Nothing to See Here (3)

“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.

We also played on the basketball team, the only two freshmen to start in years and years. The team was no joke, had won a few state titles. At Iron Mountain, basketball and cross-country were hugely important to the school’s identity; I suspected that, for most girls, they were a great way to add complexity to their college applications, but there were girls like me who just really liked being badasses all over weaker people. I played point guard and Madison, so damn tall, played power forward. We spent a lot of time in the gym, just the two of us, running full-court sprints, shooting with our nondominant hands. I had always been good, but I got better with Madison on my team. She gave me some kind of extrasensory court vision; she was so beautiful that I could find her without even looking. We were Magic and Kareem. We told our coach that we wanted to wear black high-tops, but he refused. “Jesus, girls, you act like you’re New York playground legends,” he said. “Just don’t get in foul trouble or turn the ball over.”

There were times when Madison left me behind, but I didn’t take it personally. I think if I’d been a different kind of person—and I don’t mean wealthy—I could have been a part of it, but I had no interest. She and the other beautiful girls would sit together at lunch. Sometimes they would sneak off campus and hang out at a bar near this experimental art college where boys hit on them. Sometimes they bought cocaine from some super-sketchy dude named Panda. Madison would show up in our room at three in the morning, somehow eluding the dorm parents who watched over us, and sit on the floor, drinking a huge bottle of water. “God, I hate myself for being so damn predictable,” she would say.