"Oh, I couldn't," Ginger said. "I'm not smart like you and Kate and Fig. I'm not exactly stupid, but I know I ain't much in the brains department. My dad has always told me that. He laughs and says I'll need a keeper all my life. And I guess he's right; I couldn't even make my grades without you all."

"That's ridiculous," I said. "Next time you'll do it by yourself. Who does he think is going to be your keeper when you're out and on your own?"

"I don't think he thinks I ever will be," Ginger said. "He'll have somebody picked out for me, when the time comes. There are lots of boys my age in Fowler. Not bad ones, either. I don't think it'll be a problem. I'll inherit the mills, you know."

There was no hint of boasting or rancor in the words, not even of resignation. Her voice was light and level and rich, as always. The appalling scenario seemed not to bother her.

"That's awful," Cecie said heatedly. "You deserve better than that, Ginger. You can't just let somebody else decide your whole future for you. What about what you want?"

"Well, see, there's not anything I really want, except what I have now," Ginger said, and suddenly there was something in her voice. Sadness lay under it, and something that I thought was fear.

I looked over at her, and she smiled at me. There was a gleam of wetness in her eyes.

"Sometimes I think I can't stand for all this to end," she said. "Sometimes I think school and singing and laughing and you all are the best there is in the world. I really can't bear to think about graduating."

"Well, you have a way to go yet," I said, unable to think of anything else that might comfort her. I could not imagine thinking of school that way. To me, the best that there ever was was always around the next bend.

We lay silent for a while, looking at the night. On the hill above the Tri Omega house the edge of the national forest that housed Lake Randolph rose up against the sky. It was black and deep, and above it the sky was milky with stars. Behind the trees, a late moon climbed, and as we looked, it rode out and above them into the sky, like a galleon on fire. I felt tears of liquor and profound exaltation fill my eyes. My heart felt as if it would burst out of my chest at the sheer beauty of the night around me. It is easy, these years later, to appreciate how much of the drama and profundity of that night, that time, was melodrama and sentimentality. But I would still give much to recapture the totality of those feelings.

"That's the very bulk of God," I said lugubriously, pointing at the line of the trees. "That makes me believe in all of it. Everything."

"Well, not me," Fig said. Her voice was, suddenly, very faraway and cold, and her words were singsong and as precise as flint. I had never heard that voice before. We all looked over at her.

"It makes me believe nothing," she said. "It makes me see it's all a lie. There isn't going to be anything for us when we die. Look at those stars. Do you realize that those stars are going to be burning up there in that empty sky long after we and everybody else are dead and in the ground? There we'll be, just lost in blackness, and those stupid stars will shine on, and on...and for us it will be...black. Nothing. Black nothing. Black forever and ever and ever..."

We were silent. Cold crept along my spine and into my blood. Cold and emptiness. The abyss whispered below me like a snake. Beside me, I felt Cecie stir uneasily.

"Just black," Fig said.

Suddenly Ginger was weeping. She cried like a child, her mouth open and square, her fist scrubbing her eyes.

"I don't want to die," she sobbed. "I don't. Oh, God, I don't..."

"Well, you will," Fig said in the new, eerie voice. "You will. All your money won't stop you from dying, and you know it."

"I don't know it," Ginger wailed. "I don't have to know it, and I won't. I won't."

"You do have to. You do and you will. You can't ever not know it again."

"Shut up, Fig," Cecie hissed suddenly, furiously. "Shut up or I'll shut you up..."

Fig lay still for a moment, breathing hard and wetly, her eyes screwed shut behind the glasses. Then she rolled over and was sick over the roof railing. We could hear it hit the brick walkway far below.

We slept late the next morning, all of us, and when we woke, it was to rueful laughter, and much ceremony about the taking of aspirin for our aching heads. We seemed, in our sleep, to have come to some agreement not to speak of the sad, sorry end to the evening, and no one did. Fig was fully back to herself, and so was Ginger. But I knew something new about Ginger now. I knew that she was, like me, like Cecie, a walker over the abyss, and that she would never allow herself to acknowledge it. I knew, without being able to articulate it, that she would die, literally die, in order to remain a good child, one who would always be shielded by others from that waiting emptiness. It was not a knowledge that I could bear, and so I put it away from me. But after that, it was always there.

