There was a face reflected in the mirror. The face was Jan’s, which made relatively good sense in view of the fact that the mirror was also hers, at least for the duration of the school year, and that she was standing in front of it.

  She was trying to decide whether or not she looked any different.

  It was something to study. After all, she had gone through a radical change that afternoon. The transition from virginity to non-virginity was about as dynamic a one as you are likely to encounter in your life as a young girl, and it seemed that it ought to show.

  It didn’t, though.

  There were slight signs of the manner in which she had spent the greater part of the afternoon, but they represented more the residue of dissipation than signs of a change in status. Most notably, there were two dark circles under each of her blue eyes. Since they had made love twice, and since she had two circles under each eye, it seemed likely that there might be a distinct correlation between acts of passion and circles under eyes. It might work the way it did with circles in tree trunks, one for each year of growth. Maybe every time you did it you got circles under your eyes, and if you got gang-banged by a hundred boys you wound up with a hundred circles under each eye, and—

  Ridiculous.

  She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. So you don’t look substantially different, she thought. But, by God, you can bet that you feel substantially different.

  Completely different.

  Entirely different.

  Totally different.

  She remembered Matthew’s question. Was she sorry she had gone through with it? God, what a question! She could hardly have been less sorry. She was so happy, so thrilled, so excited—

  And he was hers now. It didn’t matter if he did not love her. Sooner or later he would realize that he could not get along without her. She was the perfect complement for him, the perfect mortar for his pestle, the perfect scabbard for his sword. They belonged together. Each gave and received, each needed the other.

  It was that simple.

  And—

  There was a knock on the door. She turned from the mirror, feeling as though someone was spying on her. She called out, asked who it was.

  “Phone for you,” a girl said.

  “Who is it?”

  “A male. That is all ye knows on earth, and all ye needst to know. Hop to it, Cameron.”

  Matt? He wouldn’t call her at the dorm, she thought. Or would he? It was hard to say for sure.

  She opened the door, hurried down the hallway to the phone. The receiver was off the hook. She picked it up, held it to her ear, and said hello into the mouthpiece.

  “Hi, baby,” a voice said. “Busy tonight?”

  It took her a moment to place the voice. Then she realized who it was. “Oh,” she said. “Hello, Herbie.”

  “Busy tonight, baby?”

  Herbie White, she thought. Good old Herbie, who wanted to be her boyfriend—and what a quaint concept that was now! Herbie, who tried always to seduce her and was always a little too willing to accept failure, to settle for half.

  Busy?

  She was busy, all right.

  “I’m afraid tonight’s out,” she said.

  “Too much studying?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe we could get together for an hour or so?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s a shame,” he said. “I was looking forward to it. I missed you all day, baby.”

  Oh, cut the jazz, she thought.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “More studying,” she said.

  “Yeah? You’re quite the grind these days, aren’t you?”

  “Well,” she said. “I’m behind in a lot of classes.”

  “Yeah, sure. Do I have bad breath or something?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then what’s the pitch?”

  “I told you,” she said firmly. “I have a lot of studying to do. It may keep me busy all week.”

  A pause. Then: “Jan?”

  “Yes?”

  “If it’s because of last night, I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything. She was trying to figure out what he was running off at the mouth about. Because of last night—unless he had rather extraordinary delusions of grandeur, he ought to realize that nothing happened last night. Something might have happened. If he had been much of a man, he could have gone all the way last night.

  But he wasn’t, and he hadn’t.

  So what was he babbling about?

  “I’m sorry if I went too far last night,” he said. “But it’s . . . well, it’s hard for a guy to know when too far is; hard to stop. You know what I mean, don’t you, baby?”

  “It’s not that,” she said. And she thought, God, you clod, shut the hell up already.

  But he wouldn’t shut up. He already had both feet planted firmly in his mouth, and he was talking around them, and he was more of a jerk than she had ever realized. He went on to explain that sex was nothing, that he really liked her, and that he hoped she would let him take her out again.

  “Listen,” she said, “you’ve got it all wrong. I’ve just got a lot of studying. That’s all.”

  At least he had enough brains not to believe her. Finally she got him off the line, and headed for her room. It was funny, she thought. If the other girls in the dorm knew that she had just turned down a date with Herbie White they would have been convinced that she had rocks in her head, or something. Herbie was supposed to be a very desirable catch. But she couldn’t see anything remotely desirable about him. As far as she was concerned, he was just a kid, just a little boy.

  And she didn’t want a little boy.

  She wanted a man. And she had a man. His name was Matthew Boulton, and he was an associate professor of English, and he knew more about sex than he did about English, and she loved him.

  So to hell with Herbie White.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  RAYMOND HEENEY WAS on the phone. He was talking to a girl named Felicia Kraft, a girl he had dated several times, a girl he had necked with, and a girl who, after his baptism under fire at the hands of Susan Dale, he had sworn to seduce at the first possible opportunity.

  Tonight, he decided, would be the first possible opportunity.

  “This is Ray,” he said. “What are you doing about dinner, Felicia?”

  “I was figuring on going to the caf,” she said.

  “Forget it.”

  “Huh?”

