Marlboro College was my first choice.

We came there when it was still a sharp green summer and wildflowers were living hazy in the delusion that this would go on forever. I was, too.

I was a Creative Writing major. I was 18.

I knew things about the world, I thought. My mom had brain cancer, but she still came up there with me to set up my dorm. The dorm smelled like woodsmoke. The walls were all cedar, and there were three roommates. One, Kate, smiled at me toothy and sweet and talked about how much she missed her dog. She would be diagnosed with MS six years later.

The other, Anna, was exactly who I wanted to be, but wasn’t. Confident. Mysterious. Knew who she was.

“I’m probably not going to stay in the dorm,” she snapped, when I tried to get to know her. “I lived outside for a year between high school and college. I’d like to continue that.”

She’d lived outside in Arizona, though, and this was Vermont. I didn’t realize this either, though. She was glamorous.

She didn’t like me, or anyone, at first. Found me especially childish, and Kate especially boring. Set up two dim lights on her desk and an Ethiopian tapestry and that was it for her, for decorations. I craved her approval.

Eventually, shockingly, I won her over. Just a little bit.

She came back from a date hazy and grinning. It’d been a breakfast date, and the sun was just coming up still, and it was still warm. “I feel like frolicking,” she declared. I blinked, surprised. Thrilled she’d talked to me. “Do you wanna go frolick with me in the soccer field?”

I did. I followed her.

Upon reaching the field she ripped off her headscarf and ran, leaping, dark hair longer than I’d ever seen hair spinning around her dizzily. I laughed, whooping and running after her. Eventually we collapsed in a dizzy comfort beside one another, squinting up at the bright sky.

She would leave the same year I would, mid-year, that same year. She would drop out and disappear, no explanation, never to be heard from again. I would get assaulted by my boyfriend and never come back.

“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” she said dreamily, chewing on a strand of grass like Huck Finn.

Marlboro, as a school, would collapse barely a decade later, close its doors.

What a dream it was.