Cum Laude Read online

  “Oh no!” Shipley cried. “My car!” She sprinted over to an elegant black Mercedes sedan with Connecticut plates. A neon yellow parking ticket was tucked beneath one of its windshield-wiper blades.

  “Hurry up!” Professor Rosen barked. “The main parking lot is across the road. We’ll wait for you in the van.”

  Eliza’s roommate assignment hadn’t mentioned that Shipley would be beautiful or blond, or that she would drive a black Mercedes with tiny windshield wipers on its headlights. It hadn’t mentioned that Shipley’s trim, suntanned legs looked great in white shorts, especially when she ran, which she did now with the effortless grace of a Thoroughbred. Eliza didn’t know how to drive, her legs were shapeless and pale, and the only shorts she owned were the butchered black denim ones she’d worn today. It was growing increasingly difficult not to be envious of Shipley, and even not to ever so slightly hate her.

  Professor Rosen slid open the door to the waiting van, a beat-up maroon Chevy with Dexter’s logo of a single green pine tree emblazoned on it. Eliza couldn’t help thinking that Harvard probably had a whole fleet of Mercedes.

  Inside, the van was musty and crowded. Professor Rosen, who was in fact female, tapped her fingers impatiently against the wheel while Eliza squeezed into the very back seat, next to three girls wearing matching powder pink cap-sleeved Dexter T-shirts. This particular feminine cut of T-shirt was new this year and had proven to be a hit with incoming students. The bookstore had already sold out of them.

  In the second row of seats, directly in front of Eliza, Tom Ferguson and Nicholas Hamilton waited impatiently for Professor Rosen to start the engine and crank up the AC.

  “Freaks,” Tom muttered under his breath. Freaks in their wool hats and Birkenstocks. Even the professor in charge of their orientation trip, the one behind the wheel with the spiky brown hair and gold earrings. Mr. or Ms.? He had no freaking clue.

  “Why am I even going to this place again?” he’d asked his dad that morning in the car. Tom’s parents had given him a new Jeep Cherokee for graduation. His father rode with him while his mother followed them in the Audi.

  “Because you’re a legacy, and it’s the best place you got into,” his father reminded him. “Hey, don’t knock it, kid. Dexter’s my alma mater and look how I turned out: ma—”

  “Yeah, Dad. I know, I know. Manager of your own fund, happily married to a beautiful woman, two boys in good colleges, big house in Bedford, beach house on the Cape.”

  Tom smoothed his dark hair back with his hands—what was left of it anyway. He’d wanted it cut short for the Westchester triathlon, but his dad’s barber didn’t get what he was asking for and had given him a crew cut. He glanced at his father. His gray, neatly trimmed hair was flawless. His skin was flawless. His white shirt was flawless. He looked like the fucking “advertisement of the man” to quote The Great Gatsby, the only assigned book Tom had actually finished and enjoyed. But he hadn’t always looked like that. Tom had seen pictures of his dad in college. A hippie with bad skin—long stringy hair, stoner smile, zits all over the place, even on his eyelids.

  His father gazed out the window and nodded his head with that annoying parental mix of knowing and nostalgia. “Dexter will surprise you.”

  “How will it surprise me?” Tom demanded, pressing the gas pedal to the floor. He thought maybe his dad was going to tell him about Dexter’s underground secret society, where the men were weeded out from the boys and the women wanted one thing and one thing only.

  But his dad just clapped him on the shoulder and grinned cluelessly. “I have no idea.”

  The van’s windows were down. Tom stared at the grassy lawns—so green it hurt—and listened to the birds singing their heads off. He’d always noticed stuff like that—the ambient background of what was going on. He really dug that shit. He turned to the guy seated next to him, his new roommate. They’d met briefly in their room before he and his parents had taken off to grab some lunch.

  “Nicholas?” Tom addressed the wool-flap-hat-wearing freak. “Is that what you go by?”

  The guy pulled his earphones out of his ears. Dirty blond curlicues of hair fell down over the collar of his oatmeal-colored embroidered freak shirt. Actually it was more like a tunic, since it came down almost to his knees.

  “I prefer Nick.”