  He bit his lip, wishing that she didn’t say huh and similarly brilliant things. But you couldn’t have everything. She had one hell of a body, even if she didn’t have a brain, and he wasn’t going to lay her brain anyway. He was going to take her body, and her body was fine. So the hell with it.

  “Forget the caf,” he said. “Listen, I’m going to take a run into town and pick up a couple of steaks at the Grand Union. Then we’ll go out in the Glen, see, and, I’ll build a nice Boy Scout camp fire, and we’ll grill the steaks and eat outside. You have a portable radio, don’t you?”

  “Yes but—”

  “Great,” he said. “You bring it, okay? I’ll be over in about twenty minutes, a half hour at the outside. Can you be ready by then, Felicia?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good.”

  “Who else is going, Ray?”

  “You and me,” he said, ungrammatically but concisely. “Us. I’ll see you, Felicia.”

  He put the receiver on the hook and went to his room, whistling softly. His roommate was lying on the bed. “Just called Felicia,” he announced. “We’re having a cookout in the Glen.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  Jesus, he thought, everybody on earth was a ninny. “No,” he said, “She’s bringing her hall advisor, and I’m bringing Albert Schweitzer. Don’t be a jerk, will you?”

  The roommate grunted.

  “I’m going to make her,” Ray said, happily. “Have fun, son.”

  “You’re going to—”

  “Make her. Doesn’t it sound like a good idea to you?”

  “Sounds great. How do you know she’ll go for it?”

  “Oh, she’ll go for it,” Raymond Heeney said. “She’ll go for it. Don’t worry about that point, man.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  MAGGIE SWARTHOUT WAS asleep. She was in her bedroom now, lying in the precise middle of a huge round bed ten feet in diameter, and she was sleeping. Her oversized breasts, firm and proud, rose and fell with her heavy breathing.

  Susan Dale was not asleep.

  How could she sleep? Oh, she was exhausted, all right, but she was far too excited to sleep. When you have been beating your head—among other things—into all the walls in the world in a hysterical attempt to achieve fulfillment, and when in desperation you agree to a little lesbian lovemaking just to see what comes off, and when, as it turns out, you come off, now how on earth can you sleep?

  Susan couldn’t.

  Instead she sat in the butterfly chair in Maggie’s bedroom and watched the dark-haired woman sleep. She kept her eyes on Maggie’s generous breasts and remembered what they had done.

  They had made love that first time, with Susan on the couch and Maggie using her for a wine glass, and that had resulted in a rather explosive climax, but that had been only the beginning. She had very naturally been quite grateful to Maggie, and Maggie had explained she could show her gratitude, and that had resulted in another little session with roles somewhat reversed, although this time they didn’t play around with spilling wine on one another, which was just as well.

  And it went on like that. Maggie had shown her how two could play at once, which was more or less what she had watched through the air vent at the Anthony Payne motel, and it was more fun to do than it had been to watch. She and Maggie had made a number. The number was higher than sixty-eight and lower than seventy, and as far as Sue was concerned it was the tastiest number in the world.

  Now Maggie was sleeping. Sue looked at her, thinking of the woman now as her lover. It was still difficult for her to regard herself as a lesbian, to think of other girls as suitable objects for sexual activity. She had thought of men in those terms for so long that it was hard for her to reorient herself. Even the magnificent time Maggie had shown her failed to change her attitude that quickly.

  At first she had worried about Maggie. She had thought that the woman would try to make a big love thing out of it, that she would regard Sue as her own private property. Sue wasn’t too crazy about that idea. But Maggie didn’t work that way.

  “Wait until you meet the girls,” Maggie had said. “You’d be surprised at the number of lesbians in this town, sugar. Married women, college girls, single girls—all kinds of girls. I hope you’re not bashful. I’ll want to introduce you around, and a lot of the gals will want to have a crack at you. No puns intended, by the way. They’ll make passes at you, and if you’re smart you’ll take all the action you can get. Don’t tie yourself down to one woman. Spread yourself out. The more you get, the more fun you have.”

  Maggie had smiled sadly then. “Because girls like us don’t get married,” she said. “None of the husband-and-children routine, and we’re better off for it. But if you try to find love on a permanent basis you’re only in for a lot of heartaches. Play the field, get all you can, and the hell with the rest of the world. That’s the only way to do it, kid.”

  Now that she thought about it, it seemed like a pretty good way. As a lesbian, she wouldn’t have to be so compulsive about her sex-chasing. With men it had been something else again. No man gave her the satisfaction she craved, and as a result she wound up going to one man’s bed before she had washed the smell of the last one from her flesh.

  That was no good.

  But with women the frustration element would be absent. She could make love when she wanted to because she wanted to, and she could enjoy it to the utmost, and after it was over she could leave the woman and be perfectly content.

  College girls, Maggie had said. That meant there were girls at Clifton who were . . . like she was.

  She wondered who they were.

  Well she would find out soon enough. She would find out, and things would proceed perfectly, and she would be happy. She knew there had been a lesbian on campus a year ago, a girl named Anne Mason, but she didn’t know any lesbians now. Well, that was natural enough. You didn’t know the members of a secret sorority until you were a member yourself. But Maggie would spread the word, Maggie would introduce her around. And then things would proceed neatly from there on in.

