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  But the maddening thing was, her boyfriend was always hanging around, usually as sloppy as she was.

  Tolerance, I told myself. Different people have different priorities, that’s all. Hygiene wasn’t high on Amber’s list.

  * * *

  Gwen and I got together whenever we could. There was a large house off campus—a gift to the university—where premed students could live at half the usual rate, so Gwen, understandably, chose to stay there, which was a bit of a bummer for me—we would have been such good roommates.

  “So how goes it?” she asked one Friday a few weeks into school, when we’d managed to meet for dinner at a Burmese restaurant in town.

  “I love my classes,” I told her, “but—God! Amber’s a slob! She smells! Our room stinks. I can’t stand going in there at night.”

  “Huh! Mine’s the exact opposite. She even wipes off the toilet seat after she uses it!” Gwen said.

  “Amber doesn’t even use toilet paper when she pees!” I complained. “You ask how I know that? She pees with the door open.”

  Gwen burst into laughter. “You only have to put up with her for a year. Next fall you can choose someone different. Of course, you could get someone worse.”

  “Impossible,” I said. Through the window, I watched a guy in a corduroy jacket cross the parking lot and come inside. He paid for an order at the cash register and took it out to a girl in a waiting Toyota. I concentrated on Gwen again. She’d recently had her eyebrows shaped, two beautiful black curves extending out toward her temples, against her mocha brown skin.

  “Your mistake was not saying something right away,” she told me. “You’ve let it go this long; she probably figures you’re okay with it. You’ve got to talk to her.”

  I sighed. “You know I hate confrontation.”

  “Then you’ve got to decide which you hate more: talking to her about it or slob city.”

  “What are you going to specialize in, Doctor? Psychiatry?” I asked.

  Gwen ate another bite of her lemongrass beef and pointed to the last piece of my roti pancake. When I shoved it in her direction, she ate that, too, still thoughtful. “I don’t know. Pediatrics, I think. Or maybe Ob/Gyn. Remember what they told us when we were hospital volunteers? That there’s only one happy ward in a hospital, and that’s the maternity ward? What do you hear from Patrick?”

  “I’m trying to follow your train of thought here,” I said, and we laughed. “He’s having a blast. He e-mailed me about all the different people in his classes—a guy who’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro twice; a girl who’s joining the Peace Corps; a guy who pays his way through college by fishing; an artist; a priest . . . He gets to meet all these fascinating people, and I get Amber.”

  “So plan to visit him over spring break or something.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” I told her. “I’ve even priced airline tickets. But that’s months and months away. I’ll probably seem pretty boring compared to all his friends there.”

  “He’s coming back to you, remember,” Gwen said.

  “That’s one thing to be happy about,” I agreed.

  * * *

  When I got up the next morning, there was a wet towel on the bathroom floor, along with Amber’s underwear, and a washcloth in the sink. A bottle of shampoo lay on its side on the shelf, and a thin puddle of slippery goo oozed across the shelf, surrounding my makeup. Arrrghhhh! Enough!

  I whirled around and marched back into our room. Amber had thrown off her covers and was engaged in a giant stretch. Her T-shirt was bunched up around her waist, and the butterfly tattoo on her midsection seemed to spread its wings as she moved.

  “Amber, your stuff’s taking over that whole shelf in the bathroom,” I said. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d clean it up.”

  She opened her eyes and squinted at me. “Just push it to one side. I won’t care.”

  “Well, I care. And it’s also annoying to keep stumbling over your shoes and things.”

  “O-kay!” she said, yawning. “Don’t have a spaz.”

  There! I told myself. That wasn’t so hard. It was possible to assert myself without a shouting match.

  When I got home from classes that day, the towel was back on the rack and Amber’s underwear was gone, but the shampoo bottle was still on its side, and pink liquid was now dripping off the edge of the shelf. I capped it, cleaned up the mess, and wiped off my cosmetics.

  Things were a little better after that. For a week, anyway. Then I noticed she was using my deodorant stick.

