Nell acknowledged the shine in my eyes by diverting the conversation. “So midnight? I liked the midnight.”

“Me too.” I twisted my napkin into a villainous mustache, the ends pointy and hard, curled into a wicked smile.

“Stop worrying about the new film date,” Nell said, her read on me as sharp and as worrisome as Luke’s is not.

I came across Nell like you would a Robert Mapplethorpe at a street art fair, gobsmacked that something so valuable would be lumped in with a bunch of other crap like that. She’d been slumped against the bathroom wall in Butterfields, a dorm we later took to calling Butterfingers, for the lacrosse team residents who manhandled girls made Gumby-legged by Popov vodka. Even with her mouth hanging open, her tongue dry and pebbled white from all the medically sanctioned stimulants, there was no question that she had a movie star face.

“Hey,” I said, my hand on her tanning-bed-tan shoulder—easy to crawl into those fluorescent coffins when you’re so young you think twenty-four sounds ancient—and I shook her until she opened her eyes and I saw that, of course, they were as brilliant blue as the sky on the cover of the Wesleyan brochure mailed to prospective students.

“My bag,” Nell kept wailing, even as I pulled her to her feet, wrapped my arm around her dagger ribs, and dragged her back to my room. I had to throw her into the brush twice, leaping on top of her as Officer Stan from campus security ambled by in a golf cart, out for freshman blood with an alcohol content of .001 or more.

I woke up the next morning to find Nell scrambling about on my floor, digging under my futon, her frustration sounding in quiet grunts.

“I tried to find your bag!” I said, defensively.

She looked up at me, panic freezing her on all fours. “Who are you?”

We never found her bag, but eventually I figured out why it was so goddamn important to her. The bottle of pills—to help her sleep, to help her not eat, to help her stay up all night studying in the library—clanking together like a baby’s rattle as she walked. It’s the only thing we don’t really talk about.

Nell reached across the table and her ugly fingers pushed into the crevices of mine. She squeezed, and I felt the tiny bug between our hands; hers stained blue when she drew it back. I put the discipline on my tongue. Took a gulp of my bloody, swallowed, and waited. Even if this documentary did nothing to clear my old name, even if no one believed me, the least I could do was take away their ammo: She’s disgusting, nothing but a fat, bitter slam pig. The pill left a residue on my tongue that tasted the way money smells—musky, powdery—and I willed myself to believe that redemption was the only possibility.

CHAPTER 4

It was only my second week at Bradley and already I had to replace my entire wardrobe, with the exception of the orange cargo pants from Abercrombie & Fitch. Ostentatious as they were, Hilary had graced them with her seal of approval. I had a vision of her in my room, complimenting the mid-level-mall collection in my walk-in closet. Nestled between a stack of khakis, she’d spy a flap of orange, sticking out at her like a candy-coated tongue. “Do you want them?” I’d say. “They’re yours. No, seriously. They’re yours!”

Mom took me to the King of Prussia Mall and we spent two hundred dollars at J. Crew on piles of tweedy, cable-knit things. Next we went to Victoria’s Secret, where I picked out a rainbow selection of tank tops with built-in shelf bras. Mom suggested I wear them under everything to smooth out my “baby fat,” which puckered stubbornly around my belly button. The last stop was Nordstrom, for a pair of Steve Madden clogs, the same ones all the wrap and salad girls wore. You heard them thwacking down the hall before you saw them, the soles of the shoes sticking and unsticking from their heels. “I just want to glue them to their feet,” I overheard a teacher say.

I begged Mom to round out our purchases with a Tiffany Infinity necklace, but she said Dad would have her head.

“Maybe for Christmas,” she teased. “Get good grades.”

The other major change involved my hair. Dad’s side of the family is 100 percent Italian, but Mom is sliced with Irish, and with my coloring Hilary determined I could handle even blonder highlights. She told me the name of the salon she went to and Mom booked the first available appointment with the cheapest stylist on staff. The place was all the way out in Bala Cynwyd, which was even closer to Philadelphia and, therefore, farther from us. Mom and I got atrociously lost on the way to the appointment and we arrived twenty minutes late, which Mom said the snotty receptionist didn’t have to remind us of three fucking times. I was worried the salon would turn me away and tried to reassure myself that we’d been seen climbing out of a BMW—that had to count for something, right?

Thankfully, the cheapest stylist on staff found it in her heart to pardon our tardiness and painted my head in thick stripes of yellow, orange, and white, each one at least an inch from my scalp so that I already needed a touch-up before I even walked out the doors. Mom did not care for the final product and threw an embarrassing fit, which at least managed to get us 20 percent off the salon’s crappy services. Then we drove straight to the drugstore and purchased a light brown hair dye for $12.49, which, when blended with the expensively bad bleach job, resulted in a gorgeous golden hue that faded into the same color as Mom’s exhausted brass candlesticks as quickly as my star rose and fell at school. I found it fitting that my perfect shade of blond lasted as long as my popularity, really.

Even though Hilary and Olivia were warming to me, they were still cautious. So I kept my head down and spoke only when spoken to, usually in passing in the hallways or on the way out of the classroom. I was a while off from being invited to eat lunch with them, further still from being invited to one of their houses on the weekend, and I didn’t push my luck. I understood this was the assessment period. I could be patient.

In the meantime, Arthur and crew kept me company, and it wasn’t bad company by any means. Arthur cherished his gossip, and I don’t know how he did it, but he was always the first to report on a mortifying incident he had no business knowing about. He was the one to break the story that Chauncey Gordon, an icy junior with a sneer perpetually tattooed on her face, had been so drunk at a party that when the student president tried to finger her she peed all over his hand. Teddy had actually been at that party, and even Teddy didn’t know that. Teddy had the kind of pebbled red cheeks that all blond, sporty boys seem to have, and his summer tan came all the way from Madrid, where he’d attended a prestigious tennis camp for promising and rich young athletes. Without a football team, Bradley students chose soccer as the sport to revere, and they didn’t care about tennis. Still, I always felt Teddy could have leveraged himself better, made a play to sit at the table with the Hairy Legs, but he seemed content where he was. Arthur, Teddy, Sarah, and the Shark had known each other for years, and not even Arthur’s sudden, worrisome weight gain (“He wasn’t always this big,” the Shark whispered once when he went back for a second sandwich) or the halo of acne around his face could endanger his seat at their lunch table. I guess it was sort of sweet.

Then the Shark made my year when she clued me in to the fact that we could get out of PE if we played a sport. None of the wrap and salad girls took PE, and those were the thirty-nine minutes of my week I loathed the most.