The next day was Sunday. I woke up in my dorm room and thought a long time about the events of the day before. I had let Hap Dumas put his hand inside my bra. I had let him lay his hand upon my stomach. I was as good as married. It scared me to death to think such things. I rolled my head down underneath the covers. I made a tent of the covers and rolled myself up into a ball and thought as hard as I could think about it. It was like the summer before last when I had been engaged for three weeks. From the moment I took the ring until I gave it back I had been in a state of perpetual trauma. I had no dream of marriage. I had no desire to run a house or be a wife or live forever with a man. I wanted to be popular and have dates and act like I was normal, but I didn’t want to belong to anyone. I belonged somewhere else. Somewhere I had never been … I rolled my head down into my arms. I stretched my arms and legs until they stuck off the ends of the bed. I belonged somewhere in laboratories full of men and women looking through microscopes … I belonged somewhere where people talked of poetry and didn’t have to have things they read explained to them. I was going to be an old maid. I was a bluestocking and an old maid. No one understood me but Charles William and he was in Atlanta.

I was getting up now. The thought of how I had suffered made me feel better and I began to think of what I would wear to the Chi O house for lunch. I had a brand-new red cashmere sweater set I had charged to my father the day before. I would wear my red cashmere sweater set and my tweed wraparound skirt and my pearls. I made up the bed and began to dress. I had forgotten all about Hap Dumas. He belonged to Saturday night. Now it was Sunday and I was going to concentrate on biology all day. Who knows, my redheaded lab instructor might be falling in love with me. He might ask me to marry him and we could go to Chicago and split open atoms or invent vaccines.

All the way to the Chi O house I worked on my plan to marry my lab instructor. I had us in a convertible driving up the road to Chicago, Illinois, as I turned from the sidewalk and began to walk up the path to the Chi O house. “Oklahoma,” I was singing. “Every night my honey lamb and I . . .”

“Rhoda.” It was my big sister in Chi O, Donie Marsh.

“What’s up?”

“Isn’t May Garth Sheffield a friend of yours?”

“Sort of. Why? What happened? Why do you look that way?”