right before Mr. Fink came back into the room to teach us about the ancient city of Ur. This is what Misty read, her mouth moving all sanctimoniouslike under that stupid puffed-up hair: “Rape,” she said, clearing her throat a little. I squirmed in my hard yellow seat and lifted the lid of my desk up and down, up and down. “Nobody cares what you read,” I said. I knew I was lying but I said it anyway. I guess in a way that was bad. Misty cleared her throat again. “N. One.” She said it just like that, too, I’ll never forget. She didn’t make it “noun” or anything. Just “N. One.” She wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack. Then she went, “Forcible seizing and violation; ravishing.” Everybody (because everybody really did care what she was reading) went “oooh” when she said “ravishing.” She made it sound real bad, probably worse than the word really means. RAVishing. Then she said, “Two. Carrying off by force.” That one was kind of boring so people stopped paying quite as much attention and I slammed my desk down hard to make everyone look at me and giggle instead of listening to Misty. But then, loud as all hell, louder than the rumble of twenty kids talking after pizza-Thursday lunch and before they got down to the most serious business of studying the ancient city of Ur, she said, “Force to have sexual intercourse.” And she closed the book with a smack and put it back on the shelf, smug as all get-out. I think she must have been skipping around to find the most awful of definitions of that word, because I’ve since looked it up and found there’s one in there about a plant grown for fodder and oil, but Misty never once mentioned that, because she knew she was losing her audience. She went straight for the “force to have sexual intercourse.” That was the turning point. That’s how I got to be BAD. I thought a bad man was a good man, and I bragged about it to everyone on the planet. Kids don’t let you forget things like being best friends with a rapist. And when you’re best friends with a ray-pisssed, people make out like fuchsia polka-dotted Keds are the worst thing in the world, even though the day before they were positively coveting them. I walked from my Aunt May’s all the way to the Frisco Rod-n-Gun that night to buy a new phone card to call Charlotte and tell her about my utter humiliation, but instead I ended up talking about other things, Ur mostly, except that I was really too upset to learn anything of value about Ur, so what I did was say, “Ur,” a lot, like I was thinking about what to say next, and Charlotte
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