by Kevin Wilson
Dedication
For Ann Patchett and Julie Barer
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Kevin Wilson
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
In the late spring of 1995, just a few weeks after I’d turned twenty-eight, I got a letter from my friend Madison Roberts. I still thought of her as Madison Billings. I heard from Madison four or five times a year, updates on her life that were as foreign to me as reports from the moon, her existence the kind you only read about in magazines. She was married to an older man, a senator, and she had a little boy whom she dressed in nautical suits and who looked like an expensive teddy bear that had turned human. I was working two cashier jobs at competing grocery stores, smoking weed in the attic of my mother’s house because when I had turned eighteen, she had immediately turned my childhood bedroom into a workout room, a huge NordicTrack filling the place where I’d unhappily grown up. I sporadically dated people who didn’t deserve me but thought they did. You can imagine how Madison’s letters were a hundred times more interesting than mine, but we stayed in touch.
This letter had broken up the natural spacing of her correspondence, precise and expected. But that didn’t give me pause. Madison and I did not communicate except on paper. I didn’t even have her phone number.
I was on break at the Save-A-Lot, the first chance I’d had to read the thing, and I opened it to find that Madison wanted me to come to Franklin, Tennessee, where she lived on her husband’s estate, because she had an interesting job opportunity for me. She’d included a fifty-dollar bill for bus fare, because she knew that my car wasn’t great with more than fifteen-mile distances. She wouldn’t say what the job was, though it couldn’t be worse than dealing with food stamps and getting the fucking scale to properly weigh the bruised apples. I used the last five minutes of my break to ask Derek, my boss, if I could have a few days off. I knew he’d say no, and I didn’t begrudge him this refusal. I’d never been the most responsible employee. It was the hard thing about having two jobs: you had to disappoint them at different times and sometimes you lost track of who you’d fucked over worse. I thought about Madison, maybe the most beautiful woman I’d ever met in real life, who was also so weirdly smart, always considering the odds of every scenario. If she had a job for me, I’d take it. I’d leave my mom’s attic. I’d empty out my life because I was honest enough to know that I didn’t have much that I’d miss when it disappeared.
A week after I wrote back to Madison with a date that I’d arrive, a man in a polo shirt and sunglasses was waiting inside the bus station in Nashville. He looked like a man who was really into watches. “Lillian Breaker?” he asked, and I nodded. “Mrs. Roberts asked me to escort you back to the Roberts estate. My name is Carl.”
“Are you their driver?” I asked, curious as to the particulars of wealth. I knew rich people on TV had drivers, but it seemed like a Hollywood absurdity that didn’t connect to the real world.
“No, not exactly. I’m just kind of a jack-of-all-trades. I help Senator Roberts, and Mrs. Roberts by extension, when things come up.”
“Do you know what I’m doing here?” I asked. I knew what cops sounded like, and Carl sounded like a cop. I wasn’t super jazzed about law enforcement, so I was feeling him out.
“I believe I do, but I’ll let Mrs. Roberts talk to you. I think she would prefer that.”
“What kind of car are you driving?” I asked him. “Is it your own car?” I had been on a bus for a couple of hours with people who communicated only in hacking coughs and weird sniffs. I just wanted to hear my own voice go out into the open air.
“It’s a Miata. It’s mine. Are you ready to go, ma’am? May I take your luggage?” Carl asked, clearly ready to successfully complete this portion of his task. He had that cop-like tic where he tried to hide his impatience with a tight formality.
“I didn’t bring anything,” I said.
“Excellent. If you’ll follow me, I’ll get you to Mrs. Roberts ASAP.”
When we got to the Miata, a hot red number that seemed too small to be on the road, I asked if we could ride with the top down, but he said it wasn’t such a great idea. It looked like it pained him to refuse. But it also looked like maybe it pained him to be asked. I couldn’t quite figure out Carl, so I settled into the car and let everything move past me.
“Mrs. Roberts says that you’re her oldest friend,” Carl said, making conversation.
“That might be right,” I said. “We’ve known each other a while.” I didn’t say that Madison probably didn’t have any other real friends. I didn’t hold it against her. I didn’t have any real friends, either. What I also didn’t say was that I wasn’t even sure that we were actually friends at all. What we were was something weirder. But Carl didn’t want to hear any of that, so we just rode in silence the rest of the way, the radio playing easy listening that made me want to slip into a hot bath and dream about killing everyone I knew.
I met Madison at a fancy girls’ school hidden on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. A hundred or so years ago, maybe even longer, all the men who had managed to make enough money in such a barren landscape decided that they needed a school to prepare their daughters for the eventuality of marrying some other rich men, moving up in life until no one remembered a time when they had been anything other than exemplary. They brought some British guy to Tennessee, and he ran the place like a school for princesses, and soon other rich men from other barren landscapes sent their daughters. And then, after this happened enough times, rich people in real cities, like New York and Chicago, started hearing about this school and started sending their own daughters. And if you can catch that kind of good luck, it holds for centuries.
