The first time I read what is now one of my favorite short stories, for a class, it scared me. Not the story itself, but the day after in class. Everyone very clearly, very decisively spoke of the main character as crazy--and she was. And a part of me knew that as I read, but most of me did not. And so I wrote questions in the margins of my paper and my class members kept ending their comments with "because she's crazy."

After the second reading of this story (I've read it in at least three different classes now), I stayed behind after class and hesitantly asked the teacher if she thought the character was crazy. She told me she thought the character was responding to the situation in a way that made sense to her, and no, not really--though here, I think a faltering in memory leads me to paraphrase this a bit incorrectly.

This is a thing of great importance in my head, though I'm not entirely sure if it happened the way I think it did.