I wanted to return to Syracuse, I said, because the rapist had already taken so much from me. I was not going to let him take anything more. If I returned home and lived in my bedroom, I would never know what my life would have been like.

Also, I had been granted admission to a poetry workshop led by Tess Gallagher, and a fiction workshop led by Tobias Wolff. If I did not go back, I would be denied both of these opportunities. Both of my parents knew the one thing I cared about was words. No one of Gallagher's or Wolff's caliber would be teaching at Immaculata. There were no creative-writing workshops offered at the school.

So they let me go back. My mother still refers to it as one of the hardest things she ever had to do, much harder than any long drive she had to take over many bridges and through countless tunnels.

That's not to say I wasn't scared. I was. So were my parents. But we tried to work the odds. I would stay out of the park and my father would get on the phone and write letters to get me a single in Haven Hall, the only all-girls' dorm. I would have a private phone installed in my room. I would ask to be escorted by campus security guards if I had to walk after dark. I would not go to Marshall Street alone after 5:00 P.M. or hang out. I would stay out of the student bars. This didn't sound like the freedom college was supposed to promise, but then, I wasn't free. I had learned it, as my mother said I learned everything, the hard way.

Haven Hall had a reputation. Large and circular, set on a concrete base, it was an oddity among the other square or rectangular buildings that comprised the dorms on the hill. The dining hall, which had better food than many others, sat up off the ground.

But the weird architecture and the good food were not at the heart of Haven's campuswide rep. It was the residents. Rumor had it that only virgins and horse lovers (read: lesbians) lived in the single rooms of Haven Hall. Soon I knew the "tights and dykes" moniker to include a variety of female freaks. Haven was home to virgins, yes, and to lesbians, but it was also home to jocks on scholarship, rich kids, foreign girls, nerds, and minority girls. There were professionals-those students who traveled a lot and had things like a commercial contract with Chap Stick that necessitated flying to the Swiss Alps on the random weekend. There were children of minor celebrities and sluts on the mend. Transfer students and older students and girls that for a variety of reasons didn't fit in.

It was not a particularly friendly place. I don't remember who lived on one side of me. The girl on the other-an Israeli from Queens who was attending the S. I. Newhouse School of Communications and who practiced her radio voice incessantly-was not my friend. Mary Alice and the girls from freshman year, Tree, Diane, Nancy, and Linda, all lived in Kimmel Hall, sister to Marion Hall.

I moved into Haven, said good-bye to my parents, and stayed in my room. The next day, I traversed the road from Haven to Kimmel, my skin on fire. I was taking in everyone, looking for Him.

Because Kimmel was a sophomore dorm and many of the people from Marion had naturally ended up in Kimmel, I knew most of the girls and boys who lived there. They knew me too. It was as if, when they caught sight of me, they had seen a ghost. No one expected I would come back to campus. The fact that I did made me weirder still. Somehow my return licensed them to judge me-after all, by returning, hadn't I asked for this?

In the lobby of Kimmel I ran into two boys who had lived below me the year before. They stopped dead when they saw me but didn't speak. I looked down, stood in front of the elevator, and pressed the button. A few other boys came in the front door and greeted them. I didn't turn around, but when the elevator arrived I stepped in and turned to face the front. As the doors closed, I saw five boys standing there, staring at me. I could hear it without needing to stick around. "That's the girl that got raped the last day of school," one of the boys who knew me would say. What else they said, and what they wondered, I've kept myself from imagining. I was having enough trouble just walking paths and riding elevators.

But the second floor was a girls' hall, so I thought the worst was over. I was wrong. I got off the elevator and someone rushed to me, a girl I had barely known from freshman year.

"Oh, Alice," she said, her voice dripping. She took my hand without asking and held it. "You've come back."

"Yes," I said. I stood there and looked at her. I had a memory of borrowing her toothpaste once in the bathroom.

How can I describe her look? She was oozing, she was sorry for me and thrilled to be talking to me. She was holding the hand of the girl who had been raped on the last day of school freshman year.

"I didn't think you'd return," she said. I wanted my hand back.

The elevator had descended and risen again. A crowd of girls got off.

"Mary Beth," the girl standing with me said. "Mary Beth, over here."

Mary Beth, a plain, homely girl whom I didn't recognize, came over.

"This is Alice; she lived on the hall in Marion with me last year."

Mary Beth blinked.

Why didn't I move? Walk down the hall and get away? I don't know. I think I was too stunned. I was understanding a language I'd never keyed into before. "This is Alice" translated to "the girl I told you about, you know, the raped one." Mary Beth's blink told me that. If it hadn't, her next comment sure did.

"Wow," this homely girl said, "Sue's told me all about you."

Mary Alice interrupted this exchange, coming out of her room nearby and seeing me. Often, because of Mary Alice's beauty, people thought of her as a snob if she didn't go out of her way with them. But for me, in a moment like this, people's reactions to her were a plus. I was still in love with her and now my adulation included everything she was that I no longer was: fearless, faith filled, innocent.

She took me to her room, which she was sharing with Tree. All the girls of freshman year, save Nancy, were there. Tree tried with me, but we would never recover from that moment in the shower after the rape. I was uncomfortable. Then there was Diane. She was patterning herself so heavily after Mary Alice-imitating her language and trying to compete in coming up with dopey schemes-that I didn't trust her. She greeted me kindly if eagerly, and watched our mutual idol for her cues. Linda stayed by the window. I had liked Linda. She was muscular and tan and had close-cropped black curls. I liked to think of her as the jock version of me-an outsider who got along by having something that distinguished her in the group. She was a top-rung athlete; I was a weirdo, just funny enough to fit in.

Perhaps it was a kind of guilt at the memory of passing out that accounted for Linda's inability to meet my gaze for very long. I don't remember who it was that day, or how it got around to this, but someone asked me why I had even come back.

It was aggressive. The tone it was asked in implied that in having come back I had done something wrong-something not normal. Mary Alice caught the tone and didn't like it. She said something short and sweet, like "Because it's her fucking right," and we left the room. I counted my blessing in Mary Alice and didn't stop to count my losses. I was back in school. I had classes to attend.

Some first impressions are indelible, like mine of Tess Gallagher. I was registered for two of her classes: her workshop, and a sophomore-level survey course of literature. The survey course was at 8:30 A.M. two days a week, not a popular time slot.

She walked in and strode to the front of the room. I was sitting in the back. The first-day sizing-up ritual began. She was not a dinosaur. This was good. She had long brown hair held back by combs near her temples. This hinted at an underlying humanity. Most noticeable, though, were her highly arched eyebrows and Cupid's-bow lips.