Only here, I wouldn’t be able to rely on that tactic.
Since Lauren was a resident assistant and a senior, she was allowed to spend her seventh period study hall continuing my tour of the campus. We stopped by the book store and she helped me find all of the textbooks I would need for classes the next day. The book store was actually kind of ridiculous, since it was one of the slim few places on campus where students could waste their parents’ money. To provide you with a clear sense of just how much of a money pit the book store was, it was three stories tall. Text books were on the first floor and basement level, arranged by subject matter. There were also commercial fiction and non-fiction books for sale, and school supplies in every variety of color and cutesiness. The second floor of the store offered Treadwell gym suits, sweat suits, yoga gear, running shoes and windbreakers. On the third floor, dorm room stuff could be purchased, but only things that were permitted within the campus rules. Miniature fridges and desk lamps were allowed. Hot plates and coffee makers were not.
Lauren studied my housing assignment as we rode up in the Colgate elevator together. It was just past three o’clock in the afternoon, and classes had just let out for the day.
“You’re in 6J with Katie Callahan,” she informed me. We stepped off the elevator into a hallway with matted beige carpeting and dingy eggshell-colored walls. A bulletin board hung across from the elevator on which campus announcements had been pinned with tacks, providing me with a quick glimpse into Treadwell dorm life. Someone had lost their Nike gym bag and was hoping it would be returned to room 4D, “no questions asked.” The girls in room 2C were asking fellow residents to donate gently used clothes for a clothing drive being held by the Hillel Jewish student organization. Someone else had jokingly written on that flyer in marker “PRADA AND BURBERRY ONLY, NO HUNTER LODGE CRAP.”
“Here we are,” Lauren announced. We stopped at the end of the hallway in front of room 6J and Lauren knocked twice. A Republican Party elephant sticker had been stuck on the door beneath the peephole and Lauren clucked her tongue. She was reaching out to pick the sticker off with her finger nails when the door opened. A girl my height with honey blond hair and dark brown eyes opened the door.
“Hi,” the girl said.
“Betsey, this is Kate. Kate, this is Betsey, your new roommate. Betsey’s a transfer from New York City,” Lauren said, making introductions.
“Hi,” I said.
Kate did not look very pleased to see me. In fact, looking beyond her and into the small room, I could see that while the bed on the right side of the room had blankets and comforters piled on top of it, the bed on the left—which would presumably be my bed—had a ton of clothes and books on it.
“Oh,” Kate said, blankly. “I didn’t think I was getting a roommate.” Kate had a soft, charming Southern drawl.
“Well, your room is a double,” Lauren reminded her. “I did warn you on move-in day that you’d probably have a roommate before the end of the year.”
Kate stepped aside and let me into the room. “Oh yeah, no problem. Sorry, I’ve just been in here alone for four weeks, so it’s kind of a mess. ”
She began scooping up the jeans, sweaters, and books on the second bed in the room and transferred them over to her bed. The room wasn’t bad, in my opinion. In fact, it surpassed my expectations of a boarding school dorm room. The ceilings were high and the floors were hard wood. There were old-fashioned glass grid windows that opened outward with a little crank. Kate had hung frame pictures of herself with her family and friends at home over the desk on the right side of the room. I opened the door in the hallway to what I assumed was the closet, and blinked twice in surprise. The entire closet was packed solidly with clothes and shoes. There was absolutely no room for me to hang any of my stuff in there.
“Sorry, sorry,” Kate repeated. “I can put some of that stuff in storage.”
I sat down on the edge of my new bed and looked around. Lauren looked distinctly displeased with Kate’s expansion across the whole room. “I’ll have facilities send up some storage boxes this afternoon,” Lauren told Kate. She turned back to me. “So, that’s it. I’ll leave you two to get to know each other. I’m across from the elevators in 6A down the hall if you need anything at all. And the cafeteria on the first floor starts serving dinner at 6 P.M. If they give you any grief about not having an ID card yet, come and find me.”