  Tom jiggled his legs in annoyance. If Nicholas wanted to be called “Nick,” why didn’t he just put “Nick” on his registration forms the way Tom had put “Tom” on his? No one called him “Thomas,” not even his great-grandmother.

  “Hey, Professor,” he called to the guy behind the wheel. “Any chance we could get moving soon, dude? This van could really use a little air circulation.”

  “He’s a she,” Nick whispered. “Professor Darren Rosen. She teaches a senior seminar called Androgyny. I read about her in one of those college guides.”

  “Jesus.” Tom wondered if it was too late to transfer to a school with fewer freaks. He glared out the window, his gaze scanning the vast wasteland of dingy woods, muddy farms, and depressing shit-ass towns scattered around the hill the college was perched on. “Mud, grass, and trees. Mud, grass, and trees,” he muttered.

  One of the girls behind him kicked the back of his seat. “Come on, dude. This is Maine—vacationland? People come here for the scenery. You should feel honored.”

  Tom turned around to glower at the girl with short dark bangs and a permanent snarl.

  “Nice to fuck you, too,” Eliza added, acknowledging his glare.

  “I was thinking of camping out on campus. You know, while the weather’s still warm? Maybe build a yurt?” Nick mused aloud, oblivious to Tom and Eliza’s little repartee.

  Nick was one of the happy people, Eliza could tell. He wore the standard boarding school hippie uniform, and his perma-grin was probably pot-induced, but she bet he smiled like that even when he wasn’t stoned. A guy as happy as he was drove her insane. She wanted to devour him or molest him, or both.

  Nick stuck his headphones back into his ears. Eliza was right, he was happy. Never happier than when he was listening to one of his favorite albums: Simon and Garfunkel’s The Concert in Central Park. His mom had taken him to the concert when he was seven years old, just the two of them. She’d shared a joint with the people dancing in the grass next to them and had even let him take a hit, just for fun.

  After four years of boarding school, Nick should have been used to being separated from his mom and little sister, but he was already homesick. He’d spent the entire summer in the city with them, listening to records and eating picnics in the park. The bus ride up to Dexter had been lonely indeed. He’d even forgone a Subway sandwich with Tom and his parents so he could call home. His mom was at work and Dee Dee was at day camp, but it did him good just to hear their voices on the machine.

  “So what’s a—what did you call it? A yurt?” Tom asked him now.

  “Huh?” Nick kept his headphones on, trying to tune out the fact that his new roommate was going to kill him and eat him before school even started.

  “A yurt.” Tom spoke up. “What the hell is it?”

  Nick brightened. Maybe Tom would lighten up if he received enough good vibrations. “Oh, it’s like a big, permanent tent. I’m going to ask the college if I can build one and sleep in it sometimes, you know, so I can commune with nature?”

  Laird Castle, a senior at Nick’s boarding school when Nick was a freshman, had built a yurt behind the science building and lived in it until he graduated. Laird was supposed to have gone to college at Dexter, but his tent pole was struck by lightning on a camping trip in the Berkshire Mountains, killing him instantly. Nick hadn’t really known Laird, except to admire his collection of hand-knit earflap hats, the “Meat Is Murder” bumper sticker on his beat-up Subaru, and the constant plume of pot smoke emanating from the air holes in his yurt. But he had taken it upon himself to carry on Laird’s legacy at Dexter. He liked to think of Laird as Yoda, the hobbling, green centuries-old Jedi maste
r from Star Wars, and himself as the young Luke Skywalker. In order to master the force, a Jedi knight in training needed a safe hideaway in which to hone and perfect his skills. The yurt would be that place.

  Nick sneezed violently and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Then he sneezed again.

  “Jesus, man,” Tom exclaimed in disgust.

  “Sorry,” Nick apologized. “Allergies.”

  “Bless you,” Eliza murmured from the back.

  Tom loosened his canary yellow belt a notch and shifted away from Nick. Obviously his sneezy new roommate couldn’t wait to invite him camping. They could have a gay old time in their tent or yurt or whatever, drinking hot toddies and wiping each other’s nose and rear-ending each other. Damn it to hell, why couldn’t school just start already so he could get the next four years over with and start working for his dad? He didn’t need any stupid orientation. He was already pretty fucking oriented, and all compasses pointed toward four long years of mise-fucking-ry, starting with an entire year rooming with this allergic twat from Manhattan.

