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Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Meg Wolitzer has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is dedicated to:

Rosellen Brown

Nora Ephron

Mary Gordon

Barbara Grossman

Reine Kidder

Susan Kress

Hilma Wolitzer

Ilene Young

without whom …

ONE

GREER KADETSKY MET Faith Frank in October of 2006 at Ryland College, where Faith had come to deliver the Edmund and Wilhelmina Ryland Memorial Lecture; and though that night the chapel was full of students, some of them boiling over with loudmouthed commentary, it seemed astonishing but true that out of everyone there, Greer was the one to interest Faith. Greer, a freshman then at this undistinguished school in southern Connecticut, was selectively and furiously shy. She could give answers easily, but rarely opinions. “Which makes no sense, because I am stuffed with opinions. I am a piñata of opinions,” she’d said to Cory during one of their nightly Skype sessions since college had separated them. She’d always been a tireless student and a constant reader, but she found it impossible to speak in the wild and free ways that other people did. For most of her life it hadn’t mattered, but now it did.

So what was it about her that Faith Frank recognized and liked? Maybe, Greer thought, it was the possibility of boldness, lightly suggested in the streak of electric blue that zagged across one side of her otherwise ordinary furniture-brown hair. But plenty of college girls had hair partially dipped the colors of frozen and spun treats found at county fairs. Maybe it was just that Faith, at sixty-three a person of influence and a certain level of fame who had been traveling the country for decades speaking ardently about women’s lives, felt sorry for eighteen-year-old Greer, who was hot-faced and inarticulate that night. Or maybe Faith was automatically generous and attentive around young people who were uncomfortable in the world.

Greer didn’t really know why Faith took an interest. But what she knew for sure, eventually, was that meeting Faith Frank was the thrilling beginning of everything. It would be a very long time before the unspeakable end.

SHE HAD BEEN at college for seven weeks before Faith appeared. Much of that time, that excruciating buildup, had been spent absorbed in her own unhappiness, practically curating it. On Greer’s first Friday night at Ryland, from along the dormitory halls came the ambient roar of a collective social life forming, as if there were a generator somewhere deep in the building. The class of 2010 was starting college in a time of supposed coed assertiveness—a time of female soccer stars and condoms zipped confidently inside the pocket of a purse, the ring shape pressing itself into the wrapper like a gravestone rubbing. As everyone on the third floor of Woolley Hall got ready to go out, Greer, who had planned on going nowhere, but instead staying in and doing the Kafka reading for her freshman literature colloquium, watched. She watched the girls standing with heads tilted and elbows jutted, pushing in earrings, and the boys aerosolizing themselves with a body spray called Stadium, which seemed to be half pine sap, half A.1. sauce. Then, overstimulated, they all fled the dorm and spread out across campus, heading toward various darkish parties that vibrated with identically shattering bass.

Woolley was old and decrepit, one of the original buildings, and the walls of Greer’s room, as she’d described them to Cory the day she arrived, were the disturbing color of hearing aids. The only people who remained there after the exodus that night were an assortment of lost, unclaimed souls. There was a boy from Iran who appeared very sad, his eyelashes clustered together in little wet starbursts. He sat in a chair in a corner of the first-floor lounge with his computer on his lap, gazing at it mournfully. When Greer entered the lounge—her room, a rare single, was too depressing to stay in all evening, and she’d been unable to concentrate on her book—she was startled to realize that he was merely looking at his screen saver, which was a picture of his parents and sister, all of them smiling at him from far away. The family image swept across the computer screen and gently bounced against one side, before slowly heading back.

How long would he watch his bouncing family? Greer wondered, and though she didn’t miss her own parents at all—she was still angry with them for what they had done to her, which had resulted in her ending up at Ryland—she felt sorry for this boy. He was away from home on another continent, at a place that perhaps someone had mistakenly told him was a first-rate American college, a center of learning and discovery, practically a School of Athens nestled on the East Coast of the US. After managing the complicated feat of getting here, he was now alone and quickly becoming aware that this place actually wasn’t so great. And besides that, he was also pining for his family. She knew what it was like to miss someone, for she missed Cory so continually and pressingly that the feeling was like its own shattering bass vibrating through her, and he was only 110 miles away at Princeton, not across the world.

Greer’s sympathies kept collecting and expanding, while in the doorway of the lounge appeared a very pale girl who stood clutching her midsection and asking, “Do either of you have something for diarrhea?”

