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paused to chew milkily, and Flannery had to look away. Her nausea was returning. “You are wrecked. I’m the one who took you there. Remember?”
    “Oh yeah. Right.” She did, too. Sort of. She could imagine it, anyway. “So. Here’s my question. I didn’t do anything stupid, did I, before I left? That you saw?”
    “Jansen, Jansen, Jansen.” He shook his head sadly. Over a mouthful of Sugar Pops he seemed to consider tormenting her with a series of amusing lies about her embarrassing escapades, but decided benevolently against it. “No. Relax. All I saw was you dancing with some red-headed chick in a tank top, till God knows what hour.”
    “Dancing? With her?”
    “Yep.” He thought about it for a minute. And swallowed. “Yep. She was hot.”

I t seemed criminal to finally have the raw stuff of fantasy—dancing, with Anne, for pity’s sake!—and not be able to remember it. Flannery could not forgive herself. She felt sure that under hypnosis she would be able to retrieve the images. Were they close? What songs did they dance to? How did Anne move?
    Then again, Nick might have made that up.
    Or maybe just embellished, unaware of how critical accuracy was here. After all, he was probably drunk, too. Maybe she and Anne had one single dance together. That was probably it, and Flannery could just about re-create a montage of smiles and bare arms (she remembered with heartbreaking clarity the curve of Anne’s shoulders), some general moving around to something like music. Flannery remained completely blank, however, on what idiocies she might have uttered, what confessions freely given, what sloppy compliments slurred into that exquisite ear.
    It was impossible to go to class, obviously. How could Flannery be in the same room with her, not knowing what had gone on? When the Thursday of the lecture dawned, Flannery was all set to skip it. Then she ran into Susan Kim, who reminded her that it was the last class before the Thanksgiving break, when Bradley would be talking about the extra reading they were supposed to do in preparation for their long-paper assignment. Flannery had to go. Why hadn’t she dropped the damn class? Who needed Criticism, anyway? She went so far as to place a desperate call to someone in Admin to find out if it was truly, absolutely, too late to drop the class now. She got an earful of accented attitude from a secretary (“That’s why we have deadlines, ” as if she were stupid), which was enough—almost—to make Flannery break the phone, pack her bags, and head back West. Life was so peaceful there, by comparison.
    She went to class late. That was her compromise. In through a rear door, five minutes late, so that Anne would be safely sitting up front, her back to Flannery. For eighty tense minutes Flannery took jittery erratic notes, which she later found mostly unintelligible. Five minutes before the class ended, she packed away her notebook and got ready to go. Susan looked at her quizzically. The professor was just then reaching the heart of what he was hoping from them in their long papers (none of which he would ever read; that was the privilege of the teaching assistants). He listed important pitfalls for them to avoid, tips on how to find something original to say. Flannery missed all of it. To Susan she shrugged with a half-smile and mouthed, Doctor’s appointment. Susan nodded and went back to her own notes.
    Flannery left. So relieved not to have to see Anne that on her way out she slammed the door inadvertently. She could hear its loud, wooden reverberations echo through the Critical classroom as she made her lucky escape to the world outside.

T here was no question on Friday whether Flannery wanted any proximity to the rust-colored corner building where—she couldn’t make herself forget this—Anne held her afternoon office hours (3–5 p.m., Room 303). She didn’t. She didn’t want to be anywhere near there. She stopped at the post office, which was