Marcia, a round, motherly senior, stood smiling at me. She'd risen from her chair during dinner one night to inform us she was an Avon representative and would be happy to order us whatever we needed.

"Hi," she said. "Mind if I take a moment of your time?" She had a wide, shiny forehead. She wedged herself inside before I could answer.

"Dolores," she began, "as recording secretary for Hooten and the head of the Sunshine Committee-"

"Plus you're the Avon lady," I said. Her laugh was fake. "Righty-o, but that's not the reason for my visit today. How are things going?"

"Fine," I said. "Super."

"Super," she repeated. "Now one of my jobs as recording secretary is to take attendance at house meetings. We've had four so far and my records say you haven't shown up once." Her smile bordered on squinting.

"I could use some perfume," I said. "Sign me up for ten dollars' worth of whatever. I'm not really fussy. Our own Avon lady. Wow."

"Is there any reason in particular?" she asked. "I'm just no good at picking out stuff. What's that kind you're wearing? Order me a bottle of that."

"Any reason why you haven't been coming to the meetings, I mean?"

"Oh, well... I get these migraines." I pinched the skin between my eyebrows and made a face like the woman on the Anacin commercial. "So are you and-" she stopped and checked her records.

"Are you and Katherine getting along? Is it roomie problems?"

I shook my head. "Homesick?"

You could show a drive-in movie on that forehead of hers, I thought. "Kippy and I get along fine," I said. "Why? Did she say something to you?"

"Oh, good golly, no. We were just wondering, the other officers and me. If there's a problem, we want to know about it. My first semester, I was so homesick, I used to upchuck before class."

I had called Grandma only once on the pay phone. She'd been on her way to bingo. Ruth and Larry never even answered their phone.

"Everything's really great," I said. I smiled hard enough to see my cheeks in my peripheral vision. "Really super."

"Terrific!" she said. "Then we'll see you tonight at the meeting after supper. It's important you're there because we're discussing the big Halloween party. Can I pencil you in for a committee?"

"Well," I said, "as long as my migraines cooperate." I made a fist and tapped my head for emphasis. Migraines had always made Mr. Pucci back off, but Marcia acted as though she'd never heard of them.

"Fantabulous!" she said. "See you then. And I'll put your cologne order in, immediately if not sooner. Do you need any sachet?"

"I guess I'm all set on that," I said. "Thanks."

"You're entirely welcome." Pushy bitch.

That night I skipped downstairs supper and ate the rest of my apricots and a package of Mallomars. But just as I dozed in the quiet of the deserted floor, Marcia's voice boomed from the PA box in the hallway. "Dolores Price! Dolores Price! We're holding up the meeting for you. We need you downstairs to make it one hundred percent perfect attendance."

I unlocked the door and spoke to the box. "My head is pounding," I said in a quivery voice. "I don't think I can make it."

"I can't hear you, but I'm clicking off now," she said. The cheeriness dropped suddenly out of her tone. "Get down here quick!"

The meeting had already begun by the time I sat down at the outskirts, on the piano bench. From up front, Marcia looked up from her reading of the minutes and gave me a wink. The truth was, I sat as far away from other people as they sat away from me. The closest person to me was little Naomi, the girl who had been to Woodstock and made a speech that first day. I watched her tap her knuckles against her knees. Her skin was pale and scaly, her chewed-up fingernails rimmed with dried blood.

As Marcia had promised, the key item on Rochelle's agenda was the upcoming Hooten Hall Halloween party. She said she was against a costume-party theme. Hadn't last semester's luau made them the laughingstock of the campus? She, for one, was tired of the guys from Delta Chi making pigs-on-a-spit jokes every time they passed Hooten on their way to class.

After some discussion, Marcia took the floor. She said that since it was a Halloween party, she, personally, felt costumes would be cute, though she was happy to go along with whatever we gals decided democratically.

In the spirit of cooperation, with Marcia beaming proudly at us, we voted in costumes (Rochelle rolled her eyes but abstained), keg beer, vodka punch, and a $2.50 cover charge for girls from other dorms. Rochelle invited new business.

"Right here!" Naomi called, loud enough to make me jump. She rushed to the front of the room.

"For those of you who don't know me, my name is Naomi, okay? And I feel it's real important for our dorm to take a stand on Cambodia."

She hopped nervously from one side of the room to the other. There couldn't have been much more than eighty -~.,ric inside those bib overalls.

"I've drafted this petition"-she waved a clipboard at us-"and if we all sign it, then it's a start. See, we need to get organized. If hundreds of thousands of college kids across the country unite, then how can even a cocksucker like Nixon not hear us?"

"Excuse me," Marcia said, smiling her Avon lady smile at Naomi. "You have a perfect right to your opinion, but, personally, I don't think it's necessary to refer to the President of the United States as... as..."

"Nixon himself is the obscenity," Naomi snapped back. "Anyway, that's not the point. The point is My Lai."

I wasn't unsympathetic to her argument. Those My Lai pictures in Life magazine had made my stomach heave. My mother's Tricia Nixon essay was what had gotten me stuck at this cruddy school in the first place.

Naomi's petition passed unsigned from girl to girl as she spoke. Kippy's hands didn't even touch the clipboard. Up front Naomi hopscotched from one world problem to another. Private conversations broke out around the lounge. They were treating her like a joke.

"Well," Rochelle finally interrupted, "we apologize if Merton isn't radical enough for you, but some of us have studying to do."