Lauren left and suddenly I felt very unprotected in the small room. Kate gave me a fake, apologetic smile. There was an open math textbook on her desk, and I guessed we had probably just interrupted her afternoon homework routine.
“Are you the girl from England?” she suddenly asked me with enthusiasm.
“Uh, no,” I said. I wasn’t really from anywhere. I had grown up between Malibu, New York, and sometimes New Jersey when my dad’s band was recording. Not to mention Danko’s estate in Croatia, and the apartment my mom kept in Paris for when she was there to do fashion and editorial stuff for Darlene.
Kate sighed, disappointed.
“I really am sorry about all my stuff everywhere. It happens sometimes that there are an uneven number of residents and people get their own room. I had kind of thought maybe I had lucked out for the year,” Kate said.
“It’s OK,” I assured her, even though I kind of felt like it wasn’t OK. She clearly thought of this room as her own and it was going to take a while for me to feel like it was also rightfully mine. I got up off the bed, eager to unpack my suitcase and stake out my territory. When I opened the top drawer of the dresser on the left side of the room, I wasn’t surprised to see that it was already full of Kate’s bras and panties.
She winced. “I’ll pack it all up, I promise,” she said. “Every time I go home on a weekend I end up bringing more stuff back with me.”
Kate’s father was a senator in South Carolina, which explained her accent. Her mother was his campaign publicity manager, and it was an election year, so she informed me that she had been going home almost every weekend so far that school year to help out in the campaign office and attend events with them. She had two older sisters, one who was studying law at Harvard and the other who was an undergraduate at Yale. Kate bragged that her eldest sister, Kaela, had just made Law Review.
I didn’t know what Law Review was, but I congratulated Kate anyway. A suspicion was solidifying within me that I was out of my element at Treadwell. If everyone at this school was just like Kate, then I was in way over my head. I didn’t know anything about higher education and academia. My mother had been given a high-ranking position at Darlene the day after she earned her bachelor’s degree. There had been no ladder for her to climb. My dad never even considered college. Danko had studied finance at some weird school in Europe and when he wasn’t driving sports cars around, he sat on the board of a couple of investment banks, but I had no idea what his academic credentials were. No one seemed to care much when Bijoux gave up on school. It wasn’t like the world had lost a potential ground-breaking brain surgeon or anything when she decided not to continue her education. Similarly, I didn’t think anyone in my family was holding their breath for me to become a Rhodes Scholar.
But I calmed myself down by reminding myself that Taylor Beauforte was a student there, and neither of her parents were great scholars. I wasn’t the only girl on campus who hadn’t been groomed for collegiate success since the day she was born.
“Yeah, we’re really proud of her,” Kate said, showing me a picture from her desktop of her whole family linking arms at an outdoor event. All of the Callahans had the same honey blond hair color. “I want to be a lawyer, too, just like my dad. And maybe run for office. What do your parents do?”
Over the next few days, I learned that unlike in private school back in Manhattan, introductions at Treadwell always inevitably involved sharing your parents’ occupations. Your presence on campus implied that it was probable that your parents were super rich, so it was a natural thing to ask questions to help you get a sense of jus
t how rich within moments of meeting someone.
“My mom is the global Executive Creative Director of Darlene Cosmetics,” I stated. “And my dad is the bassist of Pound.” Kate had already not-so-subtly suggested that her own parents were loaded, so I felt no need to hold back for fear of offending her, as I had with Lauren.
“Oh,” Kate said. “You must know Taylor Beauforte, then.”
I guessed by her reaction that my answer had suggested satisfactory wealth. “Yes, I know her. We’re friends.”
As I learned, I wasn’t the only mid-year transfer at Treadwell. Two days earlier, a girl named Nicola had arrived from London. Nicola’s father owned some huge media conglomerate in the UK. He also owned and was the general manager of the Thames United football club, on which soccer superstar Matthew Bankston had arisen to international fame. Anyone who’d never heard of Matthew Bankston had been living on a space colony for the last few years. He had the most ripped abs of any man I’d ever seen. He was insanely hot, and for one whole season he’d dyed his hair bright blue (the Thames United colors are blue and white). He modeled underwear and shoes for Apax sportwear and used to date Tawny, my favorite singer, when he wasn’t starting fights on and off the football field.
