I WAS RIPE for something rotten even before I got it here. And that freshman year, four years ago, was rotten from the start. I can check off the reasons.

First, I was rich, and I didn't know then that money was a Bad Thing. I'd traipse in thrilled with news of an upcoming African cruise and naively read the tight-lipped hostility that greeted me as polite Eastern reserve, Or I'd be tanned in December and wonder why no one asked me where I'd been. First strike--I was a political pariah.

Second, I was from the Midwest, and the nouveau riche out there have a notion of high-falutin' Harvard. At Detroit cocktail parties when someone drops the name, a shock of respect invariably registers on the listener's face. Second strike--I suffered from a feeling of cultural inferiority.

Third, I was straight out of a provincial private school that failed to teach the tools of academic bullshit. I was bowled over by my first reading list, and understood not a word of my first lecture. Third strike--I thought I was one of the admissions' test tries, and a goof, at that.

Fourth, I was a virgin. And being fed on nineteenth century novels, I believed in "romantic love." And I had no intentions of losing my precious status until I was good and ready. Fourth strike--I was, by virtue of my female sex, a prick tease, a Bitch Goddess.

These were the seeds of the problem. But what brought the rotteness to bloom was a glamorous picture in the Freshman Register. Not that it was a glamorous picture by the standards of any other place. In any style-conscious suburb, it would have passed as an ordinary look, made out of the touch-up job that money buys: the dentist-made perfect teeth, the smooth complexion, the tan from the West Indies, the European sense of style, the hair subtly streaked, the wide open look and confident carriage from knowing none but a comfortable world. The picture looked like every other rich girl that looks like the "California Girl." But at Harvard, it was glamorous. And that was where all the trouble started.

It started with the phonecalls. I'd get about 20 a day, almost all of them from strange males, each after, in his own way, the same thing. That thing I was none too eager to lose. Now I can't really be sure that that was what they wanted, because I didn't let them get close enough to try. Not that I wouldn't have liked them individually given time. But a mass siege/assault hardly left me that time to find out.

THEY WERE CLEVER, though. The normal Clever Caller would follow up a polite introduction with a catch-her-off-balance fast jab, "What are you doing now?" And I'd be stupid and fumble for excuses, "I'm studying." "Great, then you'll need a coffee break." Panicked, "Well, actually, I was going to sleep." His oh-so-cool and patient laugh, "Oh come on now. At 10 p.m.?" "Yeah, well, I got bored." "Great. I'm downstairs" (the dorm was guarded by a switchboard) "I'll come right up and entertain you." At which point, having let myself in for it, I'd either go through with it and suffer, or I'd drop the niceness act--"Look, I just don't want to" and hang up mortified by the cruelty in rejection.

Then there were the not so clever but persistent ones. "You can't make it tonight, huh? What about tomorrow?...the night after? after that?...Well, what about Sunday morning?" And I, oh innocent me, would try to explain, "Look, I'd love to meet you. But this happens fifty times a day, and I just can't come through on every one, see? I mean, I'm sorry. I really am. Maybe I'll run into you and it will be love at first sight. Let's put our money on that, OK?" And he'd laugh and say OK and God would I feel guilty.

And there were the Rude Ones who'd slam down the phone with a snarl that usually had to do with my being just like all the others. Now I'd heard about "Cliffie bitches." I kept a lookout for them vowing to be different. But here I was fitting right into the groove--lacking the experience then to know it as a groove carefully carved out for me.

Back to phonecalls; because there were more, too many more. I could hang up on the Breathers; I ignored the men who exposed themselves at me in the streets at night; I ran away from the guy who grabbed my hand and placed it on his penis in the library; I bit--a bloody bite--the grad student who followed me from Harvard Square, hurled himself upon me, and tried to rape me in the Commons; and I called the cops when I spotted him waiting in a grey Chevy outside my dorm the next day. These Painful Perverts threatened me physically, therefore I had a right to hate them. The others, less brutal, were not so easy to dismiss. There were the Friends of Friends and the Hometown Boys, the Hustlers--"I saw your picture and I fell in love"--and the Hipsters--"Look, baaaa-by, I don't wanna..."--, there were the City Slickers and the Hicks, the Machos and the Movers. There were roommates on dares, painters after subjects, photographers after models, the set man who needed an extra for "Love Story." And I'd say no, no, no and pray they wouldn't take it personally.

AFTER A WHILE I wised up. I started telling them that I had a possessive boyfriend so nobody's feelings would get hurt. And somehow, the message got around. They must have warned their friends of me, because I got fewer calls. Of course, my pretended boyfriend was an empty wish. I wanted, at this point protection, and I was very lonely.

It was when I started hearing rumors about myself from the slightest of acquaintances that I began to realize the extent of my notoriety. And those rumors were rich. I'd learned that I was the biggest bitch to hit the 'Cliffe; that I was the most promiscuous miss in town, well-nigh a nymphomaniac; that I was, get this, a Moaner, a Screamer, a Scratcher; that I was the Body-by-Fisher Fisher (I wasn't) and as a baby heiress I'd been promised to a son of my daddy's tycoon pal; that I was a Lesbian.

I had a good laugh of incredulity Part of me was even flattered. But another bigger part of me was bothered, and bothered intensely enough to do some grapevine legwork. As it turned out, most of the rumors were my rejectees' revenge. It was simple: roommates are checking out the register for a top-twenty; the rejectee bargains for their attention when he casually drops my name, and wins their respect when he slanders me, getting back at me at the same throw.

It was so obvious, so predictable, a syndrome. The high school bigshot comes to the Home of The Bigshots and gets his ego smashed right off the bat. So he spends most of his conscious energy working out a strategy to piece it back together. A woman, of course, is prime target for his peacockery, meat for his projected fantasies. But if she slights him, however inadvertently, he takes it as a threat, and the war is on.