"Who was that girl in the top bunk?" I asked in the hall.

"Oh, that's Nancy. She's just crying. She does it all the time."

I asked myself: What is all this?

My girlfriend from home, she of the brilliant mind and the mysterious paintings, came up for the Harvard-Yale game. She arrived on Friday, and I suddenly realized that I knew nothing to do. My life here, I suddenly saw, consisted of talking to my friends, going to class, and reading books. All idle hours I had beguiled with the anodyne of print. What to do?

We went to the Prudential observation room and looked down at the bright lights of Boston-a city I still knew nothing about. She, of course, had a new boyfriend. We were, of course, miserable together.

Saturday we went to the Harvard-Yale game. This was, as every one knows, the football game of the century-the magic moment when Harvard's miracle man Frank Champi snatched a glorious tie from the jaws of ignominious defeat and saved the Crimson's only undefeated season in ?? these many years. I wish I could describe to you the tension in the stands as he stood poised to throw the history-making pass, the thrill of victory as he completed it, the frenzy-thot gripped 10,000 men of Harvard after the game.

But I cannot. We left at the half and went to the Fogg.

I told myself: You blew it again.

Later that night, the girl intimated to me that she found this all a little dull. I was shocked, hurt, outraged, threatened. Dull? Why this was Harvard: the throbbing seat of intellectual, literary, artistic stimulation.

If this was... dull, then my last banner, my last token was ruined. After all, Harvard was the good place. Merely breathing the air here made me better, wiser, stronger, more attractive.

Didn't it? Didn't it?

December: Dan, my friend from South Carolina, vanished. Utterly, we whispered to each other. Without trace. He left his room one Sunday night to see his Nat Sci 9 tutor and did not return.

Perhaps we should have seen it coming. Perhaps when he stopped going to tennis practice. Or perhaps when he stopped going to classes. Or perhaps when he stopped going to meals. Or perhaps when he stopped coming out of his bedroom. Or perhaps when he began sleeping 17 hours a day.

After he had been gone a week, we became a little confused. He was not at home. He was not in Cambridge. The crisis, fraught with dark drama, was played out with all the dramatic trappings it deserved. One morning his boss from the student dorm crew called his room; I answered.

"Is Dan there?" he asked.