Friday after class he hurried out with his friends, Florette taking hold of his arm intimately to check his watch. She noticed then he had a shoulder bag with him, a kind of duffel bag, and his friends had bigger backpacks than usual. They were running to catch the bus, she guessed, going into New York for the weekend. He told her he came from Philadelphia, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to New York with his friends-or maybe just to New Haven to catch the train home. She tried to put Blake out of her mind, but Dr. Romfield had lost his charisma, just a middle-aged man with a ginger beard and a nice speaking voice. She would go on working hard on her essays for him, but she no longer imagined living with him in a nice brick house in Middletown with two babies and a dog, or a baby and two dogs. Instead she imagined herself with Blake. They were dancing in a big room lit only by candles. No, there would be a fire in a high fireplace, like at the lodge of the ski resort. They would dance together just perfectly and gradually he would hold her tighter, closer to him. Her breath caught in her throat as she imagined their bodies touching. He would never be interested in her, but he was perfect for her fantasies. That night and the next, she put herself to sleep having long conversations with him.

Emily brought her along with a group of students she had already managed to meet at some mixer, out for pizza, then a movie, then for ice cream. She was glad to be with them, even though this guy Reed kept hitting on her. He reminded her of Jonah: in fact he had the same squared-off blond looks, the same too-thick eyebrows, the same smirk. No, thank you! She had not come to college to replace one man who felt superior to her for no good reason with another who felt the same. All he could talk about was football and TV and the hundred he had won on last week's Patriots game. There was no mystery, no romance in him.

Emily went off with a guy whose name Melissa never caught. Melissa returned to their dorm by herself, but she would rather be alone with her fantasies than with a man who would treat her the way she knew Reed would. She'd prefer to be alone forever than with a man who did not care for her, a man she could not love with her whole being. She would wait, she would look for love but accept no substitute. Fern greeted her enthusiastically, as if she had been afraid Melissa would never return. "Everyone has so much stuff," Fern said. "I'm on scholarship. I've never seen your friend Emily's roommate in the same outfit twice. She must have come to school with a trailer."

"Think of her as upper-class trailer trash."

But Fern didn't smile. "I could never call anybody that."

"She's just a twit, Fern. The brains of a canary. Em can't stand her."

Fern perched on her bed looking forlorn, her eyes lowered. "Everybody here has gone to summer camp and Europe and I've never left home before...."

"Fern, we're all out of our depths. Every time a professor calls on me in class, I jump. I'm terrified of saying something stupid. But we'll survive. You'll see. You're going to go out for sports, right? So once you're on some team, you'll make friends there too and you'll feel like you belong."

"If it wasn't for you, I don't know what I'd do. Thank you."

She ought to thank Fern for making her feel secure by comparison. She patted her roommate's shoulder and basked in being big-sisterly. It helped. Fern was actually pretty, with her blue-black hair and large melting brown eyes, but she didn't seem to care. She was more interested in using her body than in looking at it or adorning it. However awkward and out of place Fern felt in college, she was at home in her body in a way that neither Emily nor Melissa herself had ever been or probably ever would be. Buttercup had social confidence, but Fern had jock confidence, the belief that whatever she saw any other woman do physically, she could match or better. Already her tennis game was competitive. Melissa envied her. She would love to relax into her body and her life and just live, just plain live.

* CHAPTER FOUR *.

Monday Em and she were walking into the Center for the Arts complex, all white and modern and squarish, to see an old Hitchcock movie.

"Okay, I've made some inquiries.... Here I am, your private private eye."

Emily raked her hand through her cropped hair and put on a serious glower, pressing her glasses against her nose. Emily was nearsighted and could not endure contacts. "He hangs with the African-American kids some, but he's a loner. He has a bike, a Honda. Believe it or not, he's Jewish. He had a girl come up and see him once. Nobody paid her enough attention for me to get any dirt. So can't size up the competition."