Grades were posted the next day and Ginger passed all her exams, though admittedly in some instances by a hair. That night at dinner we gave her a standing ovation, and she cried and went around the table, hugging us one by one.

"I don't think there'll ever be a happier night in my life," she said mistily. "Not even my wedding night."

"Oh, how can you say that?" trilled Francine Powers, who had recently become ostentatiously engaged to her porcine SAE, Grunt. We all groaned. Everyone was getting a little tired of Francine's exalted carryings on.

"Well, see, I've done the Black Act," Ginger grinned at her. "I've never made my grades before."

"Do you think she really has?" I said to Cecie that night.

"Probably," Cecie said. "I have a feeling it's no bigger thing to Ginger than sleeping late or dancing or eating pizza. It all feels good and makes her happy, so why not?"

"Do you ever wish it was that simple?"

"I've always thought it probably was going to be that simple, when I got right down to it," Cecie said equably. "It's just a matter of finding the person it'll be simple with. That's the one requirement. Can you imagine doing it with Grunt?"

"Well, it would be simple with Grunt, all right," I said. "Wham bam, thank you ma'am. The thing is, I can't really imagine doing it with anybody."

"You will," she said.

School closed that Friday for spring break, and the night before, Ginger put her head into our room and said, "I just talked to my folks, and they're going to open the house at Nag's Head this weekend. Daddy said if y'all would like to come up with me he'd send Robert for us with the car and he'd drive us up, and bring us back next week in time for classes. Please come. I want to show Daddy what kind of friends I have. He won't believe it."

We said yes before the words were out of her mouth. I had been dreading going home to the crumbling house on the Santee where my mother entertained, prissily, the disapproving deacon, and the prospect of adventure was always manna to Cecie. Fig was beside herself. She prattled about suntan lotion and Rose Marie Reid swimsuits and summer houses until Ginger told her, good-naturedly, to shut up. I felt an unexpected pang of pity for her, watching her put dreadful and inappropriate things into an aqua plastic Samsonite suitcase. This trip must be, to her, akin to a street urchin's being invited to the palace. It was something she had never even aspired to. A kind of irritated protectiveness flooded me. I could already feel the cool eyes of Ginger's rich mother on her.

"Robert and the car" proved, astoundingly, to be an enormous Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a jump seat in back, driven by an impassive middle-aged white man in a dark sack suit and a peaked chauffeur's cap. Cecie and Fig simply stared, mouths open, as he loaded our luggage into the trunk and held the doors for us. Even I stared. I had seen chauffeured automobiles before, but not at Randolph. The rest of the chapter stood on the steps and hung out windows, goggling frankly. Ginger stomped about cheerfully, but her neck and cheeks were dull red under the freckles. We had long known that there was money behind Fowler Mills, of course, but none of us had much concept of wealth, and Ginger went to elaborate pains to conceal her provenance. Her clothes were plain and disheveled to the near-edge of shabbiness, and she had brought no car to school with her. We forgot, for long stretches of time, that the cold, fast Warrior River pumped money into C. D. "Buck" Fowler's pockets as steadily as it powered his mills. But we would not forget now.

Robert acknowledged Ginger's introduction with a nod so scant and a brow so thunderous that we were intimidated. But Ginger giggled as she watched him toss our luggage into the vast trunk.

"He's mad," she whispered. "Daddy's regular driver is Woodrow and Robert feels like driving a bunch of giggling college girls is beneath him. Usually he works in the mill."

"Where's Woodrow?" Cecie said.

"Well, you know," Ginger said. "Woodrow is a Negro. We're going to have to stop overnight in Charlotte or somewhere, and...it's just better if Robert drives. But he feels like he's been demoted. I'll bet you he doesn't say five words between here and the Outer Banks."

And he didn't. The new green of the advancing spring streamed across Alabama and Georgia and into North Carolina, and we chattered and giggled and slept and woke again, and Robert drove stoically, stopping only when Ginger pleaded, "Robert, I don't think we can wait till you get low on gas. And we're hungry. Please stop the next place you see."

And he would, silently. He would be waiting in the car, eyes straight ahead, when we came gratefully out of the rest room, and we ate our candy bars and potato chips and drank our Cokes on the road. I never saw Robert eat, and I never saw him go into a men's room.

