Lucky by Alice Sebold

coat and kept on running. They got her anyway.
    I was thinking, as tears rolled down Tom's face, of how my rapist had grabbed my long hair.
    "I don't know what to do or say," Tom said.
    "You can't do anything," I said to him.
    I wish I could go back and erase my last line to Tom. I wish I could say, "You're already doing it, Tom. You're listening." I wondered how his mother had gone on to have a husband and a family and never tell anyone.
    After those visits in the early summer, Tom and I saw each other at church. By that time I was no longer fixated on gaining Tom's attention or being seen with a handsome boy. I was scrutinizing his mother. She knew I knew about her, and she certainly knew about me, but we never spoke. A distance grew between me and Tom. It would have anyway, but the story of my rape had stormed into their lives uninvited. It had catalyzed a revelation inside their home. How that revelation eventually affected them I do not know.
    But via her son, Mrs. McAllister gave me two things: my first awareness of another rape victim who lived in my world, and, by telling her sons, the proof that there was power to be had in sharing my story.
    The urge to tell was immediate. It sprang out of a response so ingrained in me that even if I had tried to hold it back, thought better of it, I doubt I could have done so.
    My family had secrets, and from an early age, I had crowned myself the one who would reveal them. I hated the hush-hush of hiding things from other people. The constant instruction to "keep it down or the neighbors will hear you." My usual response to this was "So what?"

    Recently my mother and I had a discussion about saving face at her nearby Radio Shack.
    " I'm convinced the clerk thinks I'm a lunatic," my mother said, on the subject of returning a portable phone.
    "People return things all the time, Mom," I said.
    "I've already returned it once."
    "So, the clerk may think you're a pain in the ass but I doubt he'll think you're insane."
    "I just can't go in there again. I can hear them now: 'Oh, there's that old lady who couldn't figure out a fork if it came with instructions.' "
    "Mom," I said, "they exchange things all the time."
    It's funny now, but growing up, the worry over the opinions of others meant keeping secrets. My grandmother, my mother's mother, had had a brother who died drunk. His body was discovered three weeks later by his younger brother. My sister and I were warned never to tell Grandma that Mom was an alcoholic. We also weren't supposed to talk about her flaps, and she did her best to hide them on our visits to Bethesda, where her parents lived. Although my parents cursed a blue streak, we were not supposed to curse.
    And even though we heard what they thought of the deacon at St. Peter's (a "supercilious moron"), what they thought of the neighbors ("He's courting a heart attack with all that fat"), what they thought of one sister when the other sister was up in her room—we were not meant to repeat it.
    I seemed constitutionally unable to follow these instructions. When we moved to Pennsylvania from Rockville, Maryland, when I was five, my sister had to repeat the third grade. This was because she was too young, according to the East Whiteland school district, to be in fourth grade. So, on this basis alone, she had to stay in third grade for another year. This was traumatic for her because flunking a grade was one of the worst brands you could bear at age eight in a new town. My mother said no one had to know.
    She failed to say that for this to happen, they would have to wire my mouth shut and keep me from leaving the house.
    A few days after settling into the new house, I was in the backyard with our basset hound, Feijoo. I met a neighbor, Mrs. Cochran, who bent down and introduced herself. She had a child my age, a boy Brian, and no doubt wanted to get the scoop on our family. I obliged her.
    "My mother's the one with the pits in her face," I said to our shocked neighbor. I was