The girl accepted their responses with a grim weariness, and then for lack of anything else to do she sat down too. Curling through the porous walls came the smell of butter plus tertiary butylhydroquinone, alluring but inadequate to the task of cheering anyone up. Moments later this was followed by the source of the smell, a big plastic tub of popcorn conveyed by a girl in a robe and slippers. “I got the kind with movie theater butter,” she said to them as an added inducement, holding out her bowl.

Apparently, Greer thought, these are going to be my people, tonight and perhaps every weekend night. It made no sense; she didn’t belong with them, and yet she was among them, she was one of them. So she took a hand span’s worth of popcorn, which was so wet that her fingers felt as if she’d draped them through soup. Greer was about to sit down and attempt a conversation; they could tell one another about themselves, how bleak they felt. She would stay in this lounge, even though Cory had encouraged her earlier not to stay in tonight, but instead to go out to a party or some sort of campus event. “There has to be something going on,” he’d said. “Improv. There’s always improv.” It was her first weekend at college, and he thought she should just try.

But she’d said no, she didn’t really want to try, she would rather get through it her own way. During the week she would be a super-student, working in a carrel in the library, her head bent over a book like a jeweler with a loupe. Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She’d always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran’s bouncing family. She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she’d first suspected that her parents weren’t all that interested in her. Then she’d kept going, plowing through children’s books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing both backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would be able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did.

But tonight, books were unseductive, and so they remained untouched, ignored. Tonight college was only about partying, or sitting in a bland dormitory lounge, bookless and self-punishing. Bitterness, she knew, could give you an edge. Unlike pure unhappiness, bitterness had a taste. This display of bitterness would be for no one but herself. Her parents wouldn’t witness it; even Cory Pinto, down at Princeton, wouldn’t. She and Cory had grown up together, and had been in love and entwined since the year before; and though they’d vowed that throughout the four years of college they would Skype with each other all the time—the new video feature would even allow them to see each other—and borrow cars to visit each other at least once a month, they would be entirely separate tonight. He had gotten dressed in a good sweater in order to go out to a party. Earlier, she’d watched as the Skype version of him came close to the webcam, all pore and nostril and rock-ledge forehead.

“Try to have a good time,” he’d said, his voice stuttering slightly because of a glitchy system configuration. Then he turned and held up a finger to John Steers, his off-camera roommate, as if telling him: Give me two more seconds. I just have to deal with this.

Greer had quickly ended the call, not wanting to be seen as “this”—someone to deal with, the needy one in the relationship. Now she sat in the Woolley lounge, lowering and lifting her hand into and out of the popcorn, looking around at the tacked-up posters for the Heimlich maneuver and indie band auditions and a Christian Students picnic in West Quad, come rain or shine. A girl walked by the room and stopped; later on she admitted that she had done this more out of kindness than interest. She resembled a slender, sexy boy, perfectly made, with a Joan of Arc aesthetic that immediately read as gay. She took in the sight of the bright room of lost people, frowned in deliberation, and then announced, “I’m going to check out a few parties, if anyone wants to come.”

The boy shook his head and returned to the image on his screen. The girl with the popcorn just kept eating, and the girl in distress was now debating with someone on her cell phone about whether she should go to Health Services. “I know that on the plus side they could help me,” she was saying. “But on the minus side I have no idea where they’re located.” Pause. “No, I cannot call Security and have them escort me there.” Another pause. “And anyway, I think it might just be nerves.”

Greer looked at the boyish girl and nodded, and the girl nodded back, turning up the collar of her jacket. In the dim hall, they pushed through the heavy fire doors. Only when Greer was outside in the wind, feeling it ripple along the thin material of her shirt, did she remember she was sweaterless. But she felt certain that she shouldn’t break the moment by asking if she could run up to the third floor and get her sweater.

“I thought we could sample a few different things,” said the girl, who introduced herself as Zee Eisenstat, from Scarsdale, New York. “It will be like a test kitchen for college life.”

Zee led them to Spanish House, a freestanding clapboard building on the edge of campus. As they walked in, a boy in the doorway said, “Buenas noches, señoritas,” and handed them glasses of what he called mock-sangria, though Greer got into a brief conversation with another resident of the house about whether the mock-sangria was perhaps actually not mock at all.

“Licor secreto?” Greer asked quietly, and the girl looked at her hard and said, “Inteligente.”

Inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and then she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her class.

Later on, when it wasn’t just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there—your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were—both exhausted and frightened Greer, and she thought of this as she and Zee headed for their next social destination, the Lamb Art Studio. How Zee, a freshman, knew about these parties was unclear; there had been no mention of them in the Ryland Weekly Blast.