  Professor Rosen started up the engine. “Here comes our last passenger—finally. Scoot over, boys.”

  Shipley had smoked another cigarette while she looked for a parking space. She wasn’t even sure if she was smoking correctly, but just imagining what her mother would think if she saw the car’s ashtray stuffed with old butts gave her a singular thrill.

  “There were no spots left so I had to park in the grass,” she told the professor. “Hope that’s okay.” She tucked her hair behind her ears and contemplated where to sit. Eliza was all the way in the back, squashed between three girls wearing matching pink T-shirts.

  “Sit here!” Two boys parted ways, clearing a more than adequate place for her between them. One of the boys wore the same oatmeal-colored J. Crew beach tunic she’d bought as a swimsuit cover-up last summer. The flaps of his wool hat barely covered the headphones of his Walkman. The other boy wore blue seersucker Bermuda shorts and had to crouch to keep from hitting his closely shaved head on the roof of the van.

  Shipley sank into the seat as the van eased out of the parking lot and down the hill toward town. Warm wind whipped in through the open windows, blowing her blond hair backward.

  “That breeze feels so good!” one of the girls in the back cried.

  “Amazing!” her friend agreed.

  “Awesome!” the third one chimed in.

  “Listen, I’m Tom.” The big preppy boy thrust his right hand at Shipley. “From Bedford,” he added with the implied assumption that Shipley would know what he was talking about. And she did. Bedford, New York, was Greenwich, Connecticut’s smaller kissing cousin. It was hunt country, as in horses and hounds. Shipley had ridden in pony trials in Bedford almost every weekend when her old pony was still sound. “And that’s Nick over there.” Tom glanced at the other boy. “Don’t even try calling him Nicholas. I did and he almost bit me in the sac.”

  “Oi!” Professor Rosen shouted from behind the wheel.

  Eliza snorted and kicked the back of Shipley’s seat. Nick grinned. “I’m Nick,” he said in a loud voice. He pulled his headphones off and leaned toward Shipley. He smelled like basil, sort of. “You know the person driving, our anal leader?” he whispered.

  Shipley giggled. “What about him?”

  “He’s a she,” Tom murmured in her other ear. “But she seems like kind of a dick anyway.”

  “Her name is Professor Darren Rosen,” Nick continued. “I’m pretty sure she teaches Freshman English.”

  Eliza stared out the window as she eavesdropped on their conversation. She’d actually seen Tom’s and Nick’s ears perk up when Shipley got into the van. They’d pointed, like horny bird dogs. Her father used to have two springer spaniels that he used for hunting ducks. She knew pointing when she saw it.

  The van paused at a stop sign and a pale, skinny jogger ran by, his maroon Dexter basketball jersey flapping loosely against his limbs. He reminded Tom of Salvador Dalí’s famous painting of dripping clocks. He’d been running so long, he was melting.

  “Pay attention, folks!” Professor Rosen announced. “We’re about to cross the Kennebec River. Two miles downstream is our camp. If anyone has to go pee-pee, find a spot away from the river. It’s ramen noodles for dinner. You’ll be eating a lot of ramen this winter, so why not get used to it now?”

  “Ew. Yuck!” The three pink-T-shirted girls moaned a chorus of dismay from the back.

  A farm flashed by. A trailer home. A dilapidated barn. More clover, more daisies, more buzzing bees. Motionless cows blinked at the van, insects hovering over their heads in clouds.

  “Damn. Did you see that? This whole geographic region is freaking depressing as hell,” Tom complained.

  “Hey, man,” Nick countered. “People live here. And they probably hate us, you know? Rich city kids turning up to go to college in their town? Littering on their farms? Driving up the price of bacon or coffee or whatever.”

  Nick could feel his earlobes flush a deep, hot pink. He tugged on the flaps of his hat and glanced self-consciously at Shipley, who was busy pretending to gaze dreamily out the window while secretly admiring Tom’s bulging triceps. Eliza continued to glare at the back of Tom’s meat-headed skull, while Tom marveled at the way in which the sunlight reflected off the tiny blond hairs on the tops of Shipley’s thighs, causing them to sparkle. The van turned onto an old logging road that led directly into the woods. It barreled over a pothole, tossing its passengers together as the trees enveloped them.

