"Fat slob this, fat slob that. You hear that all the time. You're like me: a clean fat. I could tell that right off. Why do you think I let you stay here?... I see it all the time. The dirtiest, sloppiest girls are the skinny ones. Year after year, same thing. You can tell who the pigs are going to be just by looking at them. You take Jackie Kennedy. Or Jackie whatever her name is now. I bet in private she's a very sloppy person. I bet you any amount of money."

She looked pleased for having let me know. We both took sips from the Cokes I'd bought us downstairs. Dottie leaned back on Kippy's mattress and pointed her soda bottle at me.

"Let me tell you something, see? If you'd come here yesterday with those suitcases and been some skinny little ninety-pounder, I would have turned you right around and sent you back where you came from. But you were a fatty, see, so I knew I could trust you."

This was new. For four years I'd been hated or ignored because of my weight With Dottie, it was an advantage.

She hooked her foot around the chair leg and scraped it toward her, then hefted up her legs. Marbled with squiggly blue veins, they looked like huge blue cheeses.

"What's that supposed to be, anyway?" she said. She was making a face. My eyes followed hers to Ma's flying-leg painting, leaning against the wall.

"Just a picture," I said, blushing.

"A leg with wings on it? What's it supposed to mean?"

I didn't want this moron even looking at it. "I'm not really sure," I shrugged. "Tell me about Hooten."

Maybe I'd ship Ma's painting back to Grandma's, I thought. Come to think of it, I didn't want Kippy staring at it, either.

"... And there's this girl Rochelle that's dorm president this year. Got the rest of them fooled, but I bet you'll see right through her. Miss Tiny Twat. Lays out there sunbathing on the lawn so everyone coming and going to class can get a good look. One time I caught her spitting a hawker right into the drinking fountain. 'Excuse me,' I say to her, 'but the other girls might like to drink out of that.'"

'"I haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about,' she says. And there's her fucking phlegm in the bubbler. Conceited bitch... Last year her and this other girl started this petition thing to get me fired. Stare at them in the shower, ha! Who's got time to stare at them when I'm cleaning up all their messes for them? First she parks herself out there in a bathing suit. Then she accuses me of staring." There were tears in her eyes; her hands were fists. " 'Just go about your business,' my foreman says. 'You're a good worker. Just keep your nose clean.'"

She scared me. Still, she had declared me an ally, a "clean fat." There was a kind of authority in those dozens of keys on her ring. And she'd let me stay, had brought me food like Ma always had. She was here. She was somebody. "You want a cigarette?" I asked her. When I lit hers, I noticed strands of gray in her blunt black hair. "How old are you?" I asked.

"Me? Twenty-nine. Hey, you know what? I got three aquariums at my house. One in the kitchen, one in the parlor, and one in my bedroom. I got piranhas. You feed 'em canned shrimp and they attack it. The angelfish are the ones in my bedroom. They're my special cuties. Hey, maybe someday you could come see them. My fish. You could come over for supper."

She reached for the remaining rectangle of cream cake. "Here, let's split this," she said, breaking me a handful. "Open your mouth."

Twenty-nine: she was too old to be my friend, too young to be my mother. "So tell me about you," she said.

"About me?" I laughed. I told her the plot of Valley of the Dolls instead, rambling on about the three main characters, how their bad choices had wrecked their lives. She was smiling at me without listening. "What?" I said. "What's the matter?" She leaned toward me. With her finger, she wiped a fleck of frosting off my chin, brought it back to her own mouth, and licked.

Then her gaze was over my shoulder. "A leg with wings," she said, shaking her head at Ma's painting. "That's wild!"

THE STREDNICKIS TRIED THE LOCK THREE TIMES BEFORE they got the door open. I listened to the click of metal on metal, relieved that the shades were down, grateful for every extra second Kippy wouldn't see me. She was the first to enter. I watched her hand pat the wall until she located the light switch. "Something stinks in here," she said. Then she saw me.

Her parents stared, light-dazed. No one spoke.

I'd been ready for her earlier-had braced myself all morning long as strange voices faded in and out of rooms, up and down corridors on the other side of my locked door. I'd skipped both breakfast and lunch, hoping it might make me look more reasonable. But by three o'clock I'd had enough and taken out the day-old unsold birthday cake Dottie had bought for our party the day before. "Happy Birthday to-----." No one had wanted it but Dottie and me.

