Cum Laude
Cecily von Ziegesar
For my teachers
Considering the lack of direction in the world, it seems as though many people get through college and beyond without really questioning who they are.
—Preface, The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, 1992
Contents
Epigraph
1
College is for lovers. At least, this one was. Looming…
2
The relationship between town and college is often fraught with…
3
It’s often said that the best way to strengthen a…
4
The sheep were out grazing and the house was quiet.
5
College has a break-in period. First there is the unfamiliar…
6
Dexter was an earnest place. Eliza had been waiting all…
7
And so it went. Shipley lost her virginity to Tom…
8
At college you are free to do as you please,…
9
November was a curious month. Some days it was warm…
10
Why take the job when she didn’t need the money?
11
In driver’s ed they teach you that most accidents happen…
12
Tuesday was Election Day. The more conscientious students hurried back…
13
Nick lost his zen the hard way. It was taken…
14
Holidays are a state of mind. You spend all day…
15
December came, and it was as if Thanksgiving had never…
16
Even the most bucolic college suffers from bouts of nerves,…
17
Second best to earning a lot of money and spending…
18
The sun had set at five o’clock and the air…
19
The average freshman course load at a liberal arts college…
20
They say a pet can do wonders for your mental…
21
The dorms were alive again. Everyone had returned from the…
22
It wasn’t that long ago that Nick had waited outside…
23
Sleep and wakefulness are active states controlled by specific groups…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
1
College is for lovers. At least, this one was. Looming up out of the trees on its hilly pedestal, Dexter College looked so strikingly pretty and at the same time so quaintly academic, it was almost as out of place in its rural setting as some of its students. The campus was fortified on all sides by forests of ancient conifers, tall birches, and dense maples, so that only the proud white spire of the college chapel was visible from town. Homeward Avenue, the road that led uphill to campus from Interstate 95, continued down the hill to the blink-and-you’d-miss-it town of Home, Maine, which consisted of a Walmart, a Shop ’n Save, the Rod and Gun Club, and a few mom-and-pop shops frequented only by locals.
Shipley Gilbert would have sprinted up the hill to campus if she could, but her family’s Mercedes was loaded down with a semester’s worth of freshman essentials, so she had to drive. At least her mother wasn’t with her. Shipley had insisted on that.
She steered the car into one of the temporary parking spots in front of an imposing brick building with the word “Coke” engraved in marble over its black double doors. The parking area was a busy place. Students carted wheeled suitcases and cardboard boxes, dads reined back dogs on leashes, little sisters twirled their skirts, little brothers shot at birds with their fingers cocked, moms fanned the humid air. The sky was blue, the grass green and freshly shorn, the brick red and clean. A gaggle of tie-dyed T-shirted boys played Hacky Sack on the sprawling lawn. A handsome young English professor sat cross-legged as he read aloud from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, trying to inspire a thirst for something other than beer in the twitching semicircle of incoming freshmen seated around him. Three girls in matching pink Dexter T-shirts jogged toward the field house.
Dexter College was exactly as advertised.
Shipley stepped out of the car, releasing the scent of Camel cigarettes and Juicy Fruit gum into the sun-burnished air. Never a gum chewer or a smoker, she’d decided to cultivate both habits on the drive up. A late August wind rustled the maple trees that stood between the car and the quad—that long expanse of grass at the center of Dexter’s campus. On either side of the quad, redbrick buildings with massive white columns challenged each other to do better. The pristine white clapboard chapel stood at the peak of the hill at one end of the quad, and Dexter’s new glass and pink stucco Student Union stood at the other end, a perfect juxtaposition of tradition and modernity.
“Tradition and Modernity” was the college’s most recent motto, indoctrinated during the Student Union’s ribbon-cutting in June. The Dexter College bookstore even sold a pair of wind chimes with the word “Tradition” printed on one bulky brass chime and “Modernity” on its slim stainless steel mate. Of course the Dexter College letterhead still bore its original Latin motto—Inveni te ipsum (“Find yourself”)—but very few students knew or bothered to find out what it meant.
Shipley inhaled the clean country air and imagined kicking up the maple leaves this fall when they were red and crisp and covered the ground. Bundled into her favorite cream-colored cable-knit sweater, she’d stroll along the stone walks with a group of new friends, drinking hazelnut-flavored coffee from the Starbucks café, discussing poetry and art and cross-country skiing, or whatever people talked about in Maine. Eager to get on with it, she popped open the trunk and grabbed the handles of her largest duffel bag.
“Want some help?” Two boys appeared at her sides, flashing eager, helpful smiles.
“I’m Sebastian.” The taller of the two reached for the duffel bag and then ducked into the car for another. “Everyone calls me Sea Bass.” He tossed the second bag at his friend, whose dense thicket of hair could only be described as a Greek afro. “That’s Damascus.”
Damascus clasped the duffel against his burly chest. His knuckles were meaty and tan. “We’re totally harmless,” he assured her with a mischievous smile.
Shipley hesitated. “I’m on the third floor. Room 304. I guess that’s kind of a hike?”
