“The thing is,” Denise would start her speeches to Dinah, forefinger aimed like a pistol shaking with her vehemence. “The thing is …” She stabbed the air with those words. She’d be bouncing naked on her twin bed, on her side of the room, hair flapping, breasts swaying, belly shaking, angrily declaiming over some offense of Moe’s, threatening often to kill herself, to throw that unclad body from the window at her side, even though they were only three floors up and the sliding glass could be opened maybe four inches.

It seemed like the only time she spent in the dorm room was after a fight with Moe. She’d storm in, heated flushed indignant at least, and pull off clothes she’d worn too long. She had fine-pored olive skin and her big breasts hung in U’s. Her aureoles were brown. She was slim but her belly draped a bit over her crotch, wiggled oddly when she then climbed to bounce on her small toes on her small bed, O-eyed and O-mouthed with that finger out: “The thing is …”

Dinah knew Moe hit Denise sometimes, and she concluded that Denise asked for it. It was like a dance they ran and each knew the steps; the reward was some kind of fabulous makeup sex, busy mouths locked on each other’s loins for hours, hours, that Scott and Dinah couldn’t even imagine well enough to mock.

Dinah saw it once from the other side. Instead of being in the dorm room studying when Denise tromped in, she was at the fight when Denise stomped out. They were all at Moe’s and Kaseem’s place. Scott and Kaseem were playing a long game of chess and Dinah was reading when sounds of strong argument began in the bedroom. Epithets and drawer slamming.

Soon they were in view. Denise was leaving, Moe was following yelling, she was turning screaming, and he was reaching for her at the door, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her a little to emphasize his words. It was scary, so sudden, but then they saw Denise was moving under those hand-covered shoulders, resonating like a tuning fork, amplifying the sway till her back was smacking the door. Like pushing the Ouija piece. They witnessed her helping the passion look good before she tore out of there for the privacy of her bouncing bed.

They saw all that, the choreography, but they somehow never realized that the sags and shadows of Denise’s body signified more than harmless ventures into sex. Why that girl had birthed at least one baby, and Dinah never knew it till recently, gazing at her own used belly, thinking back.

West Virginia. Denise didn’t go back much. She and Moe didn’t make it of course; neither did Scott and Dinah. They lost touch after that year, but Dinah heard tidings of Denise last month.

She married a fireman. They moved to Nevada. Denise settled down in the Sparks area and raised four kids.

Dinah got the news from Philip’s wife Rita, after connecting with them on the Internet. Philip seems successful: a tenured math professor well-married to a self-employed businesswoman. Through them she learned about Kaseem’s disability and Moe’s death in a rock climbing mishap. They told her no one knew where Scott was. They forwarded some e-mails from Denise.

Her letters were creepy. It sounded like she had gone completely over to the other side. A regular church participant. Almost fundamentalist. Profoundly anti-choice. So consistent about denying her past deviance that she almost believed the rewrite herself. It was easy to resist re-acquainting with her.

The view of Denise is much more satisfying from here, decades backward, noticing clues about histories that nobody thought of then. Dinah can still see Moe edged forward on his chair, fired by argument, punctuating his opinions with sharp drags on the unfiltered cigarette between his orange fingertips. She’ll never erase the vision of wide-eyed Denise in vehement, naked, chaotic bounce. They were all young then, weary and excitable, coiled in abusive ballet. It amazes Dinah, really, to note how little they noticed.