Berkeley. September 1967. Dinah selected the dormitory site unseen, solely for its proximity to Telegraph Ave. She and her best friend Mary had been parentally prohibited from sharing a room, owing to a recent (chaste) misadventure involving a bonfire and older boys at Stinson Beach. Dinah had no other roommate preference. She picked the dormitory obelisk closest to all the action, and she took her chances with random assignment. She got Denise.

The room was empty when Dinah’s parents left her to settle in. Denise made her appearance soon after.

“Are you my new roomie?” Her voice piped like a child’s, lilting on “room.”

Dinah turned away from organizing her underwear drawer, to first sight. She felt no love and little interest. She intended to get along with Denise of course, but Denise was no Mary. She sounded and looked a lot like what Dinah despised.

Denise was cute. Short, small, with sleek brown hair longer than Dinah’s, round chocolatey eyes, a pert nose, big breasts, tiny feet. Her lips weren’t full but the upper one curled poutily. Her fingers were short and her palms were plump.

“Where you from?” Denise asked after Dinah smile-nodded at her. That voice! High thin sweet. Dinah wondered if Denise had short vocal chords.

“Oh, I just crossed the bay,” Dinah said, pointing roughly northwest over her right shoulder, approximately toward Marin County. “You?”

“West Virginia.” Dinah was surprised. She’d heard of West Virginia but she didn’t know where it was. West of Virginia, obviously, and she thought Virginia was somewhere near Washington. She didn’t know U.S. geography.

Coal mines. Mountains. What they call mountains in the East anyway. Mountains with their tops shaved off, for coal. That’s what Dinah thought about West Virginia. She never wondered about Denise coming all the way to Cal.

For that matter, Dinah didn’t wonder about all the other out-of-state students she met. Half of the kids she encountered during orientation were from LA, but the rest weren’t residents. They were from Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Montana. A clot of them from Washington, D.C. Delaware.

Delaware! The state that makes Maryland look huge. The place with Chancery Court and reverence for corporations. Traveling all the way to UC …

There was a posse of them from Wilmington, but after some sifting three emerged distinct: two Philips and a Moe. The first Philip was brilliant at math and adept at French; he had lank dark hair and acne-scarred cheeks and decided the night they met that he was in love with Dinah. The second Philip went by his last name, Kaseem, which was as strange as coming from Delaware. He was wide-eyed and fat-cheeked and no one ever saw him work at anything except chess. He never graduated. He went straight from Cal to Social Security for a mental disability, and this may be unscientific but no one who knew him then can forget all the acid he dropped, or resist wondering if whatever he has was self-induced.

Then there was Moe-who-would-be-called-Maurice. He was medium tall with medium brown hair, and he affected a slouch. He looked insolent and a little dangerous, but he was just Morris Zumbach from Wilmington. As bright and political as they all were, no one noticed that the group contained amiable Jews and Arabs.

Moe and Philip and Kaseem sauntered into the orientation dance the night Denise and Dinah moved in, and they zigzagged through the crowd – “Hi. Where you from? What’s your major?” – till they got to the young women. Then Philip fell in love with Dinah, Moe and Denise sparked like a match and gasoline, and Kaseem shuffled. Moe affected Frenchness and asked everyone to call him Maurice, but he was already Moe.

Dinah’s social life took a little turn. She didn’t spend as much time with Mary as she had imagined she would. The boys were a year older and lived in apartments a few blocks away. They had kitchens and no curfews, which felt almost as liberating as leaving home had been; Denise and Dinah couldn’t resist stepping into real-life unsupervised apartments. They grew closer than they otherwise would have: spent more time together out of their room than in it, talked about the boys when they weren’t with them. Dinah didn’t return Philip’s regard but they managed to be friends. Within a month she hooked up with his pal Scott from Ohio. Scott and Dinah were relatively hot. Enough so to trade their virginities on a striped mattress on Spaulding Street that December. But they couldn’t hold a candle to the passion that was Denise and Moe. Dinah was struck when Moe asserted that oral sex was the best sex. Denise agreed.