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feeling sick to my stomach—and leave the room.
    The most important thing was to keep from looking around to see where they were coming from. If I did get caught whirling my head around, I would try to cover up.
    “Oh, I just thought I heard a noise,” I would say, acting nonchalant. I often found myself laughing out of nervousness, but for the most part, people didn't seem to catch on.
    Still, the pressure was building.
    My fear of the Voices was beginning to spill over into the rest of my life. I was always terribly anxious, because I never knew if those around me could hear them too. I watched my friends’ faces expecting to see their expressions turn to horror when they heard these Voices calling me “whore.” When the Voices called me a “fucking bitch” I watched my professors to see if they would throw me out of class.
    When I heard the Voices yelling such terrible things, I grew afraid to make eye contact with the people I was with. I was afraid they had heard the Voices and now knew the terrible secrets about me that they were revealing. What tortured me more than anything was when the Voices laughed at me. It was a kind of hysterical laughter, as if I was the target of everyone's jokes. I didn't know why they were making fun of me so viciously but I hated myself for being the sitting duck for ridicule. I became extremely self-conscious in front of everyone for fear they too would nail me to a taunting cross.
    I began to feel that my friends hated me. That's what the Voices said. I felt they regarded me as scum. That's what the Voices said too. I kept on seeing my friends, kept on partying with them, kept on laughing and joking, driving around and dancing with them. But in little ways, I began to act on my strange feelings.
    One weekend, Tara threw a big birthday party for Lori Winters, and invited a lot of her own friends from home. As they began arriving, I began feeling pressured. These people didn't like me. They were talking about me. They were going to start making fun of me. I didn't want to be around, so I jumped into my car and drove four hours home to New York. Then, I turned right around and drove back to Boston.
    I took a class in abnormal psychology, and pored over big fat books with teeny tiny print. Every atypical symptom in the lectures and the textbooks seemed to apply to me. I felt overwhelmed by the material, but at the same time a little comforted. At last I didn't feel so alone. There were people out there who felt the same way I did. In fact, I decided, it was really possible that everyone experienced Voices as a young adult, but, like me, chose not to discuss them.
    I spent my junior year abroad. While I was in Spain my first semester, the Voices were softer, but I was so revved up, my motor seemed to be working overtime. When the Voices did speak to me, sometimes they did so in Spanish: “Puta! Puta!” they yelled. “Vaya con el diablo.” Go to hell, whore.
    In London during the second semester, I grew increasingly depressed. The Voices were back in force. There almost never seemed to be a time when the Voices left me alone. Still I kept forging on. I had to keep going. I couldn't let go.
    Gail Kobre was in London with me, on her own junior year program from Skidmore College. We wrote reports together on Disraeli and Gladstone. We studied British history, painting and sculpture. We stopped in Trafalgar Square to have our pictures taken with the lions. We went to pubs and drank beer, ate tea and crumpets and tried to make the Queen's Guards laugh. At one time during the semester we cut our fingers and smooshed our blood together. We'll be friends forever, we said. Blood sisters. Nothing will come between us.
    Of course it wasn't true. The Voices were already between us.
    Keeping my secret grew harder and harder. When I got back to Tufts, Lori and Tara and I had moved in together along with another girl. We lived in a big house off campus. We shopped for food, piling up cookies,