So, basically everyone at Treadwell had assumed Nicola Rotherham was close, intimate friends with Matthew Bankston. I had no reason to believe she, herself, had ever stated that as a fact, but the mere rumor was all it took to elevate Nicola to the status of Girl Everyone Wanted to Befriend. It really didn’t hurt her much that she had long, silky straight brown hair, pouty lips and a supercool accent. I would have probably wanted to be friends with her, too, except that if Nicola was the new girl everyone wanted to meet, I was the new girl who simply wasn’t Nicola. Nicola’s father was also filthy rich. While most girls at Treadwell liked to brag about the Mini Coopers and Fiats they received from their parents back at home when they turned sixteen, the Daily Mail in London had reported that Nicola’s father had bought her an Audi R8 V10 convertible.
He, himself, collected vintage Britannias.
I mean, seriously. What sixteen-year-old girl drives the same kind of car as James Bond?
After picking up my uniforms at the mail room and then unpacking as much as I could in what little available space Kate created for me, I became itchy to leave our room and go get dinner. I asked Kate if she wanted to join me in the dining hall, and she said she was in the middle of her chapter review and would go downstairs as soon as she was done with it. Nervously, I rode down in the elevator by myself, not sure if uniforms were supposed to be worn in the cafeteria or not. The elevator stopped on the fourth floor and three laughing girls stepped on, all curiously looking me over, wondering who I was. Their sequined sweatshirts, tight jeans and bohemian scarves wrapped around their necks and hips suggested that I was right in assuming uniforms were not worn in the cafeteria, at least not at dinner time.
I felt strangely alone in the small, crowded elevator and tried to stare straight ahead, as if I was lost in my own thoughts. I wondered what Christie was doing back in New York, and what my sister was doing back in the East Village with Tobin. The novelty of being away from home had worn off. I felt uncertain of my surroundings, self-conscious, and in an unexpected way, kind of homesick.
“She’s totally fat,” one of the girls who had stepped on the elevator had said, hissing the word fat as if it were a curse. The girl was at least four inches taller than me and really pretty, with tan skin and curly dark hair. “I saw her at the book store and she had like, saddlebags!”
“I heard her dad is going to fire her,” a pretty black girl with huge diamond earrings and black Prada eyeglass frames added. “For gaining weight. Can you imagine getting fired by your own dad? ”
“Oh, that sucks,” a pale girl with short black hair said with a big smile on her face. “Although I have to say, she kind of deserves it. She’s evil. She deserves to get fat and have the whole world laugh at her.”
The elevator finally made its way to the first floor and when the girls stepped off of it, I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t like anyone would have picked me out of a crowd and called me obese, but I was sensitive about my weight and couldn’t help but feel like I had a weight advantage over the other girls in the elevator. The topic of their discussion terrified me. It hadn’t really occurred to me when I had been plotting my arrival at Treadwell that I might be a target for harassment here. I wondered how long it would take before I’d make my own friends and crack my own jokes in the elevator. And I wondered which one of these long-legged girls on campus had been the subject of the conversation, the unfortunate gainer of weight.
At the entrance to the cafeteria, I informed the woman scanning ID cards that I was a transfer student and hadn’t had my ID created yet. She nodded me in without a smile and told me to just pay cash at the register.
When I had pictured what it would be like to attend Treadwell, I had let myself imagine a sprawling, majestic dining hall like the one at Hogwarts, where I would have sat next to Taylor and we would have laughed and laughed like the best of friends until tears ran down our faces and soda came out of our noses. But I had been placed at Colgate, a sophomore dorm, and there was no reason for Taylor to ever show up at our dining hall for a meal. I also couldn’t just walk across campus to Hartford Hall, the cafeteria where the juniors and seniors who lived in the cottage-style dorms could have meals. Someone would have had to sign me in. Someone would have to be expecting me.
