No one can say how it began, least of all the girl in the photo on my desk, dressed in the white frothy wedding dress, who has been performing all her life: for teachers, lovers, friends, parents, spouses. Her mother was always arranging her like a bouquet, each morning pinning her hair back in pink Goody barrettes, then dabbing her face, first with a wet cloth, then with rouge and lipstick and eye shadow. Her mother always said a girl can be someone special or no one at all.  The choice is hers. I will be no one, the girl knew, as certain as her name was Annie Louise, as the gap between her front teeth, as the long wait between dinner and four o’clock in the afternoon with the cat and a Nancy Drew mystery on her lap, a macaroon melting on her tongue. She ate slowly as she read, so slowly that even now, years later, the late afternoon hours taste like coconut and sugar, so sweet, her heart aches.  Sometimes, when she put the book down and gazed into the distance, she thought she heard the still quiet voice of God. What does it sound like? her mother asked. She didn’t say—like the pause between the bathroom faucet’s slow drip-drips. Each drop clinging to the spout, a tiny universe waiting to fall.