The three of us had begun to adjust to one another by November of that year. After two months Lila and I were getting used to Pat's love of pranks. He liked to touch a spot on your collarbone and say, "What's that?" When you looked down, he chucked you under the chin. Or he would bring you a cup of coffee and, when you reached for it, pull it away. He teased us and when he went too far, Lila and I whined in response. Lila, who had a younger brother, told me that with Pat in the house, it was as if she had never left home.

In a course called Ecstatic Religion, I sat next to a boy named Marc. Like Jamie, he was tall and blond, and in small ways didn't fit in. He didn't go to Syracuse. He was getting a degree in landscape architecture from SUNY's forestry school, which, like a dependent little sister, shared buildings and grounds with Syracuse. He had also come of age in New York's Chelsea district. This made him wise beyond his twenty-one years, and sophisticated, or so it seemed to me. He had friends with lofts in Soho. Places, he promised, that he would show me someday.

After religion class we had chaste but passionate sessions about that day's topics. The history of shamans and the occult garnered our intense intellectual scrutiny. He gave me tapes of Philip Glass and knew things about music and art that I didn't. He spoke wryly on subjects like Jacqueline Susann's adoration of Ethel Merman. He represented what my mother had always said was the best of New York-culture by birthright-even if the love trysts of "the Merm" and the author of Valley of the Dolls weren't what she meant.

Suddenly, Steve's earnestness, his caring attention to my pains and ills, didn't seem as attractive as Marc's "seen it all, done it all" world. When I told my jokes: "Why doesn't a rape trial rate a mention on ye ol' résumé?" Marc would laugh and join the riff whereas Steve would stop me, place a hand on my shoulder, and say, "You know that's not really funny, right?" Marc had a car, cable television, other girls thought he was cute. He wasn't afraid of drinking and he smoked cigarettes like a chimney. He cursed and because he was going to school for architecture, he drew.

He had also been honest and up front with me from the beginning. When we'd met, the year before at a party, we were clearly attracted to each other. He told me later that three boys had pulled him into the bathroom after they saw him talking to me.

"FYI, Marc. That girl's been raped."

Marc had said, "So?"

And they had looked at him dismayed. "Do we have to spell it out for you?"

But Marc was a natural feminist. His mother had been unceremoniously dumped for a much younger woman. One of his sisters was a lesbian and called her two male cats "the girls," the other was a lawyer with the Manhattan district attorney's office. He had read more Virginia Woolf than I had and he introduced me to the work of Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. He was a revelation to me.

I was to him as well. He knew names and theories I had never heard, but when he met me, I was the only woman he knew who had been raped. Or who he knew to have been.

I began having fun with Marc while I struggled with Steve.

"How many security guards does one girl need?" Lila asked one day after I'd been on the phone twice to each.

I didn't have an answer save to say I had never been popular with boys and suddenly I felt I was: Two boys both wanted me.

Our old roommate Sue had done a photo-essay for her senior project and she had left all sorts of makeup behind. One night, when Pat was at the library, I decided to play fashion photog and snap pictures of Lila. I dressed her up. I made her take off her glasses and we painted heavy kohl lines across her eyes. 1 really laid it on. Deep blues and blacks surrounded her eyes. Her lips were a horrible dark red. I posed her in the hallway of the apartment and began to point and shoot. We were having a wonderful time, just the two of us. I had her lie on the floor and glance up, or bring her shirt down over her shoulder for what we called "a skin shot." I mimicked what I thought real fashion photographers said to get models in the mood. "It's hot, you're in the Sahara, a beautiful man is bringing you a pina colada," or, "Somewhere, the only true love of your life is freezing to death in Antarctica. He has one precious photo of you to keep him alive and this is it. I want sex, sincerity, searing intelligence." When she wasn't distorting her features to achieve "the look," she was cracking up. I posed her in front of the full-length mirror on the outside of the bathroom door and took a long shot with me in it. I had her sit with her head in profile and her hands in black gloves.

My favorites back then were by far the more dramatic. In them, she is crawling on her hands and knees, blind eyes wide and lined with color, down the hall outside my bedroom. I think of them now as Lila's "before" shots.

A week before Thanksgiving 1983, the poet Robert Ely gave a reading in the auditorium of the Hall of Languages. I was anxious to see him, having greedily read his poems at the urging of both Tess and Hayden Carruth. Lila was at home studying for the kind of killer test that, as a poetry major, I no longer had to concern myself with. Pat had gone to study in Bird Library.

Tess and Hayden were both in attendance. So were the department heads. Ely was a big-name poet and the room was packed. I sat in the middle of the small auditorium. My friend Chris had graduated the year before and so now I attended readings solo. Twenty minutes into the reading, I felt sharp, stabbing pains in my abdomen. I looked at my digital watch. It was 8:56 P.M.

I considered toughing it out, but the pains were too intense. My stomach was cramping. At the end of a poem, I stood and noisily made my way between people's knees and the back of the row of seats in front of me.

Out in the hall, I called Marc. He had a car. I told him to meet me at Bird Library. I was too sick to take the bus home, I had used the same phone two years before to call my parents, but I had scrupulously avoided it since then. That night I failed to honor superstition.

Marc had to take a shower. "Twenty minutes at most," he said.

"I'll be the one cleaving to my abdomen," I tried to joke. "Try to hurry."

As I waited outside Bird, I began to tense up even more. Something was wrong but I had no idea what it was.

Finally, after forty minutes, Marc pulled up. We drove off campus and up Euclid, where many students lived in run-down wooden houses.

We turned the corner onto my street. Up at the end of the block, where Lila and I lived, were five black-and-whites with their lights going. The policemen were out running around, talking to people.

I knew.

"Oh my God, oh my God," I started saying. "Let me out, let me out."

Marc was flustered. "Let me park, let me go with you."

"No, let me out, now."

He drove into a driveway and I got out. I didn't wait for him. All the lights were on in our building. Our front door was open. I walked right in.

Two uniformed policemen stopped me in the small foyer.

"This is a crime scene. You'll have to leave."

"I live here," I said. "Is it Lila? What happened? Please."

Involuntarily I started peeling off the layers of my clothing and letting them fall on the floor. My winter hat, my scarf, my gloves, jacket, and down vest. I was frantic.

In our living room, there were more cops. One of the uniforms made a gesture to someone there and began, "She says she lives-"

"Alice?" the plainclothes detective said.

I recognized him instantly.

"Sergeant Clapper?"

When I said his name, the uniforms ceased restraining me.

"It's Detective Clapper now," he said, smiling. "What are you doing here?"