The next afternoon, after a straight, seemingly endless, grind across North Carolina's fertile black flatlands, we crossed the Albemarle River and then Roanoke Sound, at Manteo, and turned left onto a narrow, pitted blacktop road that paralleled the coast. It was lined with small, unpainted beach shacks on stilts, and bait and souvenir shops, and an occasional fish restaurant; on the left, on the land side, great dunes lifted their heads into the paling sky, larger dunes than any I had ever seen, even on the Cape. They were small sand mountains; they were awesome, out of humanity's scale. They were covered with low, scrubby vegetation, but there were no houses on them, and no roads seemed to lead up to them. On the right, more unpretentious beach houses lifted their second and third stories above another, lowered line of dunes that fringed the ocean. But the ocean itself was out of sight. It was both a wild landscape and an entirely banal one. I was obscurely disappointed. The Outer Banks had always been in my mind the very epitome of wildness and romance.

Then Robert turned the big car off the blacktop onto a narrow sandtrack that led through the secondary dune line, straight toward the hidden sea, and I saw them for the first time, the grand old Unpainted Aristocracy of Nag's Head. A line of perhaps thirty or forty huge old beach houses, side by side at the crest of the primary dune line, alone against the pearled evening sky like a congregation of crouching witches looking out to sea. They were enormous, tall, black-weathered, stark against the horizon, unsoftened by trees or plantings or much of anything else. Just the great, shifting, breastlike curves of the sand and the houses and the empty sky. They stood, all of them, on great stilts, like massive old crones on reed-thin legs, and they soared three and sometimes, with widow's walks and crows' nests, four stories into the sweet, streaming salt air. I felt something old and slow and heretofore undiscovered turn over in my chest, as if a sleeping homunculus had wakened.

Robert pulled the car up into the soft sand yard of one of the last houses in the line, and we got out, stretching and sniffing and staring, silent. The house was a beetling, shingled Victorian pile, weathered dark gray to near-black, its turrets and towers roofed with lighter gray cedar shake, its seemingly countless deep-shuttered windows open to the sea wind. It had portholes and millwork and chimney pots and cupolas and porches and gray steps connecting many levels of decking; it sat in a feathery nest of beach grass, and had a border of old wax myrtle, yaupon, bayberry, and Spanish bayonet. A line of stunted black-green Norfolk pines made a windbreak that, with the line of the dunes' crown, shut the sea from sight. But we could hear it, booming hollowly on the beach below and beyond us. Ginger ran up the wooden steps to greet her parents, who were standing on the deck, waving their welcome. Fig trailed her like a puppy. Cecie and I, without a word and with one accord, went straight through the pines and over the dunes as if sung to the sea by a water witch.

We stood on the high green crown and looked down at the sea. A wooden walkway led from the porch down through the low, scrubby vegetation to the tan sand itself. The walkway was weathered to near-black like the house, and it snaked its way through drifts of sea oats, beach grass, and a dense, low matting of little running plants and flowers I could not name. The sand itself was powdery and soft, drifting like whipped cream and then melting into damp, packed flatness and finally a shining mirror where earth met water. The combers marched in stately and perfect, unhurried and unimpeded in their progress straight from Spain. The water, except for where it broke white on the beach, was the deep, true blue of gentians, or lapis lazuli. No one was on the beach below, and no sails broke the great, tossing blueness, and no sound but the hollow boom...hushhhh of the water and the bronze calling of gulls reached our ears. The wind was straight off the sea and fresh and nearly chilly, blowing our hair straight back, but the sun on the backs of our necks and shoulders was still hot.

We stood for a while, not speaking. When we heard Ginger calling out to us, we turned toward the house. We stopped once more. On the sea side it was all glass, one entire wall a great arched window that came to a point up under the eaves, framed in gray Victorian millwork and unimpeded by panes. The half-oval of glass must have been two full stories tall; inside we could see, dimly, a great stone wall dominated by a huge fireplace and shining bare floors and oversized furniture set about, and an enormous refectory dining table and chairs. It was simple, but the total effect was breath-stopping. Its impact was, I saw, all in its scale, and in the uninterrupted mingling of living space and sea and sky. The architect who had envisioned this window had known what true enchantment was.