"Okay, okay," Naomi nodded. "I just want to say one more thing, okay? I was at Woodstock this summer. That was re-a/-ity, you guys! We owe it to our generation to get political!"

Rochelle wielded her gavel and declared the meeting over. Someone handed Naomi's clipboard back to her. No one had thought to pass it to me.

"Just a second! Just a second!" Naomi protested. She ran from one exiting girl to the next. "Why aren't there more names on this thing? Innocent women and children, you guys! Wake the fuck up!"

She and I were the last two people left in the room, slumped at opposite ends,.

"Let me see that thing," I said.

Counting Naomi's, mine was the fourth signature.

"Do you get it?" she asked. "I just don't get it"

Her eyes were wet and jumpy. The best I could manage was a shrug.

That night, Kippy and some others were playing rummy in our room. I was lying in bed on my side, watching the wall.

Bambi came in without knocking, her face bloodless. She was clutching an album jacket. "Something awful has happened, you guys," she said. "Something really horrible. Paul McCartney is dead."

"No sir," Kippy said.

"It was just on the radio. He's been dead for months." She thrust the Abbey Road album at us. "Look! His eyes are closed and he's barefoot. It's all symbolic. George is the gravedigger. John Lennon is God."

Other Hooten girls entered, asking if we'd heard. Mine and Kippy's room was becoming some sort of headquarters. Was it an assassination? No, a disease, someone said. A tropical disease he had had for over a year. The other Beatles were in mourning and couldn't be reached.

Marcia said he probably caught it down in India when they were studying with that greasy old maharishi. She said she'd read someplace that in India people just squatted down and pooped right in the street.

There were girls on the beds, girls on the floor. Someone listening to a different radio station said if you played the White Album backwards, it said, "Turn me on, dead man." Kippy put the record on her turntable and spun with her finger. People moved closer to the eerie gibberish.

They were treating death like some kind of game. I wished all of their mothers dead.

"This is bullshit!" I said.

They turned and looked.

"It's all just some stupid practical joke the radio is playing. Can't you tell that? Real death isn't fun, it's painful. She was right tonight-what she said about Vietnam. Naomi. About poor women and children."

The record on the turntable spun in silence. Nobody spoke.

Then the door opened again, allowing in a wedge of hallway light.

"Phone," Veronica said.

Kippy sighed. "Is it Eric? Tell him I'm too upset to talk."

"It's for her." Veronica pointed at me.

The hallway made me squint. If it was that busybody dean of women, I'd hang up in her face.

"I was wondering," Dottie said, "if you'd like to come eat supper next Saturday. And see my fish."

"Next Saturday? I can't."

"I'm making pork. And this string-bean casserole. You make it with cream of mushroom soup and a can of onion rings. You put the onion rings on top. Like a crust. I'm not sure what I'm having for dessert yet."

"I can't go," I repeated. "I'll be studying all that weekend."

"I thought they were having that Halloween-party thing. You won't be able to study with a party going on. It'll be quieter over here."

"Well, thanks, but-"

"Please. My brother's not going to be here. He's got National Guard that weekend. If you don't like pork, we can have something else."

Rochelle walked past. If any of them knew she had called me...

"Maybe some other time," I whispered. "I have to go now. See you."

"When?"

"When what?"

"You said some other time. So, when?"

"I'm not sure. It's hard to say."

"He's going to be gone that whole weekend. I already bought some of the stuff. You can't freeze pork, you know. It gets some kind of germ."

"I can't. Honest. I have to go."

"You know what she said about you?"

I gripped the phone so hard, it hurt. "What?"

"Well, I was going to tell you on Saturday. It's not something I want to go into over the phone. But believe me, she's no friend of yours."

Suddenly, I was crying. About my poor attendance in class. About that lecture I'd just given them. It wasn't as if my mother's death was their fault... They never once asked me to play cards with them. My being at college was one big joke.

"You won't even want to sleep in the same room with her when I tell you. It was really rotten."

"I can't."

"That first week you were here was so much fun. I could pick you up in my brother's car. He always leaves it here when he's got National Guard. If you'd rather, we could go out somewheres and eat. Some restaurant. Don't say yes or no. Say maybe."

I waited.

"Dolores," she said. "I love you."

It scared me. Jack Speight's tickling me up there on that porch.

"I love you so much."

"I have to go now. See you tomorrow." Only I wouldn't see her. I'd stay in my room all day long with the doors locked. If she tried to come in, I'd report her.

"Why are you treating me like this? That week was the best week of my life. I really miss dancing with you."

"Did you hear the news?" I said. "Paul McCartney is dead."

"Honest to Christ, Dolores, I keep thinking and thinking about you." There were some funny popping noises: crying. "I just meant I love you as a friend, that's all. Don't get the wrong idea. We're so much alike, you and me. Who cares about us couple of fatties?"

I hung up.

The bathroom was empty. I locked myself in the stall, shaking so hard that the toilet seat rattled beneath me.

By the time I returned to my room, the others had left. Kippy stood in the dark, playing with the flickering candle flame.

I expected her to be angry, but when I flopped onto my mattress, she came over and sat down next to me, the first time she'd ever done that.

"You were thinking about your mother before, weren't you?" she said. "Is that what got you so upset?"

I'd kept Ma's flying-leg painting in my closet. I didn't trust Kippy with the subject of my mother.

"You said she died in an accident. Tell me about it."

"A car accident... Well, a truck. I don't really want to-"