The air in the studio was sharp with turpentine, which almost served as a sexual accelerant, for the art students, all upperclassmen, seemed highly attracted to one another. They were twinned and tripled, with skinny bodies and paint-spattered pants and drawn-on hands and ear gauges and unusually bright eyes. In the middle of the white wooden floor, a girl was being carried around on a guy’s shoulders, crying, “BENNETT, STOP IT, I’M GOING TO FALL OFF AND DIE, AND THEN MY PARENTS WILL SUE YOUR VISUAL ARTS ASS!” He—Bennett—carried her in staggered circles while he was still sufficiently young and powerful and Atlas-like to hold her like this, and while she was still light enough to be held.

The art students were into one another and one another only. It was as if Greer and Zee had stumbled upon a subculture in the clearing of a forest. “The male gaze” kept getting mentioned, though at first Greer heard it as “the male gays,” but then finally she understood. She and Zee slipped away not long after arriving, and once outside again they were almost immediately joined by another freshman who confidently and unapologetically attached herself to them. She said her name was Chloe Shanahan, and she seemed to aspire toward a certain mallish brand of hotness, with spiky heels and Hollister jeans and a Slinky-load of thin silver bracelets. She had wound up in the art studio by mistake, she told them; she was actually looking for Theta Gamma Psi.

Chloe shrugged. “They apparently have a keg and loud music. That’s all I need tonight.”

Zee looked at Greer. Did she want to go to an actual frat party? She wanted it less than most things; but she also didn’t want to be alone, so maybe she did want it. She thought of Cory leaning against a wall at a party right this minute, laughing at something. She saw an array of people looking up at him—he was the tallest person in any room—and laughing back.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the survivors of a plane crash. Chloe took them across West Quad, and then they looped around behind the fortress of the Metzger Library, which was all lit up and poignantly empty, like a 24-hour supermarket in the middle of the night.

The Ryland website showed a few nominal photos of students in goggles doing something with a torch in a laboratory, or squinting over a whiteboard jammed with calculations, but the rest of the photos were social, cornball: an afternoon of ice skating on a frozen pond, a classic “three in a tree” shot of students chatting beneath a spreading oak. In fact, the campus only had one such tree, which had been over-photographed into exhaustion. In daylight, students straggled to class along the paths of the inelegant campus, occasionally even wearing pajamas, like the members of a good-natured bear family in a children’s book.

When nighttime fell, though, the college came into its own. Their destination tonight was a large, corroding frat house thundering with sound. Greek life, the college catalogues had called this. Greer imagined IMing Cory later, writing, “greek life: wtf? where is aristotle? where is baklava?” But suddenly their usual kind of shared, arch commentary that kept them both entertained was irrelevant, for he wasn’t here, not even close, and now she was inside a wide doorway with these two randomly chosen girls, heading toward the noxious smells and the inviting ones, and, indirectly and eventually, toward Faith Frank.

The house drink that night was called the Ryland Fling, and it was the pastel pink of bug juice but immediately had a muscular, slugging effect on Greer, who weighed 110 pounds and had eaten only a few small, sad anthills of food from the salad bar at dinner. Usually she liked the pleasing snap of clarity, but now she knew clarity would just lead her back to unhappiness, so she drained her first hyper-sweet Ryland Fling from a plastic cup with a sharp nub on the bottom, then stood waiting in line for a second one. The drinks, plus what she’d already drunk at Spanish House, were effective.

Soon she and the two other girls were dancing in a circle, as if for the pleasure of a sheikh. Zee was an excellent dancer, her hips sliding and her shoulders working, yet the rest of her moving with studied minimalism. Chloe, beside her, drew shapes with her hands, her many bracelets chiming. Greer was free-form and unusually unguarded. When they were all exhausted, they plopped onto a bulbous black leather couch that smelled vaguely of fried flounder. Greer closed her eyes while an annoying hip-hop song by Pugnayshus began to swell:

“Tell me why you wanna rag on me

When I’m in a state of perpetual agony …”

“I love this song,” Chloe said, just as Greer started to say, “I hate this song.” She stopped herself, not wanting to impugn Chloe’s taste. Then Chloe began to sing along: “… perpetual a-go-ny …,” she enunciated, as sweet and reassuring as someone in a cherub choir.

Above them, Darren Tinzler strode down the wide, majestic stairway. He hadn’t been identified as Darren Tinzler yet, hadn’t been given significance, but was still just another frat brother standing in front of the amethyst stained glass on the landing, thick-chested and with an overhang of hair and wide-set eyes beneath a backward baseball cap. He surveyed the room, then after consideration he headed for the three of them and their concentration of femaleness. Chloe tried to rise to the occasion like a little mermaid lifting toward the ocean surface, but she couldn’t entirely sit up. Zee, when he dubiously turned his attention to her next, closed her eyes and held up a hand, as if quietly shutting a door in his face.