"Oh, Lord," Cecie murmured. I thought it was a prayer. "Amen," I said. And we turned from the sea and went in to meet Ginger's parents.

Fig told me later that she had been a little disappointed with the house.

"I mean, they hadn't even painted it," she said. "It was big and all, but with all that money, you'd have thought they might get something, you know, a little grander. It just doesn't look like rich."

But I had seen the austere, sprawling old summer enclaves of the truly wealthy on the islands and beaches of the Northeast, and I knew what this house said. I was unalterably and forever lost to it by the time I set foot on the first step leading up to the deck; I could feel my very bones softening with love and yearning for this crazy, wind-borne old house, and my heart aching fiercely with the wanting of it. To this day, long gone to earth in my own much-loved house by the sea some eight hundred miles north of it, I still dream of Ginger Fowler's house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Everything about it, and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep-buried wildness in my heart. I, who had never found earth beneath my feet that called "home" up to me, here found home raging through my entire body like an ague.

"If I ever get married I want to spend my honeymoon here," I said, smiling at Ginger's mother and taking her outstretched hands in mine.

"You can have it for as long as you want it, if you'll let me be your bridesmaid," Ginger said, wriggling with the happiness of showing this treasure to us.

"Me, too," Fig chimed.

"Well, why not just have the wedding here, then?" Mrs. Fowler smiled, and "It's a deal," I said, and we went into the house where Ginger's father waited to impale steaks on skewers and immolate them, and the week flowed forward.

Late that night a storm broke over the house. Ginger's father had told us he thought one was likely; it was, he said, the season for the great spring thunderstorms, and he had seen the vast sweeps of the feathery mare's-tail clouds riding in off the sea earlier in the day.

"Outer Banks are the storm capital of the world," he said, with the genial, savage authority with which he said everything. He was a giant blond copy of Ginger, with a blunt red face, white eyebrows and lashes, narrow blue eyes, and a perennial shout that made even his frequent sallies into humor threatening. I could see why Ginger had remained the sweet-tempered child that she was; it was clear that that was how Buck Fowler wanted her, and it would have taken a daughter of far rarer complexity, toughness, and guile to circumvent him than Ginger. I doubted that I could have. Cecie might have.

"Right down the coast yonder, at Hatteras, the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current come together, and it kicks up such a fuss that they call it the graveyard of the Atlantic," Buck Fowler said. "More than five hundred ships have gone aground there. Up here at Nag's Head, too. Way it got its name, the old-time Bankers used to hang lanterns on the heads and tails of their horses and lead 'em along the dunes down the beach, and the ships would think they were heading into safe harbor and go aground on the shoals right out there. Bankers would come out and plunder 'em."

And he laughed hugely. I shivered. In my mind's eye I could see it, the black raging seas, and the splintered ships sliding slowly under the surf, and the screams in the darkness, and the silent rowboats coming on inexorably, like a flock of poisonous water insects.... When we were lying in the twin beds in the room Mrs. Fowler had given us that night, that faced the porch and the sea, and had turned off the light so that the faint silver line of the surf shone like ghost water, I said to Cecie, "What do you think of them?"

"She's nice," Cecie's voice came through the darkness. "But he's...he's something else again. I think he'd have loved to be right out there with those pirates, carrying off the spoils from dead men. He makes my blood run cold."

"Mine, too," I said. "Poor Ginger. But this place. Cecie...what about this place?"

"It's better than cancer," Cecie said drowsily, and we laughed, and slid into that thick black sleep that the sea sends.

When the lighting and thunder and the great, booming surf woke me hours later, I could see instantly, from the malign white flashes of the lightning bolts, that Cecie's bed was empty, and she was not in the room. Alarm had me on my feet and at the door of our room before I consciously thought of getting up. I did not know why I was uneasy; it was likely that she was in the bathroom, down the hall. I padded barefoot out into the hall and looked, but the door was ajar and the room dark and empty. I went silently through the sleeping house in my shorty pajamas, and out onto the porch. Cold rain blew almost horizontally onto the porch, so furiously that I could not see into and through it. I peered along the walkway through the dunes down to the beach. It, too, was black, and roared with the fury of the storm. I was suddenly terribly, terribly frightened.

