There was a posse of guys from Wilmington, but after some sifting three emerged distinct: two Alans and a Moe. The first Alan was brilliant at math and adept at French, and he was just then changing his name spelling to Alain. He had lank dark hair and acne-scarred cheeks and decided the night they met that he was in love with Mel. The second Alan went by his last name, Nasri, 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. Mel’s not sure he ever graduated. She heard he went straight from Cal to Social Security for some mental disability, and she knows it’s unkind but she can’t ignore all the acid he dropped – she’s sure 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 like James Dean. He looked insolent and a little dangerous, but he was just Morris Zimmerman from Wilmington, and Mel never realized till now that on top of being just Moe from Delaware, bombastic about books and politics and really not very good at French, his name almost certainly meant he grew up Jewish, and somehow, even after all the guidance Mel got from her aunt and her mother and the rest of the sisterhood, she didn’t notice that. Then too, she never realized that Nasri was an Arabic name, with whatever that suggests.

Moe and Alain and Nasri sauntered into the orientation dance the night Mel and Michelle moved in, and they zigzagged through the crowd – “Hi. Where you from? What’s your major?” – till they got to the roommates. Then Alain fell in love with Mel, Moe and Michelle sparked like a match and gasoline, and Nasri shuffled.

Mel’s social life took a little turn. She didn’t leave her dormitory neighborhood to spend as much time with Ellen as she had imagined she would. The boys were a year older and lived in apartments a block away. They had kitchens and no curfews, which felt almost as liberating to the girls as moving out of their parents’ houses; they couldn’t resist stepping into real-life unsupervised apartments. Mel and Michelle 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. Mel didn’t return Alain’s regard but they managed to be friends. Within a month she connected with his pal Mike from D.C., so she was in the picture with or without Alain. She and Mike 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 Michelle and Moe.

“The thing is,” Michelle used to start her speeches to Mel in their room, forefinger aimed like a pistol shaking with her vehemence. “The thing is…” Mel will always remember her stabbing 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 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 only opened six inches. Small as Michelle was, even she would never wedge through that space.

It seemed like the only time she spent in the dorm 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 like Mel’s mother’s. Her aureoles were brown instead of pallid pink like Mel’s. 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…”