Which left Greer, who of course wasn’t available either. She and Cory were sealed together, and even if they hadn’t been, she knew she was too mild and focused for someone like this bro, though she still looked appealing in a very specific way, small and compact and determined, like a flying squirrel. She had straight, shining dark hair; the shot of color had been added at home with a drugstore kit in eleventh grade. She’d stood over the sink in the upstairs bathroom, getting blue all over the basin and the rug and the shower curtain, until in the end the room looked like the set of a slasher film on another planet.

She had imagined that the streak in her hair would be a temporary novelty. But when she and Cory suddenly became involved senior year, he’d liked touching that unexpected swatch of color, so she’d kept it. In the beginning with him, when he sat looking at her for an extended moment, she often instinctively dipped her head down and glanced off to the side. Finally he would say, “Don’t look away. Come back to me. Come back.”

Now Darren Tinzler turned his cap around and tipped it to her as if it were a top hat. And because of those powerful Ryland Flings, which had seriously loosened Greer, she stood and reached her hands out on either side of her waist, as if lifting a skirt in an air-curtsy, and bobbed her head. “Such a fancy occasion,” she murmured to herself.

He regarded her curiously, then led her into a corner, where they rested their drinks on top of a careless pile of warped and long-ignored board games—Battleship, Risk, Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, Full House Trivial Pursuit. “Were these rescued from the Great Frat House Flood of 1987?” she asked.

She told him she lived in Woolley, and he said, “You have my sympathy. It’s so depressing there.”

“It really is,” she said. “And the walls are the color of hearing aids, am I right?” Cory, she remembered, had laughed when she’d said that, and told her, “I love you.” But Darren just looked at her again in that irritated way. She thought that she even saw disgust in his expression. But then he was smiling again, so maybe she had seen nothing. The human face had too many possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.

“It’s been kind of not so great,” she confided. “I wasn’t supposed to be here at Ryland, actually. It was all a big mistake, but it happened, and it isn’t fixable.”

“Is that right?” he asked. “You were supposed to be at another college?”

“I did. But it didn’t work out, and it’s too complicated to go into. So here I be.”

“Here you be,” Darren Tinzler said. He reached out in a proprietary way and rubbed the collar of her shirt between his fingers, and she was startled and didn’t know what to do, because this wasn’t right. His other hand ran experimentally up her shirt, and Greer stood in shocked suspension for a moment as he found the convexity of her breast and encircled it, all the while looking her in the eye, not blinking, just looking.

But he held on, giving her breast a hard and painful squeeze, twisting the flesh. When she pulled away for real he took her wrist and yanked her close, saying, “What do you mean, what am I doing? You’re standing here coming on to me with your bullshit about getting into Yale.”

“No one else here is going to fuck you, Blue Streak,” he continued. “It would have to be a mercy fuck. You should be grateful that I was into you for two seconds. Get over yourself. You’re not that hot.”

Then he let go of her wrist and pushed her away as if she had been the one who had been aggressive. Throughout all of this Greer’s face had turned warm and her mouth had gone as dry as a little piece of fabric. She felt herself swallowed up once again inside the usual feeling of being unable to say what she felt. The room was eating her up—the room and the party and the college and the night.

No one appeared to have noticed what had happened, or at least no one was surprised by it. This tableau had taken place in plain sight: a guy putting a hand up a girl’s shirt and grabbing her hard and then pushing her away. She was as inconspicuous as Icarus drowning in the corner of the Bruegel painting they’d studied on the very first day of class. This was college, and this was a college party. Pin the Tail on the Donkey was being played, while several people chanted, “Go Kyla, go Kyla,” in monotone to a blindfolded girl who held a paper tail and took lurching baby steps forward. Elsewhere, a boy was softly puking into a porkpie hat. Greer thought about running to Health Services, where she could lie on a cot beside another cot that perhaps now held the girl from Woolley with diarrhea, the two of them having started college so inauspiciously.

But Greer didn’t need to go there; she just needed to leave this building. She heard Darren’s mild laughter pattering behind her as she moved quickly through the crowd, then out onto the porch with the groaning swing in which two people lay clasped, and then down onto the college green, which, she could feel through the heels of her boots, was still spongy from summer but already starting to turn brittle at the edges.