"Emily, nobody's competition. He's just in class with me. He was curious because of my father. I'm used to people being curious."

"We'll see about that," Emily lilted. "I want you to wear your blue sweater Wednesday. Your tit sweater. I do so well that I'm giving you advice." Emily had gone to a beer party Saturday with the guy from the movie group, but he got drunk and puked on her shoes. "I'm off him. He wasn't much in bed."

"I just have no skill or luck with men. Better without."

"A Black Jew. That would curl your mother's hair. Go after him! It'd drive them up the wall."

"He isn't Black, Em. His skin is barely darker than mine. It's more like Middle Eastern or Mexican or Indian. Anyhow, that'd be just pitiful to try to snag him with a sweater." But she wore it. Her mother sent her an e-mail to watch C-SPAN. Father was in the paper Tuesday with his maiden speech in the Senate, in favor of an amendment to an appropriations bill. It was too complicated for her to figure out, but the amendment had something to do with trucking. Melissa would pretend she had seen it, to save a quarrel. He was always wanting to deregulate something. Probably he wanted truck drivers not to have to bother with licenses, like that. She could imagine the world her father would create, black water spurting out of faucets, air thick as pudding in cities, planes falling out of the sky like dead birds, trucks caroming all over the turnpike.

Wednesday was warm, even for October-the temperature at seventy, the wind abated, the sky blue porcelain. The leaves were still brilliant on the hills around Middletown, since no storm had ravaged them yet. It was one of her favorite times of year. Her siblings and friends would say summer was their favorite season, but in summer, she always felt inadequate. Not as slender as Merilee, apt to burn rather than develop a mahogany tan. Summer was the time she was cast back on her family, separated from the fragile support group school offered. Fall was the time life cranked up and everyone went their own way. Today she was happy-happy to be away from home, happy to be living with Fern right near Emily, happy to be doing all right in school. She and Emily had buddies in the dormitory and both had been to parties a reasonable number of times. Ronnie next door, a sophomore from Texas, often dropped in to chat and one evening taught them the two-step so they could line dance. Em and she were not only surviving, they were flourishing, even if they hadn't been asked out much or found a boyfriend. But who needed a boyfriend? What would she do with one, with all her effort going into making friends and trying to excel in her classes? When they had any time, there were free movies and lectures and cheap events and plays every single night.

Her first class on Wednesdays was Ecology of Plant Populations, to satisfy her science requirement. She had not the least interest in plant ecology, but had taken it because she couldn't get into the more interesting sounding classes. Except for the boredom and the difficulty of making anything out squinting through a microscope, it was not difficult. The microscope was a problem. The first time Melissa had drawn something, it had turned out to be her own eyelash, not the plant cells they were supposed to be studying.

Then she had French with Emily. They were reading Zola's Germinal. Melissa was quicker at French than Emily, who had trouble with languages. Melissa liked the sound of her own voice talking French, and she was always trying to get Emily to talk French-but then they never knew the words for what they really wanted to say, so it was always too much trouble after the first few sentences.

She felt like cutting her writing class today. Her crush on Dr. Romfield had evaporated, and the day was so gorgeous, she could imagine taking a long walk down into town under the brilliant maples or just lying on the sun-warmed grass. However, she was not secure enough to cut. She was still afraid she might miss something vital, and she was bound to get one of her sinus infections that winter and miss classes. She wanted to do well in college. She would never be brilliant like Merilee, but at least she could avoid fucking up. She saw herself Phi Beta Kappa, she saw herself taking honors in whatever she finally decided to major in. She lifted her head as she walked along, moving in her cap and gown onto a platform to wild applause.