I grew up in the valley of that mountain, just poor enough that I could imagine a way out. I lived with my mom and a rotating cast of her boyfriends, my father either dead or just checked out. My mother was vague about him, not a single picture. It seemed like maybe some Greek god had assumed the form of a stallion and impregnated her before returning to his home atop Mount Olympus. More likely it was just a pervert in one of the fancy homes that my mom cleaned. Maybe he was some alderman in town, and I’d seen him all my life without knowing it. But I preferred to think he was dead, that he was wholly incapable of saving me from my unhappiness.
The school, the Iron Mountain Girls Preparatory School, offered one or two full scholarships each year to girls in the valley who showed promise. And, though it might be hard to believe now, I showed a fucking lot of promise. I had spent my childhood gritting my teeth and smashing everything to bits in the name of excellence. I taught myself to read at three years old, matching the storybooks that came with records to the words the narrator spoke through the little speaker. When I was eight, my mother put me in charge of our finances, the weekly budgeting from the envelopes of cash that she brought home at night. I made straight As. At first, it was purely out of an instinctual desire to be superlative, as if I suspected that I was a superhero and was merely testing the limits of my powers. But once teachers started to tell me about Iron Mountain and the scholarship, information that my mother could not have cared less about, I redirected my efforts. I didn’t know that the school was just some ribbon that rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. I thought it was a training ground for Amazons. I made o
ther students cry at the spelling bee. I plagiarized scientific studies and dumbed them down just enough to win county science fairs. I memorized poems about Harlem and awkwardly recited them to my mom’s boyfriends, who thought I was some weird demon speaking in tongues. I played point guard on the boys’ traveling basketball team because there wasn’t one for girls. I made people in my town, whether they were poor or middle class, especially upper middle class, feel good, like I was something they could agree on, a sterling representative of this little backwoods county. I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.
I got the scholarship, and some of my teachers even raised enough money to help cover expenses for books and food, since my mother told me flat-out that she couldn’t afford any of it. When it was time to start school, I put on some ugly-ass jumper, the only nice thing I owned, and my mother dropped me off with a duffel bag filled with my stuff, including three changes of the school’s uniform black skirts and white blouses. Other parents were there in their BMWs and cars so fancy I didn’t know the names of them. “God, look at this place,” my mom said, heavy metal on the radio, fidgeting with an unlit cigarette because I asked her not to smoke so it wouldn’t get in my hair. “Lillian, this is going to sound so mean, but you don’t belong here. It don’t mean they’re better than you. It just means you’re gonna have a rough go of it.”
“It’s a good opportunity,” I told her.
“You got shit, I understand that,” she said, as patient as she’d ever been with me, though the engine was still idling. “You got shit and I know that you want better than shit. But you’re going from shit to gold, and it’s going to be real tough to handle that. I hope you make it.”
I didn’t get angry with her. I knew that my mom loved me, though maybe not in ways that were obvious, that other people would understand. She wanted me to be okay, at least that. But I also knew that my mom didn’t exactly like me. I weirded her out. I cramped her style. It was fine with me. I didn’t hate her for that. Or maybe I did, but I was a teenager. I hated everyone.
She pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter and while she waited for it to fire up, she kissed me softly and gave me a hug. “You can come back home anytime, sweetie,” she said, but I imagined that I’d kill myself if I had to do that. I got out of the car, and she drove off. As I walked to my dorm, I realized that the other girls didn’t even look at me, and I could tell that it wasn’t out of meanness. I don’t think they even saw me; their eyes had been trained since birth to recognize importance. I wasn’t that.
And then I found Madison in my room, the room we were going to share. All the information that I had on her had been provided in a brief letter during the summer, informing me that my roommate would be Madison Billings and that she was from Atlanta, Georgia. Chet, an ex-boyfriend of my mom’s who still hung around the house when she wasn’t dating someone else, had seen the letter and said, “I bet she’s from the Billings Department Stores. That’s Atlanta, too. That’s big money.”
“How would you know, Chet?” I asked. I didn’t mind Chet so much. He was goofy, which was better than the alternative. He had a tattoo of Betty Boop on his forearm.
“You gotta pick up on little clues,” he told me. He drove a forklift. “Information is power.”
Madison had shoulder-length blond hair and was wearing a yellow summer dress with hundreds of little orange goldfish printed on it. Even in flip-flops, she was model tall, and I could tell that the soles of her feet would be so fucking soft. She had a perfect nose, blue eyes, enough freckles to look wholesome without looking like God had blasted her with bad skin. The whole room smelled of jasmine. She’d already arranged the space, had chosen the bed farthest from the door. When she saw me, she smiled like we were friends. “Are you Lillian?” she asked, and I could only nod. I felt like a kid on The Bozo Show in my shitty jumper.
“I’m Madison,” she told me. “It’s nice to meet you.” She held out her hand, her nails painted a faint pink, like the nose of a bunny rabbit.
“I’m Lillian,” I said, and I shook her hand. I’d never shaken the hand of someone my own age.