  She realized suddenly how easy it would be to be a lesbian at Clifton. When you had sex with boys, you were always worried about being found out. You couldn’t do it in dormitory rooms because that meant taking an awful chance. Motels were expensive. And places like the golf course and the Glen were only good in decent weather.

  But girls didn’t face that problem. Two lesbians could make love behind closed doors in a dormitory room and no one on earth would be remotely suspicious of them. It was perfectly legitimate for girls to be together in a room. No one would raise an eyebrow. No one would guess how complete their togetherness was, a sort of togetherness McCall’s would never dream of touting.

  She grinned.

  Lord, she thought, a whole new world was opening up for her now. The drawbacks, such as they were, did not bother her in the least. Drawbacks? Well, there were a few obvious ones. For one thing, she would spend her whole life being “different.”

  So what? She was used to it. She had certainly been different enough in the past—Susan Dale, the sure thing, the round-heeled nympho who would go down for anything in pants. If anything, lesbianism would be a quieter life than the one she was used to leading.

  Objection number two—no husband and no kids. Well, that was no drawback. She had realized long ago that she was not the sort of woman who could make something of a success of the marriage-and-family scene. It was not for her. It was fine for other girls, maybe, but it was not fine for her, and she wouldn’t miss it at all.

  Other drawbacks? None that she could think of, none that she cared to worry about. For the first time since the onset of puberty, she was not worried about sex. She was happy with it. And that made a tremendous difference to her, more than enough to override any drawbacks that might raise their heads in the future.

  She smiled again, then glanced again at the big round bed in the middle of the room. She watched the rise and fall of Maggie’s big breasts, and she began to feel stirrings of desire, a hunger for a renewal of their lust-match. Her mouth craved the taste of Maggie’s breasts and her hands itched for the sweet warmth of Maggie’s flesh. An interesting lesson in orientation, she thought. Maggie was a woman, and she had never related to women in sexual terms. But Maggie had led her to gratification, and now she was able to look upon Maggie’s physical attributes and see them not only as aesthetically attractive but as personally desirable.

  Interesting.

  She got to her feet, went over to the bed. She lay down upon the bed, lying in the direction opposite Maggie.

  And she woke the sleeping woman with a kiss.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  ORDINARILY KITTY BOULTON might have been worried. It was getting quite late, Matt was not home, he had not called, and she was alone. This sort of thing might have been upsetting, especially when you stopped to consider the fact that Matt was not in the habit of doing this. He was withdrawn, he ignored her, he sat around drinking—but he was the type of person who did all this in the privacy of his own home. He didn’t stay away without letting her know where he was and when she could expect him.

  So ordinarily this might have had her somewhat on edge. But she was not on edge at all. Matt was not home, and she didn’t know where he was, and this did not upset her in the least. Because this was not an ordinary day. Ordinarily, Kitty Boulton was sober.

  Today she was stoned to the ears.

  She was not just a little high. Not now. Now the gin bottle was just about empty, and there was no nonsense about highness or anything of the sort. She was drunk. She was smashed. She was potted and polluted, squizzled and plowed and blind, fuddled and obfuscated and groggy and ginny. She was soused, soaked, boiled, canned, crocked, crocko, cut, pickled and plastered. She was fried, oiled, lubricated, gilded, balmy, pie-eyed, stinko, tight, tanked, and loaded. She was drunk as a skunk, drunk as a lord, drunk as a piper, drunk as a fiddler, drunk as an owl, drunk as Paddy’s pig on the seventeenth of March. She was high as a kite, half-seas over, listing to starboard with three sheets in the wind.

  Hell, she was stoned.

  It was by no means unpleasant. She had taken to nibbling food in the course of the getting-stoned process and this had helped absorb some of the gin that might have otherwise been sloshing around in her gut. And she was drinking straight liquor, which is a little less likely to come up again than mixed garbage. And she had not really had that much—an honest-to-God, card-carrying alcoholic needs a great deal to attain her state of insobriety, but Kitty could manage the same highness on a good deal less.

  So she was feeling fine. She was sitting numbly in the Morris chair, an empty glass on the table beside her. She was smoking a cigarette; more accurately, she was holding a cigarette and watching it burn itself up. She wasn’t exactly smoking it.

  Whee, she thought. I’m drunk.

  “Whee!” she said aloud. It sounded nice, so she said it a few more times. “Whee! Whee! Whee!”

  She hauled herself to her feet, still wheeing foolishly, and she took a few drunken steps around the floor. Her coordination was not impaired, strangely enough. Not on a physical level, at any rate. She could still move around as well as before. Her mental coordination was off, that was all. Her mind wandered down channels of its own, free in time and space, wild and loose and having a wonderful time. She took a few more steps, then kicked her feet high and watched her shoes sail one after the other across the room. One of them struck the wall. The other landed in the center of a Chagall reproduction and left a footprint there. She stared at the footprint in the middle of the painting and burst out into spontaneous, hysterical laughter. The footprint made it look as though some clown had been walking on the wall.