An instant later, as she trotted along College Row with its weathered brownstone buildings toward her class, she felt overwhelmed by indecision. She still didn't have any idea what she was going to major in. Every Friday when her mother e-mailed her, Rosemary asked her. Government, maybe. After all, that was what she knew the most about. She would be a crusading reporter, investigating men like her father and unmasking their insincerity and corruption. She was doing well in American Government and Politics. She had a lot of knowledge of how politics really worked and what went on that the public never saw. She could tell Rosemary journalism next time her mother pestered her. But Rosemary would ask why, and she could hardly say, In order to prevent people like you and Daddy from running the country and lying to people.

Someone else was in the hot seat today, a football player who had probably cribbed his essay off the internet. That guy really did steal it, she thought, because he was doing a crappy job of answering questions about what he was supposed to have written. It took nerve to copy an essay, or maybe only a lack of imagination. She never cheated, because she was always sure she would be caught; or maybe because she wanted to please, to be deemed worthy. If she did not do her own work, how could she prove herself?

It really was stupid to imagine Blake had felt any boy-girl type interest in her. That girl, Florette, he was sitting with, she was much prettier. Enormous doe eyes. Emily missed her dogs, and Melissa herself was going around like a homeless dog looking for some guy to attach herself to. She felt ashamed. She just wanted someone to care about, someone to care about her. They weren't allowed to have pets in the dormitory. Every day she alternated between thinking she was doing really well at college and suspecting she was a complete misfit and people ignored her or laughed at her. Florette's eyes reminded her of one of the kids she had tutored in language skills in Hartford, Robert, whom the other kids called Pup. He had been writing about his lost mama-he lived with his grandma and his mama was in prison for drugs-and then one day he wasn't in class and Sonya, who always sat with him, was crying. Drive-by shooting. They were aiming at somebody else, but Pup was dead. She would never forget the kids she had tutored, she thought, never. Nobody in her family understood-only Emily, who had an enormous heart for everything living that hurt. Maybe sometime she could tell Blake about it all and how it had changed her. Would he think she was putting it on? Trying to come off liberal and cool? She walked out of class thinking how inept she was at relations with guys, when Blake fell into step with her. "So, want to pick up a sandwich and grab some countryside?"

"What do you mean?"

"You can ride with me. We'll go up into the hills. Looks pretty today, doesn't it? You have afternoon classes?"

She had an aerobics class, but she could cut that. "I was thinking all the way here how gorgeous it is today and how much I'd love to be outside."

"Great. Come on, we'll pick up something at Mocon. My bike's just by Hewitt."

"I've never been on a motorcycle," she said when they came up to where he had chained it to a wrought-iron fence around a little cemetery there weirdly in the middle of campus, by the dorms. Fern said she had heard it held the bodies of students who had killed themselves. Melissa hoped that was a legend.

"You'll love it," he said confidently. "You can't help loving it."

She knew she was supposed to wear a helmet, so it felt clandestine, vaguely wicked and a little dangerous to climb on behind him, holding on to his leather jacket. She thought as he sped through town that they must look tough and very cool. They could not talk, which made things easier. Talking with guys was always skipping along a tightrope. Of course, plastered to his jacketed back, she could see little and only to the right side. They were climbing now, riding the curves up and out of town. She was a little scared but excited. How often did she do something as unlikely as go off with a guy on his bike up into the hills? It was something other girls did, like Emily (not Merilee, never Merilee), and she would envy them their adventures. Even if he just wanted to talk about class or even if they had nothing to say and it was a complete fiasco, she would have a story to tell. She would have an experience of her own. She would say to Ronnie, the redhead in the room next door, that she had cut her afternoon classes and gone up in the hills on a motorcycle. He turned off the pavement. They bumped far more slowly along a dirt road through the woods.

When he finally stopped and she got off, her legs felt funny-tingly and stiff. She misstepped and he caught her arm. "Takes getting used to, but you did fine."

"I liked it."

"Of course you did. Riding the wind. And this was just a little run. But it got us up here, didn't it?"

They were in a clearing near the edge of a cliff-the valley with the college and Middletown below them. "It's beautiful. Thank you."

