In a split second, I reminded myself what had brought me to Treadwell. I wasn’t there to win any popularity contests or make the kind of friends who might get me into the kind of trouble I always seemed to attract. I was at Treadwell to make an honest effort to become a good student and establish a new path for myself. I couldn’t do anything to risk getting sent back to Danko. A life of loser-dom might have been exactly what I needed.
“Hi,” I said, sitting down across from the bright red lips. “I’m Betsey.”
“I know,” the girl with the lipstick informed me. “Betsey Norfleet, daughter of Wade Norfleet. I read a lot of blogs. I know all about you and your sister. Plus, the girls from Japan are seriously freaking out that you’re here.”
I turned to follow her gaze across the room where two Japanese girls were giggling into their hands.
“Oh, geez,” I said. “Well, I hope you don’t believe what you read.”
“It’s cool,” the girl assured me. “You’re half-celebrity, half-cosmetics industry royalty. You’ll be fine here. No one can shake their finger at either of those things. I’m Chloe Goodwin.”
Chloe blotted some of the grease off of her pizza slices with a paper napkin.
Goodwin. Something in my brain clicked into place.
“Like, Paula Goodwin?” I asked.
Paula Goodwin was a huge entertainment star and entrepreneur who specialized in home design. She had a morning talk show, a magazine, and lines of cooking, baking and gardening utensils that could be bought on QVC. There had also been rumors that she was a lesbian involved with a famous Broadway star after she had divorced her husband a few years back.
“Ex-act-ly,” Chloe said in a sarcastic, sing-song voice. “Please, don’t ask me for any scrapbooking or gardening tips. Everything my mother does, I abhor. I would rather gauge my eyes out than make any kind of wreath or bake any kind of bundt cake, OK?”
I took a bite out of my turkey burger. My nerd status was solidifying. This girl was awesome. It was almost impossible to believe that she was the offspring of Paula Goodwin. Even upon closer scrutiny of her facial features, I couldn’t see any resemblance to her mother at all.
“OK,” I agreed, my mouth full of food.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kate step into the dining area with her dinner tray. She noticed me sitting with Chloe Goodwin and her expression changed to one of pity. She immediately then turned in the other direction as if she hadn’t seen me at all, and sat down at a table with a bunch of other girls, one of whom with red hair I recognized from cable TV but whose name I couldn’t remember.
“What’s the story with that girl?” I asked Chloe, nodding casually in the direction of Kate. Demonstrating a practiced, subtle neck stretch to look across the dining hall at Kate’s table, Chloe smirked. “Why? Has she given you a hard time?”
“Kind of,” I said. “She’s my roommate.”
Chloe chortled and took a huge bite of the crust of her pizza. After chewing it carefully, she said, “I hope you like close-minded, Republican snobs. That’s the Jesus freak table. Take a good look. If any of those girls invite you to a club or a concert, you can be certain they’re trying to recruit you to join their prayer circle.”
This was definitely not something I had anticipated finding at Treadwell. Religious people? Religion had been noticeably absent from all of my previous private schools. It would have been a stretch to say that Mom was an atheist because even that would have required her to have put some thought into her belief system. Danko had been raised Catholic, but as far as I could remember, he’d never gone to church in all the years he’d been married to Mom. Dad had recently started telling people in interviews that he was a Buddhist, but that was an outrageous exaggeration, in my opinion. Reading two books written by the Dalai Lama didn’t qualify as Buddhism.
The table at which Kate sat had a clear line of demarcation down its center. On Kate’s side sat a petite girl with bright carrot-orange hair, a chesty brunette with huge hoop earrings, and a girl with long black hair to her waist. The brunette with the earrings made eye contact me, totally busting me in my study of her group of friends, as she animatedly appeared to be telling a story. Suddenly all four heads, including Kate’s, turned in my direction and it was painfully obvious that she had just informed her friends that I was her new roommate. Their expressions were blank and provided me no clue as to their first impression of me, although I was sure they were all passing judgment.
