“Is it an important one?”

“Yes.”

“So what are you going to do?”

This is the moment. This is the very moment when he is going to make a move to indulge his sense of touch.

He answers, “I’ll make sure it’s not neglected next time.”

How it is that he brings the evening to an end without anything having happened is a mystery to me. It must be my teeth. Or my fat, my gray, my frizz, my brown contacts, my glasses. Perhaps I should take them all off. No, I can’t believe I’m even thinking this, after my resolution—after Gabriel. My throat tightens at the memory of him.

Peter says he’d better call it a night because he has to get up early the next morning. He offers to escort me home. I tell him that won’t be necessary. He kisses me on the cheek and I leave.

I decide to walk home to clear my head. My apartment is 45 minutes away, but the air isn’t cold for December and I’m wearing a big coat over my bloat wear.

“You look a bit hot and sweaty,” Adam notes, opening the lobby door for me. “When you get upstairs, why don’t you cool off by opening your window and sticking your head out, feet first?”

Of course, he doesn’t know that my best friend killed himself by jumping out a window. I doubt he would have made that comment if he’d known—despite his disorder.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Strad and Lily are walking to his friend’s birthday party when he suddenly takes hold of the edge of Lily’s mask and tentatively begins to lift it off her face.

She grabs his wrist. “Never,” she says.

“Oh, come on, won’t you let me?” Strad pleads.

Lily shakes her head. “No one ever takes off my mask. Only I do that, when and if I choose to.”

“I think I’m going to go home. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m feeling a bit sad.”

“Why? Because I won’t take off my mask?”

“That’s just a symptom. The spot I take up in your heart seems . . . so small. It’s hard for me to get used to that.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Your unwillingness to be truthful,” he says, leaning against a lamppost. “You allow me to believe things that are completely inconsistent with ways that you act, and you don’t bother explaining the inconsistencies, as though I’m not even worth the trouble.”

“What inconsistencies?”

“You let me believe that you absolutely have to wear a mask in public so that you won’t be harassed by strangers, but then why do you put it on when I go to the bathroom in your apartment? It insults my intelligence. Also, you refuse to take off your mask to go to this private party, and yet you took your mask off at the bookstore on our first date. So why can’t you take it off now as a special favor to me? My friends aren’t going to pester you the way those jerks did at the bookstore.”

Head hanging, shoulders drooping, Lily says nothing. She can’t explain to him that she puts on her mask when he goes to the bathroom because there’s no music in the bathroom and when he emerges from it, he’ll see her in all her ugliness; he’ll instantly recognize her as Lily until the music’s power takes hold of his brain again.

He continues. “I want to help you find another way to deal with the problems you’re struggling with that make you wear the mask.”

“That’s not likely to happen. I’ve been wearing a mask for fifteen years.”

“You have?” He pulls her to him and tenderly whispers in her ear, “I knew there was more to it. Things didn’t quite add up. Please open up to me. I want to know you.” He kisses the edge of her ear. “Will you tell me? Let’s forget about the party and go home.”

She nods. They walk back to her place. In her mind, she’s rehearsing Georgia’s concoction. She dreads using it. When she first heard it, she cringed and was tempted to ask Georgia to make it more literary, but Georgia had already made it clear she wouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be effective on Strad.

Strad and Lily go straight to her bedroom. She turns on the music. A minute later, she takes off her mask. She lies next to Strad on the bed.

He strokes her hand. “Tell me everything.”

She gazes at him for a long moment and then takes the plunge into Georgia’s fabrication. She describes at length a torrid history of sexual abuse that supposedly happened up to and including the age of eight, and that involved many pedophiles: her swimming instructor, her neighbor on vacation one summer, an art teacher, etc. The offenses were never genital penetration—because, as Strad knows, she was still a virgin their first night together—but it was everything else. Lily tells him she had an uncle she adored, who’d never laid a finger on her, until one day when he became one of the others. He couldn’t bear the guilt of what he did to her, and what he did to her again twice, and what he knew he would continue doing to her, so he killed himself.

Strad looks too shocked to respond.

“And that,” says Lily, “was when I started wearing the mask.”

Strad puts his arms around her and seems very distraught.

She, too, is upset, though over the fact that this crazy story was what she had to resort to. And it’s not even over.

She pulls away from Strad. “He left a suicide note confessing to my mother that he’d been molesting me and that he was killing himself mostly for this reason. I couldn’t believe he would do that to me—that on top of traumatizing me with his abuse and traumatizing me with his death, he was exposing our disgusting secret. He himself was conveniently escaping the shame of it through death, leaving me to bear it. I wanted to die, too.”

Strad is staring at her, looking quite upset.

Lily continues. “I refused to take off the mask. I wasn’t only wearing it to stop attracting sexual abuse, I was also wearing it out of shame. When my parents tried taking it off by force, I had a fit. I told them that if they didn’t let me wear it, I’d find another mask and glue it to my face with Superglue, or I’d cut up my face. They were horrified. They sent me to therapy, which was useless. Finally, there was one shrink who did help, though only a little. Now I’m going to explain to you those inconsistencies that offended you.”

“Okay. Thank you,” Strad says.

“After three months, the psychiatrist found an alternate way to make me feel safe. I was only eight years old, keep that in mind. He made me listen to a piece of music and said that whenever that piece was playing, I’d be protected. He claimed the music had properties that would make people around me inoffensive and relatively normal-acting in the face of my looks.”

Strad strokes Lily’s hair.

She continues. “My parents were thrilled, at first, that the therapist was able to add the musical piece to my derangement. They thought I was on the road to recovery. What they didn’t realize was that my progress toward mental health would stop right there. They had to learn to live with their daughter either masked or accompanied by music, and they got so tired of both that sometimes it was hard for them to decide which they could bear. To this day, things haven’t changed. I can live either behind the mask or behind the music. I can choose between my two prisons.”

“But now, as an adult, I assume you know the music doesn’t protect you.”

“On some level I know that. But on an emotional level I still believe in it. I need it.”

“What a sad story.” He pauses. “I don’t mean to sound nitpicky, but I still don’t understand the bookstore. You took off your mask, yet I assume your special music wasn’t playing.”

“Yes, it was, actually.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Connections.”

Strad nods.

“Now you know. I’m very screwed up,” she says. “It’s hard for me to have a normal life. That’s why Barb thought we might be a good match. Most men wouldn’t stand for my lunacies, but she thought that you—because you value physical beauty so much—might be willing to . . . or be able to . . . overlook these huge psychological aberrances.”