I got the scholarship, and some of my teachers even raised enough money to help cover expenses for books and food, since my mother told me flat-out that she couldn’t afford any of it. When it was time to start school, I put on some ugly-ass jumper, the only nice thing I owned, and my mother dropped me off with a duffel bag filled with my stuff, including three changes of the school’s uniform black skirts and white blouses. Other parents were there in their BMWs and cars so fancy I didn’t know the names of them. “God, look at this place,” my mom said, heavy metal on the radio, fidgeting with an unlit cigarette because I asked her not to smoke so it wouldn’t get in my hair. “Lillian, this is going to sound so mean, but you don’t belong here. It don’t mean they’re better than you. It just means you’re gonna have a rough go of it.”
“It’s a good opportunity,” I told her.
“You got shit, I understand that,” she said, as patient as she’d ever been with me, though the engine was still idling. “You got shit and I know that you want better than shit. But you’re going from shit to gold, and it’s going to be real tough to handle that. I hope you make it.”
I didn’t get angry with her. I knew that my mom loved me, though maybe not in ways that were obvious, that other people would understand. She wanted me to be okay, at least that. But I also knew that my mom didn’t exactly like me. I weirded her out. I cramped her style. It was fine with me. I didn’t hate her for that. Or maybe I did, but I was a teenager. I hated everyone.
She pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter and while she waited for it to fire up, she kissed me softly and gave me a hug. “You can come back home anytime, sweetie,” she said, but I imagined that I’d kill myself if I had to do that. I got out of the car, and she drove off. As I walked to my dorm, I realized that the other girls didn’t even look at me, and I could tell that it wasn’t out of meanness. I don’t think they even saw me; their eyes had been trained since birth to recognize importance. I wasn’t that.
And then I found Madison in my room, the room we were going to share. All the information that I had on her had been provided in a brief letter during the summer, informing me that my roommate would be Madison Billings and that she was from Atlanta, Georgia. Chet, an ex-boyfriend of my mom’s who still hung around the house when she wasn’t dating someone else, had seen the letter and said, “I bet she’s from the Billings Department Stores. That’s Atlanta, too. That’s big money.”
“How would you know, Chet?” I asked. I didn’t mind Chet so much. He was goofy, which was better than the alternative. He had a tattoo of Betty Boop on his forearm.
“You gotta pick up on little clues,” he told me. He drove a forklift. “Information is power.”
Madison had shoulder-length blond hair and was wearing a yellow summer dress with hundreds of little orange goldfish printed on it. Even in flip-flops, she was model tall, and I could tell that the soles of her feet would be so fucking soft. She had a perfect nose, blue eyes, enough freckles to look wholesome without looking like God had blasted her with bad skin. The whole room smelled of jasmine. She’d already arranged the space, had chosen the bed farthest from the door. When she saw me, she smiled like we were friends. “Are you Lillian?” she asked, and I could only nod. I felt like a kid on The Bozo Show in my shitty jumper.
“I’m Madison,” she told me. “It’s nice to meet you.” She held out her hand, her nails painted a faint pink, like the nose of a bunny rabbit.
“I’m Lillian,” I said, and I shook her hand. I’d never shaken the hand of someone my own age.
“They told me that you’re a scholarship kid,” she then informed me, though there wasn’t any judgment in her voice. She seemed to just want to make it clear that she knew.
“Why did they tell you that?” I asked her, my face reddening.
“I don’t know. They told me, though. Maybe they wanted to make sure that I’d be polite about it.”
“Well, okay, I guess,” I said. I felt like I was forty, fifty steps behind Madison, and the school was already making it harder for me to catch up.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” she told me. “I prefer it. Rich girls are the worst.”
“Are you not a rich girl?” I asked, hopeful.
“I’m a rich girl,” she said. “But I’m not like most rich girls. I think that’s why they put me with you.”
“Well, good,” I said. I was sweating so hard.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Why did you want to come to this place?”
“I don’t know. It’s a good school, right?” I said. Madison had a kind of directness that I’d not experienced before, where shit that should get her killed somehow seemed okay because her eyes were so blue and she didn’t seem to be joking.
“Yeah, I guess. But, like, what do you want to get out of this place?” she asked.
“Can I put down my bag?” I asked. I touched my face and sweat was beading up and starting to trickle down my neck. She gently took my bag from me and placed it on the floor. Then she gestured to my bed, unmade, and I sat on it. She sat beside me, closer than I’d prefer.
“What do you want to be?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. Jesus, I don’t know,” I said. I thought Madison was going to kiss me.
“My parents want me to get amazing grades and go to Vanderbilt and then marry some university president and have beautiful babies. My dad was so specific. We’d love it if you married a university president. But I’m not doing that.”
“Why not?” I said. If the university president was sexy, I’d jump right into the life that Madison’s parents imagined for her.
“I want to be powerful. I want to be the person who makes big things happen, where people owe me so many favors that they can never pay me back. I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.”
She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her. She flipped her hair in such a way that it could only have been instinctual, evolution. “I feel like I can tell you this.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re poor, right? But you’re here. You want power, too.”
“I just want to go to college, to get out of here,” I said, but I felt like maybe she was right. I’d learn to want all that stuff she said. I could go for power.
“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”
“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing, “I hope so, too.”
And we did become friends, I guess you could say. She had to tamp down her weirdness in public because it scared people when beautiful people didn’t act a certain way, made themselves ugly. And I had to tamp down my weirdness because people already suspected that I was supremely strange because I was a scholarship kid. A few days into my time there, another scholarship girl, from a town that bordered mine, came up to me and said, not in a mean way, “Please don’t talk to me the entire time that we’re here,” and I agreed immediately. It was better this way.
The point is, we had to be composed in public, so it was nice to come to our shared space and cut out pictures of Bo and Luke Duke and rub them all over our bodies. It was nice to hear Madison talk about being a lawyer who sends the most evil man in the world to the electric chair. I told her that I wanted to grow up and be able to eat a Milky Way bar every single morning for breakfast. She said that was better than wanting to be the president of the United States of America, which Madison kind of wanted to be.