"Hi," I said. "What do I owe you for the bedspreads?"

Kippy was wearing a turned-down sailor cap with autographs written on it "Just a second," she began. "They told me downstairs that two-fourteen is mine and my roommate's room."

"I'm her."

Part of me enjoyed the panic overtaking her facial muscles. Parents, a boyfriend, a peppy little life: she was overdue someone like me.

"Don't forget to figure in the tax on those curtains and bedspreads," I told the three of them. "I don't want you to cheat yourselves."

The whole thing was Dottie's fault. All week long, we'd worked mornings-scouring shower stalls, waxing floors, distributing laundry packages to the vacant rooms. By midweek, Dottie had brought in her record player and we'd done our cleaning to her soul albums. We both liked the duets best: Sam and Dave, Marvin and Tammi, Ike and Tina. Our favorite was "Mockingbird." From our respective cleaning areas, we called the lyrics into the empty hallways -called out to each other-our voices echoing off the cinderblock walls.

Mock- Yeah!

-ing- Yeahf -bird!

Yeah!

Yeah!

Yeah!

In the afternoons, exhausted and sweaty from work, we showered on separate floors, then met each other down in the lounge where we ate and watched TV and played Dottie's favorite card game, Chinese rummy. I was good at it almost immediately. After the first couple of games, we were even-steven.

Throughout the week, Dottie brought me treats: day-olds and Kentucky Fried, hot fudge sundaes melting from the ride across town. She waved away whatever money I held in front of her. "You don't owe me anything," she always insisted. "This was my idea." She left each evening at dusk. She had to get home to her fish, she said. I'd lie awake in that strange, darkening dormitory, sometimes singing to myself both sides of those soul duets, sometimes reminding myself who I really was: fat Dolores, mother killer, the girl who deserved nothing but shit Our party on the last day before the other girls arrived was Dottie's idea, too. She wanted, she said, to celebrate the fact that she'd finished her work a whole day ahead of schedule, thanks to me. She wanted to celebrate our friendship. Besides the cake, she bought a bottle of vodka and four pounds of pistachio nuts, gift-wrapped in a cardboard box. The side of the box said "Two Size D Flanges." We started at noon, cracking those nuts with our teeth and drinking Tang-and-vodkas, giggling and trying to guess what a flange was.

We sang and danced to Dottie's records and by midafter-noon we were drunk enough to be the singers themselves- the twirling, jiving Temptations, the lovelorn Shirelles. Dottie dropped to her knees as Little Anthony, was up again and strutting as James Brown. When she put on a Supremes record, she insisted we were Flo and Mary, the two nice ones. For scrawny Diana Ross, Dottie stuck a mop into her utility bucket and we snapped our fingers and danced around it, singing that we heard a symphony.

"You can tell that show-off Diana is a real bitch in her personal life," Dottie declared between tracks. "And a slob, too."

Without premeditation, I yanked the needle off the turntable, hunched up my shoulders, and became Ed Sullivan. "Diana Ross has been fired from our really big shew," I announced. "She's been replaced by America's newest singing sensation, Dolores Price!"

I lifted my foot and sent the utility bucket clanging across the room, the mop clattering to the floor. Then I dropped the record-player arm onto the opening of Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and began a full-out performance. I threw my whole body into it-threw into it, too, my anger, my sense of outrage, all the power of two hundred fifty pounds. Dottie sat back on the bed, struck dumb at first by what I was feeling, then hooting and shouting the choruses along with me.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Find out what it means to me!

We'd played the song over and over, raising our fists and shouting about respect until we were both hoarse, until we were both somehow avenged.

Now Kippy's mother's eyes bounced from my unsnapped pants to the knife I'd stuck diagonally into the remaining half of the birthday cake. The father wore high-water flare pants and orange socks. Kippy had shiny chipmunk cheeks. What right did they have to judge me?

Her father put down two suitcases and walked through the awkwardness, offering me his hand. "I'm Joe Strednicki... heh heh... I'm an electrician." That hand felt solid and sandpapery. I held on to it longer than I should have.

"I took this side of the room if it's all right with you," I said. "But I can switch if you want. It makes no difference. Really." For some reason, I kept saying it to Kippy's mother.

"So wait a minute," Kippy said. She was shaking her head. "There's a definite mistake here. There's a mix-up somewhere because-"

"You got mail already," I interrupted. "A letter from Dante. Your boyfriend. I'll get it for you."

