These fumbled sexual exploits in the backs of cars or in the basements of someone's parents' house seem wonderful to me. Nancy was ashamed of having lost "it," as we all called virginity, in a Datsun, but it was, after all, a normal part of growing up.

In letters sent me over the breaks that year Tree and Nancy were spending every night with their high school boyfriends. For Tree there was talk of a ring being bought. These girls began to take over my landscape.

I also got letters from the boys I'd worked with at my summer job after high school, particularly an older guy named Gene. I begged Gene to send me a photo. Of course, I pretended to the other girls he was more than just a friend, and I wanted evidence to show around.

The photo he sent was clearly a few years old. He was thinner and had more hair but there was the handle-bar mustache that shouted out man. When I finally got the photo late in the first semester I showed it around. Mary Alice cut to the core. "Is it the seventies still? I feel a disco ball dropping down." Nancy pretended to be impressed but she and Tree were too busy keeping connected with their real boyfriends-boys they'd gone to high school with, whom they had promised to marry someday.

For her part, Mary Alice was obsessed with, in order: Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger. On the subject of Bruce-for he was our familiar-she was apoplectic. For her birthday I got a T-shirt made. MRS. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN it said, in puffy, too-big iron-on letters. She slept in it every night.

Honestly, when I look back, I can say I was in love with Mary Alice for most of my freshman year. I loved watching her get away with things and being a troop member in her carefully planned out escapades. Stealing a sheet cake from the dining hall became an operation worthy of James Bond. It involved discovering the tunnel between two dorms that led to the odd door that was always locked. There were keys that needed to be stolen and people who needed to be distracted and finally, late at night, pink cake that needed to be disguised and hustled up to our rooms.

But my dorm girlfriends were also fond of the bars on nearby Marshall Street and by spring they went regularly to fraternity keg parties. I hated fraternity parties. "We're just meat!" I yelled above the music to Tree, who was ahead of me in the line for the keg. "So what?" she shouted back. "It's fun!" Tree became a little sister. Mary Alice was always popular no matter how she felt. No fraternity house would turn away a natural blonde and her attendant friends.

I was taking a poetry class and in it, there were two boys, Casey Hartman and Ken Childs, who were unlike any in my dorm. They were sophomores, so I thought of them as mature. They were art students, taking the poetry class as an elective. They showed me the art building, a beautiful old thing that was yet to be restored. It had studios in it with carpeted platforms for the models in the life studies classes and old couches and chairs that the students crashed in. It smelled like paint and turpentine and was open all night so that students could work because, unlike most majors, you couldn't do your homework for things like metal welding in your room.

They pointed out a decent Chinese restaurant and Ken took me to the Emerson museum in downtown Syracuse. I began to wait for them outside their classes and go to the art openings they and their friends had. They were both from Troy, New York. Casey was on a creative fellowship and never had money. I would run into him and he would be having tea three times from the same bag for dinner. I only knew pieces of Casey's story. His father was in jail. His mother was dead.

It was Casey whom I had a crush on. But he didn't trust all the liberal arts girls who found him romantic, his scars from a birthmark and beatings things they wanted to cure. He talked fast, like an erupting coffeepot, and sometimes didn't make sense. I didn't care. He was a freak and so much more human, I believed, than the boys in fraternities or in my dining hall.

But Ken was the one who liked me and who, like me, liked to talk. The three of us formed a frustrated triangle. I complained about how many of the girls at Marion were so experienced and how I felt lame. Ken and Casey were quiet at first but then it came out. They felt lame too.

When there was a party at the dorm-and kegs were allowed in your room back then-I would leave and go walk on the quad. I would end up in the art building, making instant coffee in the basement, and then sit for hours reading Emily Dickinson or Louise Bogan in the spring-shot sofas and chairs spotted throughout the building. I began to think of this place as my home.

Sometimes I would walk back to Marion in hopes the party would be over, and find it had seemingly barely begun. I didn't even go inside, I just turned around. I slept in the art classrooms, on the carpeted platforms meant to warm models' feet. They weren't big enough to stretch out on, so I would curl up into a ball.

One night, I was lying in a classroom in the dark. I had closed the door and made a bed in the back. The lights in the hallways were always on and the lightbulbs were covered in mesh cages so they wouldn't break or be stolen. Just as I was nodding off, the door to the hallway opened and a man stood outlined by the light coming from behind him. He was tall and wearing a top hat. I couldn't see who it was.

He turned on the light. It was Casey. "Sebold," he said, "what are you doing here?"

"I'm sleeping."

"Welcome, comrade!" he said, and tipped his hat. "I will be your Cerberus for the night."

He sat in the dark and watched me sleep. I remember, before I nodded off, wondering if Casey could ever find me pretty enough to kiss. It was the first night I'd ever spent with a boy I liked.

I look back and I see Casey as a guard dog. I want to say that under his guard I felt safe, but the person writing this is not the person who curled up on the carpeted platforms inside dark classrooms. The world was not divided for me then as it is now. Ten days later, on the last night of school, I would enter what I've thought of since as my real neighborhood, a land of subdivision where tracts are marked off and named. There are two styles available: the safe and the not safe.

The burden of being father and mother to a rape victim fell very heavily on my parents during the summer of 1981. The immediate question that loomed over them was what to do with me. Where should I go? How could I be least damaged? Was it even a consideration for me to return to Syracuse?

The option most discussed was Immaculata College.

It was too late in the game for me to enter any normal college, which had already accepted its students, both freshmen and transfers, for the following year. But my mother was sure Immaculata would take me. It was a girls' school and it was Catholic and she said a major advantage was that I could live at home. My mother or father could drive me the five miles down Route 30 each day and then pick me up when classes were over.

My parents' priorities were my safety and the chance not to miss a year of college. I did my best to listen to my mother. My father was so clearly disheartened by her plan that he could barely muster the requisite endorsement (but then, he had no other options). From the very beginning I saw Immaculata as one thing and one thing only. It was a prison. I would be attending it for one reason alone: because I had been raped.

It was also ludicrous. The idea of me, me, I said to my parents, attending a religious academy! I had picked theoretical arguments with the deacon of our church, cultivated any obscene narrative I could get my hands on, and imitated Father Breuninger's sermons to the delight of my family and even Father Breuninger himself. I think Immaculata and the threat of it inspired me, more than anything else, to come up with an airtight argument.