Imagine you just graduated from high school and now you live here. Boys and girls sprawled around the TV in the lobby, running back and forth to each other’s rooms, giggling as they dashed down the hall wearing towels on their way to the showers. But Couch Hall had a confused libertine quality. The other dorms had that distinct atmosphere of a place where only boys lived or a place where only girls lived. Boys down the hallway to the right, girls down the hallway to the left. The bottom floor was girls, the top floor was boys and the middle floor was half and half. We both lived in Couch Hall, which was a coed dorm. She was a slight girl from a small town in Arkansas, a year behind me in college. If you said “what?” she repeated herself just as quietly as before you’d said “what?” You learned that you had to lean in and listen carefully. She was painfully shy, never making eye contact, holding her head so low her frenzied hair spilled over her face. The second thing you noticed about Mandy was that you couldn’t hear anything she said. The curls fell down around her shoulders and roiled like foam at the bottom of a waterfall. A mad sprawl of tightly coiled dark ringlets exploded out of her head.
The first thing you noticed about Mandy was her hair.
