Dissociation, a psychological fleeing from a scene evoking terror, suggests important points about learners in stressful situations. First, a student who dissociates may not have learned that, outside of the abusive relationship in which the dissociation started, she can say no and mean it. She may need to learn how to construct protective, less permeable boundaries around knowledge about her private life and learn how to discern whom she can trust with private information. While reading and responding to the rich, but exotic sensory detail in Out of the Dust—at least for an urban Indiana student—she can create clear distinctions between her own experiences and Billie Jo’s in both time and situation. Second, dissociation’s relationship to hyperarousal and therefore to shame suggests that a student who dissociates may need to learn how to empathize with the person she was when her traumatic event occurred. Because a woman who psychologically flees can look at the traumatic scene over her own shoulder, somewhat as Baxter and I did, dissecting our ability to see the world, she may have internalized even inadvertent shaming comments. In Out of the Dust there is so much silence surrounding the catastrophic events of crop failure after crop failure—and Billie Jo’s mother’s fiery death—that overheard whisperings are not only taken as blame but are exploded to unmanageable proportions. Students can be invited to interrogate not only the language and circumstances Billie Jo interprets as shaming, but these silences as well. They can investigate silences, made all the more prominent and poignant by the imagistic poetic form, by asking, based on their emotional responses as adult readers, what other meanings for the whispers besides blame that Billie Jo could have missed. Then, while listening to her classmates’ discussion, a student can also listen to her own, perhaps different emotional responses. She can learn how others construct those different responses, and perhaps if theirs are less harsh than hers, she can learn how to feel empathy for both the character and herself. On the other hand, if the classmates’ responses are more harsh, she can question why they feel the way they do without taking their responses personally.