"Whatever. Maybe I'll go to a movie so they can't find me-like Z."

"It's a good film," said Ted.

"You're telling me ?" said Doug. He pause. "Nah-who am I kidding? I can't go into Boston, Boston? " He laughed, then asked Ted to wait on dinner a second until he could comb his hair.

After Doug disappeared into the bathroom. Ted turned to me, smiled, and said, "He's something, isn't he? He's happy, at least."

"You think so?" I asked.

"Sure," said Ted. "Doug's different from the rest of us. Do you know he is the only person I know in this whole fucking school who has never-not once-threatened to kill himself?"

II

"FUCK IT!" cried Carol, as her Cricket lighter jammed at Lehman Hall last week. It's a tough world, and Carol is finding it tougher all the time. I offered her a match, but she put her filtered Gauloise away, saying, "The hell with it. I've got to give up smoking anyway."

But Carol isn't about to give up smoking. Because smoking Gauloises lit by Cricket lighters is part of her life here. It is essential to her existence-as essential as her Espresso coffee pot, her subcription to the New Yorker, her four ring, her Marimekko clothing, and the lonely preppies who offer her weekend trips to the Caribbean.

I don't know Carol particularly well, but she is always eager to tell me what's going on. "Maybe I should go with Paul," she said. "He needs someone-he's really mixed up-and a few days of sun might be nice."

"So why don't you go?" I asked.

"I don't know. It might be fun. It just doesn't seem right, that's all." She will let Paul take her to dinner at Locke-Ober's instead.

"You know," she went on, "it's a new term and it just doesn't feel any different from the last one. I don't know what I did last term. Classes, of course, all that. But what else? I sat around Lehman Hall and waited for something to happen. I tried out for a part at the Locb, and I made call backs, but that was it. . . Maybe I'll write a novel."

"About what?"

"Everything that's happened."

She reached for a cigarette at last and let me light it with a match. A sad-eyed boy came over.