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  This year, it was a burgundy ribbon. Last year, it had been a crimson one. She put it on in front of her tall mirror, not knowing whether her soft-spoken roommate was dead or alive. For some reason, not every suite in their hall possessed a full-length mirror.
  Once she had tied it neatly around her waist-length ponytail, she knocked gently on the door of Garance's bedroom. Her head pounded. No response. Her newly-woven braids felt unusually heavy. She hadn't set eyes on Garance in about three or four days.
  "G… Are you ill? …Is everything okay?"
  She tried the door, and it was locked, as she had expected. A piece of folded notebook paper, lined in aqua, appeared above the threshold and between the toes of her black leather boots. She crouched to pick it up. Inside, in delicate and vaguely gothic capitals, it read, DO NOT TRUST ANYONE. It was actually the first time that Nene had ever seen her roommate's handwriting. That must be how the little children were taught to write in one or more of the rural primary schools in France. Beautiful. But Nene shrugged her shoulders, knowing that she didn't.
  "If this is about Alex G, then I'm fine. I'm safe. I'm handling it."
  There was no response.
  "I'll buy you some more walnuts on my way back."
  Walnuts were the only food that Garance would accept, and that only when the door was not being watched. Nene staunchly avoided looking at the mirror again as she collected her keys, phone, and tote bag from various surfaces in their sliver of a living room. Well she knew that merely looking could alter the image, and, as she was now, she sensed that she was just perfect for Alex. Thinner than usual (what she thought of as 'rare'), well-rested and therefore relatively wide-eyed, utterly out of shape, dark red lipstick. The shade was charmingly called 'pozhaluysta!'
  "Bye, G…!"
  Nene attained the cyber-yellow corridor. Her R.A. had decorated each door with either one or two classic film posters, based on the number of residents. Hers was Maurice. Garance had Rashomon. For herself, R.A. Mabel had chosen My Beautiful Launderette, which was Nene's favorite movie. Nene took the stairs down from their floor, which was the nineteenth floor, because she liked the echoing sound of her heels on linoleum.
  The evening sun relinquished a hot pink lustre. That was what covered leagues of spires and gables and lacquered the facets of glass libraries outside, as well as the whites of Nene’s eyes and the already-pink sections of her fingernails. She passed under the silver constructivist arches which students nicknamed 'the paperclip.' To her, they were like the finger-bones of a titan, of the daughters of being. Traipsing across this weird playground, Nene beamed without knowing why.
  Alex G lived in a gorgeous shared house on the southern edge of campus that was falling down. Its guardian angel was an old, silvery manx that had no owner and no name. Nene had spent hundreds of hours in the basement of that house and on its top floor, for Alex had the attic room. His was the only room with two gable windows.
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  Alex G, fortunately, was way less of a surgeon about it than many of the others whom Nene had tried. They were a good fit because he also liked music - this month, Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane - and he was learning to meditate.
  Tonight, he meditated on his coverlet while Nene, prone, mopped at her neck with a linen handkerchief.
  "I'm worried that my roommate's losing her mind."
  "What's eating her?"
  She rolled her eyes at this predictably grisly pun, which he had made without even bothering to open his own.
  "Nothing."
  Now, he opened one.
  "That's the issue!"
  "What I mean is that it just came on all of a sudden. Garance was never even particularly nervous before."
  And that was true. Garance may have been a reserved person, or even, as some of Nene's friends had suggested to her in private, frosty, though Nene had never believed it of her herself. But she was also tenacious, in the way of individuals who have always been academically driven, and moderately phlegmatic, qualities which, alongside her natural elegance and proclivity for cool-toned reds, had reliably drawn friends. Garance Didot was the type of person, in short, who would be voted the president of a club, and she had been last year: the French Students' Society, Young Western-European Entrepreneurs, and the League of Amateur, Nonprofessional Foresters.
  But that was perhaps the one thing that Alex G could never be made to understand about her, or anyone else: their popularity. All he ever did was read and drink blood, and he saw the few people with whom he was in social anthropology and literary theory reading groups more as opponents than as comrades.
  "I feel responsible for her," Nene insisted.
  "Then intervene. Stage an intervention."
  "I can't," said Nene, not thinking. "Her door is locked."
  Alex G was perhaps the most beautiful person she had ever seen. He looked nothing like her, or any of the people with whom she had grown up. A strange friend had once given her a piece of cathedral quartz for her birthday, supposedly to aid in clearsightedness and being in the right place at the right time. In a certain way, that was just what Alex G looked like.
  As she fell in love again, he opened both of his pale eyes to glare at her.
  "My advice would be: don't go through the door."
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