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name?”
    “Henry?”
    “Yeah, him.” She leaned towards the mirror and began to fluff out her hair, swiveling her head this way and that. Her nails were Chanel red but so long they had to be the kind you bought at the drugstore. “I think he’s an asshole.”
    “I kind of like him,” I said, offended.
    “I don’t.” She parted her hair in the center, using the curved talon of her forefinger as a comb. “He’s always been a bastard to me. I hate those twins, too.”
    “Why? The twins are nice.”
    “Oh yeah?” she said, rolling a mascaraed eye at me in the mirror. “Listen to this. I was at this party last term, really drunk, and sort of slam-dancing, right? Everybody was crashing into everybody else, and for some reason this girl twin was walking through the dance floor and pow, I slammed right into her, really hard. So then she says something rude, like totally uncalled for, and first thing I knew I’d thrown my beer in her face. It was that kind of a night. I’d already had about six beers thrown on
me
, and it just seemed like the thing to do, you know?
    “So anyway, she starts yelling at me and in about half a second there’s the other twin and that Henry guy standing over me like they’re about to beat me up.” She pulled her hair back from her face in a ponytail and inspected her profile in the mirror. “So anyway. I’m drunk, and these two guys are leaning over me in this menacing way, and you know that Henry, he’s really
big
. It was kind of scary but I was too drunk to care so I just told them to fuck off.” She turned from the mirror and smiled brilliantly. “I was drinking Kamikazes that night. Something terrible always happens to me when I drink Kamikazes. I wreck my car, I get into fights …”
    “What happened?”
    She shrugged and turned back to the mirror. “Like I said, I just told them to fuck off. And the boy twin, he starts
scream
ing at me. Like he really wants to kill me, you know? And that Henry just standing there, right, but to me he was scarier than the otherone. So anyway. A friend of mine who used to go here and who’s really tough, he was in this motorcycle gang, into chains and shit—ever heard of Spike Romney?”
    I had; in fact I’d seen him at my first Friday-night party. He was tremendous, well over two hundred pounds, with scars on his hands and steel toe-clips on his motorcycle boots.
    “Well, anyway, so Spike comes up and sees these people abusing me, and he shoves the twin on the shoulder and tells him to beat it, and before I knew it, the two of them had jumped on him. People were trying to pull that Henry off, too—lots of them, and they couldn’t do it.
Six guys
couldn’t pull him off. Broke Spike’s collarbone and two of his ribs, and fucked up his face pretty bad. I told Spike he should’ve called the cops, but he was in some kind of trouble himself and wasn’t supposed to
be
on campus. It was a bad scene, though.” She let her hair fall back around her face. “I mean, Spike is tough. And
mean
. You’d think he’d be able to beat the shit out of both those sissy guys in suits and ties and stuff.”
    “Hmm,” I said, trying not to laugh. It was funny to think of Henry, with his little round glasses and his books in Pali, breaking Spike Romney’s collarbone.
    “It’s weird,” said Judy. “I guess when uptight people like that get mad, they get
really
mad. Like my father.”
    “Yeah, I guess so,” I said, looking back into the mirror and adjusting the knot on my tie.
    “Have a good time,” she said listlessly, and started out the door. Then she stopped. “Say, aren’t you going to get hot in that jacket?”
    “Only good one I have.”
    “You want to try on this one I’ve got?”
    I turned and looked at her. She was a major in Costume Design and as such had all kinds of peculiar clothing in her room. “Is it yours?” I said.
    “I stole it from the wardrobe at the Costume shop. I was going to cut it up and make, like,