She had never been touched like this before, she thought as she began a shaky speed-walk back across campus. In the hard, dark night, alone with herself in this new place, she tried to figure out what had happened. Of course boys and men had often made rude or lurid comments to her, the way they did to everyone, everywhere. At age eleven Greer had been muttered at by the bikers who hung around the KwikStop in Macopee. One day in summer, when she’d gone there to buy her favorite ice cream bar, a Klondike Choco Taco, a man with a ZZ Top beard had come close to her, looked her up and down in her shorts and little sleeveless shirt, and made his assessment: “Sweetie, you’re boobless.”

Greer had had no way to defend herself against ZZ Top, no way to say anything spiky or do anything to stop him or even just call him out. She’d been silent before him, sassless and undefended. She wasn’t one of those girls who seemed to be everywhere, hands on hips, those girls who were described in certain books and movies as being “spitfires,” or, later on, “kickass.” Even now, at college, there were girls like this, fuck-you confident and assured of their place in the world. Whenever they came upon resistance in the form of outright sexism or even more generic grossness, they either vanquished it or essentially rolled their eyes and acted as if it was just too stupid for them to acknowledge. They wasted no thought on people like Darren Tinzler.

On the college green now, people walked together in the resuscitative air, having left parties that were winding down, or heading toward other, smaller ones that were just starting up. It was the middle of the night; the temperature had dropped, and without a sweater Greer was cold. When she got back to Woolley the girl with the popcorn was asleep in the lounge, cradling her big plastic tub, which now contained just a cluster of unpopped corn kernels at the bottom like a congregation of ladybugs.

Over the next few days she would repeat a version of this to several conscious people, at first because it was still so upsetting, but then because it was so insulting. “It was like he felt he was entitled to do whatever he wanted,” Greer said on the phone to Cory with a kind of incensed wonder. “He didn’t care how I felt. He just thought he had the right.”

Zee told her she should report him. “The administration should know about this. It’s assault, you know.”

“So? All the more reason that he shouldn’t be messing with you.” When Greer didn’t respond, Zee said, “Hello, Greer, this is not tolerable. It’s actually pretty outrageous.”

“Maybe it’s a Ryland thing. This wouldn’t happen at Princeton, I don’t think.”

Zee was innately, bracingly political. She had started with animal rights when she was young; soon after, she became a vegetarian, and over time her depth of feeling for animals extended toward people too, and she added women’s rights, LGBT rights, war and its inevitable flood of refugees, and then climate change, which made you imagine future animals, future people, all of them imperiled and gasping, having run out of possibilities.

But Greer hadn’t yet developed much of a political inner life; she only felt sickened and reluctant as she imagined filing a report and having to sit alone in Dean Harkavy’s office in Masterson Hall with a clipboard on her lap, writing out a statement about Darren Tinzler in her overly neat, good-girl handwriting. Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?

Greer thought about how victims’ names were kept out of sexual assault reports. The idea that something had been done to you seemed to implicate you, even though no one said it did, making your body—which usually lived in darkness beneath your clothing—suddenly live in light. Forever, if someone found out, you would be a person with a body that had been violated, breached. Also, forever you would be a person with a body that was vivid and imaginable. Compared with something like that, what had happened here was small potatoes. And then, once again, Greer thought of her own breasts, which could also be described that way. Small potatoes. That was the sum of what she was.

“I don’t know,” Greer said to Zee, aware of a kind of familiar vagueness sweeping around her. She sometimes said, “I don’t know,” even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.

As the moment with Darren Tinzler receded, it became less real, and finally it simply turned into an anecdote that Greer deconstructed more than once with a few girls in her dorm, all of them standing around the common bathroom carrying the plastic shower pails that their mothers had bought them to take to college, so that they resembled a coalition of children meeting at a sandbox. Everyone knew by now to keep their distance from the odious Darren Tinzler, and finally the topic exhausted itself, and exhausted the people thinking about it. It wasn’t rape, Greer had pointed out; not even close. Already it felt much less important than what was apparently going on right now at other colleges: the rugby-playing roofie-givers, the police reports, the outrage.

But over the next couple of weeks, half a dozen other female Ryland students had their own Darren Tinzler encounters. They didn’t even necessarily know his name at first; he was just described as a male wearing a baseball cap and having “eyes like a carp,” as someone said. One night in the dining hall Darren sat with his friends and watched a sophomore for a long, unhurried amount of time; he gazed across the crowded space at her while she raised a spoon of fat-free something or other to her mouth. Another night he was in the reading room of the library, slouched at one of the butterscotch tables staring at a student as she forged her way through Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics.

