Chapter 4 #2
“I’m a freshman,” she began. Then, at the flash of alarm on his face, she quickly added, “I’m twenty-one. I started late.”
“Ah. Godwin Scholarship?”
“The school has other scholarships,” Ellory said, her grip tightening on the plate. “But yeah.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it…however you’re taking it. I know plenty of Godwin Scholars. Come here a sec.”
Liam’s large hand pressed against her shoulder blades and steered her back into the house.
Tai was still at the flip-cup table, knocking back a plastic cup of beer and then positioning it at the edge of the table.
She flicked the base, which sent it tumbling through the air before it landed upside down in the center of the table.
Cheers erupted from her team. Her opponents looked pained but not yet defeated.
Ellory felt sorry for them already. Tai’s scorched-earth, kiss-the-ring, bend-the-knee approach to every drinking game would crush their spirits one way or another.
To the left of the living room was a staircase with white balustrades.
An actual velvet rope was attached to one, barring the way upstairs in a way that made the second story of the house seem like some exclusive nightclub and thus would stop absolutely no one.
Liam led her to a group of four loitering in front of the stairs, most of them people of color, most of them women.
A pale redhead with glittering pastel-pink lip gloss.
A russet-skinned woman in a sour-apple-green hair wrap.
A spiky-haired man with golden skin, wearing a Manchester United T-shirt.
A freckled woman with her hair drawn up into a frizzy bun and a black cherry White Claw in her hand.
They all stared at her, making Ellory feel like a kindergartener on the first day of school. All she needed was a Bluey lunch box to clutch to her chest or maybe a box of Crayola crayons—the good shit, the sixty-four pack with the built-in sharpener—to trade in exchange for friendship.
Liam’s hand slithered to her shoulder. “I found another one. This is Ellory. She’s new.”
“Hey,” the man said first. “I’m David Chang Vargas.” His smile, when he turned it on Liam, stopped shy of friendly. “Blackwood’s been collecting as many of us as he can find tonight. Have you checked off your bingo card yet?”
Liam laughed obliviously. “Not yet, but I’ll keep you posted.”
Everyone else made their introductions. The Black woman was Imani Khalif.
The redhead was Addison Sullivan, “but you can call me Red.” The final woman was Ximena Moreno, an introduction she followed up by offering Ellory a White Claw from her oversize purse.
Imani and David were nineteen-year-old poli-sci majors, while twenty-one-year-old Ximena was suffering through biochem, and Red, twenty, was here for electrical engineering.
All of them apologized when Ellory said she was majoring in poli-sci, too.
“We’re still mostly doing core classes,” said David, assuming, like everyone did, that Ellory was a senior. “But even those are soul crushing. Something about the atmosphere here is so…”
“Serious,” Red finished, “in a super-pretentious way. Like, we get it, you’re a future hedge fund manager with an inheritance you can’t wait to snort your way through. There’s no need to wear a fucking suit to the student center.”
“That was one time,” Liam said. “And I had a networking event.”
“It was twice,” said Imani. “And you wore different suits each time.”
“I had multiple networking events!”
His hand was still on Ellory’s shoulder.
She reached up to pat it. She didn’t know how to explain to him that the problem was probably that he owned a full suit in the first place, let alone more than one.
If he wasn’t aware that they were expensive, that most people rented them for prom or thrifted them for interviews, then there was nothing she could do to save him from the undercurrent of resentment this group was sending his way.
He didn’t seem to notice it, at least. She wondered what that was like. Did elevator music play in his head when someone didn’t like him, drowning out the barbs and the side-eyes? Or did he notice the barbs and take the high road, the road that money allowed him the luxury of taking?
The conversation turned to coursework, professors who made them want to give their best and professors who made them want to drop out, and the general lack of time for anything resembling a life thanks to the demands of the Godwin Scholarship.
Ellory ate her pretzels and let the words wash over her, trying to stay engaged.
But the more they spoke, the more she thought about her constitutional law textbook and the quiz she’d come to the party to escape.
So far, she hadn’t seen Hudson Graves anywhere.
Maybe he hadn’t deigned to attend his own house party.
Maybe that was why he’d scored higher than her.
The pretzels tasted like lead. She handed her plate and empty Corona bottle to Liam. “Is there a bathroom?”
“There’s…” Liam pointed to a door a few feet to their left that had a couple enthusiastically making out against it. One groped for the doorknob behind them, and they tumbled inside, only two hands visible. “Well, there’s another one upstairs, to the right. Oi!”
Ellory left him to deal with that. Upstairs was quieter, cleaner, emptier.
The walls were painted a peaceful blue, and the bathroom was white brick and tile with a sunset-orange shower curtain hiding the tub from view.
Ellory peed and examined herself in the mirror over the sink as she washed her hands.
Her mascara was still impeccable, her dark lipstick only slightly smudged from the beer.
She touched it up and then took several deep breaths, shoving con.
law to the back of her brain where it belonged.
She was at a party. She was having fun. She could talk about schoolwork and make new friends without having a breakdown.
It wasn’t even obvious that she’d been crying earlier this very night.
Back in the hallway, she paused. The stairs were ahead to the left, but there was another door between them and the bathroom that she’d ignored in her haste to empty her bladder. It was half-open, and she could see bookshelves. Did these people actually have a home library?
No, it was a bedroom, albeit one that seemed stuck in the transitional stage between that and a library.
There was a queen-size bed wedged in the corner.
There was a desk underneath a window with short cherry-red curtains.
There was another door opposite the bed that she assumed led to a closet.
Almost every other inch of space was full of bookshelves or books that couldn’t fit on the bookshelves and had instead been stacked unsteadily over the black carpet.
There were books on top of the shelves, books in front of the shelves, books on the desk, and books under the desk.
There were books on the bed, fanned out across the pillow as if they’d fallen asleep.
It was a literary wonderland.
Ellory forgot about the party, instead losing herself in the cracked and well-loved spines.
These books weren’t for decoration. They had all been read, some of them many times.
Nonfiction biographies and memoirs. Crime novels and fantasy epics.
Essay collections and leather-bound classics.
Romance novels piled next to a single self-help book.
She gasped and reached for one of the tomes on the desk, a copy of Reel to Real by bell hooks that had been read so many times that the cover had been taped back on.
It was her favorite of the author’s works, a series of essays on the influential nature of films—whether they meant to teach a certain lesson or not.
During those first few years after she’d moved to America, television had been Ellory’s gateway to culture.
She couldn’t speak like her classmates, and she didn’t grow up with the same references, but she kept a list of the things she overhead so she could diligently catch up.
Then Aunt Carol bought her a copy of Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies from the bargain bin at the Strand, and Ellory devoured the analysis, pored over the highlighted stereotypes, and took a more critical eye to all the media she consumed from then on.
It was as if she’d been asleep, and bell hooks had been her gentle awakening to a world that said so much more than she had been picking up.
She traced the cover with loving fingers, a small smile on her face.
The pages were dog-eared and annotated with thoughtful comments and questions that made it clear the owner had really engaged with the text.
She flipped to the chapter on Crooklyn, her favorite of the essays, almost eager to get their thoughts.
“Of course,” said a bored voice behind her. “With an entire floor of food and festivities, why wouldn’t you instead break into my bedroom?”
Ellory dropped the book. Her smile went with it.
Standing in the doorway was Hudson Graves.