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pink sweater. I had my old camp trunk, a quilt, a pillow, and a Raggedy Ann doll with one eye. My dorm room was small, with two beds, two desks, and a bathroom down the hall for everyone to share. I tacked up my poster of a kitten clinging to a branch with the words “Hang in There!” in rainbow-shaped script above the kitten’s head. My mother helped me make my bed and set up a five-dollar metal desk lamp. And then we were done. I was waiting for her to say, “This is depressing, a huge mistake, let’s pack up and get the hell out of here.”
    She cleared her throat. “Well, I should get moving. I’m going to have dinner with Pebbles in Cambridge.” I felt an ache in my chest, and my palms started sweating. (This was the first of a few panic attacks I would experience in my life.) I begged, pleaded, and cried for her to stay. As my mother pulled the Volvo out of the parking lot, I was hanging on to the front bumper, my sickly arms wrapped around the chrome appendage, my feet braced in the gravel. Either I would stay in that position while we traveled home, or my mother would have mercy somewhere on the Mass. Pike and let me in the passenger side.
    It had been two hours since my mother peeled out of the school driveway when my roommate, Lucy, walked in with her father. She had a jolly smile, a plump face, and a nervous giggle. She and her father were from northern New Hampshire and had accents straight out of Good Will Hunting . Lucy’s dad put down her suitcases, shook my hand, gave her a pat on the back—“Ah-rite Lucy, I gutta git bick in the cah before it gits too dahk”—and disappeared.
    We walked together across the soccer field to the dining hall. It was unspoken but clear that whether we ended up liking each other or not, we were an army of two when we walked into the commissary. We would sit together, walk together, and act closer than we actually were. Your first friend at boarding school, camp, or prison is your life raft, and you always have each other’s back. Luckily Lucy and I genuinely liked each other, which made the first few months tolerable. If I had ended up with one of the Asian girls in our class who always got awards and went to MIT early decision, I never would have been able to keep up, although I’d know how to rock a Hello Kitty minidress, and I’d probably own half of China!
    I realized quickly that in boarding school the only method of survival was to smoke. Like in prison, if you have cigarettes you’re exalted and safeguarded. There was one room designated for smokers, which was elegantly named the “butt room.” One had to walk through it to enter the end of the dorm closest to the main classroom building. So in bad weather, if you didn’t smoke, the walk from one end of the rancid basement strewn with filters and ash to the other was excruciating. You could almost hear, “Dead man walking!” So I learned how to smoke cigarettes. Like most urban gangstas, I chose Kool menthols as my brand, eventually switching to Virginia Slims Menthol Lights. I mean, I was a lady, for God’s sake. I remember endless frigid nights spent sitting in the butt room under the fluorescent lights in our Lanz nightgowns, puffing away as we debated virginity—who had it and who didn’t.
    Around Thanksgiving was when the landscape changed. The trees were barren, every day was gray, and sports practices took place in the dark. It was this time of year that girls, no matter how much they smoked, started to succumb to the doldrums of winter and the environmental depression it brings. Everyone would order pizza nightly to ensure that each day would have a silver lining. The same way a recently married friend of mine told me, “The way I get through sex with my husband is I close my eyes and visualize the Oreo I’m going to treat myself to when it’s over.” In those days pizza and carbs were a teenage girl’s antidepressants. When the tattooed pizza guy finally showed up with the boxes, the