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asking me to lie to my father. And I wasn’t angry at her when she shunned me for not having lied well enough. And I wasn’t even angry about the things she did to Hondy Pilt. All she did was play her part in a tableau that, as far as I was concerned, couldn’t have gone any other way.
    Sometimes, when I was a girl, I climbed onto the roof through the gabled window of my second-story bedroom. From the chimney peak, I could see all the way up and down the street. It was as tall as my world got, and it was wonderful. Those summer evenings, I would lie on the sloping shake, securing myself with the soles of my sneakers, watching the stars come out. From my meager height, I beheld the whole entire world as I knew it. And what could be bad about all this?

Chapter 2
    M y name is Lumen. My father says my mother gave me the name because it means light. I am a light, and I light the way. That’s what the North Star and guardian angels do. But my name also means this:

    is me, Lumen. Lumen as a unit.is how many candelas. Candela is another beautiful name. I wish I knew someone named Candela so we could be Lumen and Candela, and we would define each other in measurements of light. The mathematics of illumination.is another unit, steradians, but that is an angular measurement—it defines the direction in which a light is shining. If the light is democratic, if it is loving and gentle and good, if it doesn’t prefer one angle over another, then the equation becomes even more beautiful:

    Because there are four pi steradians in a perfect, all-encompassing sphere.
    Here I am, now matured to fifteen years of age, and my grades are excellent, the best in school, and I am also smaller than all the other girls in my class, delayed in my growth—stunted, even—and I stay in the library after the final bell rings to look up my name in the large, dusty encyclopedias.
    Who could know me? Not my mother, who was dead before I remember. Not my friends, who seem to have found their way into an idea of adulthood. Maybe not even my father, who is generous to a fault and believes so heartily in the errorlessness of me that I wear myself out with being his good daughter. So maybe these books know for certain who I am. They seem so absolute about what they know. They etch my name in perfect symbols. They draw lines to define me, they show how Lumen equates to other delicious little glyphs. I want to be the precision of these equations. Then I could justify who I am.
    So yes, there I am in the library, turning the pages of encyclopedias. My ankles itch under my socks. Many of the other boys and girls in my class, Polly included, have gone down to the lake to swim. The boys have tied a rope to a tree branch that overhangs the lake. They swing out over the water and drop in, like dumplings. Once in, they make a game of submarining their way to the girls and grabbing their legs to startle them. Some boys flip the girls head over tail. When this is done, the mandate of the flipped girls seems to be initial outrage followed by affable censure. I have gone to the lake, too, on occasion, but mostly I sit on the shore and watch. When I do go into the water, I wait patiently to be pinched or tumbled by the underwater boys—but perhaps I am prey too meager for their tastes. My hair stays dry.
    I love the smell of the encyclopedia. When no one is looking, I bury my nose deep into the crease of the binding and breathe in the book. No one else does this. I do not witness any of the other students sniffing the pages of Great Expectations when the paperbacks are handed out in our English class. Me, rather than putting my nose to it, I casually fan the pages with my thumb, which sends into the air the pleasant aroma of wood pulp and ink.
    In the library I sit at a carrel, the farthest one in the back corner, and I search through piles of books looking to understand my name. The dictionary does me little good, but I have no hard feelings toward it—I love the way