We laughed a little and I noticed something warm still running down my neck and I patted it with my fingers. It was blood. I twisted around and it was all over the collar of my shirt. Then I realized that my breasts hurt; I touched them and they were tender and bruised. I felt like I had been in an accident. I felt like…

“I love you,” she said.

She knew just what to say after putting me through a meat grinder. I was so thankful.

The next night at church was the Lord’s Supper.

It was a night full of stars that I didn’t want to leave to go inside. But I filed back into the building with the other girls. A sweetish yellow light filled the church.

The preacher got up and, in a conversational tone as if he were down among us, said what he always did about eating the flesh of the Lord with sins on our conscience. We would burn in hell if we did. I broke out in a sweat. If I had died since the last Lord’s Supper, I knew that I would be in hell.

But then something happened worse than hell. Rohn left me.

She was just gone.

I didn’t see her at all the week following the Lord’s Supper. I thought that maybe she had gone somewhere with her mother. But she didn’t come back the next week either.

The Saturday night following the second week I knew that something was wrong. I cried a whole night so silently that my grandmother, sleeping in the same bed, didn’t hear me.

I learned, mostly by listening, that she had indeed disappeared. Rohn had disappeared and so had Fauna Dipman.

Fauna Dipman was a light-skinned girl with freckles. She went to the Baptist church. She had just gotten married that past spring. I’d never paid her much attention, and Rohn had never mentioned her. I heard somebody saying that Rohn was crazy and Fauna was probably dead. Fauna’s young husband walked around like somebody had hit him on the head.

One day I went to a small hollow down past our garden at the edge of the woods. It was another of my secret places, and I had taken Rohn there. While I was there, something made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was just a feeling.

She had already started haunting me. I ran out of that hollow so fast I had a stitch in my side. I still run from that place in my dreams. I wake up sweating and feeling the hollow, not as empty as it should be, at my back.

I didn’t see Rohn again for twenty-eight years.