“Fucking A!” Sea Bass crowed, the corners of his mouth spreading so wide they nearly touched the tips of his carefully sculpted sideburns. “That’s right next to us!” He dropped Shipley’s bag on the ground and threw his arms around her, hugging her with such force that her feet left the ground. “Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life!”
Shipley took a startled step backward and tucked her long blond hair behind her ears, blushing furiously. She wasn’t used to being hugged by friendly, boisterous boys. She’d gone to the same girls school—Greenwich Academy—since kindergarten. It had a brother school—Brunswick—and she’d sung in choir with boys and even had a male lab partner in AP Chemistry. But because her father was of the mostly absent variety and her older brother was strange and remote and had been away at boarding school almost since she could remember, she remained unsure of herself around boys. She walked around the car and opened the door to the backseat, where she’d stowed her goose down pillow and her portable CD player, wondering if she would take to fraternizing with males as easily as she had taken to chewing gum and smoking.
“Okay.” She tucked the pillow beneath her arm and slammed the door closed. “I’m ready.”
“So why’d you choose Dexter?” Sea Bass asked as she followed him up Coke’s dark and winding back stairs.
Shipley shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. “My brother went here.” She paused. “And I didn’t get into Dartmouth.”
“Me neither,” Damascus replied from behind her. “I guess that’s why we all end up here, huh?”
Shipley followed Sea Bass down the hallway. Dexter provided a dry-erase board on the door of each room so that students could leave messages for one another. Yesterday, the staff from the Office of Student Housing and Campus Life had marked each board with the names of the students who would occupy each room. The names “Eliza Cheney” and “Shipley Gilbert” were written in loopy cursive on the board outside room 304.
The room itself was small and plain, with two single wooden beds pushed up against the white walls. A wide wooden desk stood in front of the only window, with a chair on either side and a lamp in the middle. Across from the desk stood a built-in set of drawers with a large rectangular mirror and an electrical outlet for a hair dryer or curling iron on the wall above it. The drawers were framed by two shallow, rectangular spaces fitted with wooden rails for hanging clothes. The white walls were freshly painted, but the wooden furniture and orange linoleum floor were scratched and pen-marked, bestowing the room with a gloomy institutional charm.
Shipley sat down, claiming the bed nearest the door. Sea Bass and Damascus hovered in the doorway.
“You want beer?” Sea Bass asked. “We ordered a keg.”
“Funnels!” Damascus whooped.
Down the hallway Shipley could hear the sounds of parents calling out their last good-byes. “Don’t we have to leave for orientation soon?” she asked.
Freshman orientation was a Dexter tradition. Incoming students spent a night camping in the woods with their roommate and five or six other freshmen, under the guidance of one of the professors.
“Nah.” Damascus ran his hands over his chubby stomach. “We’re juniors. Been there, done that. We just got here early to party. Hardy.”
Sea Bass went over and pushed open the window as far as it would go. He perched on the window ledge, stretching his long legs out in front of him. The knees of his jeans were split open like giant paper cuts. “They give all the freshmen the tiniest, shittiest rooms. Ours is like a palace compared to this.” He watched as Shipley fluffed up her pillow and tossed it onto her mattress. “So what class was your brother in?”
Shipley hadn’t given any thought to how she’d respond to such a question. Four years ago, she’d come with her parents to drop Patrick off at this very dorm, in a single room on the first floor. He’d sat on his bed with his jacket on, his carefully packed trunk at his feet, and waved them cheerfully away. Two months later, the college had called to complain that Patrick rarely went to class and often left campus for days. A month after that, they’d called to say he’d disappeared entirely, leaving behind his unpacked trunk.
Traces of Patrick appeared on credit card bills. He’d been to bars, motels, and diners all over Maine. Then there were the police reports. He’d broken into empty houses to get warm and slept in parking lots, campgrounds, and on beaches. He’d stolen a brand-new bicycle. Then there were the emergency room bills. He’d had pneumonia, frostbite, and poison ivy.
Shipley’s parents tried to leave word for him to come home or at least call, but he never did. Long after dinner was over and Shipley had wandered up to her room to finish her homework, they would sit at the dining room table, drinking in silence. Sometimes her mother cried. Once, her father broke a plate. Eventually they canceled Patrick’s credit card and gave him up for lost.
“At least we’ve got Shipley,” they’d said.
“He didn’t graduate,” Shipley explained now, fanning herself with her hand. Despite the open window, the air in the room was thick and hot. “He left,” she clarified. “No one really knows where he went.”
“Freaky,” Damascus remarked from the doorway.
“Excusez-moi?” A girl with razor-straight black bangs popped her head up over his shoulder. “Talking about me already?”
“Sorry.” Damascus stumbled into the room and attempted to shove his hands into his hip pockets. His brown corduroys were stretched so tight at the waist it was more like a finger dip.
The girl wore black denim cutoffs that were so short the frayed white insides of the pockets showed. “I’m Eliza.” She pointed her finger at Shipley. “Hey, you’re sitting on my bed.”
