Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson Page B

have a rich supply. “Don’t you know
enough
jokes?”
    â€œBad sport,” someone called, and then others took it up. “Bad sport, rotten sport, not fair.”
    What a silly routine, Natalie thought, not realizing, sitting there alone on the stool in the center of the ring of girls, how she was jeopardizing her own future in college, her own future for four years and perhaps for the rest of her life; how even worse than the actual being a bad sport was the state of mind which led her into defiance of this norm, this ring of placid, masked girls, with their calm futures ahead and their regular pasts proven beyond a doubt; how one person, stepping however aside from their meaningless, echoing standards, set perhaps by a violent movement before their recollection, and handed down to them by other placid creatures, might lose a seat among them by questions, by rebellion, by anything except a cheerful smile and the resolution to hurt other people.
    â€œI won’t,” Natalie said, not knowing whom she was answering.
    â€œExcused,” said the leader.
    Natalie, realizing that she must relinquish the stool and the light, said as she rose (and loud enough, she hoped, to carry to the fortunate girls still asleep, the red-haired girl and the others who had not answered the call), “I think this is the silliest thing I ever saw.” Follow me, she prayed to the girls still sitting in the ring, follow me, stand up, and a new world is made; but no one, standing up beside her, or even raising her voice or her eyes, noticed Natalie by now.
    â€œDirty joke?” the leader was saying to the new girl.
    â€œI don’t know,” said the new girl, blushing pleasurably. “Let me think.”
    Natalie opened the door, observed but not interfered with, and went out.
    She went, alone and with a realization of aloneness, to her own private, untouched, room.
    Dear Dad,
    This is going to be my most ambitious letter to date, and
please don’t criticize
, because I am writing fast and not stopping to correct, and even though that might be the way to get things down best, it makes for a lot of mistakes. Because this is going to be about the college. I know you saw it that first day when you and Mother and Bud brought me down, but at that time we were all strange and didn’t know what it was like, and now, after over two weeks (and it seems like two years, really) I feel so much at home here that I don’t really remember what it was like to live anywhere else, and I sometimes think of how that first day is all
you
know of the place, and you still see it like that, and I can’t remember.
    First of all, let me tell you about my house. I guess you saw most of it when I moved in—and by the way, that was the
only
time I saw it
that
way, like a stranger with her mother and father and brother, I mean, because right after you left it got all different and I started feeling like a college girl who lived here. Do you know what I’m trying to say? Anyway, the house you saw isn’t the one, I think, that I live in at all. By now it’s turned into something where girls are yelling and laughing and feeling somehow completely private, and sort of in a world of their own. It has four stories, and I live on the third, as you know. I have a little room, like all the other rooms they give to freshmen. The third- and fourth-year students can have double rooms or suites, but the freshmen and usually the second-year students have rooms alone.
    Our house is supposed to be the best because it’s attached to the dining room and kitchens, and the girls here only have to go down the stairs and down a hall to get their dinner. Some of the others have to come all the way across the campus, from the other houses we saw. The main part of the campus is a long lawn, where we sit on warm evenings, and I keep thinking about that lawn, because, when I saw it the first day I was with you and Mother and Bud,