The next few days passed her by without really registering, a distant distraction like a television playing unwatched in a corner of the room.

Outwardly she was still the Invisible Girl, for which she was thankful, because this allowed her to give her attention almost entirely to the stranger she had suddenly become.

Who was this girl who had done all those things, things that played themselves over and over in her mind, things she had never even heard of but knew were bad, things that would shock anyone who knew her? Things she had only done because she’d been forced to, she told herself, but still things she was certain no other girl she knew had even thought about. She felt as if she had not only become a different person, but a different species, outwardly similar in appearance but inwardly totally unlike the people around her.

Sometimes a particular memory would suddenly fill her mind. While changing into her gym clothes she would remember standing in her bra and panties before him, his eyes looking at her. Absently chewing on a pencil in class, she would suddenly recall having him in her mouth, the taste of him. At those moments she would blush to the roots of her hair, and have to look down, thankful for her long bangs and glasses.

And it didn’t help that her history class was studying the Civil War. Every time she heard the word slavery it jolted her. She wondered if slaves then had to do the kinds of things she had done.

And what about him? She could hardly bear to think about him. When she did she would cringe inwardly, overwhelmed with conflicting feelings: anger that he had forced her to do and say such awful, humiliating things, driving her to tears; shame that she had done them—she had had a choice, after all, and could have turned herself in, which would have been the right thing to do—what a good girl would have done. And this brought her to a deeper feeling of shame, one that told her that maybe she had deserved exactly what had happened to her, because she was not a good girl.

And below that, a shame so deep that she dared not allow it to become even a thought: that she had, finally, enjoyed it.

And that he knew.

The thought of seeing him again terrified her. As long as she didn’t see him, it hadn’t really happened; only in her mind, a story she had made up. To see him again, to have him looking at her, would make it irrevocably real. So she scuttled from one class to the next, her head even further down than usual, and dashed out a side door at the end of the day. Once she had recognized the back of his head in the student union cafeteria and had run out in a blind panic. She hated him more for knowing the things she had done than for making her do them. He was a terrible person; only a monster would have made her experience such degrading things.

And yet sometimes, even when overwhelmed by memories that made her want to cry with shame and anger, there would arise unbidden the memory of that kiss—a wonderful, romantic kiss, despite the circumstances. The way he had held her, the tenderness in it. It was the kind of kiss she had only seen in movies or read about.

And that look he had given her afterwards, his eyes searching hers. What was it she had seen in that look? She didn’t know. But she thought that sadness was a part of it.

In some ways the memory—that kiss, that look—haunted her more consistently than any of the others, so much so that even though she was frantically trying to avoid him, she also now found herself paying attention to how she looked, although she wouldn’t admit to herself that she was doing so, resolutely thinking about something else as she picked out her clothes in the morning.

By the end of that week she was no longer drawn to her invisibility wardrobe. That Friday morning she put on a white blouse with matching knee-socks (she hated pantyhose, which made her feel as if her lower body had been shrink-wrapped) and a tartan skirt—nothing that would attract attention, certainly, but not invisible, either. She had even, while defiantly not noticing that she was doing so, put on a pair of panties that she had never worn—white, with a pattern of large and small red hearts—which her mother had picked up somewhere and given her as a sort of jokey Valentine’s day present. She had never worn such girly things, not since entering adolescence, and would not allow herself to wonder why she was doing so now.

Her family lived close enough to the school that she could ride her bike there in good weather and she did so that morning, arriving, as she had all that week, in a state of anxiety and, somewhere underneath, unacknowledged, anticipation. She had managed to avoid him so far, except for that moment in the lunchroom. She knew that in a school as small as Ridgeton Community College she couldn’t hope to avoid him forever, but felt that maybe if enough time went by it would erase what had happened between them, if only partially.

So when he came into the library while she was studying there that afternoon she restrained herself from picking up her books and fleeing.

There was a good chance he wouldn’t see her: the long table at which she sat was almost around the corner of the L-shaped room and partially obscured by a chest-high set of bookshelves. It was an unpopular table because there was no window, and the light wasn’t good, which was why she had chosen it. She could see across the library but was somewhat in shadow herself.

And even if he did see her they were in the library, and the librarian was a tight-lipped old harpy whose devotion to silence rivaled that of any monastic order. He could say nothing to her.

But having him not see her would be even better. She bent her head over her book, trying to summon her powers of invisibility.

But she wasn’t reading, of course, not even trying. She was looking over the tops of her glasses, following his every movement.

He was wearing tan chinos and a navy blue polo shirt. He had an average physique, not tall or short, neither muscular nor flabby, but he had broad shoulders that made him look a little more imposing. His brown hair and his sideburns were both a little longer than the school dress code permitted, but as a soon to be graduating second-year he could get away with it.