“The carrot top is Grace Mathison,” Chloe told me without even looking over her shoulder again to review Kate’s company. “She’s a certifiable Jesus freak. On move-in day I was wearing a Team Corpse concert t-shirt and she offered to pray for my soul. I told her to go to hell. The girl across from her with the big earrings is Giovanna Pasquasi. Serious mafia queen. She has one of the biggest mouths on campus. The other one at that table is Juliette Santangello. She’s actually somewhat normal if you can manage to separate her from those lemmings.”
There was a part of me that longed to take notes on everything Chloe was telling me. I wondered how she happened to know so much about these girls when it didn’t seem like she’d exchanged too many words with them, but that’s how private school just was. Reputations formed quickly and lasted forever. Since Chloe had mentioned she was a fan of the goth rock group Team Corpse, I made a mental note to never, ever tell her how much I loved All or Nothing.
I averted my eyes to the other side of that table to avoid Giovanna’s stare-down. The girls who sat on the right side of the table were noticeably more outgoing and fashionable. One of them, Ameerah Thompson, I immediately recognized from TV as the daughter of the super famous record producer who owned Black Diamond Records. She was enviably pretty with dark skin and long lashes, and was wearing what I was pretty sure was a Missoni sweater, imported from Italy. Across from Ameerah sat another black girl, the one wearing Prada glasses with whom I’d ridden down in the elevator, who had very neat, slim dreadlocks pulled back from her face. Even though Treadwell was more diverse than Pershing, Ameerah and this other girl were among a small handful of black students in the dining hall. Another girl at that end of the table looked up from her tray of food and I recognized her as Renée Ricard. Renée was basically fashion royalty. Her mother was the Editor-in-Chief of Jolie! in Paris, and Renée had practically grown up in the front rows of runway shows. She looked exactly like a miniature version of her mother, Sabine, with severe, thick dark eyebrows and a tiny, bird-boned frame. Both Renée and her mother always looked ferociously angry, with perfectly plump pouts. I sort of knew Renée in that way in which rich kids sometimes have met a few times at their parents’ events but don’t really know each other.
The foursome of girls who were clearly the holders of social power in the cafeteria was completed by a girl with short blond hair who Chloe told me was Stacy Davidson, a student so terrifyingly vicious, so smart and mean, that even teachers feared her wit. “Just avoid her,” Chloe instructed me. “At all costs. If she even so much as says good morning to you, run in the other direction. Last year she made Miss DiMico, the art teacher, cry when they got into it over whether or not Modigliani deserves to be recognized as a master. It turns out that Stacy’s dad is a huge collector of Modigliani’s work. Who would have known?”
I nodded, taking all of this in, grateful that I had Chloe to give me the inside scoop on everything.
The girls with whom my roommate sat weren’t even the worst of the lot, Chloe claimed. Pure evil sat in the southwestern corner of the cafeteria. It went by the name of Alyssa Ackerman, whose father was a plastic surgeon in Palm Springs, California. Alyssa had golden blond hair, like gold spun by Rumplestiltskin, and enormous china blue eyes, like a porcelain doll. She looked a little like Lauren Glover, only much more precious. Her mother was one of the stars of a reality television show called, “The Dotted Line,” about competition between real estate agents in the obscenely overpriced desert market. Of course I’d seen the show about one t
housand times, because Bijoux loved stupid television like that. I was pretty sure Alyssa’s mom was the woman with short, silvery blond hair and tons of American Indian-inspired turquoise jewelry who liked to refer to things as being “maaahvelous.” Alyssa’s co-conspirator in evil doings was Jenny Nothrup. Jenny was as dark as Alyssa was light. Her father owned a chain of casinos where Hollywood bad boys were always making headlines.
“Now watch this,” Chloe said, as a girl with curly brown hair stepped into the dining area with her tray and began the stroll through the aisles between tables toward her friends. As she passed us, I became keenly aware of how attention in the cafeteria closely followed her. Heads turned, whispers were passed, eyes were rolled.
