My fifth year college reunion was full of people I'd forgotten:

--Danny. Bloated, but still recognizable; shocked when I knew who he was (I knew him only peripherally) and mentioned that I remembered him dating Bess B. At the mention of her name something seemed to fall away from his face. Hard lines softened. He let his cigarette fall away from his mouth. But still a shadow of old bravado. His challenge: "So, you gonna tell me your name, or are you just gonna tell me about myself?"

I told him who I was; asked if he still kept in touch with Bess. Again his face softened. The years melted. In his hand his cigarette burned unnoticed. Sometimes, he said. Every now and then. She was very special, he said. I nodded. We had, he said, stumbling over the words, something really sweet, just really sweet and good. His eyes met mine, but he did not seem to see me. Between you and me, man--he paused. She was my first. And I hers.

--Lenny T. from Brooklyn. Bill's old roommate. Still wearing the same aftershave—strange to remember that, but I did. And do.

--Manny B., basketball player extraordinaire from the Sudan. Once at Garfield House he showed up shivering, with nowhere to stay for the night. It was a cold winter's day on a campus emptied for Christmas break. We watched TV together in the comfortable old wood paneled room.

--Tanu. Megan's roommate from freshman year. Seemed genuinely glad to see me, gave me a hug, flashing that big smile that still seems to fill up her face. And I remembered sitting in the common room on the fourth floor of my freshman dorm, talking to her and Mimi and Shirin while Megan stood on a chair and smoked out the top of a window. She told a story about some asshole she'd liked in high school, who hadn't wanted to date her because she was Indian.

Strange how some of my memories of college seem to have been inexplicably replaced. Written over and encoded in an unwelcome and inaccurate mnemonic shorthand. For example, when I try to gauge the emotional heft of the place, inevitably I recall the rhythms of the passage from East of Eden where the protagonists wander around saying goodbye to Princeton—that hectic, headlong flow of gorgeous yet misaimed and mawkish Fitzgerald prose—and as I write this I realize with a sinking heart that East of Eden is a Steinbeck book and a movie, and that I meant to say This Side of Paradise. "Goodbye, Aaron Burr. You and I knew strange corners of life" and all that Jazz Age jazz. So: my memories replaced by a book. And I have forgotten the book.

Although I remember why I read it. It was because Shirin spoke of it one night with some strange enthusiasm that I didn't understand. And later that night I went to Sawyer Library and got the book. Read it, lying in my bed, trying to drown out the sounds of the party upstairs—blond desiccated girl-jocks drinking Bud and smoking bud with their khaki wearing red-faced boy-jocks. And later still woke up to the sounds of the fire alarm. One by one we stumbled out, shivered in the cold.

And on Saturday night last at the reunion we got drunk at the hockey rink and drank beer and ate cheese fries at the Log. Forty year olds (in good condition, with minimal wear and tear) danced to ABBA and disco and disco ABBA at Goodrich. And those self-same girls were on the first floor of Gladden, partying with those same boys, and drinking the same beer and playing the same music and dancing in the same half-hearted, stumbling way. And the fire alarm went off, of course, at four in the morning. And again, at six.

--and somewhere in Queens, I know now, Jen D. was sinking deeper and deeper into sleep. Her boyfriend tossed and muttered, perhaps. But Jen lay still, her breathing shallow, her lips drying. No fire alarm woke her. And she drifted away and didn't come back. Nothing woke her again.

I had forgotten her. Thought of her once at the reunion, maybe. Or so I'd like to think. But really, I hadn't remembered her till Bill told me the other day that she was dead.

Now I remember: Baxter Hall, early freshman year, passing by her with my tray of food. She was sitting alone at a table. Her head was bowed. Her elbows were on the table. She was very thin. Before her sat a bowl of cottage cheese, and sliced onions meant for hamburgers. And a bowl filled with ketchup, with eight french fries sitting in it. A glass of water. She kicked her heels up and down, as she shook more ketchup into her bowl, as she stirred the cottage cheese and onions. A strand of hair got in her eyes and she carefully brushed it aside. Slant of loneliness in her shoulder, I thought. Her gestures slow—the speed, it seemed, of some secret sorrow. Something in me welled up in answer to that perceived sorrow. What if I were to sit next to her and introduce myself, I wondered. And in that moment I imagined a future. I imagined getting to know her. I imagined becoming her friend—and then somebody called to me from a different table. And what I saw, and what I imagined, I forgot. And lost. I didn't talk to her until two years later. We sat in her room once listening to Kid A and talking about U2.

In other universes: a single electron deviated from the path it followed in ours at the beginning of time. A neutrino lasted a femtosecond longer. The speed of light a hundredth part faster or slower. The Irish discovered America and left Ogham knots tied to Plymouth Rock. The Aztecs stole Cortes's ships and sailed to Australia. The Black Death wiped out China instead of spreading to Europe. Korea invaded Japan. Subotai conquered Europe. Roses are blue and violets are red. Jen came to reunion and slept in Gladden and the fire alarm woke her up. Somewhere, somewhere I didn't forget. I sat down at that table and said: Hi. And she looked up and smiled.