Flashback.

 

This is Wikipedia's stock photo of Sidgwick Hall. Enter the main doors in the picture, and on your right you will find a full-length wall mirror. Continue forward, and you run into the bathroom with the push-button shower. Take the left hall from the entrance. My room was on the right side, three or four doors down.

 

I remember myself wandering across a dimly lit courtyard at midnight to enter a red-and-white roulette lounge at Queens' College in Cambridge at age fifteen. I wore a black-and-white strapless party dress with a thin black lace shrug, impossible heels, and smoky black eye makeup. My nineteen-year-old date had a blue Mohawk and got plastered within a couple hours of my arrival, so I spent most of the night alone. The live band on the dance floor sucked (think Shania Twain playing original pop/rock), so after wandering through poker games, snacking on marshmallow fondue, and gazing into the river Cam from Mathematical Bridge, I ended up sitting on a grassy knoll outside the college in all my party finery watching two equally plastered kids run towards each other in sumo suits before making my way back to my one-room dorm in Sidgwick Hall at Newnham. My single-occupancy bedroom had a deceptive closet that opened to a sink and mirror as well as an English wardrobe and a small bed with a window that looked into the inner courtyard. I never went to church in England, though my best friend Alison, who lived across the hall, never missed her Catholic services and would wheedle me to join her every Saturday night before we went to sleep. Instead, I would sit and enjoy my Sunday mornings in bed curled up in white sheets with literature recommended to me by my gay creative writing professor who enjoys the distinction of managing to sport man-capris before the rest of Europe caught on.