Campusland: A Novel

by Scott Johnston

  Not today.

  Today was the day after Labor Day, back-to-school day, and the campus teemed with tanned students arriving with their equally excited parents. Milton made a point of walking toward the vast East Quad, where the first-years were housed. On the road outside, dozens of SUVs disgorged wide-eyed young men and women. Milton knew the parents, many of them, had spent over a million dollars getting their children to that curb, and goodbyes would not be quick. He remembered arriving at this same curb, decades ago, but his trip had been by train and then a taxi, a steamer trunk lugged the whole way. That’s just how it was then. Safe travels, Son.

  He stopped and helped one family wrestle a huge duffel out of a Volvo, getting it as far as the curb. The delighted parents, realizing who their benefactor was, asked for a selfie with Milton and their daughter. He knew that was coming, just as he knew the picture would get posted to Facebook. It would probably say something like “So fortunate Milton Strauss was able to help us carry all of Susie’s stuff!”

  Milton cherished these interactions, the acknowledgment that he, Milton Strauss, son of a tailor—a Jew!—was president of Devon University. Well, perhaps the Jewish part wasn’t that remarkable anymore in this former WASP redoubt, but still. He imagined the figure he cut, the confident stride of a Man of Importance.

  “Milt!” another student cried, prompting another wave. Walking on, Milton saw the future site of the two new residential houses. He swelled with pride thinking about what would surely be his signature achievement. No brutalist ruminations for new buildings on his watch, no. Designed by the renowned architect Soren O. Pedersen, these would be soaring, neotraditional Gothic monuments to academia, and—dare he think it?—to Milton Strauss. Teacher, leader, master builder: Robert Moses in academic robes.

  Land had been cleared and the contractors were all but ready to break ground. The project would allow Devon to increase its enrollment by 15 percent, which would increase the projected admission rate from 5.2 percent to 6. This would allow room for additional first-gens and students of color. Foster Jennison, billionaire member of the class of ’62, was pledging the first $250 million toward the projected $550 million cost. Milton Strauss, master builder, and Jennison, investment titan, didn’t always agree on everything—Jennison had some distinctly dated ideas—but he was always at the ready for his beloved alma mater with seldom a string attached. In a remarkable display of donor temperance, he even spared the school from having to accept his intellectually tepid second grandson—the one with 1300 SATs. Yes, Jennison was a man Milton could work with. The other grandson—he was still here, wasn’t he? Milton couldn’t quite remember the boy’s name. He must get D’Arcy to double-check on the boy’s status.

  Feeling a renewed sense of vigor, Milton crossed Bingham Plaza and approached Stockbridge Hall, where he and other top administrators kept offices. Oddly, a small knot of protesters were outside the entrance. It was early in the year for that sort of thing, but having spent the last several decades at Devon, Milton was more than used to it. He even had sympathy for most of the causes, having himself slept several nights in a shantytown that progressive students had constructed back during the dark days of apartheid. That had been right here, in the stone expanse of Bingham Plaza. What could they be protesting today? No doubt something well-intentioned.

  The protesters spotted Milton and instantly became animated. “Hey, Milton! Divest from Israel now! Stop the murder!” cried one. “Divest now! Divest now!” Their homemade signs thrust up and down like pistons.

  Milton smiled and walked over. “It’s great to see everyone. Really great.” He began shaking hands, much to the bewilderment of the protesters, who didn’t know what to do other than shake back. “Keep up the good work, and welcome back to school!”

  Then, Milton Strauss, seventeenth president of Devon University, turned and disappeared inside Stockbridge Hall.

  Lulu’s Room Sucks

  THE DOOR TO Lulu’s room opened, letting in unwanted light. Her annoying roommate again. Why can’t she just disappear? It was two weeks into the semester, and Lulu had yet to get up before ten, and now it was only because her roommate, whom she’d kicked out for the night, was coming back from wherever it was she’d gone—the Asian Student Center? That was, what? Three times so far? It would equate with however many boys Lulu had brought back.… The last one departed sometime during the night, although she wasn’t sure exactly when. Right now, her immediate need was a Diet Coke. Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls, and when she leaned forward, her brains longed to slide out the top of her head. Best to lie back again.