Kippy took the letter absentmindedly without noticing the red fingerprints on the envelope. "Open it! Go ahead!" Dottie had kept teasing me at one point during our party, waving the letter near my face. The red pistachio-nut dye wouldn't erase away. In my wastebasket were five inches' worth of shells I'd meant to dump. All day long I'd been wrestling with my first hangover and passing gas more foul than I'd thought possible.

Kippy sat rigidly on the edge of the mattress I'd chosen for her. Her mother's smile blinked on and off as if it had a short circuit-something Mr. Strednicki might be required to fix.

pusnea me top nap oactc over me omuuay UIKC UUA, sinking the knife in deeper, and got up off the bed. "So I guess I'll let you get unpacked. Be back in a little while. Nice to meet you."

"Is it your birthday?" Mrs. Strednicki asked vaguely. Come to think of it, she had that chipmunky look, too.

"Not really," I said. "Well, sort of."

Mr. and Mrs. Strednicki smiled and nodded approvingly, as if what I'd just said made perfect sense.

From the end bathroom stall, adjacent to mine and Kippy's room, I listened to their family argument. It was both a sound and a vibration through the cinder block. "... Hard-earned money," I heard her father say. And from Kippy, "Not with that hippopotamus!"

I was glad I'd brought the cake with me. Detaching a blue sugar rose, I placed it in my mouth, on my tongue, then pushed up, crushing it against the roof of my mouth. It was so sweet, it burned.

At five P.M. Rochelle, the dorm president that Dottie hated, led the eight of us freshmen girls downstairs to the lounge, where she passed out Styrofoam cups and poured us each two inches of Boone's Farm apple wine. We watched and waited while she lit herself a Cigarillo, sipped her wine, and flipped apathetically through her paperwork. Dottie had made her sound more beautiful than she was. A willowy redhead, she kept her eyelids at permanent half-mast indifference. It was as if Robert Mitchum had mated with an Irish setter and this bitch was the result.

Rochelle said her job was to tell us about useful things they didn't print in the Merton College catalog. Such as which professors were assholes and which boys' dorms to stay away from. Such as how to outsmart the fire inspector when he checked our rooms for hot plates.

None of the other freshmen had sat anywhere near me. I sloshed the wine around in my cup and realized I was going to be as powerless and invisible to these girls as I'd been to the girls in my high school. "So, why don't you just all say who you are and tell a little about yourself," I heard Rochelle say.

i aa They started at the opposite end of the room. Bambi, Kippy, Tammy: each girl up front had a cute and sunny personality to match her Walt Disney cartoon name. Each seemed thrilled to have landed at cruddy Merton.

The girls nearest me were plainer, frumpier. Someone named Veronica had a noticeable twitch. She said she was enrolled in the honors program and took her studies seriously. Naomi, frail and nervous as a parakeet, said she'd been at Woodstock over the summer and the experience had woken her up. Then she veered onto the subjects of Vietnam and civil rights and the mercury content in swordfish. Kippy and Bambi exchanged uncomfortable looks. Rochelle rolled her eyes and interrupted. "And last but not least?"

I had been chewing on the edge of my cup, dreading my turn. The squeak of my teeth on the Styrofoam was the loudest sound in the room. Everyone waited. "Oh, me?" I finally said. "Dolores."

"And?"

What was I supposed to tell them? That I'd been stupid enough to arrive a week earlier than the rest of them? That I'd been raped at thirteen?

"I'm wicked glad to be here," I mumbled to the coffee table.

It occurred to me as Rochelle read dormitory rules from her clipboard that you could tell a lot more about people from watching their behavior with Styrofoam cups than you could by what they told you. Kippy had stopped taking notes and was poking holes into the side of hers with her pencil point. Naomi dismantled her cup into small chips. I had gnawed mine into one long spiral.

"And a word to the wise," Rochelle said. "Don't get involved with any of the guys in Culinary Arts. You have to be horny and a jerk just to get into that program. It's a prerequisite." Kippy and Tammy widened their eyes at each other and giggled. "Their whole dorm is on academic probation this semester. You'll see them at supper tonight. They're putting on a barbecue for our dorm. Don't say I didn't warn you. And then, of course, there's ten-ton Dottie."

My breathing stopped. At the mention of weignt, several girls glanced instinctively toward me, then immediately away.