“Who is she?” I asked Chloe. The girl didn’t look especially deserving of such sinister interest. She just looked like a regular, unremarkable sophomore in high school wearing an outfit not unlike everyone else’s outfit.
“That’s just Rebecca Smith. She’s no one, really. But that just goes to show you, no one is safe. We call this cafeteria the catwalk because there’s no way to get to your seat without everyone watching,” Chloe explained, folding one of her slices of pizza and taking a mighty bite out of its tip. “Some girls walk all the way over to Rutherford every night to eat with the freshmen just to avoid it.”
Good to know, I thought to myself. The idea of all eyes following me across the cafeteria at every single meal as I made my way toward my seat, carrying all of my food, made me panic. As I picked at my turkey burger, I decided to make a point of getting up even earlier than necessary to get my ID photo taken so that I could eat breakfast before everyone else arrived in the dining hall. Just then, my reverie was interrupted by a shadow falling over me.
“You’re Betsey Norfleet,” a solemn voice with a London North End accent said above me.
I looked up to see none other than the recently famous Nicola Rotherham standing at the edge of our table, less than a foot away from me, carrying her tray of food and waiting for a response. To say she was intimidating would be an understatement. She was as foxy as a pop star with flawless skin and eyes that were a shade of hypnotizing amber. She was also, incredibly enough, wearing a black knit one-sleeve dress in the Treadwell dining hall as if she was in a nightclub at two in the morning instead of a private school cafeteria when the sun was still up outside. Her single, snow white, exposed shoulder escaped from the dress like a dare.
“I am,” I replied. I’d been hearing about her all afternoon, and wondered how on earth she could have possibly heard about me.
“My brother is in love with your sister,” she stated matter-of-factly. “We should be friends.”
That was it. I had never met anyone more direct before, ever.
“I’m in Room 4B with Nala. You should stop by. I want to see your class schedule,” Nicola said, and then marched off to the popular girls’ table, where she promptly took a seat next to the girl with dreads who I assumed to be Nala.
“Well,” Chloe said, blinking twice. “It looks like you may have just been recruited to join the ranks of the elite.”
I told myself that I would not go to Nicola’s room that night because I don’t like being given orders, and I really wanted to look for Kristijan on video chat in the hopes that he’d be awake and online late. But after two hours alone in my dorm room with Kate lightly sniffling and typing away at her computer with her back to me, I was stifled. Even if Kristijan had made an appearance online, I would have felt strange about trying to have a conversation with him in Kate’s presence. Kate and I had barely exchanged words after dinner, other than her casual warning to me about befriending Chloe.
“A lot of people don’t like her,” Kate said nonchalantly over her shoulder. “She has a very negative energy around her.”
Funny, I thought, that Kate chose to mention Chloe’s energy but didn’t say a word about the fact that Chloe was probably ten sizes larger than eighty-percent of the other girls on campus.
So I left our room, making up a weak excuse about wanting to find the laundry room even though Lauren had already shown me where it was. I walked down the sixth floor hallway toward the door to the stairwell, passing rooms with doors propped open with the audio of television broadcasts seeping into the hall. The experience of walking down the hall before curfew was not unlike walking through an exhibit at a museum; each open door offered a glimpse into a different vignette. As I passed 6E, I dared to look inside the open doorway and saw Grace sitting on her bed with her headphones on, watching something on her laptop, and Juliette twirling her hair around one finger, reading a novel at her desk.
It turned out that the stairwell was where the real evening action could be found. Stacy Davidson, who I had been told to avoid, was smoking on the sixth floor landing, blowing smoke out the window. She and her companion, Renée, both startled as I pushed open the heavy door to the stairwell. The door was in urgent need of having its squeaky hinges greased.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling stupid as soon as I apologized, because I hadn’t really done anything wrong. The stairwell stank of stale smoke, so I guessed that its primary use was more of a smoking hideout and less of an escape route in case of a building fire.
