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The lights ca a bear suit All the eneral hilarity, and then the chane came out I had been accepted

The dues were a hundred and ten dollars a month--ned on for extra hours at the library and found I couldat Jonas’s house in Beverly, but Christ about my situation, and did not want to be the object of his pity A semester of nonstop parties had also put me badly behind in my studies I was at a loss as to what to do until I hit upon the idea of calling Mrs Chodorow, the woreed to let me stay, even offered to let me haveperson around for the holidays On Christmas Eve, she invited ether, baking cookies for her church and watching the Yule log on TV She’d even bought ht I was immune to holiday sentiment, but I was so touched that my eyes actually welled with tears

It wasn’t until February that I decided to call Stephanie I felt bad about what had happened and had er I’d waited, theup on enuinely happy to hear from me I asked her if she wanted to meet for coffee, and the two of us discovered that, even sober, we liked each other We kissed under an awning in the falling snow--a much different kind of kiss, shy, almost courtly--and then I put her in a cab to Back Bay, and when I returned to

Thus were the terms established for the next two years of iven me my trespasses, my vain ambitions, my casual, self-interested cruelties I should have been happy and for the most part was The four of us--Liz and Jonas, Stephanie and I--became a quartet: parties, movies, weekend ski trips to Vers to Cape Cod, where Liz’s fa the off-season I did not see Stephanie during the week, nor did Jonas see much of Liz, whose life did not seem otherwise to intersect with his own, and the rhythms appeared to work Froht, the fun began

My grades were excellent, andabout where I would pursue my doctoral work Harvard was at the top of my list, but there were other considerations My adviser was lobbying for Columbia, the chairman of the department for Rice, where he had taken his PhD and still had close professional connections I felt like a racehorse up for auction but hardly , and I would commence my mad dash down the track

Then Lucessi killed hie, staying at Mrs Chodorow’s, and had resu at the lab I hadn’t spoken to Lucessi since the last day of our freshht of him beyond a mild curiosity, never acted on, as to his fate It was his sister, Arianna, who telephoned me How she’d tracked me down, I didn’t think to ask She was clearly in shock; her voice was flat and e in a video store He appeared, at first, to have taken his expulsion more or less in stride The experience had chastened but not broken hi the local co to Harvard in a year or two But across the winter and spring, his tics had gotten worse He beca to talk to anyone for days The low-grade ed in conversation with i obsessions took hold He would spend hours reading the daily newspaper, underlining random sentences in wholly unrelated articles, and clai him

Gradually it became apparent that he was in the throes of a psychotic episode, perhaps even full-blown schizophrenia His parents ements to have hiht before he was to leave, he disappeared Apparently he had taken the train to Manhattan With hith of sturdy rope In Central Park, he had selected a tree with a large rock beneath its boughs, flung the rope over one of the branches, put the noose in place, and stepped off The distance was not enough to break his neck; he could have regained a foothold on the boulder at any time But such was his determination that he hadn’t done this, and death had been caused by slow strangulation--a horrendous detail I wished Arianna had not shared with