I put my hands to my mouth to call her, and then a great bolt of lightning split the teeming sky and I saw her. She was far below me on the beach, at the very edge of the water; had, in fact, waded in as far as her knees. Lightning bloomed again and I saw that she was naked, her small body silver-white and perfect against all that shouting, heaving blackness, her arms lifted to the sky, her head thrown back as if to receive in her face the full fury of wind and rain. As I watched, in the flickering light of the now near-constant lightning, she began to dance, an exultant, splashing little dance, turning round and round in the water and flinging her arms over her head. She stooped and scooped black water up and flung it about her, and then she dived into the sea and disappeared.

My heart stopped absolutely still, and jolted forward only when I saw her dark head break the water a few yards out. She was swimming strongly, parallel to the beach, and every now and then she turned over on her back and let the rain pound into her face. I watched for another moment, and then I turned and went back through the house and crawled into my bed and pulled the covers over my head. My heart was pounding, great, slow, dragging beats, and the picture of her, pagan-naked and alone in that terrible storm, in that black sea, seemed literally burned into my retinas. I still see it; when I think of Cecie Rushton Hart, that image from the beach at Nag's Head is what comes to me first.

I had my back to her and was feigning sleep when she came into the room. I heard her slide under the covers, and it seemed a very long time until I heard the familiar sound of her breathing in sleep. I knew that I would never speak of it to her. I would as soon have asked someone about their wedding night, or their conversion to faith. But I hoped she would speak to me about it. It seemed to hang in the air between us, an enormity.

But, the next morning, when Mrs. Fowler said, "I thought I heard somebody out on the porch in the middle of that storm last night," Cecie said only, mildly, "It was me. I went out to bring in my bathing suit. I left it on the railing last night. I hope I didn't disturb you."

"Oh, no," Regina Fowler said. "But it was quite a storm, wasn't it? I'd love to have seen it over the ocean. Did anybody wake up and look?"

"Not me," Fig and Ginger said together. Cecie turned and looked at me, an unreadable look. And I knew then that she knew I had seen her, dancing her little dance of rapture and abandon on that wild beach, swimming in her pearly nakedness in that wild sea.

"I woke up but it was too dark to see anything," I said.

She never did speak of it to me. From that moment, I think, we began, in grief and helplessness, to part from each other. I still do not know why. She always was a creature of secrets and intuitions; perhaps she sensed him waiting ahead for me, felt and smelled Paul Sibley like an animal or an Indian, and knew him for what he was, and would be to me. And began to leave me before I could leave her.

When I got back to Randolph for the last quarter of my junior year he was there, and after that nothing was ever the same.

Chapter Six.

I SAW him days before I met him. He walked into Louis Cooney's dreaded, mandatory Survey of World Design class on the first day of the spring quarter, fifteen minutes late and obviously unrepentant. The soft inhalation that went up from perhaps eighty throats was as much for his audacity as his physical presence. Both were formidable.

Nobody was late for Louis Cooney's class with impunity, and no one was ever late twice. Cooney was a slight, shudderingly homely, snake-tongued homosexual who punished male students for being not-so-covertly repelled by him, and female students for being competition for the males. No one escaped his tongue and few of us escaped his punitive grading system. He seemed to dislike me more than the norm for the women students, and to spew over me more than his automatic spray of sarcasm and spittle; it had become, last quarter in his Industrial Design course, a kind of grim joke. Since I could not escape his classes if I wished to graduate and it was clear that to call attention to myself was suicide, I sat far in the back and kept as quiet as I could. When the newcomer strolled in fifteen minutes late without even the coating of sweat that meant an earnest attempt at promptness, I cringed for him, and waited for the inevitable.

"Ah, well. And what have we here, dragging in like the cat's dinner? Sitting Bull, I presume?" Louis Cooney drawled.

The class gasped again. The young man did indeed look like an Indian, though perhaps an idealized Frederic Remington Indian. He was tall, and appeared taller because he held himself very straight, and his high-planed, narrow face was dark with what seemed more than sun. He had a high-bridged hawk's nose and dark eyes set very deeply under level brows, and a lock of thick, absolutely straight black hair fell over his forehead. Somehow the sheer, physical fact of him smote the air, and a kind of stillness radiated from him like an odor. He stopped in the door and stood looking mildly at Louis Cooney. His hands hung loosely and easily at his sides, and he seemed to me very like a wild animal at rest in its habitat, relaxed but alert. He did not speak.

