I am not a skier. I tell her that, this relentlessly friendly Sporty Blonde. She refuses to listen.

“Let’s go to the ski swap at Robinson Hall at 1,” she says as we return to the table from our second helping of soft-serve ice cream at Thayer. “Why?” I say. I remind her that I am not a skier.

“Because it’s so much cheaper to buy than to rent.” She goes through the calculations, the four years of college, so many weekends of snow, times the cost of rental. She’s an engineering and economics major, but it’s only three days into freshman fall. She hasn’t yet learned to incorporate one basic premise into her calculations: I wouldn’t have rented the skis.

What possessed her to ask me to lunch anyway? It’s obvious we have nothing in common. Did she not take heed of my gauzy, hippy-style shirt, puka-shell necklace, white painter pants and long, dark crazy-frizzy hair? Doesn’t my entire persona scream, “I really belong at Wesleyan?”

“I don’t ski.” I say again, this time to the back of her “Corning High Swim Team” sweatshirt as I scramble to keep up. She strides briskly out the cafeteria doors with a wide-shouldered swing athletes have.

“Why not?” Sporty Blonde (S.B.) is genuinely perplexed, and in her sky-blue eyes I see a small cloud of concern, as if I had said I don’t eat or I don’t sleep.

“Long Island is flat as a pancake.”

“Oh, but you will. That’s what you do in the winter here,” she responds amiably. Inwardly I hear the voice of my father, Frank ’54: “There’s nothing to do in the winter but ski. I tried it once, twisted my ankle badly. It’s the pits.”

It’s not truly fall yet, and the sun has warmed the chill of the New Hampshire morning. S.B. briskly pulls off her sweatshirt to reveal, big surprise, her “Corning Lacrosse” T-shirt, green like her “Dartmouth Lacrosse” sweatpants.

I stand by silently as she negotiates a deal on a used pair of skis. I buy the damn skis just to shut her up. Then she gets interested in some kind of “jumping skis”—I don’t like the sound of that at all—and purchases them for herself.

Carrying my new skis is so awkward. They separate from the poles I also bought, almost knocking students in the head as we cross the Green. S.B. demonstrates the proper technique. She used to be a ski instructor for children and is infinitely patient.

“Don’t even bother buying cross-country skis,” she says. “You can just check them out for free from the Dartmouth Outing Club.” She points to a building to the left. I didn’t even know there were different kinds of skis.

Lugging new boots along with her jumping skis, S.B. suggests finding a car to take our stuff back to the River Cluster. We drag our equipment down Wheelock Street until we come to a ramshackle fraternity house with half-naked upperclassmen playing beer croquet on the lawn. They greet my new friend with a cacophony of, “Little Fudd! Fudd’s little sis! Fuddette! Le petite goose!”

“How does everyone know you already?” I ask. She responds, looking embarrassed, “My brothers’ fraternity. No one ever bothers to learn my real name.”

Our sole point of mutuality, I discover, is that we both come from families of six children. I have two brothers and she has five. “So,” I ask, “did all of your brothers go here?” “Not all,” she replies. “Pete’s still in high school.” It makes sense now: The way she knows where everything is, the faded Dartmouth sweatpants.

An upstairs window of the house cracks open and a chiseled chest, attached to an All-American face, leans out. “Keys!” S.B. shouts up, and he drops them down.

We head to an old beat-up station wagon plastered with sporty bumper stickers and crammed with athletic gear. I think of my parents’ station wagon, adorned with La Leche League and Whaler’s Barbershop Chorus bumper stickers.

As we near the River Cluster, S.B. points to the woods ahead. “That path leads to the boathouse. Canoes, kayaks, they’ve got everything!” she says.

