At night, the grubby packs of snow gleamed vague and white, but now they were grimy
and brown at the edges, heaps of dirty sheets ready for the wash. Harkness Tower loomed
over it all like a melting candle, its chimes sounding the hour.
It had taken Alex a few weeks to realize why Yale looked wrong to her. It was the complete lack of glamour. In L.A., even in the Valley, even on its worst days, the city had
style. Even Alex’s mother in her purple eye shadow and chunks of turquoise, even their dumpy apartment with its shawls over the lamps, even her no-money friends, gathered at
backyard barbecues, recovering from the night before, girls in tight shorts, midriffs bare,
long hair swinging to the small of the back, boys with shaved heads or silky topknots or
thick dreads. Everything, everybody, had a look.
But here the colors seemed to blur. There was a kind of uniform—jocks in backward baseball caps and long loose shorts they wore regardless of the chill, keys on lanyards that
they swung like dandies; girls in jeans and quilted jackets; theater kids with crests of sink-dyed Kool-Aid-colored hair. Your clothes, your car, the music pumping from it, were supposed to tell people who you were. Here it was like someone had filed down all of the
serial numbers, wiped away the fingerprints. Who are you? Alex would sometimes think, looking at another girl in a navy peacoat, pale face like a waning moon beneath a wool cap, ponytail lying like a dead animal over her shoulder. Who are you?
Mercy was an exception. She favored wild florals paired with a seemingly endless
parade of eyeglasses that she wore on glittery strings around her neck and that Alex had
yet to see her use. Today she’d opted for a brocade coat embroidered with poinsettias that
made her look like the world’s youngest eccentric grandma. When Alex had raised her brows, Mercy had just said, “I like loud.”
They entered the Jonathan Edwards common room, warm air closing over them in a
gust. Winter light slatted over the leather couches in watery squares—all of it a coy, falsely humble prelude to the soaring rafters and stone alcoves of the dining hall.
Beside her, Mercy laughed. “I only see you smile like that when we’re going to eat.”
It was true. If Beinecke was Darlington’s temple, then the dining hall was where Alex
worshipped daily. At the squat in Van Nuys, they’d lived on Taco Bell and Subway when
they were flush, cereal—sometimes dry, sometimes soaked in soda if she got desperate—
when they were broke. She’d steal a bag of hot dog buns whenever they were invited to
barbecues at Eitan’s place so they had something to put peanut butter on, and once she’d
tried to eat Loki’s dry kibble, but her teeth couldn’t manage it. Even when she’d lived with
her mom, it had been all frozen food, boil-in-a-bag rice dishes, then weird shakes and
nutrition bars after Mira got suckered into selling Herbalife. Alex had brought protein pudding mix to school for weeks.
The idea that there could be hot food just waiting for her three times a day was still shocking. But it made no difference what she ate or how much of it; it was as if her body,
starved for so long, was ravenous now. Every hour her stomach would growl, chiming like
the Harkness bells. Alex always took two sandwiches with her for the day and a stack of
chocolate chip cookies wrapped in a napkin. The supply of food in her backpack was like
a security blanket. If this all ended, if it all got taken away, she wouldn’t go hungry for at least a couple of days.
“It’s a good thing you work out so much,” Mercy noted as Alex shoveled granola into
her mouth. Except, of course, she didn’t and eventually her metabolism would stop cooperating, but she just didn’t care. “Do you think it’s too much to wear a skirt to Omega
Meltdown tomorrow night?”
“You’re still committed to this frat thing?” Omega Meltdown was part of Mercy’s Five
Party Plan to get her and Alex to be more social.
“Some of us don’t have a hot cousin to take us interesting places, so until I’m offered a