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cakes, candy and donuts. Sometimes in the supermarket we tore into boxes of chocolate chip cookies and polished them off before we hit the checkout counter. We were always dieting, though. We switched to eating Twinkles, reasoning that since they weren't chocolate, they weren't fattening, like Ring Dings. We starved ourselves all day, and stuffed ourselves like pigs at dinner, finally pushing ourselves away from the table, moaning our secret code: ISF—I'm So Fat.
    I kept up with them. I had to. I kept laughing with them, joking with them, rising at 5:00 A.M. with them for our part-time job waitressing at Mug ’N Muffin, a coffee shop in Harvard Square. But my hands had begun to tremble. I had begun smoking in Europe, a chic thing to do, I thought. Now I had trouble lighting up without a steady hand.
    My highs were higher, my lows lower. In my high moods, I spent money wildly, recklessly. Sweaters, books, candy, tapes, records—I bought more than I could ever need, more than I could ever use, more than a college student could ever afford. My thoughts would race, speeding faster than I could talk so no one understood me. I loved everything in life, from the gripping winter weather to the power of a slamming door, to laughing back at the Voices.
    The Voices were with me nearly constantly these days. Where once I could retreat in sleep, now not even that refuge was left. They followed me into the night, and followed into my dreams. I went for days without sleeping.
    In my low moods, I kept to my room, refusing to go to class. Partly, it was the blackness of the depression that was making it impossible for me to move. Partly it was dread: The Voices were beginning to command me to hurt people, and I was starting to fear I might obey. If I stayed in my room, I was safe.
    Lori Winters began to see that I was upset.
    “Come into my room, if you can't sleep,” she said. So night after night, long into the night, I sat in her room, smoking cigarettes and shaking, while she tried to coax from me my secret. But I could tell no one. I thought increasingly about hurting myself. I sat in the library, up all those flights of stairs, and considered jumping.
    The problem was here, it was here at Tufts. I had known it all along. I should never have come. I would leave here, I would leave the problems behind. So I drove across the river to Boston University, wrote them a check, and told them I was transferring. The next day I transferred back. Something was about to snap.
    Finally I called my parents. I told them as little as possible.
    “I'm having some problems,” I told them. “I think I need to talk to someone.” They were already perplexed by my decision to leave Tufts in my senior year. I was just about to graduate, they said. Tufts was so much better a school, they said. What was I thinking? They could see I was upset, so they readily agreed to my consulting a therapist.
    I met first with a counselor at Tufts, and then with a psychiatrist in private practice. Week after week I met with him, yet I couldn't speak. I couldn't talk about the Voices. It was too dangerous. The Voices were twisting themselves around me. It was hard to tell where they left off and I began. They threatened me, and I believed them. If I squealed on the Voices, they might kill me. If I ratted on them, the person I told would have to die.
    My thoughts grew increasingly confused and poisonous. Session after session I sat in the psychiatrist's office wondering: Who the hell is this guy? What is he going to do to me? Send the white coats for me? Send me to Rikers Island? Was he going to take a scalpel and dissect the wrinkles of my brain? Do a lobotomy? What could he do about the stuff rotting there in my head? He gave me Valium for my anxiety. I took it, and grew steadily more anxious.
    Things began to spin out of control. Trying to flee the Voices, I took to my car, racing up the old Hutchinson River Parkway, and the narrow Merritt Parkway. I wanted to see