Second, you didn’t want to be uncool. And third, a cliché: you didn’t ever want to be a cliché, but always extraordinary, not commonplace in any way. So I seemed together and in control, interesting and cool, up in my tower above it all, and better than anything that happened to me. Confession: I was a needy, uncool cliché and a really lonely girl. Our dorm suite had three bedrooms, two freshman girls in each, and a central living room, with couch, chairs, lamps and an ugly beige rug in the middle, plus a compact refrigerator and big-screen TV, courtesy of Inez’s parents. After amiably agreeing about which posters would go up on the living room walls, we made another agreement: if a girl had a guy over, her roommate should sleep out on the couch. This seemed only fair and made sense, but we soon learned you had to get your combos right. I started out sharing a room with Inez who had lived a very cushy, protected life in the Chicago suburbs. “I was raised in a golden cage,”