  “Hey, Amber, that’s mine,” I said.

  “Oh. Do you care?”

  “Well . . . sure! I mean, it’ll be used up twice as fast, and I’m paying for it.”

  “I’ll buy the next stick,” she said.

  * * *

  I think it was that night that I woke up around two or three to a rattling sound, and my first thought was that Amber had locked herself out and was trying to wake me up. I lifted my head and listened.

  It was a steady, rhythmical, squeaking sound, and then I realized that Amber had her boyfriend in bed. I didn’t know if I was more angry, surprised, or embarrassed.

  “Oh, you’re so good . . . you’re so good,” Jerry’s voice kept murmuring.

  Little breathy moans from Amber. Her bed frame rattled louder as it knocked against the wall.

  I didn’t turn on the light, but I got up and went to the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I heard the guy swear.

  After I’d flushed the toilet, I went back to bed. I could hear the two of them whispering in the darkness, so I put my pillow over one ear and went back to sleep.

  In the morning Jerry was gone, but he’d left his socks behind. Amber came out of the bathroom, brushing her teeth. She had on a wrinkled sleep-shirt with SURF CITY written on the front. She wasn’t smiling.

  “Thanks for nothing, Alice. You could at least have waited,” she said.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed and stared at her. “Excuse me?”

  “Jerry was pretty pissed off at you. You were banging around at the critical moment, and he lost it.”

  I knew exactly what Jerry had lost, but I said, “If he’s looking for his socks, they’re under your bed.”

  “You know what I mean,” Amber said. “Let’s have a little consideration.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Are you serious? I’m wakened at three in the morning by you and Jerry, and I’m the inconsiderate one?”

  She simply went back in the bathroom, and this time she closed the door.

  I called home.

  “I can’t stand it, Dad!” I said. “I shouldn’t have to put up with this!”

  “Then don’t. Talk to your resident adviser and see what the rules are. Are men allowed in women’s rooms?”

  “Huh?” I said. “This is the twenty-first century, Dad! Of course they are! But we’re supposed to show consideration. Amber claims I didn’t show her any when I interrupted them.”

  “Well, honey, I’m here if you need help with life-or-death decisions, but I think this falls in the solve-it-yourself category,” Dad said.

  One thing about Amber, she didn’t hold a grudge. She went right on as though nothing had happened. I hid my shampoo and deodorant, and she even asked if I had any. I lied and said no, and she washed her hair with hand soap.

  I was facing a huge assignment due on Monday and knew I had to work on it all weekend. On Saturday afternoon, though, Amber decided to do her laundry—the first time I’d actually seen her do any at all. Jerry came by, and they started stripping down her side of the room—sheets, towels, shirts—stuffing everything in a pillowcase to take to the washing machines in the basement. I headed for the library with a stack of books.

  I worked right through dinner, stopping only long enough to get a tuna wrap and a bag of chips, but by nine that night, I’d had it. My eyes could scarcely focus and my head throbbed. I knew I had a full day of writing ahead of me on Sunday and wanted only to
go to bed and sleep.

  When I got back to our room, Amber was sitting at her desk, painting her toenails, one foot propped on our wastebasket. We talked a little about exams and grade points, and then I undressed in the bathroom, pulled on my pajamas, and got into bed.

  My pillow had a dirty-hair smell that wasn’t mine, and I could almost bet that Amber had borrowed my pillow. I was too tired to start an argument, though, so I turned it over and stretched out.

  My foot touched something between the sheets, however, and suddenly I sat up, threw off the covers, and saw a rolled-up condom at the foot of my bed, along with Amber’s underwear.

  I leaped out of bed.

  “Look!” I shouted, pointing.

  Amber turned. “Oh! Sorry!” she said. She stuck another wad of cotton between her toes and padded over to retrieve the condom.

  “This is my bed!” I yelled. “What were you thinking?”

  “Well, my sheets were in the wash, and Jerry doesn’t like to do it on a bare mattress,” she said. She shrugged. “You were gone, so . . .”

