated. Barely alive. But still, it existed.

“Mr. Sandman Bring Me a Dream”

HE WOULD PROTECT ME. HE PROMISED.

Kissing the scar at my hairline. Smoothing the hair back, that he might press his lips lightly against the scar. Making me shiver.

He would take measurement of me. Establish a record. The size of my skull, the length of my spine, the size of my hands and feet (bare). Height, weight. Color of skin.

Then taking my hand. Pressing it between his legs where he was fattish, swollen like ripe, rotting fruit. Pressed, rubbed. When I tried to pull away he gripped my hand tighter.

Don’t pretend to be innocent,“Vio-let!” You dirty girl.

SOMETIMES HE CALLED ME SLEEPING BEAUTY. (WHICH HAD TO BE one of his jokes, I was no beauty.)

Sometimes he called me Snow White.

“I am ‘Sandman.’ Do I have a sandpaper tongue?”

SEVEN MONTHS. WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN.

If it was abuse as they charged it did not seem so, usually. It was something that I could recognize as punishment.

Each time was the first time. Each time, I would not remember what happened to me, what was done to me. And so there was only a single time, and that time the first time as well as the last.

Each time was a rescue. Waking to see the face of the one who had rescued me, and his eyes that shone in triumph beneath grizzled eyebrows. Sharp-bracketed mouth and stained teeth in a smile of happiness.

Vio-let Rue! Time to wake up, dear.

Mr. Sandman was the teacher who’d sighted me lost in the ninth-grade corridor, when I was in seventh grade. When I’d first come to Port Oriskany as a transfer student. The teacher with the grizzled eyebrows and strange staring eyes who’d seemed to recognize me, who’d interrogated me about my name.

And now you are in my homeroom. “Vio-let Rue.”

No alternative. Mr. Sandman was the ninth-grade math teacher.

At last, I was his. On his homeroom class list and in his fifth-period math class.

For both homeroom and math class Mr. Sandman seated me at his right hand where he could keep a much-needed eye on you.

He’d helped me to my feet. Before he’d been my teacher. Discovered me sleeping in a corner of the school library where I’d curled up beneath a vinyl chair as a dog might curl up to sleep, nose to tail, a shabby little terrier, hoping to be invisible and not to be kicked.

No one else seemed to see me. Might’ve been somebody’s sheepskin jacket tossed beneath a chair at the back of the room.

Standing over me breathing hoarsely for so long, I wouldn’t know.

Time to wake up, dear! Take my hand.

But it was his hand that took my hand. Gripped hard, and hauled me to my feet.