And then, when she stood up to talk to a friend or to bus her plate or to get some supposedly UTI-curative cranberry juice from the spigots with their miraculous free-flow that defined college life, or simply to stretch a little, joints going pop-pop-pop, he stood up, too, and strode toward her with resolve, making sure that they had cruised into a side-by-side position.

When they were together in an alcove or hidden behind a wall or otherwise away from all onlookers, he started a conversation. And then he perceived her politeness or kindness or even her vague responsiveness as interest, and maybe sometimes it was. But then he always made it physical, a hand up a shirt, or on a crotch, or even, once, a finger swiped fast across a mouth. And when she recoiled he became angry and squeezed her hard so she cried out, and then reeled her in, saying some version of, “Oh, like you’re so shocked. Give me a fucking break. You’re such a little whore.”

In every case she jolted back from him, saying, “Get away,” or simply storming off, saying, “You sick fuck,” or saying nothing and later telling her roommate what had happened, or maybe telling no one, or else worriedly polling all her friends that night, asking them, “I don’t look like a whore, do I?” and having them gather round her and say, “No, Emily, you look incredible. I love your look, it’s so free.”

But then one night in Havermeyer, which was still known as the “new” dorm, though it had been built in 1980 and had a Soviet style amid all the eclectic architectural overreach that defined the Ryland campus, a sophomore named Ariel Diski returned very late to her room to find a boy waiting in the fourth-floor hallway’s defunct phone booth. There was no longer a phone in the booth, just a series of chewing-gum-plugged holes where the pay phone had been ripped out, and a wooden seat to sit on in this useless little chamber. He opened the squeaking glass accordion door and stepped toward her, detaining her, talking to her, and even saying something that amused her. But soon he had touched her rudely and was edging her into her room; she pulled away from him, at which point he got mad and reined her in by her belt loops.

But Ariel Diski had studied Krav Maga in high school with the Israeli gym teacher, and she got Darren in the center of his chest with a perfectly executed elbow strike. He brayed in pain, doors opened up and down the hall, people appeared in various states of undress and standing-up hair, and finally Security lumbered into the building with their sizzling, muttering walkie-talkies. And though Darren Tinzler was gone by that time, he was easily identified and apprehended back in Theta Gamma Psi, where he was pretending to be deep in a one-person round of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit.

Soon the other girls rallied and came forward, and while the college initially tried to avoid any kind of public airing, under pressure officials agreed to hold a disciplinary hearing. It took place in a biology lab in the pale, leaking light of a Friday afternoon, when everyone was already thinking about the weekend ahead. Greer, when it was her turn to speak, stood in front of a glossy black table lined with Bunsen burners, and half-whispered what Darren Tinzler had said and done to her that night at the party. She was sure she had a fever from testifying, a wild and inflamed fever. Scarlet fever, maybe.

Darren was without his usual baseball cap; his flat, fair hair looked like a circle of lawn that had been trapped and left to die under a kiddie pool. Finally he read a prepared statement: “I’d just like to say that I, Darren Scott Tinzler, class of 2007, a communications major from Kissimmee, Florida, am apparently kind of bad at reading signals from the opposite sex. I’m very ashamed right now, and I apologize for my own repeated misunderstanding of social cues.”

A decision was handed down within an hour. The head of the disciplinary committee, a young, female assistant dean, announced that Darren would be allowed to stay on campus if he agreed to undergo three counseling sessions with a local behavioral therapist, Melanie Stapp, MSW, whose website said her specialty was impulse control. An illustration showed a man frantically puffing away at a cigarette, and an unhappy woman eating a doughnut.

There was a strong but diffuse outcry on campus. “This is misogyny in action,” said a senior when they were all sitting in the Woolley lounge late one night.

“And it’s just amazing that the head of the committee apparently had no sympathy for the victims,” said a sophomore.

“She’s probably one of those women who hates women,” said Zee. “A total cunt.” Then she began to sing her own version of a song from a musical that her parents used to like: “Women … women who hate women … are the cuntiest women … in the world …”

Zee said, “Cunt,” and everyone laughed. “Oh, come on,” Zee went on. “I can say what I want. That’s having agency.”

Greer and Zee were part of long conversations about Darren with other people in the dining hall; they stayed until the food service workers kicked them out. Anger was hard to sustain, and despite these conversations and a tightly reasoned op-ed by a senior in the Ryland Clarion, two of the girls involved said they didn’t want the case to drag on any longer.

Still Greer kept thinking about him. It wasn’t the actual encounter that remained—that was almost gone except for a trace memory—but instead she fixed on how unfair it was that he was tolerated there. Unfair: the word sounded like a child’s complaint hollered bitterly to a parent.

