My fourth-grade teacher did not like me.

Miss DiLalo criticized everything about me.  She hated the two thick braids which hung down or got pinned with bobby-pins in a crown around my head.  She mimicked the way I walked and would cajole boys in the class into doing the same. Not boys who had befriended  me, but boys who liked her and ogled the span of thigh above her gartered stocking as she leaned on their desks.

Our section of fourth grade got stuck in the old grade school building next to the high school.  Miss DiLalo didn’t much care for the banishment.  She’d stare longingly out the windows, across the blacktop at the new Elementary School building with its wide expanse of yellow bricks.  In the red-brick building, four stories tall with spooky back corridors, we groveled under Miss DiLalo’s wrath.

One particular day, Miss DiLalo scolded my bad penmanship.  She took a red ballpoint pen and made a dark red check-mark on my cheek, to match your freckles, she said.  I did something I would not have thought myself capable of doing in response.  I back-handed her, right across the face.

She sent me home.  Screeching, raging, beet red, eyes popping, she grabbed me by the braids and dragged me to the entry way of her classroom and ordered  me out, sputtering, swearing, throwing my book bag after me.

I limped the 3/4 of a mile to our house, where  my hung-over father demanded an explanation. When I told my story, head down, saddle-shoes scuffling, tears welling in my eyes, my father sank to his knees.  He placed his hands on my shoulders, the only gentle touch which I recall from him.

Then he drove me back to the school and demanded that the teacher be fired for what she had done:  For the belittling, for the gouge in my cheek, for sending a little crippled girl struggling home without the brothers who usually saw to her safety, in the middle of the day, to what could well have been an empty house.

In December of last year, I started taking what I’ve laughingly called the world’s strongest anti-viral.  The intention of this drug is two-fold:  To stop the re-activation of the HHV-6 which caused the viral encephalitis which originally damaged me; and to ameliorate some of its symptoms.  I don’t yet know if the drug has done either.

But this I do know.  There is one unmistakable side effect, a phenomenon for which I have no other explanation, and one about which I have absolutely no complaint.  And it’s this:  My freckles have returned.