When I finished this poem I was shaking. I was in my room at Haven Hall. Despite its wobbles as a poem, its heavily Plath-influenced rhymes, or what Gallagher later called "overkill" in many places, it was the first time I'd addressed the rapist directly. I was speaking to him.

Gallagher loved it. "Now that's the ticket," she said to me. I had written an important poem, she told me, and she wanted it to be workshopped. This was a big step. This meant sitting in a room with fourteen strangers-one of them, as it happened, Al Tripodi-and basically telling them I had been raped. Buoyed by Gallagher, but still afraid, I agreed to do it. I worried over a title. Finally, I made up my mind: "Conviction."

I passed the poem out and then, as was standard practice, I read it aloud to my fellow students. I was, as I read it, hot. My skin blushed and I could feel the blood rush to my face, prickle along the tops of my ears and the ends of my fingers. I could feel the class around me. They were riveted. They were staring at me.

When I was done, Gallagher had me read it again. Before she did this, she told the class that she expected everyone to comment. I read it again, and this time it felt like torture, an instant replay of something that had been hard enough the first time. I still question why Gallagher was so insistent that I workshop "Conviction" and that each and every student-this was not standard-respond to it afterward. It was an important poem by her standards, in that it dealt with important material. Perhaps, by her actions, she meant to emphasize this not only to the class, but to me as well.

But the eyes of most of my peers had a hard time meeting mine.

"Who wants to start?" Gallagher asked. She was direct. By her example she was telling the class: This is what we do here.

Most of the students were shy. They buried their response in words like brave, or important, or bold. One or two were angry that they had to respond, felt the poem, combined with Gallagher's admonition that they react, was an act of aggression on her part and mine.

Al Tripodi said, "You don't really feel that way, do you?"

He was looking right at me. I thought of my father. Suddenly, there was no one else in the room.

"Like what?"

"You don't want to shoot him in the knees and that other stuff with the knives. You can't feel that way."

"Yes, I do," I said. "I want to kill him."

The room was still. Only Maria Flores, a quiet latino girl, had yet to speak. When Gallagher told her it was her turn, she passed. Gallagher pressed. Maria said she could not speak. Gallagher said she could formulate her thoughts during the break and then speak. "Everyone must comment," she said. "What Alice has given you is a gift. I think it's important that everyone recognize this and respond to her. You are joining her at the table by speaking."

We took a break. Al Tripodi quizzed me further out in the flagstone hall near the display case where faculty publications and awards sat on dusty glass shelves. I stared down at the dead bugs that had gotten stuck inside.

He could not understand how I could write those words.

"I hate him," I said.

"You're a beautiful girl."

Presented with this for the first time, I was unable to recognize something I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both for Al Tripodi?

I told him about a dream I had over and over again those days. A daydream. Somehow, I wasn't sure how, I could get at the rapist and do anything to him that I wanted. I would do those things in my poem, I told Tripodi, and I would do worse.

"What is there to gain by that?" he asked me.

"Revenge," I said. "You don't understand."

"I guess I don't. I feel sorry for you."

I scrutinized the dead bugs on their backs, how their legs went out and then shot back in at sharp angles, how their antennae fell in stilled fragile arcs like lost human eyelashes. Tripodi could not see it because I didn't move a muscle, but my body was a wall of flames. I would not take pity, anybody's.

Maria Flores did not come back to class. I was infuriated. They just couldn't deal, I thought, and this made me angry. I knew I was not beautiful and in Gallagher's presence, for three hours that day, I didn't have to care about being beautiful. She, by writing that first line down, by workshopping the piece, had given me my permission slip-I could hate.

Exactly one week later, Gallagher's If they caught you would turn out to be all too prescient. On October 5, I ran into my rapist on the street. By the end of that night, I could stop calling him "the rapist," and start calling him Gregory Madison.

I had workshop that day with Tobias Wolff.

Wolff, whom I met the same day I did Gallagher, was a harder sell. He was a man, and at the time men had to surprise me before I even so much as thought about trusting them. He was not a performer. He made it clear that his personality was not the issue-fiction was. So I, who had decided to be a poet and had lucked into this fiction thing, took a wait-and-see attitude. I was the only sophomore in Wolff's class and the only one to wear weird clothes. The fiction writers wore a lot of starch and denim, shirts emblazoned with sports teams or upright plaids. Poets flowed. They did not, most certainly, wear shirts emblazoned with the logos of sports teams. I saw myself as a poet. Tobias Wolff, with his military posture and never indirect analysis of a story, was not my bag.

Before class I needed to get something to eat. I walked down to Marshall Street from Haven. I had been in Syracuse for a month and begun to make quick trips to Marshall Street, as everyone did, for snacks and school supplies. There was a mom-and-pop store that I liked. It was run by a Palestinian man in his sixties, who often told stories and who had an emphasis, when he said "Good day," that told me he meant it.

I was walking down the street when I saw, up ahead, a black man talking to a shady-looking white guy. The white guy stood in an alleyway and talked over the top of the fence. He had long brown hair, to his shoulders, and a few days' growth of beard. He wore a white T-shirt whose sleeves were rolled up to accentuate the small bellies of his biceps. The black guy I could see only from the back, but I was hyperaware. I went through my checklist: right height, right build, something in his posture, talking to a shady guy. Cross the street!

I did. I crossed the street and walked the rest of the way to the mom-and-pop store. I did not look back. I crossed the street again to walk directly into the store. Time slowed down here. I remember things in the way one rarely does. I knew I had to go back outside and I tried to calm myself. Inside the store I chose a peach yogurt and a Teem soda-two items, if you knew me, that testified to my faltering composure. When the Palestinian man rang them up, he was brusque and hurried. There was no "Good day."

I left the store, crossed directly back to the safety of the other side of the street, and shot a quick glance over to the alleyway. Both men were gone. I also noticed a policeman to my right, on my side of the street. He was getting out of his patrol car. He was very tall, over six feet, and had bright, carrot-orange hair and a mustache. He seemed in no hurry. I assessed my surroundings and decided I was okay. It had been just a more intense version of the fear I had felt around certain black men ever since the rape. I checked my watch and quickened my step. I did not want to be late for Wolff's workshop.

Then, as if out of nowhere, I saw my rapist crossing toward me. He walked diagonally across the street from the other side. I did not stop walking. Or scream.