"Do you have a name or shall we call you Tonto?" Louis Cooney said. He was flushed, and I could see that something about the young man made him very angry. He did not usually resort to clumsiness.

"Paul Sibley." The man-for he was that-was, I thought, a good five years older than the rest of us. "But Tonto will be fine. And I'll call you White Eyes, shall I?"

He smiled lazily at Louis Cooney. His voice was deep and slow, with nothing of boyhood in it. There was a faint something there, the edge of an accent of some kind. His teeth were very white. I felt my chest tighten, and realized that I was holding my breath. I let it out, and inhaled.

"Sit down, Mr. Sibley. You have just had a point taken off your final grade for this course. You will be silent in my class and you will not behave like a cochon here."

Louis Cooney had studied in France, and let no one forget it for long.

Paul Sibley smiled.

"Tout les hommes sont des cochons, non?" he said in rapid, fluid French.

There was a furtive ripple of laughter from the class. Not one in twenty of us understood French, but we all understood the tone.

"That's one point off the grades of every person in this room," Cooney spat, and the laughter stopped. But glee lingered in the eyes that followed Paul Sibley as he found a seat near the front and folded himself loosely into it. Eyes swung to him from time to time throughout that entire first lecture. Mine hardly left him. I could not seem to will them away, and I could not stop the pounding of my heart. I had never seen anything remotely like this dark hawk of a man.

"Who is that?" I said to Janellen French, who worked in the admissions office, after class. Janellen would know, if anyone would.

I did not have to tell her whom I meant. Several other students were clustered around her, obviously having asked the same thing. Janellen was pursed with importance.

"He's a transfer from North Carolina State, in architecture," she said. "He must be good; I've never seen grades like that. He lives off campus, over on Scofield. He's here on the G.I. Bill and the McCandless scholarship. He lists North Miami as his place of birth, but he's lived all over, and he was in France in the army for four years before he started at N.C. State. No living close relatives. He qualified for room and board in one of the dorms, but he refused it. He's paying for his own apartment. It must be the pits, if it's on Scofield; I think he's probably very poor."

"Lord, Janellen, no shoe size? No color preference?" I said. I did not know why her smug litany of information about Paul Sibley annoyed me. I had asked, too, after all.

"Well, don't pretend you wouldn't have read his folder after you'd gotten a look at him," she said, smirking. "You're only the fifth girl who's asked me about him, and this is the first day of classes. And look at your face; you're red as a beet!"

I knew from the heat in my chest and cheeks that it was true. I left hastily for my next class. The image of that dark face and ripe voice went with me through the day, and was there when I awoke on the next.

I thought that I might meet him naturally in the course of the design class, but it was soon obvious that he was not interested in meeting any of us. He was not rude, only remote. He was usually in his seat when I got there, intent on his notes, and left without speaking or nodding to anyone when the class was over. He went purposefully, with a long, padding stride that seemed to start in his hips, like a big cat's. Cooney didn't speak to him again after that first day, and did not call on him in class.

I saw him frequently after class that first week, but he never saw me. I could have sworn to that. I saw him twice in Harry's in the afternoons, drinking coffee and reading alone in a booth, but though I haunted Harry's in the afternoons after that, his visits had no discernible pattern. Both times he was in what had become, to me, his uniform: sharply creased cotton chinos, a blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up his dark forearms, white tennis shoes with no socks. Both times he seemed oblivious to the eyes that turned to him. I was not the only one who felt the magnet of his presence.

I saw him sometimes at the drawing board in his permanent lab on the third floor of McCandless, but since the Interior Design department was on the first, I had no real reason to be there, and was embarrassed to be spotted lolling about the halls. Once I saw him going into the coin laundry across from McCandless, his laundry bag over his shoulder, and felt a flush of intimate heat all over my body at the thought of his clothes, that had been next to that dark body, crumpled softly in the bag. I was so discomfited at the thought that I blushed even darker. Charlie Boyd, who had the board beside mine, said, "You okay?"

"Yeah," I said. "Hot in here, though."