Clad in flannel pajama pants, barn jacket and untied sneakers, Emma was up early, headed for the cafeteria for a couple of bowls of the generic Cap'n Crunch that made up the bulk of her dietary intake, but stopped in the hallway just outside her room, conscious of a stranger's fingerprints upon the dorm. There were evident whorls on the off button of the stereo that usually thumped techno music 24-7 through the walls of 317; loops and arches could be seen on the latched silver knob of the never-closed-door on 314; Emma leaned into the doorway of 312 and saw a swirling imprint on the down-turned face of Amber, who looked up, eyes puffed and unfamiliar, and blurted, "Ginny Abrahms died. She was hit by a car last night."

Emma mumbled an epithet of disbelief, then stepped back into the hallway---Ginny Abrams, dead. She wondered if she should feel aghast. Or maybe outraged? Morose? Some other semi-passionate emotion? None of these things rose from within her as she leaned against the student-painted mural that adorned the walls between the even-numbered rooms. Ginny lived in North Wing, three-oh-something, a sweet girl with whom Emma had walked a couple of times from 19th Century Lit to the dorm. She was from Rockland, or maybe Rockport, and wanted to be an anthropologist, or maybe an archeologist. It was always small talk: She recalled topics like Matthew McConaughey on Letterman and Malcolm in the Middle reruns, but not much else.

It was awful that she died, of course, but Emma wondered, if she hadn't heard the news, might she have gone the rest of the semester without noticing Ginny wasn't there: It was a crowded campus, and there were too many faces in the crowd to keep tabs on them all. Was that a bad thing? She stood in the harsh flourescence of the dormitory hallway imagining how this day would be: Students sobbing, RAs "making themselves available" to talk, university staff camped in the common area watching for signs of concern in her dorm mates.

Emma thought of a line from a Jim Carroll book that she had transcribed to a journal many years ago, a reference to a wake that Carroll had attended as a teen, where an open casket that gave mourners a chance to say something to the deceased; if you had nothing to say, said Carroll, "it was a chance to just stand there and feel shitty about everything." Emma stared down the long row of of closed doors and felt exactly that shitty, wondering how long it would take to clean off all of these fingerprints.