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.
“It looks fun,” I said, lying.
“It can be,” she said, her pupils crazy big. “But it’s just a phase.”
School was more complicated there than in the valley, but the classes weren’t hard. I made straight As. So did Madison. I won a poetry contest when I wrote about growing up poor; Madison had told me to do it after I showed her my first poem, which was about a fucking tulip. “Use it at the right time,” she told me, by which I think she meant my bad upbringing, “and you’ll get a lot out of it.” I think I understood. I mean, here I was at Iron Mountain, thriving. I got here. Madison sometimes slept in my little bed, the two of us wrapped around each other. I had good things, and it wasn’t as hard to admit to where I’d been before I ended up right where I belonged.
And then one of Madison’s beautiful friends—the least beautiful of the six of them, if you want to be cruel—got upset at a joke that Madison had made, a moment when Madison’s weirdness had spilled out beyond the confines of our dorm room, and so the girl told the dorm parent that Madison had a bag of coke in her desk drawer. The dorm parent checked, and there it was. Iron Mountain was a place for rich people, and it depended on those rich people, so Madison hoped, in bed with me one night as we talked it over, that the school would go easy on her. But I was not rich, and what I understood was that sometimes a place like Iron Mountain made an example of one rich person in order to gain the trust of a bunch of other rich people. It was almost the end of the year, just a few weeks till final exams, and the headmaster of the school, no longer some British dude but a Southern woman named Ms. Lipton with a white shell of a hairstyle and a maroon pantsuit, called Madison and her parents to meet with her in her office, the invitation sent on official letterhead. Ms. Lipton called everyone “daughter” but had never married.