We were in the Italian restaurant when Frank said that, and Lauren stifled a giggle and drank from her glass of red wine quickly. I reached beneath the table and squeezed her thigh, that beautiful, long, smooth leg, that fleshy yet tight (I want to say silky but not really) thigh. Looking at her, I was so crazy about this girl and so relieved I had a decent-looking perhaps permanent girlfriend that it hit me, in that Italian restaurant in Manchester, and on the ride back to Camden—getting a hard-on just from thinking about the way she kissed me last night—that I had something like four papers due from last term that I wasn’t ever going to start, and it wouldn’t matter since I was with Lauren. It didn’t even bother me too much that she was a Poetry major since girls who are Poetry majors are usually impossible to deal with. She asked me what my major was and I said “Computers” (which might end up being true) just to impress her, and I guess it did because she smiled, raised those deep blue long-lashed eyes up, and said, “Really?” that secret yet noticeable dirty smile curling her lips.

Since we couldn’t find any parties in Manchester we drove back to campus and hung out in her room. I had my pipe with me and some good pot and we got high. I was going to bring out some coke I had scored earlier but was afraid they’d all get pissed-off and think that maybe I was really a Pre-med major. We laid half-on, half-off the big double mattress that took up a great deal of floor space in her room in Canfield, talking about people we didn’t like, classes we didn’t go to, how lame the Freshmen were, why the flag was half-mast. Lauren said some girl offed herself last night. Frank and I laughed and said it was probably because she didn’t get screwed. Judy and Lauren got pissed off (but not really, the pot had calmed us down, had buried any tension there might have been) and said it was probably because she had. The radio played Talking Heads, REM, New Order, old Iggy Pop. I moved closer to her. She began lighting candles.

I knew she loved me, and not only because of the notes, which I refused to bring up (why embarrass her?), but because when she looked at me, I could see, for the first time, just sense, that she was the only person I’d ever met who wasn’t looking through me. She was really the first person who looked and stopped. It was a hard thing to explain to myself, to deal with, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the most important aspect. Her beauty was. It was an all-American beauty, the sort of beauty that can only be found in American girls, with the blond hair, and the br**sts that only American girls have. That beautifully proportioned body, thin but not anorexic, her skin, WASP creamy, and delicately pure, in total contrast to her expressions, which always seemed slightly dirty as if she was a bad girl, and this excited me even more. I didn’t care about her background which was strictly Upper East Side Park Avenue bullshit, but she wasn’t bitchy and paranoid and defensive about it in that way girls from Park Avenue inevitably are, because all I wanted to do was look at her face, which seemed miraculously, perfectly put together, and at her body, which was constructed just as beautifully if not better.

And I told her all this, that night, when the four of us lay on her mattress in the dark, the candles burning out one by one, listening to classic songs on the radio, stoned, Judy and Frank drunk, passed-out, wasted, and I couldn’t wait; couldn’t wait to go back to my room, and I moved on top of her quickly, quietly and she put her legs around mine and squeezed. She wept gratefully that night, chewing my lips, her hands slipping under my jeans, then moving up my back, pushing me into her deeper, the two of us moving slowly even when we were coming together; still silent she buried her face in my neck; we were panting loudly; I was still hard. I didn’t pull out but whispered something to her ear, some of her hair matted against my face, which was hot and sweating. She whispered something back, and it was then that I knew she loved me. That was also when Judy spoke up in the darkness and said, “I hope you two enjoyed that as much as we did,” and then I heard Frank laugh, and we cracked up also, too tired to be embarrassed, me still in her not wanting to get out, her arms still draped around my back.

Sunday, after a long lunch at The Brasserie on the edge of town, we spent the rest of the day in bed together.

CLAY People are afraid to walk across campus after midnight. Someone on acid whispers this to me, in my ear, one Sunday dawn after I have been up on crystal meth most of the week, crying, and I know it is true. This person is in my computer class (which is now my major) and I see him in the weight room and sometimes I see him at the municipal pool on Main Street, in town. A place I spend what some people think is an inordinate amount of time. (They also have a good tanning salon next door.) I keep my Walkman on a lot this term, listening to groups that have broken up: The Eagles, The Doors, The Go-Go’s, The Plimsouls, because I do not want to hear about the mutilated girl they found cut up in North Ashton (literally torn in half) by something the townspeople call The Ashton Ripper, or about the girl in Swan House who slit her throat in that house’s downstairs bathtub and who bled to death on the night of The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or hear the voices of the town’s incest victims wandering dumbly through the Price Chopper, a place I like to hang out in, a place that reminds me of California, a place that reminds me of the frozen food section of Gelson’s, a place that reminds me of home.