  “It’s my bed!” I screamed again.

  I think I went a little insane. I pulled off my sheets and flung them on the floor. Then I grabbed Amber’s underwear and tossed it out the window. I picked up her shoes, which were on my side of the room, and threw them against the wall. I scooped up everything of Amber’s that had migrated over to my section and dumped them on her bed.

  Amber left and didn’t come back that night, or the next or the next. Gwen heard she’d moved into Jerry’s room. I wondered what his roommate thought of that! Every so often, she’d come back to get some more clothes or drop something off, but we didn’t talk much. And that was fine with me.

  2

  SURPRISES

  With Amber gone, Gwen started coming to my dorm more often, and then we simply used Amber’s bed as a couch. It was a good place to hang out, and I found I was making friends more easily than I’d expected. Sometimes someone would ask if a visiting friend could crash there for a weekend, so it became a guest bed when needed, and I liked meeting friends of friends.

  I’d always heard that high school students were more independent thinkers than middle school kids and that there was even less of a herd mentality in college. That’s one of the things I hoped would happen when I got to Maryland—that I’d be released forever from worrying about whether I had the “right look” or wore the right brand-name jeans, or if I was hanging out at the most popular places.

  But it wasn’t quite that simple, because sometimes I felt there was a competition to see who had the most individualistic look, and the professors were no exception.

  Fun, though. There was the professor who dressed like he belonged in a law office, and one who looked as though he slept in his clothes. And then there was my Sociology 101 teacher, who walked into the lecture hall on the first day of classes in knee-high boots and a leather skirt.

  As the weeks went on, though, and she appeared in an ultrafeminine dress with a ruffled collar one day and a denim skirt the next, we began to realize that she was making a statement about society’s attitude toward women based on superficial appearances. Valerie Robbins and I tried to guess how her outfit punctuated her point at the end of each lecture. Male and female equality? Woman as dominatrix? Sex in the workplace?

  “I think she’s trying to establish a position of authority,” Valerie had said that first day. “All she needs is a whip.”

  Valerie was a tall, thin girl who fascinated me because she ate twice as much as any other girl I knew but complained that she couldn’t gain an ounce. I’d pay almost anything for her metabolism. She was also the kind of friend who didn’t just welcome you with open arms, she enveloped you in whatever project excited her at the moment, and Valerie was always into projects.

  “You’ve got to help me,” she said the third week of October. She’d been going with this guy Colin for a year and a half—they’d met in high school—and he was a sophomore here at Maryland. His birthday was coming up on Monday, and he had bragged that no one, ever, had been able to surprise him—he was that good at detecting signs and signals. Valerie wanted to prove him wrong.

  She brought two friends—Abby and Claire—to my dorm room around noon on Sunday and told us her plan. The four of us were going to her uncle’s house in Adelphi that afternoon to bake cupcakes, Colin’s favorite. That night she and another couple were taking him to dinner to celebrate because it was the weekend. But at three o’clock in the morning on Monday, the four of us would sneak into his dorm, stand outside his room, and belt out “Happy Birthday.” When he admitted defeat, he’d get the cupcakes. What did she have to lose but a good night’s sleep? And the rest of the cupcakes would be ours.

  Val had the car, Abby had the two cake mixes, and after a trip to the local Giant for the rest of the ingredients, we drove to her uncle’s, where we promised to leave some cupcakes in return for the use of the kitchen.

  We divided each cake mix in half. To half the chocolate, we added coffee instead of water; to half the vanilla, we added maraschino cherry juice.

  Abby was a little powerhouse—small for nineteen, but hardly fragile. The oven mitts gave her the look of a boxer, and she was definitely the director of this operation.

  “Fill each cup just two-thirds full,” she instructed. “You don’t want the batter to spread out over the top as it bakes.”

  “I hope Colin’s worth all the trouble,” said Claire, a tea towel tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Her widely spaced eyes surveyed the cupcake pans still waiting to be filled.

