About four. Quite good, considering I usually got only about forty-five minutes, creaking into bed an hour before my first class began at seven. Classes next day didn’t begin until ten thirty. Happy, or at least content, I interrupted the short silence borne of a ten-minute study break (that is, a break from hanging out to study) to ask them what we were doing that weekend.

Nicole scowled. But she scowled a lot, so I wasn’t particularly concerned.

‘Well, I have to start cleaning this room. It’s disgusting in here.’

Wariness reared up inside me. This was growing into a familiar and uncomfortable situation.

Hannah tensed up, and I could tell she was forcing herself to relax and control the vitriolic temper that lashed out at unseeming provocation—that had burnt a cigarette hole in Ashley’s stockings last week at a party. When she spoke, her voice was rent with something. Something transparent and heartbreaking and repulsive, an amalgamation of hope and anger and stiff nonchalance.

‘Yeah, this carpet sheds like crazy.’

We all knew it wasn’t the carpet’s turds Nicole was talking about. Hannah was a large girl, with dreadlocked hair that couldn’t be washed as regularly as it should have been. I was unwillingly privy to faux-concerned debates on whether it was her personal-hygiene habits or just that her body got away from her, its crevasses too numerous and too deep to clean, but the fact was that Hannah smelled really bad. Really bad.

It’s astonishing and disgusting how much space this occupies in my freshman-year memories. But then, Hannah was so relentlessly persecuted, with so much venom, by most of those we lived with, that it was inescapable—a daily train wreck I passed on my way to class. Maybe the real fact of it was that nothing helps people feel like they belong as much as ostracizing someone together. Towards the end of the year, she came down to my room on the eighth floor. Pulling me out into the hallway, she grabbed my arm and I noticed, with a feeling of whole potatoes bouncing around inside me, that she was crying.

‘Tara, why does everyone keep talking about how I—how I smell?’

I tried to deny it, but stopped midway. She knew; I could tell by how close to breaking she seemed. So I didn’t say anything, unwilling to insult her with lies or sear her with the truth.

‘Is it true, Tara? I don’t really smell bad, do I? Just tell me, please.’

I lunged at the small motion towards the untormenting ignorance she had made.

‘Hannah, I don’t think so. Listen, it’s just Tits and her stupid friends. Why even give a shit about them?’