1. The most non-conformist girl in our dormitory
2. Confidences, confessions, and advice
3. An intimate little gathering
4. Girl talk and a run-in with Standards
5. I just don't belong here

• (character chart)

1. Young Women's
2. Youth Conference
3. Saturday's Warrior
4. Brigham Young University
• Gratuitous Love Scene
5. Polygamist
6. Temple Wedding
7. Orem High
8. Bordeaux Mission
9. Exmo Conference

When Janie and I arrived back at our dorm after Family Home Evening, we found that our friends had already started a game of Hearts in Lavyrne and Trisha's room. Janie was incensed to see it because playing with face cards was already a sin in and of itself, and hence doing it on a Sunday was beyond the pale. I of course joined right in.

At last a relaxing and pleasant moment with friends. With me, Amy, Cindy, April, Trisha, Lavyrne, and Wendy all playing, we had enough girls that we had to play with Wendy and Lavyrne's special double-deck rules. Janie seemed to want to teach us a lesson by going off somewhere and refusing to participate, but since it was too easy for the rest of us not to notice that she was gone, she came back into the room periodically to remind us that she wasn't playing.

On one of her visits to the card-playing room, Janie repeated her standard refrain of how we should play the game with "Rook" cards instead of standard playing cards. To me this idea made no sense whatsoever. The two main arguments Janie gave against playing with standard playing cards were that playing with them gave the "appearance of evil" (which we should avoid) since playing cards are also used for real gambling, and that playing cards were evil because they were derived from Tarot cards, which were associated with the occult. But in my mind a bunch of girls innocently playing hearts appeared about the same -- no more or less evil -- whether the cards were regular playing cards or Rook cards, and since Rook cards were obviously derived from standard playing cards, they were ultimately derived from Tarot cards just like the face cards that were supposedly so evil.

Eventually Janie decided to go to bed for real and stop bothering the rest of us. Cindy noticed Lavyrne's tennis racket up on a shelf and suggested that it would be funny to set it up prominently in Janie's window, or rather Janie's side of our window. Apparently there was some story going around that there had once been a prostitution ring at BYU in which the girls advertised their availability by displaying tennis rackets in their windows.

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Opinion was divided in our circle as to whether it was a true story or an urban legend, but either way everyone agreed that it would be funny to see Janie's reaction to being signed up by her friends to this new profession. Lavyrne and Wendy, who lived for pranks, were particularly partisan to the idea. So I agreed that I would take the racket and set it up at the end of our game.

Looking around the room I could see that the contrast between Trisha and Lavyrne as roommates wasn't nearly as unpleasant as the contrast between me and Janie. In fact it was kind of funny. A glance at their posters was enough to get the idea. Trisha's half of the room was covered with giant posters of various boy heartthrobs such as you would find in magazines for teenage girls. I prided myself on not recognizing any of them except the seventies-era poster of Donny Osmond which matched a pillowcase I had had with his picture on it when I was a kid. Lavyrne's side, by contrast, was covered with posters of race cars and exciting sports scenes, including one of a baseball player hitting a home run, probably in a World Series or something. Over the bed, she had a similarly exciting action shot of Martina Navratilova on the tennis court.

I don't remember how the subject came up, but at some point in the game I got started on my pet subject of how annoying it is that everyone has to dress up in these same, same, same, bland, ugly dresses every Sunday. My friends had heard this lecture before, so they responded as usual that if I were really so concerned about the obligatory conformity, I should fight it by doing something truly non-conformist. I told them that I would love to except that the BYU dress code was very strictly enforced.

"There are plenty of non-conformist things you can do without breaking the dress code," April pointed out. "For girls, as long as your skirt's not too short and you're wearing a bra, almost anything else is allowed."

"You should do something crazy with your hair!" suggested Amy helpfully.

"Yeah, you could shave off part of your hair!" said Wendy, starting to get interested in the idea.

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