“Sorry, I am done with thinking about him,” Ariel Diski said one morning in the student union, after Greer tentatively approached her. “I’m super-busy,” said Ariel, “and he’s just a dick.”

“I know he is,” said Greer. “But maybe there’s more to do. My friend Zee thinks there is.”

“Look, I know you’re still invested in this,” said Ariel, “but no offense, I’m pre-law, and I can’t get stressed. Sorry, Greer, I’m done.”

That night, Zee and Greer and Chloe sat in Zee’s room, painting their toenails the brownish green of army fatigues. The room gave off a fermented chemical smell that made them all feel a little sick and a little wild. “You could go to the Women’s Alliance,” Zee offered. “They might have some advice.”

“Or not. My roommate went to one of their meetings,” Chloe said. “She said all they do is bake brownies against genital mutilation.”

Ryland wasn’t a very political place, so you took what you could get. Every once in a while a wave of protest unexpectedly lifted up. A few years into the clanking Iraq War, Zee and two sophomores were sometimes seen out on the steps of the Metzger with a megaphone and handouts. Then there was a series of protests by the very small but well-organized Black Students Association. The climate change group had become a persistently grave presence, and Zee was part of it as well. The sky was falling, they told everyone again and again, the hot and seething sky.

“You know,” said Zee, “I once made and sold T-shirts to raise money to stop animal cruelty back in Scarsdale when I was a kid. I’m thinking we could make T-shirts with Darren Tinzler’s face on them and give them away. And beneath it could be the word ‘Unwanted.’”

Money was pooled, and fifty cheap T-shirts were quickly purchased from an online closeout wholesaler, and Greer, Zee, and Chloe stayed up late in the basement of Woolley among the stored bikes and chugging laundry machines and the sluice of toilet water through overhead pipes, ironing transfers of Darren Tinzler’s face onto synthetic fabric because it was cheaper than having them printed. By four a.m. Greer’s arm was still strong as she ran the hot, pointy anvil over and over the image of Darren’s bland paleness—the baseball cap worn low, the unusually wide-set eyes. He had a stupid face, she thought, but buried in it was a brutish, cunning instinct.

Soon afterward, Chloe gave up, standing and reaching out her arms, saying, “Must. Have. Bed,” so a few hours later it was just Greer and Zee who sat yawning in the bright entrance to the dining hall, trying to get people to take their T-shirts. “Free T-shirts!” they told everyone, but in the end they gave away only five. It was a disappointment, a sad failure. Still, Greer and Zee wore theirs as often as they could, though the fabric shrank a little in the wash and Darren Tinzler’s face was stretched and slightly distorted, as if he’d put his head in a copy machine.

Zee had seen the announcement for the lecture in the Weekly Blast and was very excited. “I’ve always loved her,” she said to Greer. They had become friends in an accelerated way because of the night they’d spent with the T-shirts, scheming, talking, free-associating. “I know she represents this kind of outdated idea of feminism,” said Zee, “that focuses on issues that mostly affect privileged women. I totally see that. But you know what? She’s done a lot of good, and I think she’s amazing. Also, the thing about Faith Frank,” she went on, “is that while she’s this famous, iconic person, she also seems so approachable. We have to go see her, Greer. You have to talk to her, tell her what’s happened. Tell her. She’ll know what to do.”

Greer knew shamefully little about Faith Frank, though the night before the lecture she fortified herself with some intensive Googling. Looking facts up online comforted her; the world could be out of control, but still there were answers that could easily be found. Yet while Google provided timeline and context, it gave her no real sense of how a person like Faith actually became her whole self.

In the early 1970s, Greer saw, Faith Frank had been one of the founders of Bloomer magazine, named for Amelia Bloomer, the feminist and social reformer who published the first newspaper for women. Bloomer was known as the scrappier, less famous little sister to Ms. magazine. The magazine had been very good in the beginning, not as polished or sophisticated as Ms., never particularly well-designed but often filled with columns and articles that were absorbing and charged. Over the decades, readership had gone way down, and finally the magazine, once seen as a bulletin from the front, became as thin as a manual that came with a small appliance.

But Faith, who had been described as “a couple of steps down from Gloria Steinem in fame,” remained visible. In the late 1970s she began writing books for a popular audience that sold well, with their feisty, encouraging messages of empowerment. Then in 1984 she had an enormous hit with her manifesto The Female Persuasion, which essentially implored women to see that there was a great deal more to being female than padded shoulders and acting tough. Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate. They could be strong and powerful, all the while keeping their integrity and decency.

