Beware of Love in Technicolor Read Free Page A

feel like kids at camp. We were at college, for Christ’s sake. There were posters all over the dining hall announcing a bonfire to be held that night on the football field to welcome us. It was called the “Freshman Jamboree.”
                  That gives an idea how good the football team was.
                  Skipping the questionable meat products, I loaded my plate full of near-wilted salad, and a bowl of Cap’n Crunch to be safe, and found a table where Molly’s Extreme Friends were sitting. They were a loud, rugged looking group of fleece vests and Birkenstocks.
                  Hippies. I was starting off my college social career at the hippie table. Good God.
                  Ben was there. Plus the dark-haired kid, and three girls. Molly squealed something unintelligible and squeezed herself in next to a blonde girl named Alex.
                  Remember Musical Chairs? Remember that feeling of being the kid without the seat, standing there adrift when the music stopped, while the other players squirmed gleefully in their hard-won chairs?
                  Ben looked up from his plate of potato salad, and seeing me standing there, pushed over to his right.
                  “Thanks,” I said, and sat down, knee to knee, with him.
                  Across the table, I noticed the girl in the green sweatshirt with the biggish sort of nose elbow the girl named Alex in the ribs. But before I could introduce myself, the squawking began.
                  “This is my roomie, Greer!” Molly gushed to the girls. They stared at her as if she had just farted.
                  “This here’s Alex,” she said to me without missing a beat. “And Bonnie, and Sarah. They’re all best buds from Connecticut.”
                  Molly talked like one of those voices out of Seventeen magazine. She used words like “buds,” and “fave,” and “hunky.” Except that coming out of her, the words acquired the surreal twang of an East Texas accent.
                  I smiled meekly at the three friends and went about silently eating my salad. They were New England girls, like me, and we all understood how to shut one another out. The fact that the weird Molly Maloney brought me to the table was reason enough for them to cast me off.
                  But when Ben turned to me and started a conversation, I could see all three tense up and hone in on what we were saying.
                  “So, Greer,” he began, his blue eyes relaxed and friendly, “that’s an interesting name. Does it mean anything?”
                  “It means vigilant,” I told him, eyeing the Pissy Posse. “My mother named me after the actress, Greer Garson.”
                  “Would I know anything with her in it?”
                  “ Goodbye, Mr. Chips ,” I answered.
                  He stared at me blankly, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to break the moment, though I had no idea what to do with it.
                  Alex knew exactly what to do with our moment.
                  “Nobody watches those lame old movies anymore,” she laughed, throwing her long, albeit stringy, blonde hair over her shoulder. Sort of the female equivalent of peeing on something. “Remember when we saw Ghost last week at that little theater up in that backwoods mountain town?”
                  And just like that, the conversation turned and I was back out on the fringes.
                  As I have already mentioned, boys were a foreign land to me at that juncture of my young life. I was also relatively new to the world of being cute, as I had only dropped my baby fat that summer. I wasn’t tall, but I was fit from hours spent on the tennis court. My hair has always been so dark it appears black, with thick waves. My