I had no idea what he was talking about.—WINTER COVERED CAMPUS IN thick snow. I stayed indoors, memorizing
algebraic equations, trying to live as I had before—to imagine my life at
the university as disconnected from my life on Buck’s Peak. The wall
separating the two had been impregnable. Charles was a hole in it.
The stomach ulcers returned, burning and aching through the night.
Once, I awoke to Robin shaking me. She said I’d been shouting in my
sleep. I touched my face and it was wet. She wrapped me in her arms
so tight I felt cocooned.
The next morning, Robin asked me to go with her to a doctor—for
the ulcers but also for an X-ray of my foot, because my big toe had
turned black. I said I didn’t need a doctor. The ulcers would heal, and
someone had already treated the toe.
Robin’s eyebrow rose. “Who? Who treated it?”
I shrugged. She assumed my mother had, and I let her believe it. The
truth was, the morning after Thanksgiving, I had asked Shawn to tell
me if it was broken. He’d knelt on the kitchen floor and I’d dropped my
foot into his lap. In that posture he seemed to shrink. He examined the
toe for a moment, then he looked up at me and I saw something in his
blue eyes. I thought he was about to say he was sorry, but just when I
expected his lips to part he grasped the tip of my toe and yanked. It felt
as if my foot had exploded, so intense was the shock that shot through
my leg. I was still trying to swallow spasms of pain when Shawn stood,
put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry, Siddle Lister, but it hurts
less if you don’t see it coming.”
A week after Robin asked to take me to the doctor, I again awoke to
her shaking me. She gathered me up and pressed me to her, as if her
body could hold me together, could keep me from flying apart.
“I think you need to see the bishop,” she said the next morning.
“I’m fine,” I said, making a cliché of myself the way not-fine people
do. “I just need sleep.”
Soon after, I found a pamphlet for the university counseling service
on my desk. I barely looked at it, just knocked it into the trash. I could
not see a counselor. To see one would be to ask for help, and I believed