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want a drink? I’m going to get one. I’m dying of thirst.”

B lurred moments later, Flannery was standing over a rickety kitchen table that had been flash-flooded with alcohol: an unruly mixture of rum, gin, and vodka and a variety of drifting, bubbly mixers. Dead half-limes and -lemons had washed up on the shore; some red plastic cups swam tipsily sideways in the current. Others were scattered upright on other surfaces, but they were all half-filled, or lipstick-stained, or choked with damp cigarette butts. None were clean. The scene was vomitous, generally, and Flannery could feel the dangerous rise in her throat of whatever her own poison had been—vodka and grapefruit juice, probably, which someone somewhere had told her was called a Salty Dog.
    She could leave now, before it came to staggering around looking for the bathroom. No. No. Flannery breathed. She moved over to the window. She wasn’t as bad as all that. If she could just pause here a minute; then she could come to terms, slowly, with her inability to find that wretchedly beautiful woman a drink. Or she could just sneak away altogether, to escape her shame.
    “I thought you might have gotten lost.”
    Here she was again! Jesus Christ. She had followed Flannery in here.
    “Or that you were planning to ditch me.” Anne’s voice was sly.
    “Oh no. Never! You know I’d never do that.” Flannery kept her cheek close to the pane to stay cool. What had she just said? “No. I was just stopping for a minute to get some air.”
    “Good idea. It’s so damned stuffy here. Let’s open the other one, too.”
    But the other window seemed stuck. The two women had to stand together and push to overcome its reluctance. Flannery could see the taut line of Anne’s forearm muscle as they tried to maneuver it.
    It gave, suddenly, so that Anne fell forward, fast, into the icy onrush of night. Flannery instinctively grabbed her shoulders to hold her back—the apartment was on the fourth floor—though there was no real danger of her falling through.
    They both drew away from the window then, back into the warmer party air. Each of them shivered with relief, and with cold. Anne looked at her with a smile of an unnamable kind on her moist lips.
    “Well, thank you, Flannery,” she said, in mock solemnness. She held her hand out for her hero to shake on. “You saved my life.”

A nd then what?
    Flannery’s memory ended exactly there, and no amount of gray dining-hall coffee the next morning could bring any more back. “You saved my life,” Anne had said, ironically of course; maybe she’d even added “My hero!” to underline the joke. And then—what? Kissed her? Inconceivable. That, Flannery would have remembered. Lit a cigarette, shook her hand, said good night, sent Flannery on her way? Dully plausible. Or had she, rather, laughed savagely, hyenalike, knowing of Flannery’s impossible crush, which that hot-handed clasp of the shoulders made clumsily obvious?
    But maybe this crush wasn’t impossible. Maybe—God knows, it was hard to credit it—maybe it was possible, after all.
    Hadn’t she complimented Flannery on her dancing? Or had she? Maybe Flannery had made that up. Or, more likely, overinterpreted. Anne said something like Oh,go ahead, keep dancing, which Flannery had feverishly redrafted as My God, you enticing creature, you must dance for me and only for me.
    “Hey, Jansen.”
    It was a disheveled Nick, bearing a bowl of cereal. He had taken to calling her by her last name. Flannery couldn’t remember why anymore. This seemed to be what college was about—learning a vast amount, thus triggering an onset of chronic memory loss.
    “Hey.”
    “You look kind of wrecked. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
    “Yeah.” Flannery drank some more dreg-heavy coffee. As if that would help. “Listen. Were you at that party last night? In that guy Cameron’s apartment?”
    “Was I there!” He laughed, before shoveling cereal into his mouth. He