“Oh for Christ’s sweet sake what are you talking about!” Imogene cried. “I’m sick, my head is spinning, if you don’t leave me alone I’m going to puke all over everything. I haven’t been to a class in two weeks and I don’t give a damn but I refuse to give you the satisfaction. . . . Transfer to New York, Marya, why don’t you: you know you think you’re too good for us here.”

Marya stared at her, trembling. She had a vision of running at her friend and pummeling her with her fists—the two of them fighting, clawing, grunting in silence.

“Your jealousy, your morbid possessiveness. . . .” Imogene was saying wildly, her eyes wide, “. . . the way you sat in judgment on my parents . . . my poor father trying so hard to be nice to you, to be kind, because he felt sorry for you . . . and my mother too. . . . ‘Is she one of your strays and misfits,’ Mother said, ‘another one of that gang that will turn on you?’ . . . As for my sorority sisters. . . .”

Marya said slowly, groping, “And what about you? You’re spoiled, you’re vicious. . . . And you don’t even act that well: people here baby you, lie to you, tell you the kind of crap you want to hear.”

At this Imogene threw herself back against the flattened pillows, laughing, half sobbing. “Yes,” she said. “Good. Now leave me alone.”

“Do you think they tell you anything else? anything else but crap?” Marya said carelessly. “People who are in love with you? People who don’t even know who you are?”

Imogene pawed at the bedspread and pulled it roughly over herself. She lay very still but Marya could hear her labored breath. “I took some aspirin before you came in, I want to sleep, maybe you’d better let me alone. I think you’d better let me alone.”

She closed her eyes, she waved Marya away with a languid gesture.

“Goodbye, Marya!” she whispered.

ON THE SIDEWALK outside the house Marya took out the earrings boldly to examine them.

The Aztec ones, the barbarian-princess ones, bronze and red and blue, burnished, gleaming. . . . Marya had seen her hand reach out to them but she did not remember taking them from the room.

She tossed them in the palm of her hand as she strode along Masefield Avenue, smiling, grinning. No one, she thought in triumph, can keep me from my perfect record.

SHE WENT THAT day to an earring shop down on Fairfield Street; asked to have her ears pierced and Imogene’s splendid earrings inserted. But the proprietor told her that wasn’t the procedure; first, gold studs are inserted . . . then, after a few weeks, when the wounds are healed. . . .

No, Marya insisted, put in these. I don’t have time to waste.

But there was the danger of infection, she was told. Everything has to be germ-free, antiseptic. . . .