But the key to Kathy, or rather the key to my future relationship with Kathy, was right there, in the form of the empty chair across from her as she sat alone at the long table in the dining hall, and all I had to do was to take the chance to sit in it.

I probably hadn’t gone to breakfast more than once or twice that semester, but that Sunday morning the alcohol, etc. of the night before had refused to settle into either stupor or nausea, and I’d woken up after only a few hours sleep, restless and energized, still a little elevated but not at all sloppy, the early morning world unfolding in front of me with a relaxed, inevitable clarity, my heroic and only dimly remembered overindulgences of the night before having had the serendipitous shock effect of lifting the bell jar for a moment, of oxygenating the atmosphere, of giving me PERSPECTIVE – allowing me, in other words, to be unselfconscious enough to turn the key, to set my food tray down, sit in that chair, and meet Kathy’s eyes.

There was nothing particularly enlightened about it – at that point it was still something more in the nature of a whim. The dining hall was so empty that it would in fact have been weirder and taken more effort for me to pass her by and then sit by myself watching her sit by herself. After all we’d known each other a long time – a total of six years, three in prep school (she’d come in as a sophomore when the benighted place finally went co-ed) and three in college (transferring from a part school in Florida that she, not being a party girl, should never have gone to in the first place). Despite that we hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words in all that time, not antagonists, really, but certainly moving in different circles, with no mutual friends except for Virginia, who I’d tried to woo while ignoring or deriding everyone and everything she surrounded herself with (and we all know how well THAT went).

But I’ve learned that you can’t cut a girl’s friends out of the picture – they’ll always return, stronger even, taking over the foreground, blocking out the person they were cut out for, revenants who will haunt you the way Kathy came to haunt me.

YR PAL,

UBU