  2

  The relationship between town and college is often fraught with tension. The town would like to think it doesn’t need the college, however pretty, to draw visitors. After all, the town has its old mill, its tannery, its rushing river, its dramatic dam. Elm Street is still almost postcard-perfect despite the blight of Dutch elm disease. The pizza and pancakes aren’t half bad. The high school wins the regional championships in both basketball and hockey nearly every year. And the townies are friendly, for the most part.

  “Of course you don’t have any money,” Tragedy snapped at her brother. She manipulated her ever-present Rubik’s cube, scrambling it up so she could solve it again. “Neither of us does. And we never will, unless we get the fuck out of Dodge.”

  Adam and Tragedy Gatz were not related, but they were brother and sister nonetheless. Tragedy was adopted, and she never let anyone forget it. Their parents, Ellen and Eli, were hippie subsistence farmers and crafts fair vendors. They had both grown up in Brooklyn and had dropped out of Dexter their junior year after taking too much acid and missing too many classes. They got married and, with their parents’ help, bought a dilapidated horse farm right there in Home. Instead of horses, they raised sheep. Ellen spun wool and Eli welded hand-wrought oversized fork, knife, and spoon-shaped fireplace tongs. They ate their own grass-fed lamb and pesticide-free organic vegetables. They baked their own bread and made their own sheep’s milk cheese and yogurt. And they gave birth to a son, Adam. When Adam was four years old, Ellen and Eli adopted the infant daughter of Hector Machado, a Brazilian sheep trader who’d died of a heart attack right on their doorstep, or so the story went. As he lay dying, Hector asked the Gatzes to take care of his baby daughter, whose mother had already died in childbirth. The baby had been named Gertrudes Imaculada, after her mother. The Gatzes renamed her Tragedy, after their favorite Bee Gees song, and they raised her as one of their own.

  Right now Adam and Tragedy were sitting in Adam’s battered white Volkswagen GTI on the shoulder of the road leading through campus, directly opposite Dexter College’s new Student Union. They were arguing about whether or not to try and finagle some free coffee. Of course Tragedy would be the one to do the finagling; she always was.

  “I don’t see why you can’t just make coffee at home,” Adam said, trying to be reasonable.

  But Tragedy was never reasonable. “Doesn’t taste the same. Especially not with ewe’s milk.” She set her Rubik’s cube down on the da
shboard. “A feta-cheese-fucking-cino?” She stepped out of the car. “No, thank you,” she added and slammed the door.

  The freshmen had left for their orientation trips, and registration for the upperclassmen wouldn’t begin until the day after tomorrow. Except for the few older students who’d arrived early, the campus was quiet. Adam watched his sister cross Homeward Avenue and stride purposefully up the walk to the Student Union, her waist-length ponytail bobbing behind her.

  It was Tragedy’s fault Adam had graduated from high school virtually friendless. Over the course of his senior year, Tragedy had grown six inches taller in as many months. Her hips and chest developed at the same rapid rate, forcing her to switch from junior misses to women’s sizes. “Your sister is ridiculously hot, man,” Adam’s classmates would protest. “How can you stand it? After all, you’re not even related.” Then someone seeded the rumor that Adam’s relationship with his sister was more than brotherly, and instantly both he and Tragedy became social outcasts.

  Of course nothing had ever transpired to justify the rumors, but Tragedy kept right on developing, and for the population of Home High and the town of Home itself, that was justification enough. The irony was, Adam didn’t see it. He didn’t see what was so ridiculously hot about his sister. She was simply his little sister—annoying, confrontational as hell, impossibly demanding, constantly around, and because beggars can’t be choosers, his only friend.

  Tragedy studied the menu board on the wall of the Student Union’s new Starbucks café, trying to make sense of the ridiculous Italianate lingo. Tall was small, grande was bigger, and venti was the biggest. A few Starbucks had opened in Maine’s larger towns—it had been reported that the chain was growing at a rate of one new outpost per day—but this was Home’s first, and her first time ever inside one. It was very clean and orderly, definitely a step up from Boonies, the greasy muffin shop littered with old newspapers and overflowing ashtrays and equipped with the most disgusting bathroom in New England.