“When did you get here?” Renée asked, acknowledging that she recognized me without actually admitting that she recognized me. No how are you or nice to see you. I tried to remember the last time I had been face to face with her before arriving at Treadwell and I guessed that it had maybe been at Fashion Week in Paris when I was twelve.
I hesitated before hurrying down the steps to the fourth floor, sensing danger in Stacy’s eyes, which were assessing me, but not wanting to say the wrong thing and earn Renée’s annoyance. “This morning,” I said. “I haven’t actually started classes yet.”
“I thought you went to Pershing,” Renée said, accepting the cigarette from Stacy and taking a long drag. For someone who had lived most of her life between Paris and a mansion in Ibiza, her English was perfect. She only had the slightest trace of a French accent. How had Renée known about my attendance at Pershing? Her mother might have kept an apartment in New York, but I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if Manhattan was so small that everyone knew where everyone else’s kids were enrolled.
“Your mother told my mother that you did,” Renée clarified, answering my unspoken question. “Last year, when they were trying to figure out where to send me.”
“I did go there,” I said, “but I kind of got kicked out.”
Getting kicked out of a school smacked of scandal, and I could immediately tell that scandal appealed to Stacy Davidson. One of her eyebrows rose in renewed interest in me. She took the cigarette back from Renée.
“How did you get kicked out?” Stacy asked. There was something about her demeanor that was daunting even though she wasn’t physically very large. She had the commanding presence of a grown adult and it was simple to see why teachers feared her.
A variety of potential lies swam through my head for a hot second. There was no way of knowing what the impact of telling the truth would be at this school, but I couldn’t think of any lies while on the spot that would be more certain to impress than what had actually happened. Was it a bad move on my part to try to identify as a tough girl? Was it safer to let them just think I was a klutz? “I spilled something in the chemistry lab, and this girl had to go under the safety shower, and the fire department came,” I said, trying to wave off the whole affair as if it was just not that big of a deal. “It was totally an accident, but you know how private schools are. It was written up in the New York Post.”
“Geez,” Stacy said, obviously having expected an entirely different kind of story. “What happened to the girl? Is she OK?”
Just like that, I knew I had handled my delivery of the offense perfectly. Stacy Davidson didn’t give a rat’s butt about Jessica’s condition; her tone suggested that she found the situation to be humorous.
“She’s fine,” I said. “A pair of Fratelli
Rosseti oxfords was the only casualty.”
“Quel dommage,” Renée said, smiling wickedly. “Oxfords were over in the spring, anyway. You did her a favor. What room are you in?”
I informed both of the girls that I was in 6J with Kate Callahan, and both groaned as if suffering from food poisoning.
“Ugh, you have to get out of there,” Stacy said, mashing the butt of her cigarette into the windowsill while Renée plucked another cigarette from her fresh pack of fancy Dunhills. “She’s friends with the Bible girls. Plus she throws up her breakfast every morning in the locker room before gym class.”
I was stunned. If what Stacy was saying was true, I felt really bad for Kate and genuinely hoped that she didn’t vomit often in the bathroom we shared; that would have been gross. But girls in private schools are also complete liars most of the time, so I took Stacy’s nugget of gossip with a grain of salt. I knew how these things went. If Kate had ever so much as given Stacy a dirty look, Stacy would probably tell anyone who would listen that Kate’s family was a bunch of drug dealing, murderous thieves.
“I don’t think I’m going anywhere,” I said grimly, already kind of wishing I had been placed with a different roommate. “Lauren told me that there’s a housing crunch. The school’s at capacity. I was lucky to be accepted.”
“They always say that,” Renée informed me. “It’s part of how they build mystique around the school. People are always coming and going and moving rooms. If your parents have money, Treadwell will make a space for you.”
OK, so I couldn’t exactly consider the cool girls to be my friends yet, but at least I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be saying downright hateful things about me in the dining hall. Even though neither of them had asked me why I’d been sitting with Chloe at dinner, I felt a little guilty having talked to them when Chloe had made it clear she didn’t like them. Already I felt a strange loyalty to her that seemed a little bit like a burden.
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