On the nights when I worked, I ate sandwiches in the dark coffeehouse while the customers listened to local singers on the little stage.

Sam collected people. He never dropped anybody deliberately, but his cohorts were burned away by fatigue, or the satisfaction of their curiosity, or a distracting love affair. It didn’t matter. Sam would discover a parking lot attendant who was building a computer into his record player, or a quiet girl in the back row of a statistics class with a sure method for betting on horses. He would question and prod them into a blaze of light, introduce them to his friends, admire and stimulate them, and then go on to his new discoveries. I was an intermittent member of the circus and felt no urge to abandon the show. I came whenever I could.

He also had a good friend named Rennel. A psychology major. I never liked him much, but he and Sam were together a lot. That winter Sam and Rennel moved off campus and shared an apartment, and I bought a skirt and a pair of black knee-high boots. In the cruelest heart of the winter, the furnace failed in my house, and I stalked late into the night for men to take me home with them.

Me: “Do you have heat in your room?”

Him: “Yes, a radiator or something.”

Me: “Why don’t we go there right away.”

The answers were varied. Sometimes I slept behind the counter of the coffeehouse. It didn’t occur to me to buy another blanket, or even a coat. It all still seems fairly innocent to me. It only makes me nervous when I think of the time that it led to.

During all this time Sam was celibate, and Rennel dallied with the bleach-blond drummer of a dormitory band who, it is said, later became a docile lesbian. This drummer I saw only once, a small, dark-browed creature with a square, soft face. Whether someone told me that she became a lesbian or I dreamed it and liked the idea, I do not remember. But it does seem a likely consequence of too many sessions with Rennel. For my part, as the weather got warmer, I brought odd folk home to my attic room and let it stink for brief periods of something other than stale cigarette smoke.

When summer came, Sam and Rennel went back to New York, and I went out to the college only to prospect at the swimming pool. My stomach churned at the sight of the other girls moving across the green campus. Their lives seemed so calm and ordered, directed and productive. I filled out an application to become a part-time student.