“I’m glad you found a ride home. Now go to bed and sleep it off. I have a study group at eight a.m. I’m gonna be a wreck.”

“Who in the living passion has a study group on a Saturday morning?”

Carol Anne was always doing this: sounding as if she was going to say “who in the living hell” and then replacing the word “hell” with some other word that struck her fancy. And never the same word twice. Passion, Amy thought, was a good choice for the evening.

“I have a chemistry midterm on Monday,” Amy said.

“Oh, yeah, that’s why I don’t take chemistry. That would be your fault for having an architecture major . . . not mine.”

“I’m finding a new roommate first thing in the morning.”

“Oh, no, you’re not. You adore me, and where would you find such a complementary and perfectly opposite companion to complete your soul?” Carol Anne took one more drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out on top of her history book.

“Carol Anne, you should be a drama major. Now leave me alone.”

Carol Anne turned off the light, stumbled into the bathroom they shared with their suite-mates. The sink gurgled its ancient song down rusted pipes—a song heard by hundreds of other freshman girls.

Amy fastened her mind to this—to the water, to the dorm, and to the chemistry midterm. She began to picture the neat rows of numbers and their conclusions: only one answer for each row, no maybes. She saw the white test paper in front of her. Then a hand landed on the paper, large enough to lift her chin to a muted overhead light and copper eyes.

Damn. She opened her eyes to the morphed shapes of her dorm room. She would imagine her home in Darby; her bed, her room. She envisioned her childhood room in sequential order, used it as a sedative to assuage the body-humming thoughts of the boy at the back door. She began to fall into a misted gray oblivion.

Carol Anne banged back into the room; she had more to tell.

“Ooh, Ame. You should’ve seen the adorable boy who brought me home. I’m going to find him again. He was absolutely edible.”

Amy considered telling Carol Anne about the boy she had met at the door, then she decided she wouldn’t speak of him. She lacked the words to describe him; it was as if she needed another language to explain how he made her feel—a language she wasn’t sure she was ready to learn.

“If I know you . . . you at least got a taste of how edible he actually was.”

“Well, thanks for your confidence, Ame, but he was a perfect gentleman. Nick Lowry. Even his name is cool. I am going to find him. Ask him to the formal next weekend.”

“You already asked Cameron.”