"Yeah, I arranged it just for you." He pulled a blanket from the saddlebag and spread it out. "I'm hungry."

They ate the sandwiches they had bought, sitting face-to-face on the blanket, with the cliff falling away to their side. A hawk circled over them and then off in spirals across the cliff face. A second hawk spiraled way up and the birds called back and forth, sharp high cries, a couple sharing the sky. There had been no frost yet, and the crickets were shrilling in the shaggy grass of the clearing. She felt a fierce joy that was rare to her, a sense of having escaped from her life, her usual self, her prison of expectation and disappointment. No one knew where she was. No one would guess that she was here and with Blake, an attractive cool guy with a motorcycle. It was her own private, her own secret experience. No matter why he had asked her to come along-maybe he was lonely, maybe he was still curious-she was here and not anybody prettier or smarter or more popular shared a blanket with him.

All her life she had tried to keep little things to herself, often unsuccessfully, the way she had hidden away her diary, the way she hid things like a cobalt blue bottle about four inches high she found in a cabinet in the governor's mansion and quietly appropriated; like a special red rock she had come upon hiking in Vermont with her aunt Karen. Like a blue jay feather that had floated down on the lawn. Silly treasures. If she had something of her own, she was real, she was protected from others' scorn, others' judgments. This afternoon with Blake was such a secret, a treasure all her own. No matter if it was singular and accidental, it was hers to take home, mull over, relive.

"Today you seem happy, full of life," he said, as if he could read her mind, or perhaps her face.

"I am. Thanks for asking me to come with you."

He smiled slightly. "It wasn't a favor. It was an opportunity."

"What do you mean?" She had a moment of apprehension. But he couldn't be a mugger, a rapist, something bad. He was a fellow student.

"Why are you usually so down? I'm right about that, aren't I?"

She shrugged, embarrassed. "I'm less depressed here at college than I usually am at home, that's for sure."

"Escaping?"

"In a way. But escaping to my own life. Me. Not them."

"Them is your family."

"My parents, mostly. My younger brother, Billy, he's okay. He's a charming fuck-up. We've always been close."

"But you aren't close to your mother?"

"Rosemary? She doesn't bother much with me, unless I do something she thinks is bad-mostly in the sense that it could reflect poorly on my father. I mess up in any way, and she goes, 'Oh, what will your father say?' or more often, 'What will people say?'" She felt embarrassed talking so much about herself. "What about your parents? Are you close to them?"

"I never knew them. I'm adopted."

"Yeah, I remember you said that. But don't you know who your mother was?"

He shook his head. "It's a blank. A mystery."

"I used to have fantasies I was adopted," she said softly, afraid he would laugh at her.

"Why?" He lay down on the blanket, staring up into the sky. "Believe me, you wouldn't want to be."

"So I wouldn't belong to them. I'd have real parents who would swoop down someday and carry me off and love me the way I am. Just for being me."

"That's what we all want, isn't it? To be loved for being just ourselves. Not for being smart or winning scholarships or playing some stupid game well-just for being us."

"Exactly," she said. "But how well do you get on with your adoptive parents?"

"I respect them," he said. "They've been good to me, and they're good people. But we're different. I'm different from everyone else."

"I always felt that way too."

"Why? You know who you are. You're white, you're affluent, your daddy is important."

"But that isn't me. And it's like I don't really belong in the same family with my older sister, Merilee, and my older brother, Rich. They do everything right. I never did, I never will."

"Doesn't that depend on who's looking? Who's judging? What's right for you may be all wrong for them."

"Yes!" She found herself laughing and didn't know why. He hadn't said anything funny. Maybe she was laughing with pleasure, because she loved talking with him. "I really like being with you. You're easy for me to talk to. Talk with, I mean."

"Yeah," he said. "Isn't that a shocker. Because it's the same with me. I can talk with you. You're not with anybody, are you? Or is there someone at home?"

"Not anyone real. Just guys." She decided to be bold. "I thought you had a girlfriend."