"Dottie," Rochelle continued, "our famous lezzie cleaning woman."

Kippy looked lost. "Famous what?" she asked.

"Lezzie," Rochelle repeated. "As in lesbian. As in girl loves girl."

"Oh, ick," Kippy said. "Don't make me chuck my cookies."

The drunken night before came pounding back. In the midst of the vodka and confusion and singing-right after my performance of "Respect"-Dottie had stood up, orbited close to me, and kissed me on the lips. A single kiss, followed by laughter. At the time it had struck me as odd and silly and then I had dismissed it. Now it scared me-not so much the kiss itself, but what someone like Rochelle or Kippy might make of it. The gas from all those pistachio nuts rumbled inside me and mixed itself up with a fear of each one of them in that room. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but on that frigging frayed sofa.

"I'm sick," I said. "Can I go?"

"Just a sec," Rochelle said. "Are there any questions?"

"I have one," Kippy said.

"Uh-huh?"

"Well, never mind. I'll talk to you after the meeting's over."

"It is over," Rochelle said.

Kippy's mother had hung the Indian-print curtains before she left. A breeze from outside billowed them, the cloth rolling in toward me like surf. That entire week, it hadn't once occurred to me to open the windows.

Kippy's high-school yearbook was on the bed. In her picture, she had longer hair and a warm smile.

Junior Red Cross Volunteer I, II; Majorettes II, III, IV; Class Secretary III... Pastime: Talking during study hall. Weakness: Juicy Fruit gum. Quote: "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

She had unpacked a framed picture of a dark-haired boy and put it on her bureau. I found the same picture in the yearbook; sure enough, it was Dante. "Saint Dante." Pastimes: Milk and Cookies, praying for sinners. Quote: "I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet."

I got off the bed and walked over to Kippy's bureau for a better look. His bushy eyebrows were crimped up in a sad, sympathetic way. There was a struggle in his eyes.

When Kippy got back to our room, she banged shut her suitcases and shoved them under her bed. I could tell Rochelle had vetoed her escape.

"Your parents seem nice," I said. "You look like your mother." She slammed cosmetics and perfume bottles onto the shelf above her bed. Her fingers tweezed nervously at a knot in the speaker wire of her stereo. She jumped from chore to chore without accomplishing anything.

She had loved me in my letters, I wanted to remind her-had trusted me with volunteered intimacies. It was my fat that made her hate me.

I walked over to her bureau and picked up her boyfriend's picture. "Dante's cute," I said. "If you don't mind my asking, whatever happened between the two of you?"

That's when she finally looked at me.

"You wrote that he was pressuring you, remember? I was just wondering, well... Not that it's any of my business."

She walked over, took the picture, and slammed his face down against the bureau top. "I wrote nothing to you!" she said. "Understand?"

Down the hall, two girls whooped back-from-vacation hellos.

"I didn't write a thing to you, okay? I wrote to someone else. Someone you said you were. Okay?"

I lit myself a Salem, the match shaking in my hand. Pistachio-nut gas bubbled up from my insides. "Well, can I help it if I have a gland problem?" I said. "It's something 1 was born with. Go ahead and shoot me." She was the first to look away.

At the picnic supper I took tiny spoonfuls of the various salads, arranging them like small islands against the white space of the heavy china plate. It was an act of good faith for Kippy's sake: I would lose weight and be normal for her. But Kippy didn't notice. She and Bambi were busy trying to distance themselves from me. I had shadowed them from the dorm to the food line.

The barbecue was an oil drum cut in half and covered with wire. Sauce-slopped chicken pieces sizzled between us Hooten girls and the boys from Culinary Arts. The barbecue guy was soap-opera handsome, with his straight white teeth and wilty chefs hat. He wore a red bandanna around his neck and smiled from behind a veil of blue barbecue smoke.

"This one wants you," he told Kippy, spearing her a dripping chicken breast. He pushed it off the fork and onto her plate. If you could believe his name tag, his name was Eric. "Where you girls from?" he asked. A plump chicken leg hovered above Bambi's plate.

"Edison, New Jersey."

"Stoughton, Massachusetts."

Eric licked his greasy finger. "Oh, yeah? Well, where's that at?"

"It's near Boston," Bambi said.

"Boston? I hear they're a bunch of old farts up in Boston. I hear they ban everything."