Joe Solovey lived on the floor above Leora in the dormitory. He wanted to be an opera singer, and Leora had often heard him through the ceiling, singing his scales. In those scales, Leora could almost hear a physical movement, as if Joe Solovey’s voice were in fact Joe Solovey himself, scaling the face of some imagined cliff, climbing higher and higher until at last he could slap a hand on the ledge above—but just when he had reached that height, he would tumble down again in a cascade of pitches, sliding all the way back to the bottom. To Leora it seemed as though she were overhearing a battle of the will, a striving and a struggling, always ending in defeat, yet resumed nonetheless, every time. Joe Solovey was a man unable to complete his work, yet never free to desist from it. They weren’t friends at all, she and Joe Solovey, but they knew each other’s names. She had chatted with him in the laundry room once. He had performed, in front of a pile of mismatched socks, an impressively accurate impersonation of Leora’s roommate, mimicking her intonations with his well-trained voice. Leora had laughed and told him he was destined for the stage.

“Come on in, we’ve got lots to do!” Jessica bubbled.

Jessica turned away before Leora, still stunned, could scream what she wanted to scream in Jessica’s face: You disgust me, you sicken me, you barbarian!

Instead Leora rushed to the bathroom, where she locked herself in a stall for twenty minutes, sitting on the toilet seat with her pants still on, trying to cry. She couldn’t. All she could do was imagine that puddle-covered grave in the East Mountain Reservation, and wonder whether Joe Solovey’s family was Jewish, and hope that if they were, they would find some technicality so that they wouldn’t have to bury him alone somewhere in the woods. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t cry.

In the weeks that followed, in the afternoon silences when the ceiling no longer sang Joe Solovey’s scales, Leora decided that the barbarian way was the right way—or if not the right way, then at least the best way. It was much better, much more pleasant, much more possible, to look at such events as just that: events, incidents, an “exciting night,” a “big story.” She decided that after graduation, she wanted to be a journalist.