“I don’t boat,” I say honestly. I know the type of friend she is suited to, and they are a dime a dozen on this campus. As a local in a summer resort town I have dealt with the Devon Yacht Club people with the white and pink polo shirts, the Maidstone Club members and their uppity cabanas. “I thought you said you grew up in East Hampton,” S.B. says. “Isn’t Long Island surrounded by water?” She is not accusing, just non-comprehending. Let me disillusion her now: “The only boat I’ve ever been on is the ferry from Shelter Island to Connecticut on the way up here. My family is not outdoorsy.” I realize that might have come out unfriendly, so I try to find common ground: “I do really like the beach though. I’m a pretty competitive tanner.” S.B. laughs, but I can tell by her skin tone she’s not much of a tanner.

Back in my ugly cinderblock room I lean my skis in the far corner of my closet and hope never to encounter them again. Maybe I can dodge S.B. until the winter is over.

The next week, however, she spies the back of my frizzy head in the front row of “Calculus 101.” We start doing homework together, and although she’s really good with calculations I see none of her athletic grace and fluidity in her English essays. She is a terrible writer, the pits. She writes in short, abrupt spurts, as if she’s batting a racquet at something. I smooth over her whacks with transition sentences, move paragraphs around, add my customary flourishes and it gets her through “English 5.”

The morning of our first snowfall, loud, insistent knocking interrupts my deep sleep. It is barely light outside. “Hurry up, the first shuttle leaves in 15 minutes,” I hear S.B. call. At the Skiway lodge I try to assemble hat, scarf, mittens and boots. First confirmation that I don’t belong here is that I buckle the ski boots to each other and have to shuffle in tiny, geisha-like spurts to the chairlift. S.B. laughs heartily, fixes the boots, pushes me into the chair and lowers the bar. As the chair ascends, bone-chilling wind whips it alarmingly back and forth, punishing me for even pretending to be a sporty, outdoorsy girl. I am wearing a baby-pink puff coat that has all the seriousness of a marshmallow.

Apparently timing is important in this stupid sport. I miss the point where you lean forward and slide your butt off the chair lift. The man in the hut at the top runs out and waves his arms in alarm. He stops the lift with a jerk and backs it up as S.B. again roars with laughter. I endure hours of snowplow instruction. My useless mittens are soaked. S.B. finally suggests a cup of hot cocoa in the lodge. “Wasn’t that great?!” she says.

S.B. keeps this up, this stubborn refusal to hear what I am not. Hanging out with her, I find myself in bizarre venues such as soccer fields and, of course, more mountains. It’s easier to go with it than to fight it. She knocks on my door with cross-country skis in hand, and I realize that skiing to class is infinitely more fun than trudging through deep snow. In summer session we take canoes out from the boathouse and I flail the oars around, letting the current take me down the Connecticut River. Joining her in a pickup soccer game, I kick the ball without skill or purpose and someone yells, “Nice pass!” Running through the wooded, leafy paths on the golf course and up and down the picturesque Vermont hills becomes a standard prelude to Saturday night parties. To my delight, the rules of racquetball allow me to smash the ball in any direction at all. Thanks to these permissive parameters, suddenly I am a player.

The Year S.B. (Okay, her real name is Jean Gleason ’83) and I turn 50, she flies in from Colorado to celebrate with me in San Francisco. “I signed us up for a Pilates class in Sausalito,” she tells me. “Actually, it’s Pilates on paddleboards.”

“What! I don’t have a wet suit. I don’t know how to paddle,” I say. “I have Raynaud’s disease. My fingers will lose circulation. There’s actually danger of finger necrosis and amputation.” We go, of course, and afterward, as we sip cappuccinos, I recognize the glimmer of self-satisfaction and delight in her aquamarine eyes. “Wasn’t that great?!”

Yes, it was terrific. I can’t wait to do it again. I guess I am a paddle-boarder. But let me just say this for the record: I am not a skydiver.                                                     

Lynn Hollenbeck is an attorney and nonfiction writer who lives in San Francisco. Jean Gleason is co-owner of Smith & Truslow, an organic spice company in Denver.