The cashier paused, both hands clutching the phone so tightly that the skin on his knuckles turned white. “You are very far away,” he said, finally.

I heard the door open behind me, and I froze. I didn’t want to create a scene with another customer in the store. “Can you just tell me how to get there?” I whispered.

The cashier slowly hung up the phone, looking unsure as he reached for a map.

I heard my name.

It was Mr. Larson behind me. It was Mr. Larson’s hand on my shoulder, guiding me out of Wawa, clearing the take-out bags from the passenger seat and urging me to get in his car. There was a surrender in being found that made me lose my grip on all my secrets. All my lies—the ones I told everyone, even myself. Tears shivering on my cheeks, one split with a cut so thin and midnight dark it could have been a pen mark, I started to tell him what had happened. And then I couldn’t stop.

Mr. Larson gave me a blanket and water and an ice pack for my face. He wanted to take me to the hospital, but I became so hysterical at the suggestion that he agreed to bring me back to his apartment. The fact that he knew exactly how to handle the situation—get me to a safe place, calm me down, sober me up—didn’t surprise me then, but it does now. He was an adult, of course he knew what to do, but what I couldn’t have realized then is how new to it he was, how young twenty-four is when you’re not fourteen. Not two years earlier Mr. Larson had been skinny-dipping in Beebe Lake at Cornell with his fraternity brothers, was the only one to score with the freshman they all called Holy Shit because she was so beautiful you gasped “holy shit” when you saw her. We didn’t even look so far apart in age; if I’d been wearing makeup and a dress, we could have been going back to his apartment after a first date gone exceedingly well.

I had made it to Narberth, had walked at least seven miles from Olivia’s house. It was almost one in the morning, and Mr. Larson had been driving home from the bars in Manayunk, where most of his friends lived, where he would live if it wasn’t such a hike to Bradley in the morning. He had stopped at Wawa for a snack, he told me. Then he patted his middle and said, “I’ve been eating too many snacks lately.” He was trying to get me to smile, so I did, politely.

Mr. Larson didn’t look fat to me, but when we got to his apartment and I was able to trace the perimeter of the living room, studying the pictures on his walls, the blanket he’d given me loosening around my shoulders, I saw that he used to have that same slim, muscular build that Liam and Dean had. Muscled shoulders worked hard for in the gym, but the slender waist revealing what would be there without the bench press. I’d stopped thinking of Mr. Larson as the best-looking guy I’d ever seen in real life after he’d become my coach, after he’d started getting on my case, but these pictures reminded me of what I’d seen on my first day of school. I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, suddenly feeling like the V-neck of my sweater was too low.

“Here you go.” Mr. Larson appeared in the doorframe, a soggy slice of Tombstone pizza on a plate for me.

I ate obediently. I had insisted Mr. Larson not make anything for me, I had no appetite, but as I bit into the microwaved pizza, the center still doughy and cold, a rabid hunger overcame me. I ate that slice, then three more before I finally leaned back on the couch, spent.

“Feel better?” Mr. Larson asked, and I nodded, grimly.

“TifAni,” he began, hunching forward in the La-Z-Boy chair next to the couch. He had been careful to take that seat. “We need to talk about next steps.”

I dropped my face in the blanket. The pizza had given me the energy to cry again. “Please,” I whimpered. Please don’t tell my parents. Please don’t tell the school. Please just be my friend and not make this any worse than it already is.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.” Mr. Larson sighed. “But we’ve had, problems, like this, with Dean before.”

I used the blanket to wipe my face and raised my head. “What do you mean?”

“This isn’t the first time he’s physically assaulted another student.”

“Tried to,” I corrected him.

“No,” Mr. Larson said, firmly. “What he did at his house three weeks ago wasn’t trying, what he did tonight wasn’t trying.”

Even after everything was said and done, after the ashes fermented the grass, after I moved on to college and then New York City and got everything I thought I wanted, Mr. Larson was the only person who ever told me that this, none of this, was my fault. I saw the momentary hesitation even in Mom’s eyes. You give a blow job, it can’t be done to you. How can it be what you say it is? How could you go to the party, be the only girl, drink that much, and not expect to have what happened happen?

“My parents will never forgive me for ruining this,” I said.

“Yes,” Mr. Larson promised. “They will.”

I leaned back, resting my head against the couch and closing my eyes, my legs aching with all the Main Line roads I’d wandered. I could have fallen asleep right there, but Mr. Larson insisted I take his bed, the couch was fine for him, really, it was.

He closed the door with a gentle click, and I climbed beneath his duvet, dark red and scratchy with wear. Mr. Larson smelled like a grown-up, like a dad. I wondered how many other girls had slept in this bed before me, if Mr. Larson had kissed their necks while he moved on top of them, slow and labored, like I had always pictured sex would be.

I woke up in the middle of the night screaming. I never actually heard it myself. But it must have been pretty bad to send Mr. Larson panting into the room. He heaved the light on, standing over me and pleading with me loudly to wake up from my bad dream.

“You’re okay,” Mr. Larson shushed when he saw my eyes focus on him. “You’re okay.”

I gathered the blanket underneath my chin, everything covered except my head, the way Mom used to do with heaps of sand at the beach. “Sorry,” I whispered, embarrassed.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Mr. Larson said. “It was just pretty bad. I thought you might want to wake up from it.”

My bodyless head nodded. “Thanks.”

Mr. Larson was wearing a T-shirt, snug around the impressive slope of his shoulders. He turned to go.

“Wait!” I held the blanket tighter. I couldn’t be in this room alone. My heart hiccuped threateningly in the cavity of my chest, the first sign of the spin. It couldn’t go on like this for much longer, and if it stopped, I needed someone there to call for help. “I can’t . . . I’m not going to be able to sleep. Can you stay?”

Mr. Larson looked over his big shoulder at me in the bed. There was a sadness in his face I didn’t understand. “I could sleep on the floor.”

I nodded, encouragingly, and Mr. Larson continued on to the living room, returning with a pillow and a blanket. He arranged his materials on the ground next to the bed before turning off the light and crouching low, rearranging them to fit his form.

“Try to sleep, TifAni,” he said drowsily. But I didn’t try. I stayed up all night, listening to his soothing breath assure me everything would be okay. I didn’t know it then, but I had a lifetime of sleepless nights waiting for me after that.

In the morning, Mr. Larson microwaved me a frozen bagel. He didn’t have cream cheese, only a crusty stick of butter with bread crumbs clinging to the ragged end.

Even though the swelling in my face had gone down during the night, I still had that thin red line etched into my cheek. But it was my wrist that was really concerning me, so Mr. Larson offered to go to CVS and get me an Ace bandage and a toothbrush. After that, he wanted to drive me home, and he promised he would help me tell my parents what had happened. I agreed reluctantly.