People really seemed to want to hear this message, including every woman who had gone to Wall Street and ended up miserable. Women could get out, Faith said; they could start cooperatives, or at least they could challenge the prevailing culture at their firms. And men, she added, could use some persuading to balance their long-established toughness with a new gentleness. Balance, she told them, was everything. The book had never gone out of print, though each new edition needed to be severely updated.

Because Faith was poised and articulate and effective when interviewed, she had been given her own short segment on PBS’s nighttime magazine-format TV show Recap, where she interviewed other people; sometimes she chose sexist men as her subjects, and in their vanity they seemed to have no idea of why they had been selected. They appeared on-screen, occasionally preening and making objectionable remarks, and she calmly and wittily corrected them—and sometimes just easily took them down.

But though Faith’s interviews were popular, by the mid-nineties the whole show was canceled. Faith was still writing books by then, but they had stopped selling well. Over the years she had continued publishing more modest sequels to The Female Persuasion. (The most recent one, in the late nineties, about women and technology, was The Email Persuasion.) Finally she stopped writing books entirely.

In the earliest photographs Greer found, Faith Frank, a tall, slender woman with long, dark curls, looked tenderly youthful, open. In one shot she was seen marching in DC. In another, she was gesticulating intensely on the set of one of those cultural-roundtable talk shows that used to be on late at night, with the guests on white swivel chairs in bell-bottoms, chain-smoking and yelling. Faith had gotten into a notorious debate on-air with the proudly male chauvinist novelist Holt Rayburn. He’d tried to shout her down that night, but she’d kept speaking in her calm and logical way, and in the end she’d won. It made the papers, and ultimately ended up being the reason she was offered her interview segment on Recap. Another photo showed her wearing her infant son in a sling while squinting at a magazine layout over his loosely screwed-on head. The photos kept moving forward through time, with Faith Frank still retaining a version of her elegant, lustrous self into her forties, fifties, sixties.

In most of the photos she was wearing a pair of tall, sexy suede boots, her signature look. There were interviews and profiles; one made reference to her “surprising impatience.” Faith could apparently get angry quickly, and not just at chauvinistic male novelists. She was depicted as kind but human, sometimes difficult, always generous and wonderful. But by the time she came to speak at Ryland College, she was seen as someone from the past, who was often spoken of with admiration, and with a special tone of voice reserved for very few people. She was like a pilot light that burned continuously, comfortingly.

The chapel, when Greer and Zee arrived that night, was only two-thirds filled. The weather was unusually bad for fall, flurries spiraling widely, and the place had the smell and feel of a children’s coatroom, with slick, streaked floors, and people trying to find a place to stow their damp outerwear, only to end up bunching it up and holding it awkwardly against their bodies. Many of the students had come because their professors had made the lecture mandatory. “She’s been very important to a lot of people, myself included. Be there,” one sociology professor had said in a mildly threatening tone.

The event was supposed to start at seven, but apparently Faith’s driver had gotten lost. The sign at the entrance of Ryland was so modest that it might have advertised a small-town pediatric practice. At 7:25 there came a squall of activity from over on the other side of the chapel, and then a raw front of incoming damp night air as the double doors were pushed open and several people powered in. First came the college president, and then the dean, followed by a couple of others, all excited in their coats and unflattering hats. Then, hatless and shockingly recognizable, Faith Frank entered with a few people, including the provost, and stood unspooling a blood-colored scarf from her throat. Greer watched as the scarf unwound and unwound, a trick scarf as long as a river. Faith’s cheeks were so bright they looked freshly slapped. Her hair was the same dark brown mass of curls it had always been in pictures, and when she shook it out, snowflakes sprang off it as delicately as atoms scattering.

As in the photos of her from over the decades, she had a striking and sympathetic face with a very strong, elegant nose. The effect was one of glamour and importance and gravitas and friendly curiosity as she looked around at the medium-sized crowd, and Greer supposed that she might have perceived the chapel as half-empty or half-full, depending on her perspective.

The incoming party quickly got seated up front, and then the college president, stuffed thickly into the upholstery of a flowered dress, stood at the podium and gave a worshipful introduction, her hand on her heart. Finally Faith Frank rose. She was sixty-three years old and a forceful presence in a dark wool dress that hewed to her long, rangy middle; of course, she wore her suede boots. These particular ones were smoke gray, though she still owned a whole color spectrum of boots, which let everyone know she had once been a knockout, a sexual powerhouse, and maybe still was. She wore several rings on the fingers of both hands: chunky, arty bursts of gemstone and silver. She looked completely composed, not at all rattled, though she had been late to her own speech.

ALSO BY MEG WOLITZER

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