"Been checking me out? There's a girl I was seeing last summer. She came up from Philly one weekend. It's nothing special. Not what I really want."

"What do you really want?" There was a kind of tension now between them that made it almost hard for her to breathe. She must be imagining this gathering sexual tension, she must be projecting it. She tried to rein herself in. Stop imagining silly things. He's just chatting you up.

"I don't know. It could be you, couldn't it?" He was grinning as he rolled on his elbow to face her where she sat cross-legged on the blanket. "Want to find out?"

Her breath caught in her chest and she could not speak. He was staring intensely into her eyes, his dark, almost black, and burning. How he stared. She felt dizzy. He had not touched her, and yet she knew she was more excited than she had ever been with the boys she had fumbled with, sucked off, Jonah, who had taken her cherry. Her skin was almost crawling with the desire to be touched. She tried to make herself breathe normally so he would not guess how he affected her.

He put up a lazy hand to stroke her cheek. Tangle in her hair. Caress her neck, gently, barely touching her. Then the hand tightened on her nape and he pulled her down to him. She fell into him, and it was she who first kissed him, crushing her mouth against his. Then he rolled on top of her. His hands were on her breasts. They were grinding together. She had imagined passion but she had never experienced it. Sex was something she did because boys wanted it, because the dating game required it when you reached a certain stage. Desire was new, a pain furrowing her body. She could feel him hard against her and his hands burned into her wherever he could reach under her clothing. She was not even surprised when almost immediately he pulled at her panties and thrust into her. They were locked together madly pounding at each other. They were someplace else, some hidden intense place of fierce sensations. Her eyes were clenched shut, her nails dug into him and she strained against him. The pleasure that swept through her almost hurt. She heard herself moaning and her eyes burned and a tear leaked out. When he had come, he spoke against her ear softly. "I'm only taking what's mine."

"You didn't use anything," she said a few minutes later, as they lay slack, spent, side by side, still entangled.

"You aren't on the pill?"

"I didn't have any reason to be."

He was silent for a moment. "There's a morning-after pill. Go to health services."

"Okay," she said. "Does it work?"

"I'm told it does. And get them to put you on the pill."

She nodded against his shoulder. Did that mean he wanted to see her again? That this wasn't an aberration? She remembered after she had finally done it with Jonah, he had climbed out of their common bed in the ski lodge, lit a cigarette and turned on a bowl game. She had gone into the bathroom and briefly cried, but she could not even work up a real regret. It felt too insignificant. This had been something else, a completely different act. She did not want him to turn away and yawn.

"I...I feel confused," she said finally.

"About what?" He pulled her head down on his shoulder. "Whether I was just scoring?"

"Yes."

"And the answer is no. Things happen sometimes between people. Explosions. Coming together. I accept it. So should you."

"Okay," she said very softly, liking the way it felt to lie with her head in the crook of his shoulder. It felt safe. She worried about what it would be like when they had to stand up, for she could feel the air growing cooler. She worried about what she had done with him, but she did not regret it. She could not regret it, for it felt too strong. It felt as hard and real as the red rock she had picked up so many years ago on the mountain behind her grandpa's farm and hidden away in her dresser drawer. This afternoon was hers.

* CHAPTER FIVE *.

For the first time since she had come to Wesleyan, Melissa was not overjoyed to have Emily's company. Emily went with her to health services but would not stop saying that Melissa had gone stark raving crazy.

"Here you are, you kept your cherry till senior year, and this dude doesn't even use a condom. What got into you-besides the obvious."

"It was different, Em, completely different."

"Must have been. Like did he give you something to drink?"

"It wasn't that way. I felt so close to him. He could see right into me. We could just communicate, like I do with you, the way it used to be with Billy."

They were walking back to the dorm. Melissa had the morning-after pill and a supply of birth control pills. "Did they give you a hard time?" Emily asked, finally easing up.