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 smile, 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 other 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.