  “No trouble for me. I love baking,” Abby said. “Someday I’m going to enter a bake-off and win ten thousand dollars. All I need is a recipe no one has ever thought of yet.”

  “If I won ten thousand dollars, I’d start a rare-book collection,” Val said.

  “I’d use it to open a consignment shop,” said Claire. And we all agreed that would be perfect for her. Claire’s wardrobe was indefinable, because she could throw together the most unlikely combinations and look great. She wore her long brown hair pulled straight back, away from her face, so that all the attention was directed to her body and the flow of her clothes.

  Everyone looked at me.

  “If I had ten thousand dollars, I’d fly to Barcelona to see my boyfriend five times,” I said, and told them about Patrick.

  Sitting around that kitchen table, watching the cupcakes rise through the glass window in the oven, I was feeling pretty good about college so far. Eight weeks into the semester and I’d already made some friends, got rid of a roommate, and knew my way around the whole campus. Not as hard as I’d imagined, and if I didn’t feel really close yet to these girls, I was feeling comfortable.

  Valerie, Claire, and Abby spent the night in my dorm room. Valerie came back from her dinner with Colin around eleven, and we decided it was easier to all bed down in one room than set an alarm in four different rooms on campus. Valerie and I slept on the floor in sleeping bags, and I let Claire and Abby have the beds.

  When the alarm went off at three, it felt like we’d only been asleep for fifteen minutes. Ugh. How could we possibly pull on our clothes and sleepwalk all the way over to Colin’s dorm? But somehow we all managed to get our teeth brushed so we wouldn’t asphyxiate Colin when we surprised him, and ten minutes later we were wider awake than I’d imagined, sneaking across campus under an October moon. When we saw a security car making a turn, we ducked behind a hedge and it rolled slowly by. We felt like prisoners on the verge of escape, waiting out the beam of a searchlight.

  Finally there we were at the side door. It was a known fact that our key cards opened the side doors of at least two of the buildings on campus, and one of those buildings was Colin’s dorm.

  We went up a flight of stairs, our feet making light echoing thuds on the metal steps, and opened the fire door. We were all so used to noise in the halls—at all hours of the day or night—that the absolute quiet was a bit unnerving. But down
the hall we went to room number 231 and found the door . . . ajar.

  We stared uncertainly at each other. There was no way Colin could have found out what we were up to, because the four of us had been together all day Sunday and none of us had called anyone. Whichever of Colin’s roomies had come in last simply hadn’t bothered to close the door behind him, we decided, so we stepped inside.

  No lights were on in the small living area. On either side, there was a door to a two-man bedroom. Valerie pointed to Colin’s door.

  “Ready?” she whispered, and we faced in that direction. “One . . . two . . .”

  A large figure suddenly loomed in the doorway beside us, blocking the light from the hall, and we screamed—all four of us together.

  “What the hell?” A shadowy hand swiped at the wall for the light switch, and there was Colin in his boxers, his rumpled hair hanging in front of his eyes, just returning from a trip to the bathroom.

  There were rustlings in both bedrooms, voices in the hall, and somebody appeared brandishing a lacrosse stick.

  “Wait!” Valerie yelled.

  “Val?” Colin said, staring at her, then at us.

  “He’s surprised,” I said.

  “Happy birthday!” Val and Abby and Claire cried in unison.

  “I don’t believe this!” Colin said, finally beginning to smile, and I thrust the box of cupcakes in his hands.

  “We broke your record, admit it,” said Val.

  “Hey! People are sleeping here! Trying to, anyway,” said one of the roomies.

  “We’re going,” Val told him. “Happy birthday.” She kissed Colin’s bemused face and pointed toward the cupcakes. “Share.”

  * * *

  I was almost as excited about Thanksgiving this year as I was for Christmas. I hadn’t seen Pamela or Elizabeth since September, and most of my other friends would be home too.

  Liz texted regularly, but we had to go on Facebook to find out anything about Pamela. She called once, though. She said the theater arts college works you to death, and I said, what else is new? We agreed to get together the Friday after Thanksgiving.