I dreaded meeting her.

As my mother, father, and I arrived on move-in day my head was swimming. This was my new life and here were all the new people in it. A coed dorm held possibilities I dared not outline to my parents. My mother had on her Donna Reed face, which was a particularly sickly smile imbued with positive thinking, dredged up from I never understood where. My father wanted to get the stuff out of the car and get it over with. He was not made, as he pointed out many times that day, "for heavy lifting."

Nancy had gotten there first, chosen her bed, hung up a rainbow wall hanging, and begun to putter with her belongings. Her parents and siblings had stayed to meet me and my family. My mother's Donna Reed was cracking into panic. My father drew himself up to his full academic, Ivy League-professor height, the one from which he looked down on everybody who expressed interest in sports or daily life. "I was born two centuries too late," he is fond of saying, or, "I had no parents, I sprung from the Earth whole and unique." My mother could always manage a zinger: "Your father looks down on everybody because from that height, he's hoping they won't see his bad teeth."

Weird family Sebold meets excited family Pike. The Pikes filtered out and took Nancy to lunch. The word that suited them best, I think, is crestfallen. Their sweet daughter had drawn a superfreak.

Nancy and I didn't talk much in the first week. She would bubble and I would lie in my bunk and stare at the ceiling.

At the bright, happy orientation exercises that the resident assistants led us on-"Okay, we're going to play a game called Living Priorities. Write these down. Studying. Volunteer work. Rushing sororities. Can anyone tell me what they would choose as a priority and why?"-my roommate had hand in air. During one interminable afternoon, when the girls of our floor sat cross-legged on the grass outside the dining hall, listening to a lecture on how to do laundry, I thought I had been dropped off at a camp for morons by my parents.

I stomped into the dorm. It had been a week and I had refused to go to the dining hall with the other girls for dinner. When Nancy asked why, I said I was fasting. Later, when I was hungry, I asked her to bring me food. "It has to be white food," I said. "No colors. Erik Satie ate only white food." My poor roommate brought home mounds of cottage cheese and giant pearl tapioca. I lay in bed, hating Syracuse and listening to Erik Satie, from whose liner notes my new regime came.

One night I heard noise in the room next to mine. Everyone else was at dinner. I went out into the hall. A door was slightly ajar.

"Hello?" I said.

It was the most beautiful girl on the floor. The one my mother had pointed out on move-in day. "Just be glad that gorgeous blonde isn't your roommate. The line of boys would be out the door."

"Hello."

I went in. She had just gotten a whole footlocker of food sent from home. It was open against the wall. After a week of white food, it was an oasis. M &M's and cookies and crackers and Starbursts and fruit leather. Products I had never even heard of or wasn't allowed to have.

But she wasn't eating. She was braiding her hair. A French braid. I expressed my admiration and told her I'd never been able to do more than simple braids.

"I'll do it for you if you want."

I sat on her bed and she stood behind me and began to take the small pinches of hair and work a skull-numbingly tight French braid down the back of my head.

She finished the braid and I thanked her and looked in the mirror. We both sat and then laid down on the two twin beds in the room. We were quiet, staring at the ceiling.

"Can I tell you something?" I asked.

"Sure."

"I hate it here."

"Oh, my God!" she said, sitting up, flushed with permission. "I hate it here too!"

We ate our way through her trunk of food. I have a memory of actually sitting in the trunk with the food but this can't be right, can it?

Mary Alice's roommate was what we called experienced. She was from Brooklyn. Her name was Debbie and her nickname was Double D. She smoked and thought little of us. She had a from-home boyfriend who was older. And I mean older. Early forties, but with the agelessness of Joey Ramone. He was a DJ somewhere and had a deep smoker's voice. When he visited, they went to hotels and Debbie returned to the dorm with her cheeks flushed and clearly, again, disgusted by us. Mary Alice had long toes and would feed me crackers by digging them into the box. We dressed up in stupid outfits and, with coupons from cocoa mix, sent away for a real Swiss Miss cardboard chalet.

Debbie began two-timing her boyfriend with a male cheerleader from school. Her new boyfriend's name was Harry Weiner and of course Mary Alice and I had endless fun with that. Once, on a dare, I hid inside the Swiss Miss chalet while Debbie and Harry went at it on the bed. At a certain point, dare or no, I felt too uncomfortable and crawled, on my hands and knees, with the cardboard chalet moving with me like some sort of cartoon spy's camouflage, over to the door to make my escape.

Debbie was incensed. She put in for a room transfer. Mary Alice never stopped thanking me.

Within a few weeks of the start of freshman year, a group of girls gathered in the hall outside our rooms. We sat on the floor, with our backs against the walls, our legs outstretched or Indian-style. The former homecoming queens or future flirts tucked their legs to one side, while the jocks on scholarship, like my friend Linda, didn't think twice about how they sat or looked while surrounded by their peers. Slowly the stories came out-who was and wasn't a virgin.

Some were obvious. Like Sara, who sold hash out of her black-lit room, where she had a stereo system that cost more than most of our fathers' cars, on which she played the classic stoner tracks of Traffic and Led Zep. "Some guy's in there," her assigned roommate would say, and we would throw this girl a sleeping bag and tell her not to snore.

Then there was Chippie. I had never heard the word before. Didn't know it meant whore. Thought it actually was her name, and innocently said, "Hi, Chippie, how are you?" on the way to the showers one morning. She burst into tears and never talked to me again.

There was also a girl who was a sophomore and lived at the end of the hall. She dated a townie and modeled for Joel Belfast, a semi-famous painter in the art department. The townie liked to chain her up to her bunk bed and we would see her leather and ultrasuede bras and panties as she hurried to and from the lavatory in the morning. The townie rode a motorcycle and had an atrophied left leg. Once, on the night the campus security arrived because they were making so much noise, I saw the scar that rose up out of the top of his boot and snaked up past his hip and around the back of his body. She was stoned and screaming on the bed, where she remained chained up. Soon after, she moved into off-campus housing somewhere.

These girls and Debbie were the only four on a hall of fifty that I knew for sure weren't virgins. The rest had to be, I assumed, because I was.

But even Nancy told a story. She had lost it in a Datsun to her high school boyfriend. Tree in a Toyota. Diane in the basement of a boyfriend's house. Her boyfriend's parents had knocked on the window during the act. The other stories I've forgotten, and remember only that the make of the car became a nickname for various girls. Few were the glorious cases-a boyfriend who had bought a ring, chosen a special night, and brought flowers, or had his older brother's downtown apartment for the day. When these girls spoke we didn't believe them anyway. It was better to say Datsun or Toyota or Ford; it was dues for a peer group, a way to belong.

When that evening of revelation was through, Mary Alice and I, among those outside their rooms, were the only two virgins on the hall.