  “This is not fair,” said Song, the roommate. “It’s my room, too!”

  “Hey, this isn’t my idea of the Connaught either, sweetie, but we all have to make compromises.”

  “But I am the only one who compromises. You do what you want!”

  “This whole deal is a compromise, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, look at this dump. I’ve seen nicer prisons,” Lulu said, ignoring that the only prisons she’d seen were in Orange Is the New Black on Netflix, at least on those rare nights in New York or the Hamptons when she had nothing better to do than watch television. “And you’re no picnic either, your alarm going off at dawn every day—and just look at your half of the room.” Lulu glared at Song’s side, which was spotless. “It’s like one of those labs you spend all day in.”

  “It’s clean!”

  “Could you please just stop talking now?” Lulu raised a pillow over her face. With that, Song scooped up some books, made an angry chuffing noise, and left.

  An hour or so later, Lulu hoisted herself up and looked in the mirror. She was wearing nothing but an oversized T-shirt that said BUT FIRST, NACHOS.

  Where the hell did that come from?

  Whatever.

  She considered herself. An objective third party would say she was beautiful, but in a way that was tired beyond her eighteen years. The kind of jaded, faintly angry beauty that comes from a youth spent in Manhattan’s moneyed precincts: the Dalton School, Fifth Avenue, Barneys … Her father, Sheldon Harris, was a prominent entertainment lawyer and largely absent parent. Her mother was long out of the picture, having left Sheldon for a different life practically the moment Lulu was born. Mother and daughter had never even spoken.

  Lulu asked after her mother often in her younger years, but Sheldon would just say that she wanted a different life and left; that is, if he said anything at all. Why couldn’t Lulu know who she was? There were reasons, he’d say, as if that were an answer. It was the abiding mystery of Lulu’s childhood, and one she never quite learned to live with. Why did she leave?

  When Lulu turned sixteen, Sheldon revealed her mother’s identity, saying it was time. It turned out Lulu knew precisely who her mother was, at least from a distance. Lulu tried reaching out a number of times but never heard back, not a word. It was a wall of maternal silence. The humiliation proved too much and Lulu came to share Sheldon’s resentment. Since then, she’d done her best never to think about it, but sometimes her mother’s high profile made that difficult. It might be one thing if the bitch were out of sight, out of mind, but she wasn’t. Lulu was left to marinate in revenge fantasies, mostly involving achieving personal fame herself.

  Sheldon, for his part, did the best he could to raise a daughter on a net worth of $75 million. Mostly, this had involved a string of nannies and a weekly meal together. Quality time.

  Not that Lulu had any problems with this arrangement; she had her freedom and never wanted for financial resources. She adored Sheldon and was smart enough to know that being the only woman in a powerful man’s life had benefits. He was also kind enough to keep only casual track of the liquor and amusing pharmaceuticals he left around. This made Lulu’s apartment a frequent after-party destination for the private-school set.

  Lulu wore her hair long. It was dirty blond, although kept a lighter shade with the help of outside agents. It framed a face possessed of a beautiful s
mile, although one rarely offered without an agenda. She was lithe, almost sinewy, thanks to hundreds of hours of spin classes, giving her a body that wore clothes well and got more than enough attention from the opposite sex. Her eyes were dark green, although today more bloodshot than anything else.

  She looked around the room, glowering. It was a thirteen-by-eighteen in Duffy Hall with a single-size bed on either side, two utilitarian desks, and two dressers. Her closet was a horrifying thirty-six inches wide (she had looked up the dimensions online during the summer) and didn’t fit a fraction of her wardrobe. Sheldon—that’s what Lulu called him—insisted that she stay in on-campus housing for at least a year because that’s what he did, and he’d had such a good experience. Lulu tried to explain that her roommate wasn’t likely to be from their crowd, the way everyone was in his day, but Sheldon said some diversity would be good for her. “Multiculturalism—isn’t that the thing now?” he’d said. But he didn’t have to room with Song, the human robot.

