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groggy and indifferent to everything. People came and went, class bells rang, phone calls were made. Every time the door opened, a different girl stuck her head in, each face a queer mix of fascination, horror, and pity. “What’re you looking at?” I might’ve asked, but I didn’t have the energy or care to speak.
    I was shuffled out of the school and into the back of a car. A minute later, I was surprised to find Sister Mary Margaret, Freshman Rhetoric, sitting beside me and holding the bandage to my wrist. Still more surprising, she was stroking my hair and saying, “There, there. It’s okay. You’ll be fine.”
    At Baton Rouge General I got six stitches on my left wrist and a shot for tetanus while Sister Mary Margaret held my hand through the entire cloudy, painful operation. I was lying on top of a bed in the recovery room when my parents at last rushed in—my mother blubbery with worry, my father looking faintly ridiculous with stray pieces of straw hanging from the shoulder of his work shirt. Sister Mary Margaret narrated the gentlest possible interpretation of events for them: There had been some accident at the school bulletin board, she said. Nothing too serious—a cut on the wrist, probably two more stitches than were necessary, but better to be on the safe side. Of course, it was difficult being a new student and all, but really, Laura was fine, your daughter was just fine. What she needed now, the good nun said, was rest and sympathy.
    You might imagine the gratitude I felt for Sister Mary Margaret. Up until that day I had known her only as a pale older nun who seemed unnaturally preoccupied with grammar; she smelled musty, like a library, and she rustled when she walked, like her very insides were made of parchment. In little more than an hour, though, she had become my new best ally in the world, and a happy disproof to my suspicion that all nuns below their habits were really witches at heart.
    The good nun saw me as far as the school dormitory, where mean Sister Hagatha-Agatha took charge again. She and my mother settled me into my room, where I was ordered to stay for two days of bed rest. I mustn’t leave the building, I couldn’t go to class, and I couldn’t have any visitors. Suspended, in other words.
    After they’d gone, Melissa looked at me from her bed on the other side of the room. She raised one eyebrow and asked, with something like admiration in her voice, “Wow, what’d you do, cut yourself?”
    “Leave me alone.”
    “Jeez. Only asking.”
    In the principal’s office, meantime, my parents conferred with Principal Evelyn and Sister Agatha. I didn’t know then what they were plotting for me; it was only later that I was able to piece together what went on in that meeting. The nuns must have shown my parents the offending letter. My mother, taken in by their severe uniforms and the crosses on the wall, would have broken down and confessed to them the whole ugly truth of why they had brought me to Sacred Heart in the first place: it was on account of that very same pervert boy who had written that very same pervert letter. It was his fault, she said. He had corrupted their daughter and led her to all this, all this … perversion. Oh god! What could be done?
    To my mother’s relief, the nuns knew what to do. They’d had experience in such things. They handed her tissues and, while my father sat by awkwardly, said that the wisest solution would be to confiscate any more of the dangerous evil obscene letters that arrived from the boy. (“Yes. Yes, you’re right,” I imagine my mother saying, nodding and dabbing her eyes.) The nuns would watch over me at school. And at home during the summer, I should be kept away from the boy and encouraged to take up other activities—softball, say, or sewing. (“Yes, yes, of course, that’s what we’ll do.” “We’ll do it!” my father seconded.) Then, when I returned for the fall semester, I would be fully ready to concentrate on my