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Show 158 looking past the g i r l with the bangs. "Do you l i k e i t ? " Shannon asked, spreading his fingers to brush a cigarette ash from the front of i t . His hands were enormous. "I offered to let Gloriana wear i t tonight but she was afraid she would t r i p over i t ." " I l i k e i t very much," Lorin said, tucking away the name in a back pocket of his mind. "Why thank you, Lorin. You're so effusive tonight." "Give me a minute and I ' l l say something nice to Harry too." Harry was the other friend. He had been s i t t i n g there making a sound l i ke "Snx snx" behind his hand to show he understood Lorin and Shannon were only kidding. Lorin f e l t bad about despising him, because Harry was a good fellow at bottom. He was Shannon's roommate, homely as s i n , with a face badly pitted and therefore unevenly b r i s t l e d and raw from shaving, which he nevertheless saw to daily because his habits were fastidious. Harry was s t i l l in school and Lorin sometimes ran into him during nostalgic v i s i t s to the art building on days when Yvonne was running late. His habits hadn't changed from former years, and something about his dogged persistence should have brought tears to your eyes. He had set up his own corner in one of the studio classrooms and there, behind a barricade of drawing benches and steel folding chairs on which he had l a id out his studies-in-progress, he worked hour by hour, his glasses slipping steadily down and being shoved back with a finger that l e f t a different color on his nose every time. The window ledge beside him f i l l e d up during the day with pencils and used brushes and sandwich wrappers and styrofoam coffee cups. The window i t s e l f was taped over with wrinkled sketches. He worked through whatever classes happened to be occupying the room, and kept from being distracted by means of his tiny transistor radio which he kept in his s h i r t picket, turned to a |