Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

and have been told that my village is two hours by bicycle from the nearest town. No electricity, no cell phone coverage. I’ve started a blog and will be posting notes whenever I’m in the capital, but I don’t know how often that will be. I just want you to have the same chance that I do to explore and meet new people, and I hope you believe me when I say that you still, and will always, mean a great deal to me.
    Patrick
    Why couldn’t I just live with that? Why not let that last line sustain me and throw myself into new friendships, a new relationship maybe, and see what would happen?
    And finally, back in my dorm when I’d sat at my computer motionless for twenty minutes or so, my feelings going back and forth like a pendulum, I put my fingers on the keys:
    Dear Patrick , I wrote. Understood. Really. Always, Alice.
    Abby was my roommate my sophomore year. After the “outbreak of Amber,” as I called it, Abby was a refreshing change. She respected my space, kept her own reasonably neat, and I certainly never found her underwear in my bed.
    Now that the second bed belonged to Abby, the whole gang hung out here sometimes, with as many guys as we couldcomfortably squeeze in. Besides Dave and Travis and Jag, there was Cole, the basketball player, and James, who was inheriting his family’s farm, and Pete and Andrew and other guys I went out with occasionally for a sandwich or to a club, and that’s how the big shave-off took place in our room.
    I’m not sure how “No Shave November” got started. I think it was originally a charity event to raise money for men’s health awareness or something. But guys all over campus had been growing competitive mustaches or beards—whatever—and then, on the first of December, we had a big shave-off. At some schools, I’d heard, women take part and don’t shave their legs for a month, and sometimes, for the big shave-off, they removed hair from . . . uh . . . other parts of the body as well.
    We were content to watch the guys try to outdo each other, and in they came with handlebar mustaches, goatees, shoulder-length hair, dreadlocks, and we girls supposedly had the pleasure of shaving them or watching them shave each other.
    “I hope somebody’s going to vacuum this up,” Abby said as we watched Cole’s reddish locks fall, hit or miss, into the barber’s apron that we fashioned from a sheet. Colin had the arms of a vinyl raincoat tied around his neck, and soon his hair was sliding down the front and, some of it, anyway, into a trash basket.
    “Isn’t there some way to recycle hair?” Val said, waiting with a mustache trimmer. “Fill mesh bags with it to surround an oil spill or something?”
    We shrieked as Travis posed for a picture with only halfof his handlebar mustache shaved off, and we made him pose for another with Dave, who had run a razor up both arms from wrist to elbow.
    But James won first place when he stripped off his shirt and presented his hairy back to the girls.
    “Wow!” I said, running my hand over the silky mat of black hair. “I had a cat once that felt like this.”
    James pretended to purr. “Live it up. I’m all yours.”
    I contemplated that vast expanse of shiny blackness. It was like a virgin forest, and I felt like an axman about to destroy it forever.
    “Uh-oh,” said Claire, “she’s got that look in her eye.”
    I put down the scissors I’d been holding and borrowed the narrow mustache trimmer instead. Then, bracing my left hand on James’s shoulder to steady myself, I turned the gadget on and carefully shaved out the letters A-L-I-C-E, to much laughter.
    When we got a hand mirror and showed James his back, he spun me around and sat me on his lap. Then everyone got their cell phones and took pictures of us. Valerie sent one to my laptop, and hers was the best. There I sat, straddling James, who was looking over his shoulder and grinning, his face pressed up against mine, with A-L-I-C-E etched on his back in crooked