Shipley jumped to her feet. “I don’t have to have this bed,” she stammered.
Eliza rolled her eyes. She was used to scaring the shit out of people—it was her specialty—but if she didn’t want her new roommate to hate her instantly she would have to make an effort to be nice. “I was kidding. I was just trying to make you feel stupid. I’m sorry. Now I feel stupid. And I got into Harvard.”
“No shit,” Sea Bass whistled. “What are you doing here then?”
Eliza shrugged her shoulders. She’d chosen Dexter over Harvard because the girl who’d given her a tour of Dexter’s campus had worn old-fashioned roller skates with yellow pom-poms on the laces and had skated backward in them the entire time. That was all she remembered about the tour. It seemed to her that at a small, boring, vaguely crunchy New England liberal arts college like Dexter, the eccentrics really stood out, whereas at a place like Harvard no one would notice them. And she wanted to be noticed.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I heard the food was better?”
Her drab green army duffel—the only bag she’d brought with her on the bus from Erie, Pennsylvania—blocked the hallway like a dead body. She dragged it into the room. “This one is fine,” she told Shipley, attempting to modulate her bitchy tone as she sat down on the bed against the far wall. She turned to Sea Bass, still perched on the windowsill. “And you live where?” she asked, the bitchiness coming back. It was obvious the boys were only hanging around because Shipley was beautiful and blond. She also seemed weirdly shy, which was a good thing, because Eliza herself was anything but. They’d get along swimmingly. Two peas in a pod. Two pumpkins in a patch. Two hens in a peck, or whatever the fuck you called it. “Because I really need to count my tampons before orientation starts.”
Sea Bass stood up quickly. Damascus was already gone. “Remember there’s a keg waiting for you when you get back!” Sea Bass called before slamming the door.
Looking for something to do, Shipley unzipped the smaller of her two bags and pulled out her new Ralph Lauren sheet set. She could feel Eliza staring at her as she ripped open the plastic and removed the bottom sheet from its casing. She’d spent a long time at the Lord & Taylor in Stamford, picking out new sheets. They were the first she’d ever bought for herself and she wanted them to be right. Something about this pattern, with its dark purple, navy blue, and hunter green swirling paisleys seemed just rebellious enough to say “college,” while still being Ralph Lauren.
“Nice,” Eliza commented. “Those are really nice sheets,” she clarified. “Really.”
“Thanks.” Shipley couldn’t tell if her new roommate was entirely sincere. She stretched the bottom sheet over the mattress, tucking it in where it draped at the sides. “I told those guys I didn’t get into Dartmouth, but actually I did.” The fact that she and Eliza had both chosen Dexter over an Ivy League school gave them at least one thing in common. “Just like you, I decided to come here instead.” She smoothed the wrinkles out of the sheet. The room looked better already.
“How come?” Eliza unzipped her duffel bag and pulled out a collection of books—The Bell Jar, Flowers in the Attic, Interview with the Vampire—and a giant white rabbit’s foot on a little gold chain. Kneeling on the mattress, she thumbtacked the chain to the wall so that the rabbit’s foot hung over the head of her bed. She sat back and smiled, delighting in its perverse mix of tackiness, gore, and desperation.
Shipley shook out the top sheet. Her parents were annoyed when she’d even applied to Dexter. When she’d decided to go, they’d almost stopped talking to her. Of course they blamed the school for not keeping a
closer watch on Patrick. And what exactly was Shipley trying to accomplish anyway? Dartmouth was a far superior school. But Shipley was eighteen now, and she was tired of doing the right thing in the shadow of the brother who’d always done the wrong thing. To her, Dexter represented a sort of backless wardrobe, a gateway to a far more interesting life than the one she’d led thus far. Patrick had come here and then—gloriously—disappeared.
Someone knocked. “Shipley Gilbert? Eliza Cheney?”
Eliza went over and opened the door. “Who wants to know?”
A tall, lean person with spiky golden brown hair, a square jaw, a prominent Adam’s apple, and long earlobes decorated with two tiny gold studs blinked coldly back at her. Eliza studied the baggy shorts, loose-fitting Dexter T-shirt, and brown suede Birkenstocks. Male or female? It was impossible to tell.
“I’m Professor Darren Rosen, your orientation leader. It’s time to head out. Don’t forget, you’re in Maine. Bring something warm to wear tonight.”
Eliza grabbed the first sweater she could find, a magenta-colored acrylic V-neck she’d bought at JCPenney. Magenta was like a big, loud fuck-you to light pink, a color she absolutely loathed. She wadded up the sweater and tucked it under her arm, watching as Shipley pawed through an array of pretty sweaters until she settled on a cream-colored cable-knit cardigan with pockets and tied it around her waist. She looked like a model in one of those clothing catalogs Eliza’s mother always threw out because “Penney’s has everything.”
They followed Professor Rosen downstairs and outside the dorm. Most of the other freshmen had already left for orientation, and the temporary parking lot was quiet now.