Each time I was punished, I would run, out that door and racing home to my mother. For the first time, the girl who was always running to some place began running away from something. “Mama, what’s ‘vain’?” I was crying on our doorstep. She had learned not to even let me in the house when I ran home from school. Sister Fidelis had just called me that. “That you think you’re cute,” my mother said, buttoning her coat to bring me back. Oh, I thought, deciding I never wanted people to think that I thought I was cute. It would be safer to let them know that I knew I wasn’t cute. Better yet, just
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