her best friend, Maddie, had entered one of Sam’s paintings—a picture of sailboats at a marina on Cape Cod—into a competition for young artists, sponsored by the New England Arts League. Sam won. She got to go to the governor’s mansion. She received a check for three hundred dollars. She loved Maddie so much in that moment. Sam never would have entered on her own. From then on, she took painting seriously.
Once, she had dreamed of actually being a painter someday. But she knew now that she wasn’t good enough, because of the way her professors and peers regarded her work.
“Competent but not strikingly original” was how one instructor described her final project sophomore year. During a critique, a classmate said of one of Sam’s paintings, “There’s something a little, I don’t know—hotel room—about it.”
Sam liked to paint landscapes and portraits and bowls of fruit. There was nothing edgy about her work, which somehow felt embarrassing. But then, there was nothing edgy about her.
Academics too were a struggle when she first got to college. She hadn’t anticipated that. After Sam received the first and only C of her life, she realized she would have to work harder if she wanted to keep up with girls who had attended New England prep schools and spent their summer vacations touring Europe.
She found that, with some effort, she enjoyed academic work and was good at it. Since arriving here, she had never missed a class. Her first year, she calculated what she would eventually owe in student loans and divided the amount by the number of credits needed to graduate, and then divided that by the number of times each class met. When she wanted to skip History of European Decorative Arts, 1400–1800 or The Making of Modern Visual Culture, Sam reminded herself that this would be fifty-seven dollars thrown down a deep dark hole.
Her friend Shannon got her interested in the markers of academic excellence—dean’s list and Latin honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Things Sam had never given any thought to before, but now wanted to achieve no matter the cost. She sometimes felt like she and Shannon were competing, but in a healthy way. As Isabella put it, they were both destined to prevail in the nerd Olympics, it was only a question of who would win silver and who would win gold.
Isabella and Lexi periodically took an entire day off from classes. Mental health day! Isabella would declare, switching on the TV from her bed.
Lexi was adopted from Korea when she was a year old. Her mother was her father’s fourth wife. Lexi was her mother’s only child and her father’s fifth. They were divorced by the time she started kindergarten. From then on, she and her mother lived in a two-story luxury condo in Chicago, overlooking Lake Michigan. Lexi attended an all-girls high school that cost as much as their college.
“Everyone was either a shoplifter or a bulimic,” Lexi said once. “It was so dumb.”
Sam wondered which category Lexi had belonged to.
Isabella was the fourth generation of women in her family to attend the college. She bragged that she would have gotten in even if she had walked into the library and set it on fire during her campus interview. A chair in the French department was endowed in her grandmother’s name. (Sam wasn’t sure what this meant. If there was an actual chair with a plaque on it somewhere. She figured it had to be more than that, but didn’t want to ask.)
Sam had gotten in, she assumed, based on her essay. It was about President Washington—Shirley Washington, president of the college. Even when she wrote it, Sam knew the topic was a risk, bordering on sycophantic. But what she wrote was true: When Sam was in high school, President Washington had given a speech that went viral online. She talked about how she was the first in her family to attend college, how there should be no barriers to entry, how all women deserved a first-rate education, regardless of race, age, or ability to pay. When Sam saw the speech, it awakened something in her.
Once she was on campus, Sam learned that she wasn’t alone in her love. President Washington was a celebrity. A smile from her, a hello spoken in passing, were things a person held on to and talked about for weeks. When she addressed the student body in Driscoll Hall, they chanted her name: Shir-ley! Shir-ley! Shir-ley! They stomped their feet, and