  In reality, the room was quite generous by college-freshman standards. There was even a fireplace with exposed brick and a mantel. All the rooms had one. The fireplaces hadn’t been functional in several decades, university lawyers having ordered them plugged after students conducted one-too-many incendiary experiments, nearly burning down Wolcott House in 1972. Still, most students and their parents marveled at this hint at Devon’s Edwardian past when the scions of America’s elite arrived with servants in tow, and fresh firewood was always at the ready.

  But to Lulu, the circumstances were beyond depressing. What with the cheap blond-wood furniture that looked like it came in a box from IKEA, and a closet that held only a fraction of her Barbour and Rag & Bone …

  She flopped back in bed at the thought of spending an entire year in this place. Back home, she had views of Central Park and a walk-in closet, which out of necessity was where she’d left most of her wardrobe. It wasn’t as if there were anything to dress for in this fashion wasteland, anyway. The boys frequently wore gym shorts, while the girls favored … she didn’t even know what to call the look. Contemporary scruff? Pathetic, whatever it was.

  Reaching over to her desk, Lulu grabbed her iPhone, held it up in the air, and took a photo. With a click, she posted the photo to Instagram, where she had over four thousand followers. She added the caption “My fab room at Devon. #sarcasm.” It was immediately liked by several followers, which cheered her up, if only for a moment. Lulu photographed or filmed just about everything in her life. It was all part of building a personal brand.

  Song was from Asia somewhere—Lulu briefly tried to remember where, Singapore?—and was majoring in some science or another. STEM, as they all said. Lulu didn’t know or care to find out much more than that. What was the point? She’d probably leave soon, anyway. College was supposed to be liberating, but so far she found it anything but.

  Less than a month ago she was in East Hampton, coming and going as she pleased in her Mini (the convertible, of course), hanging with actual friends, people who understood that pairing Prada sunglasses with Tory Burch was au courant. Why, her picture was in Hamptons magazine twice this summer, spotted once at a friend’s party and another time at the Hampton Classic—with all the right people, of course. She’d seen Brooke Shields, the Hiltons, Christie Brinkley … one night she even went to Calvin Klein’s house on the beach in Southampton! Sure, it was a fund-raiser, and Sheldon paid for the ticket, but whatever—she was an It Girl in the making, a glorious hatchling who would soon grace the society pages and be photographed by Patrick McMullan.

  But four years in this social backwater was unthinkable. Sure, Devon was prestigious, and it always impressed people when she told them she was going there, but these were her years of being young and fabulous, and they were going to be wasted hanging around in a shitty little town like Havenport. There wasn’t even a SoulCycle!

  And these … people.

  Yuck.

  New York was where she needed to be. A dozen other pretty young things were probably making their moves right now, maybe even lining up their own PR agents.

  At one point Lulu thought Devon might help her cause—the reality was that not too many young socialites had the wattage to get in—but the spotlight was not here, it was two hours away, in Manhattan.

  Her town.

  The people at On the Avenue magazine, widely read in her circle, had been talking to her about doing a feature on up-and-coming “philanthropists.” It would be a multipage shoot, just Lulu and three others. She didn’t know who the others were, but she could guess. Chrissie Fellows and Aubrey St. John, for sure.

  Just now there was a rare opening in the world of young socialites, and a prominent piece would put Lulu on the map. Cricket Hayes, the unchallenged queen of twenty-something society, had moved to Palm Beach to dry out. New York was in need of a new star; at least that’s how Lulu saw it. She’d even perfected her socialite pose: Head tilted at a ten-degree angle, body turned slightly. Mouth open just enough to reveal perfectly bleached teeth, facial expression left intentionally blank. Smiling led to smile lines and, worse, conveyed the wrong image: eagerness. The last thing a socialite could be was eager, even if it happened to be the case. Eager was for climbers, not those who had already ascended the social heights. A certain world-weariness was de rigueur.

