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ghost-townishly deserted already, most students having left for their Thanksgiving vacation. Flannery had a pretty good haul: a Thanksgiving gift pack from her mother, two letters, and a heavy envelope sent via campus mail. Nick had recently discovered the cost-free joys of campus mail and had taken to sending Flannery ridiculous items, “just to keep them busy”—the freshmen face book, his winter hat, a packet of Alka-Seltzer Plus (“for effective relief of headache with upset stomach which may be due to excessive food or drink”—gone over in helpful yellow highlighter).
    Flannery bundled up her items and took them away to the bookstore/café where she intended to enjoy them slowly, with a cup of decent coffee, while not thinking about anybody’s office hours, or dance movements, or black leather jacket, or lack of black leather jacket. While not listening to the music playing in the background, which sounded uneasily familiar—a dance tune she thought might have been playing that night in Cameron’s apartment. Flannery worked to drive the music out of her head.
    Her friends’ letters were entertaining, filled with familiar accounts of parties, studies, sudden romances. The package from her mother was cute. A pretty scarf, some candy corn, of all things (oh: left over from her Halloween stash, it must have been), and a card that said brightly, “Can’t wait to see you at Christmas! Enjoy your Turkey Day, Honey.” Flannery had been invited, dutifully, to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner in New York by her invisible roommate, a pre-med who wore pink sweaters and with whom Flannery rarely spoke. Nick, too, had mentioned that his family would be on the Cape, and she’d be welcome to join them. (“They’re neurotic as hell, but the food’s good.” It was a time of charity toward others.) She had not yet decided what she was going to do.
    What had he sent her this time? Flannery opened the campus mail envelope. A book. Something kitsch, no doubt. Flannery turned it over, surprised. Poems! That seemed serious for Nick. By someone named Marilyn Hacker. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons.
    Inside, a note:
    I brought this to give you in class today, but I didn’t see you. Beware delinquency!
    Something you said the other night made me think you’d enjoy these. A little extra reading for you over the break. Don’t worry—they won’t be on the final.
    Yours,
    Anne
     
    Before Flannery had a chance to take in the import of this note, someone sat down at her table. Loud, in a diminutive kind of way, and trailing cigarette smoke. Flannery’s cheeks were, she felt quite certain, cranberry red as she looked up.
    Into the bright, almond-eyed face of Susan Kim.

S he was laughing. “Oh my God!” she said, smoking, unjacketing, and rolling up her sleeves more or less all at once. “I am so in love with my TA, it’s not even funny.”
    Too many stimuli all at once. But Flannery did do one thing immediately, instinctively—she hid the book from Susan. Her eagerness to open and read it was so ferocious she had to sit on her hands.
    “Who?” she asked, with a casualness that she felt deserved a medal. “You mean—that woman—Anne?”
    Susan inhaled deeply, nodded, and exhaled politely to the side. “I get so hot and bothered around her. You know. That jacket! Those boots! I was just in there with her talking about the term paper.”
    That jacket, Flannery thought; yes. Those boots: I know them.
    “She said we should meet for a drink sometime.”
    “She did?” And did she dance with you? Did she give you some poems?
    “Yeah, but I don’t know. With your TA? Wouldn’t that be kind of weird? God, do you think she’s gay?”
    Flannery felt a thick choke of jealousy around her throat. She shrugged, then coughed, violently. “Maybe. You know, I—I wouldn’t know.”
    “Hey, are you okay? You look a little—” Susan saw the mail scattered like torn leaves before Flannery on the table, and concern crossed