That was the beginning. Not friendship. Not anything inappropriate. Something more saving and more dangerous. An adult who told her that her gaze was not a defect. From then on she read more, stayed after class to talk about books, took home novels from the old classroom cupboard. Chekhov, Carson McCullers, Faulkner, and poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay that made her dizzy and hurt her at once. The books did not make her beautiful. Or popular. But they gave her something almost more important. Vocabulary for her shame.