Frat Girl. Kiley Roache

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       Chapter Two

      Dear Cassandra:

      Congratulations, I am pleased to inform you that you have been selected by the Stevenson Fund to receive the Stevenson Scholarship for Study and Research for this year. This scholarship was established to promote a lifelong practice of simultaneous scholarship and creative endeavors, because we at the Fund reject the premise that your career begins only after graduation or that academic pursuit should ever cease. The award value and other information about your scholarship are provided below.

      We were very impressed by all you have done in your academic career, but even more by your potential for growth and future success. This is not simply a prize for what you have done; rather it is an investment in your future. The Fund provides you with a full-tuition scholarship in exchange for equity in any and all entities you create during your time at Warren University. Tuition will be granted each year upon the submission of a renewal application, and on the condition that you maintain a GPA of 3.0 or higher and keep on schedule with all projects.

      Our goal is to help you make a difference in the world. We believe in your vision and leadership, and aim to grant you as much creative independence as possible, but there are certain criteria you are expected to meet.

      With the help of a project coordinator at the Fund, Madison Macey, you will create a plan for the completion of your projects. But you must meet the deadlines you set for yourself or risk losing funding. The exception would be extensions you request with the help of your PC and that are approved by the Fund board.

      Please fill out the attached forms as soon as possible, at which point the amount of your scholarship for one year will be sent directly to Warren University. It will be placed in your student account on hold status awaiting the completion of the first round of tutorials with your project coordinator and the creation of a preliminary four-year plan. Please send this to your project coordinator (address listed below) in two weeks’ time.

      Congratulations, and best wishes for a productive and successful academic year.

      Sincerely,

      Rupert Jones

      Vice President

      Stevenson Scholarship Fund Board

      I stare for the thousandth time at the letter that had changed my life. The result of an all-nighter, followed by the scariest twenty-minute presentation of my life. Then the waiting and checking the mail, and the waiting and the pacing, and the waiting. And then, one morning I opened the mailbox and the waiting had ended, and it was time for screaming and crying and calling my grandmother and getting absolutely obliterated on cheap champagne with Alex and Jay.

      After reading over the letter for the umpteenth time, I fold it neatly and place it in my empty desk in my new dorm room. I want to hang it on the wall for inspiration like I’d done in my room at home, but I have to be low-key about the scholarship or people will ask what my project is. It’s the same reason there wasn’t a press release from the university, and why I didn’t get to attend the Fund’s banquet in New York City. I have a fake backup project about the experience of female athletes, but I’m not about to bring it up in conversation. Which honestly doesn’t make me much different from the other kids on scholarship in a land where most kids arrive at school in Audis and Teslas, if not by helicopter. (Okay, I’ve heard of only one person doing that, but really...)

      I shut the drawer and turn to inspect my new home, a rectangular room with twin desks, wardrobes and beds. Everything I own is in duffel bags and boxes around me.

      After all the movies I’ve seen about moving into college, heading off on your own, getting into your first apartment, taking on the big world with wide eyes, I expect...something.

      But all I really feel is that it’s kinda stuffy. It’s like I’m waiting for all the deep, life-changing emotions to finally arrive. In the meantime, I’m just in a much too hot, nondescript room without air-conditioning on a late-summer afternoon.

      The building is the oldest on campus, like two hundred years old, and it takes me a while to pry open the window. Doesn’t do much to affect the heat anyway.

      “Pretty bullshit they don’t give us air-conditioning,” my roommate says, returning from the bathroom down the hall and slamming our door, disregarding the open door, open friendship rule they kept telling us about during orientation events.

      Warren has a really strict roommate policy, forcing everyone to enter randomly so all the kids from elite schools don’t pair up and leave kids like me—who know zero of the two thousand other students in our year—stranded.

      Which is how Leighton Spencer got stuck rooming with me instead of one of her ten close friends who also got in.

      She’s a pretty, wiry track runner—“not here, in high school, but I could if I wanted to”—with a platinum-blond ponytail and a ten-minute answer about where she’s from that includes three European cities and the most selective boarding school on each side of the United States. And she scares me absolutely shitless.

      “I started hanging some stuff up while you were gone. I hope you don’t mind.” I glance at my Christmas lights, Warren pennant and vintage Beatles poster. “If there’s anything you don’t like, I can take it down.”

      She flops on the plasticky blue mattress she’d claimed by the time I’d arrived, her Louis Vuitton luggage stacked around her, untouched. “It’s your half of the room—why would I care?”

      “Thanks.” I clear my throat.

      All my decorations are up, and all my shirts, pajamas, underwear and socks are placed in their respective drawers, by the time she eventually gets up to hang a rainbow of cocktail dresses in her wardrobe and starts taping Polaroids above her desk.

      “Do you mind if I play music?” I take my speaker out of a box my mom labeled “Cassie’s dorm stuff” (so specific and helpful) and set it on the desk.

      “If it’s not pop.”

      Okaaay, then. I scroll past the boy bands and choose an indie alternative band I heard at Fountain Square.

      She looks up as the first song starts. “I actually like this band. Where did you say you were from again?”

      “Indianapolis.”

      She turns back to her things.

      I look at her pictures. Leighton vacationing in the Maldives, at home in Hyde Park, leaning on a balcony with the Eiffel Tower in the background, Leighton with three different boys in a series of repeating shots. There are also a bunch with a dark-haired girl, laughing candids, posed with her hand on her hip, meeting James Franco.

      I think of Alex.

      “Is she your best friend?” I point to one with the girl.

      “No.” She scoffs. “I’m not friends with girls—too much drama. That’s my sister.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, half sister. That’s why we don’t look alike. She’s at Dartmouth. Pi Phi.”

      She stares at me for a second too long СКАЧАТЬ