  In the meantime … what? Make the best of it? The thought was so depressing. The worst thing was that no one around this place, least of all someone like Song, could understand her plight. They might even mock her for it. It wasn’t exactly typical to complain about being at Devon.

  As Lulu looked around campus, she was struck by how much reality differed from Devon’s traditional image. For one thing, where were all the white people? Okay, not white people, exactly. She wasn’t some sort of racist. There had been blacks in her class at Dalton, and she was pretty sure one was even from East Harlem. And there was that Hispanic girl she talked to once or twice.… She was thinking more just about people she could relate to. Lulu had studied Sheldon’s Devon yearbook, and plenty of students back then were from Hotchkiss, Andover, and other normal places. These days, those kids were all at Wake and UVA and Georgetown and other mostly Southern colleges that had not grown hostile to—how to put it?—people of a certain background. But Sheldon had gone to Devon “back in the day” and never shut up about it. He wanted the same experience for his only daughter. When she put together a good academic record at Dalton, Sheldon hired a consultant to help with her application essay, an avowal over the guilt she felt being from a privileged background.

  Her application was pushed over the finish line with a substantial check. She had won a coveted spot. It also didn’t hurt that she’d shown some talent for literature and writing, and by sheer happenstance the English Department was in need of bodies, having fallen out of favor for the more preprofessional disciplines. Like whatever Song was doing.

  What Sheldon didn’t understand, though, was that this was no longer his Devon. People still had this image of the “Devon Man.” He was quite the sport and wore pastel Shetland crewnecks over Brooks button-downs while tailgating before the Big Game. That image was approximately six decades out-of-date. Today’s Devon was way more South Bronx than Southampton.

  In an abstract sort of way, Lulu supposed there was nothing wrong with that. Her politics, to the extent she gave them much thought, closely adhered to the agendas of the benefits and political fund-raisers to which she aspired. This meant that by default she was a Democrat, like Sheldon (or she would be, as soon as she figured out how to register). She supported all the causes of the moment. Lately, she’d memorized a wholly impassioned-sounding plea for transgender rights that seemed to play well. Not that she’d ever met a transperson, but she was sure if she did, she’d know how to use the correct pronoun. Pretty sure.

  In her quieter moments, she sometimes felt the diversity movement had gotten a bit … strident? For one thing, did everyone have to talk about it so much? Seriously, was no o
ther subject available for discussion? Diversity and inclusion. On and on. For God’s sake, we get it already.

  Lulu crawled out of bed. Throwing on some sweatpants, she walked down to the common room to get a Diet Coke from the vending machine. There she spotted Yolanda Perez, her RA. Yolanda was pinning a poster to the bulletin board, something she did almost constantly. At the bottom it had those little tear-offs with contact information. Lulu took a quick look, not that there was any chance she’d be interested.

  Support Group for Self-Identified Women. If you have experienced emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or stalking, or if there’s an experience you wish to talk about, you are not alone. Advocates and your peers are here to listen and support you. Contact Fightback, sponsored by the Devon Womyn’s Collective. 898-555-5943

  Yolanda must have tipped the scales at 220, and Lulu wondered who on earth would stalk her. Then Lulu thought it might be cruel to wonder that, but only briefly.

  “Rough night, Harris?”

  “Is it day now? How unfortunate.” Lulu examined the vending machine. No Diet Coke. Shit. She debated taking the calorie hit of a real Coke and decided against it.

  “You know, if you ever want to talk, Harris, I’m here for you.”

  “That’s very reassuring, thank you.” Lulu was already walking back down the hall to her room. She crawled back into bed, deciding more sleep was a bigger priority than any further search for Diet Coke.