The food options at Colgate really weren’t that bad. There was a grill area where it was possible to order hamburgers, turkey burgers, grilled cheese and French fries. There was also a hot buffet counter where a woman with a friendly smile, wearing a hair net, was serving vegetables in teriyaki sauce with rice and a choice of tofu, chicken or shrimp. A rotating carousel with a heating lamp inside of it boasted three pizzas, already sliced.
But the majority of the girls flocked around the long salad bar, filling their plates with butter lettuce (Treadwell is an expensive school, after all, way too classy for iceberg) and Chinese cabbage, blocks of cold tofu and grilled tempeh, shredded salmon, plum tomatoes, cucumbers and feta cheese. Some girls squeezed lemon wedges on top of their plates instead of pouring on ranch dressing at the end of the bar. The counter boasting cakes and cookies as desserts remained mostly ignored, although the self-service frozen yogurt machine was in high demand. Girls impatiently stood in a single-file line with empty Styrofoam cups, waiting for their turn at the machine.
I didn’t take a second look at the salad bar. After narrowly escaping from Camp Delilah with my dignity, I had embraced the fact that during times of stress, all I wanted was carbohydrates. And too darned bad for my thighs; that’s what I was going to have on my first night at Treadwell. Obsession with food intake had definitely been something I’d witnessed at my private schools in New York, but within hours of my arrival at Treadwell, I had observed that some of the girls here took eating disorders to a whole new level. I noticed one girl plucking mushrooms from the salad bar one by one with the tongs, counting out exactly six for her salad. Another girl was pitching a fit at the counter were the teriyaki was being served, angry that there weren’t any more hardboiled eggs available at the salad bar. It didn’t escape my attention that the self-serve canisters of breakfast cereal were literally locked shut and chained to the counters. I wondered what the deal was with that.
The girl with the short black hair with whom I had ridden down in the elevator sent a half-hearted eye roll in the direction of the only overweight girl I had seen so far at Colgate. She was putting two slices of pizza from the carousel on a tray that already had a cup of soft-serve frozen yogurt with two cookies wedged into the mountain of confection, a heaping pile of salad drenched in Russian dressing, and a buttered roll with sesame seeds on it. She had a lot of nerve, that overweight girl, to pile up her plate like that in an environment where she must have known she was going to earn herself some nasty comments and disapp
roving glances. She was also intentionally wearing mismatched knee socks with her black velvet skirt: one navy blue argyle sock and one pink checked sock. I immediately liked her style. I couldn’t help myself. I had always taken a shine to people who made a point of not caring what other people thought of them. When she turned around, I saw that she was wearing bright, bright red lipstick.
After ordering my turkey burger and fries, I resisted the urge to add a few cookies to my plate and stepped into the line to check out. Everyone else was just able to swipe their ID card at the payment station, but I had to fumble with my wallet and hand over six dollars. When I stepped into the dining area, I stopped dead in my tracks, nervously looking around. The dining hall was strangely formal. A huge, oppressive oil painting of a grumpy lady hung at the far end of the room. A crystal chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling. The long tables were covered in white cloth tablecloths. The volume of chatter in the room was intimidating, as was the seating structure. There were no small two-person tables where a solo diner such as myself could have sat down and eaten inconspicuously. There were only these long, communal tables, none of which were empty. No one looked familiar, or friendly.
Then, I saw the overweight girl with the bright red lipstick smile at me and raise her eyebrows as if to suggest I could sit across from her if I dared. She sat at the end of a table in the north corner of the room, otherwise occupied by the nerdliest (one of Bijoux’s favorite words) students in the whole dining hall. One girl at the table wore cringe-worthy orthodontic headgear that seemed to be impeding her food intake. Another girl had a big puff of orange frizz hair and thick glasses. It was unmistakably the unpopular table, and my options were to either sit there and designate myself as a nerd, or ignore the invitation to join and take my chances by sitting, uninvited, at a table with more popular girls.
The Viscount's Daughter - [A Treadwell Academy - 03] Page 14