My friend’s name then was Jessie Madatall, but on Facebook she calls herself Jessica Hendy. She sent me a friend request about a year ago. I looked at her picture and saw an impeccable blond woman with an aquiline nose. She didn’t look like the kind of person I would know. She had the sort of face advertisers make use of in campaigns to sell bank mortgages — wholesome and responsible, reassuringly smiley. And as I was contemplating this unfamiliar face and name, Jessica Hendy sent me a message.

Hi Karen! Thanks for accepting my friend request. This is Jessie Madatall, your old pal from childhood. Jessie Hendy now — that’s right, I made the leap! I’ve been married for 14 years and am the doting mother of a sweet and rambunctious 11-year-old boy. Life is good! There’s a lot of catching up to do between now and — wow — childhood, but the reason I am contacting you today is because after a great deal of therapy and working through the issues of my past, I am reaching out to the people in my life who may have been hurt in some way or at the very least made uncomfortable by what was happening within my family when I was between the ages of 6 and 14. This is not to say I take the blame for what was done to me, but just that I’ve come to understand how a betrayal and a violation of a child can ripple outward — like a stone dropped into a still, lovely pond on a summer’s day. My wonderful therapist and I have talked about the way other people can get caught up in those ripples . . .

At the bottom of her note, Jessica told me there was no need to reply. I decided, self-servingly maybe, that this was Jessica’s way of saying, I would rather you didn’t reply, and so I never did. Instead, I called my mother and asked, Why did you make me stop playing with Jessie Madatall?

And my mother replied, in so many words, after quite a bit of hemming and hawing, that she walked in on the two of us staging a kind of stuffed-animal gang rape scenario one day after school. We had gathered up whatever dolls were on hand and could remotely be considered male in gender — we’d had no problem finding a girl doll to be violated, but boy dolls were scarcer, so it turned out a lot of my bears got in on the action, I suppose because they were named Teddy and wore bow ties.

I burst out laughing at this awfulness. It was the language she used, my mother emphasized to me. I just heard this language coming through the door and my blood went cold.

Was it like . . . the eff word and stuff?

No, no, said my mother. Everyone says the eff word — children say that all the time. No, it was just . . . so conversational.