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Childs's house—
    and I could not look at the bagels or doughnuts without feeling what—the rapist's penis—
    had last been in my mouth. I tried to stay awake. I had been up for more than twenty-four hours—far longer, what with the all-nighters that I'd pulled during finals week—but I was afraid to fall asleep before my mother got there. My girlfriends and the resident advisor, who, after all, was only nineteen, tried to take care of me, but I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn't understand it myself.

TWO
    While I waited for my mother, people began to leave. I ate a cracker, offered by Tree or Mary Alice. Friends were saying good-bye. Mary Alice wasn't leaving until later in the day. She had done instinctively what few people do in the face of a crisis: She had signed on for the whole ride.
    I felt I needed to dress up for my mother and for the ride home. Mary Alice had already been shocked when, at Christmas and spring break, I had insisted on putting on a skirt and suit jacket to take the bus home to Pennsylvania. Both times, Mary Alice waited on the curb outside the dorm in sweatpants and a lumpy down jacket, trash bags of laundry lined up and ready to be loaded by her parents into their car. But my parents liked to see me look nice, debated my choice of clothing many mornings during high school. I had begun dieting at eleven and my weight, and how it marred my beauty, was a major topic of conversation. My father was the king of the backhanded compliment. "You look just like a Russian ballerina," he said once, "only too fat." My mother repeatedly said, "If you weren't so beautiful in the first place, it wouldn't matter." The implication being, I guess, that I was supposed to know they thought I was beautiful. The result, of course, was that I only thought I was ugly.
    There was probably no better way to confirm this for me than to be raped. In high school, two boys had, in the Senior Class Will, left me toothpicks and pigment. The toothpicks were for my Asian-looking eyes, the pigment for my white skin. I was pale, always pale, and unmuscled. My lips were big and my eyes small. The morning of the rape my lips were cut, my eyes were swollen.
    I put on a green and red kilt and made sure to use the kilt pin that my mother had searched stores for after we purchased the skirt. The indecency of any wrap skirt was something she underlined to me often, particularly when we saw a woman or girl who was unaware that the flap had blown open and we, her audience in parking lot or shopping mall, could see more leg than, as my mother said, "anyone would want to."
    My mother believed in buying clothes big, so, as I grew up, I listened to my older sister, Mary, complain about how all the clothes Mom bought us were huge. In the dressing rooms of department stores, my mother would test the size of all pants or skirts by putting her hand in the waistband. If she couldn't easily slide her hand between our underwear and whatever outfit we were trying on, then it was too tight. If my sister complained, my mother would say, "Mary, I don't know why you insist on wanting pants that are so tight they leave nothing, and I mean nothing, to the imagination."
    We sat with our legs crossed. Our hair was neat and pulled back over the ears. We were not allowed to wear jeans more than once a week until we reached high school. We had to wear a dress to school at least once a week. No heels except pumps from Pappagallo, which were primarily for church and, even then, the heels did not exceed 1.5 inches. I was told whores and waitresses chewed gum and only tiny women could wear turtlenecks and ankle straps.
    I knew, now that I had been raped, I should try to look good for my parents. Having gained the regulation freshman fifteen meant that my skirt that day fit. I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat.
    I was smart, if