He laughed, and looked at her quizzically.

She shrugged. “Ben usually brings these apes home with him, you know? Football guys.” She shook her head. “I don’t like guys like that. I like skinny guys.”

Uncomfortable, he changed the subject. She was in graduate school, so he asked, “What do you study?”

“I bet you asked Ben and he couldn’t tell you.”

“He said something about women’s politics, but I couldn’t understand it.”

“I’m in history combined with women’s studies. Greensboro has a new program.”

“Oh. Well, that makes more sense.”

She giggled. “Right. I personally am studying women’s suffrage movements for my thesis. Comparing them from country to country.” She licked the joint and sealed it. “I guess women’s politics is close enough. I’m surprised he knew that much.”

“He says good stuff about you.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Like what?”

“You’re smart. Like his mom, he says. And bad stubborn like he is. And you have a wicked mouth when you need it.”

That did please her, in spite of herself. “Like Mom, huh?” She snorted a hoarse laugh and shook her head. “He would say that. I love my mom but I don’t want to be her, married and stuck in a place like this. You do Ben’s homework?”

“I help him with some of his writing.”

“I thought so. That’s Ben. He always gets people to do stuff for him.”

Her room was full of pieces of her, the walls painted a soft, creamy white, bright rugs on the floor. A low bookshelf held copies of The Feminine Mystique, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Cities of the Interior; there was a copy of The Second Sex, the book Ronny had read in class this semester; on the wall, posters of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Angela Davis, all taped on top of other posters: David Cassidy’s showing the eyes, Davy Jones’s mouth and chin, the side of Jimi Hendrix’s face, the top half of Bobby Sherman’s head. It was a collage of her obsessions, she said. He was staring at them and she noticed. “I had crushes on those guys when I was a kid. Except Hendrix. I’ve still got a crush on him.”

“But you covered most of them up.”

She giggled and rocked back and forth on the mattress. “I know. Isn’t it great? You know who those women are, right?”

“I don’t know who Betty Friedan is.”

“She wrote The Feminine Mystique. Reading her changed my whole life.”

She told him about the book, and he told her he’d read The Second Sex, and that impressed her; they talked about Simone de Beauvoir, Charlotte Brontë, books in general, writing. She was quick, like Ben, but she was also engaged with something, the idea of women and what they ought to do to be equal to men. Thoughts spilling out of her so quickly, it was hard to keep up. Whereas Ben was lazy-smart, his brain an adjunct to his body. Nina showed Ronny her collection of Barbie dolls from childhood, lined up on a shelf at the back of her closet, marked up with black marker, mustaches, S&M outfits drawn onto their naked bodies, their costumes slashed and bloody. “They’re doing time,” she said. “Paying for their crimes against women.”