The Power of Testimony

The Crime
taught not to be vain. Our church’s girls’ club had a motto that we
chanted at each meeting: “Grace is deceitful and beauty is vain; but
a woman that feareth Jehovah, she shall be praised. Proverbs thirty-​
one verse thirty.”
No one explained what the Bible verse meant. “Beauty is vain.”
I thought the word vain meant beauty pageants. Makeup. Gold
jewelry. Fine clothes. Worldly things.
But that isn’t the only definition for the word. Vain also means
vanishing. Disappearing. Transitory. Fleeting. That night I learned
about many things that are vain—​things that vanish. Not just
beauty, but also certainty. Hope. Faith. Even the future itself.
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When I got back to the dining room with the leader, the intruders
conferred. Then the other intruder marched me upstairs again with
his gun in my back, this time to Marty’s bedroom, at the back of
the house. He sat on the bed and pointed his gun at me. He said
the same thing the other one had said: “Strip.”
Somehow this time felt different.
I took off my nightgown and underwear and waited, shaking. The
shaking angered him. “Quit shaking, or I’ll blow your brains out!”
“I can’t help it.” I couldn’t stop crying either.
“Lay down on the bed,” he said.
I crawled onto the bed, trembling. I couldn’t see him clearly in
the dark, and I didn’t want to see him. I only wanted it to be over
with.
Was that the faint scent of blood? I remembered the two tampons
I had inserted before bedtime. Hours ago. A lifetime ago. I had
my period, heavy flow. Now I wondered where the tampons would
go and if they could pierce anything, and whether that would hurt.
He climbed on top of me. He had taken off his pants and jacket,
but he was still wearing a pullover shirt and the ski mask. He moved
awkwardly. I noticed the strange chemical smell again—​a scent I
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