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were only now beginning to speak to each other. Where had she been, she sometimes wondered, when all the other six-and eight-year-olds were busy playing nurse and doctor, undergoing examinations in the shaded end of the garden? Why hadn’t her mother ever discovered her and some little friend fondling each other in the closet, so she could spend the right number of years afterward ashamed and still curious? Everyone had these stories, it seemed. The rude older boy who stuck his hand in your jeans. The beer-enhanced groping in junior high that might mean “third base.” She’d even have settled, for God’s sake, for the solitary horseback ride through the dusty canyon one afternoon, when the animal’s seductive rhythms brought on a hot-faced excitement.
    Nothing. None of it. Flannery had been kissed and embraced, she’d been dated and danced with, as any pretty teen might be. There had been park fumbles and party fondles, the unexpected encounter with slobber, and within that encounter a thin, faint hint of excitement. But she’d certainly never known orgasm. She had to read about it first, typically, and had then, curious girl, set out to look for it.
    At college, thousands of miles from home and the familiar, under safe cover of darkness, she finally found it. Over and over. Oh! So that’s what they meant. Once Flannery found it, she couldn’t stop wanting that pleasure, enjoying the sound of her own short breaths in the quiet night air. More. Over. Again. She had to make up for lost years.
    Yet, even as she grew ever more learned in this new field of knowledge, she knew that something was missing. She needed someone else—a face, a figure—to take with her into the fantasy.

W hy was Cheryl always around? Why could Flannery not shake her for the shy Puerto Rican girl on the floor below, who spoke with the low lilt of a poet; or even for bleached, surferish Nick with an earring, whose laughter she often seemed to sit next to while eating, though they’d yet to trade anything besides names and home states and complaints about the mold-ridden dorm rooms?
    “Hi, Cheryl.” Flannery was too tired to fight it this morning. She’d had a long night: she’d gone to a late screening of a crime caper that starred a feisty black-haired actress—whose leather-clad antics had kept Flannery up, after, back alone in her room. Her stiff fingers plucked now at the cranberries embedded in the top of a sugar-crusted muffin. She needed their vitamin C.
    “What are you doing here?” Cheryl stood over her at the table. “Aren’t you coming?”
    “To what?” Sometimes college seemed merely an endless exhausting string of appointments. She needed a nap already, and it was not yet ten o’clock.
    “ Section .” Cheryl pulled Flannery’s sweater. The girl couldn’t stop touching her. It was beginning to get out of hand. “For Criticism. Remember?”
    “Oh God. Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.” Flannery swallowed a few more chunks of cranberry muffin, took a gulp of weak coffee, and cleared her dishes. “Thanks. I’d completely forgotten.”
    They ambled over to a remote classroom across some foreign lawn. Flannery had to follow Cheryl’s lead there. She ought to be grateful to her annoying hallmate, really, for her organization, and to prove that she was, Flannery allowed Cheryl to flutter on chirpily about a date she’d had the night before with a cute Iowan named Doug.
    Tuesday Anne. Right. And here it was, Tuesday. If this is Tuesday, it must be Anne , Flannery thought, entertaining herself sleepily with bad jokes of this kind.

D oug was still in the air between them as the two women found the classroom, but for Flannery their entrance was accompanied by a loud internal sound effect.
    Fuck.
    She had to be Anne, of course: Anne had to be her. Smaller in the large beige classroom, but just as vivid, as mouth-perfect; just as burn-bright. Sitting at the head of a broad seminar table looking through a folder of papers,