“They told me that you’re a scholarship kid,” she then informed me, though there wasn’t any judgment in her voice. She seemed to just want to make it clear that she knew.
“Why did they tell you that?” I asked her, my face reddening.
“I don’t know. They told me, though. Maybe they wanted to make sure that I’d be polite about it.”
“Well, okay, I guess,” I said. I felt like I was forty, fifty steps behind Madison, and the school was already making it harder for me to catch up.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” she told me. “I prefer it. Rich girls are the worst.”
“Are you not a rich girl?” I asked, hopeful.
“I’m a rich girl,” she said. “But I’m not like most rich girls. I think that’s why they put me with you.”
“Well, good,” I said. I was sweating so hard.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Why did you want to come to this place?”
“I don’t know. It’s a good school, right?” I said. Madison had a kind of directness that I’d not experienced before, where shit that should get her killed somehow seemed okay because her eyes were so blue and she didn’t seem to be joking.
“Yeah, I guess. But, like, what do you want to get out of this place?” she asked.
“Can I put down my bag?” I asked. I touched my face and sweat was beading up and starting to trickle down my neck. She gently took my bag from me and placed it on the floor. Then she gestured to my bed, unmade, and I sat on it. She sat beside me, closer than I’d prefer.
“What do you want to be?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. Jesus, I don’t know,” I said. I thought Madison was going to kiss me.
“My parents want me to get amazing grades and go to Vanderbilt and then marry some university president and have beautiful babies. My dad was so specific. We’d love it if you married a university president. But I’m not doing that.”
“Why not?” I said. If the university president was sexy, I’d jump right into the life that Madison’s parents imagined for her.
“I want to be powerful. I want to be the person who makes big things happen, where people owe me so many favors that they can never pay me back. I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.”
She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her. She flipped her hair in such a way that it could only have been instinctual, evolution. “I feel like I can tell you this.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re poor, right? But you’re here. You want power, too.”
“I just want to go to college, to get out of here,” I said, but I felt like maybe she was right. I’d learn to want all that stuff she said. I could go for power.
“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”
“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing, “I hope so, too.”
And we did become friends, I guess you could say. She had to tamp down her weirdness in public because it scared people when beautiful people didn’t act a certain way, made themselves ugly. And I had to tamp down my weirdness because people already suspected that I was supremely strange because I was a scholarship kid. A few days into my time there, another scholarship girl, from a town that bordered mine, came up to me and said, not in a mean way, “Please don’t talk to me the entire time that we’re here,” and I agreed immediately. It was better this way.
The point is, we had to be composed in public, so it was nice to come to our shared space and cut out pictures of Bo and Luke Duke and rub them all over our bodies. It was nice to hear Madison talk about being a lawyer who sends the most evil man in the world to the electric chair. I told her that I wanted to grow up and be able to eat a Milky Way bar every single morning for
breakfast. She said that was better than wanting to be the president of the United States of America, which Madison kind of wanted to be.
We also played on the basketball team, the only two freshmen to start in years and years. The team was no joke, had won a few state titles. At Iron Mountain, basketball and cross-country were hugely important to the school’s identity; I suspected that, for most girls, they were a great way to add complexity to their college applications, but there were girls like me who just really liked being badasses all over weaker people. I played point guard and Madison, so damn tall, played power forward. We spent a lot of time in the gym, just the two of us, running full-court sprints, shooting with our nondominant hands. I had always been good, but I got better with Madison on my team. She gave me some kind of extrasensory court vision; she was so beautiful that I could find her without even looking. We were Magic and Kareem. We told our coach that we wanted to wear black high-tops, but he refused. “Jesus, girls, you act like you’re New York playground legends,” he said. “Just don’t get in foul trouble or turn the ball over.”
There were times when Madison left me behind, but I didn’t take it personally. I think if I’d been a different kind of person—and I don’t mean wealthy—I could have been a part of it, but I had no interest. She and the other beautiful girls would sit together at lunch. Sometimes they would sneak off campus and hang out at a bar near this experimental art college where boys hit on them. Sometimes they bought cocaine from some super-sketchy dude named Panda. Madison would show up in our room at three in the morning, somehow eluding the dorm parents who watched over us, and sit on the floor, drinking a huge bottle of water. “God, I hate myself for being so damn predictable,” she would say.
“It looks fun,” I said, lying.
“It can be,” she said, her pupils crazy big. “But it’s just a phase.”
School was more complicated there than in the valley, but the classes weren’t hard. I made straight As. So did Madison. I won a poetry contest when I wrote about growing up poor; Madison had told me to do it after I showed her my first poem, which was about a fucking tulip. “Use it at the right time,” she told me, by which I think she meant my bad upbringing, “and you’ll get a lot out of it.” I think I understood. I mean, here I was at Iron Mountain, thriving. I got here. Madison sometimes slept in my little bed, the two of us wrapped around each other. I had good things, and it wasn’t as hard to admit to where I’d been before I ended up right where I belonged.