Rite of Passage

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To be honest, I haven’t been able to remember clearly everything that happened to me before and during Trial, so where necessary I’ve filled in with possibilities — lies, if you want.

There is no doubt that I never said things half as smoothly as I set them down here, and probably no one else did either. Some of the incidents are wholly made up. It doesn’t matter, though. Everything here is near enough to what happened, and the important part of this story is not the events so much as the changes that started taking place in me seven years ago. The changes are the things to keep your eye on. Without them, I wouldn’t be studying to be an ordinologist, I wouldn’t be married to the same man, and I wouldn’t even be alive. The changes are given exactly — no lies.

I remember that it was a long time before I started to grow. That was important to me. When I was twelve, I was a little black-haired, black-eyed girl, short, small, and without even the promise of a figure. My friends had started to change while I continued to be the same as I had always been, and I had begun to lose hope. For one thing, according to Daddy I was frozen the way I was. He hit upon that when I was ten, one day when he was in a teasing mood.

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