Page 1 of The New Girl

Chapter One

My first week at St. Swithins College went pretty much as I expected. Near invisibility would describe it. For half-a-second when I first arrived, I thought things were going to be different here. The student body president is one of the best looking men I have ever seen and when I was moving my stuff into my dorm room, he crashed into me in the hall.

It’s a narrow hall and not very well lit. It could have been an accident but it felt like he’d done it on purpose. Our eyes met and he didn’t look away like most guys do when they realize I’m not hot enough for them.

He said: “You’re the new girl.”

I said: “Am I?” It was a serious question. Even an exclusive college of five hundred must have more than one new student enrolled. Acceptance is rare, but notthatrare.

He picked up the clothes that had fallen out of the black plastic bag I was carrying before he crashed into me and handed them back.

The guy stared at me in such a fixed way that I thought he must know me–or thought he knew me. He could have been mixing me up with someone else. I have the kind of face that looks familiar until it doesn’t.

Then he said: “See you around” and sauntered off down the hall.

St. Swithins is incredibly old. The light fixtures are from the 1940s and don’t throw a lot of light.

I took the encounter as an omen of exciting things to come. Consequently, I was buzzing when I stumbled into my dorm room and met my roommate for the first time.

Alexis Bancroft graciously burst my bubble.

“Lysander Stark is so far out of your orbit that if he said anything to you at all, it was out of pity. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just setting you straight on how things work around here so you don’t put your foot in your mouth and get shot down.”

Mixed metaphors aside, Alexis was mean, no matter what she intended. Her cultured, Hamptons-bred accent didn’t fool me one bit. She was a bitch and she was my roommate until she managed to get a private room, which she informed me was going to happen this term even if she had to kill someone to make it happen. Swithins was so old that private rooms were unheard of.

She informed me that Lysander Stark was a year ahead of us. He was some sort of child prodigy, accelerated through the educational system and was poised to become the youngest professor of medieval literature in the United States.

He was rich, desirable, intensely handsome, and yet could give a shit about his looks or his appearance, according to Alexis.

She said: “I mean, if he remembers to put on a tie for dinner, never mind a black one, it’s a miracle. FYI, we dress for dinner at Swithy. I hope you have something suitable to wear in that plastic bag you’re carrying. Is that really your luggage? Or your laundry.”

It was my luggage. I was admitted to the college on a bursary-work program combination that offered qualifiedstudents housing in exchange for working in the college. I had a job in the library that started at eight a.m. the next day. It was a new program at St. Swithins, experimental; I was the first candidate to be accepted.

My friends back home said I was going to hate it and I was stupid for wasting four years of my life in a snooty private college that was no better than one I’d find in USNH.

I knew I was going to be a fish out of water at St. Swithins. As the only poor student in a venerable institution renowned for educating the offspring of the richest and most powerful people in the country for hundreds of years, I didn’t expect to fit in right away. But a week later, I was still eating lunch alone and engaging in awkward conversations in the dining hall with some of the biggest assholes I have ever met.

After trying to connect on any level, I finally gave up after one person at dinner asked if they could expect to see me in the same dress every night, or did I plan to go shopping in the near future?

The dress I wore to dinner was perfectly fine for the occasion of hastily choking down roast beef before I could flee to my room to change before racing off to the library for the evening shift.

I had no intention of being bullied into spending money I didn’t have on expanding my wardrobe to satisfy an insufferable snob.

I would have quit if it wasn’t for the awesome education I was getting. I have a weakness for Renaissance literature, poetry and Shakespeare—the trifecta of impoverished students everywhere. I wasn’t a prodigy like Lysander Stark who had family money to support his love of medieval lit. I had to work for a living. At some point, I hoped that my passion for arcane scribblings would lead to a job teaching English composition.

That was my goal. Yes, it was lacking in ambition and probably not very interesting, but the assholes that I was forcedto dine with every night could have at least been polite when they asked what I wanted out of St. Swithins.

I have been frozen out ever since. Even Alexis stopped talking to me. Not that I would notice. She was out almost every night of the week.

The night I found Lysander Stark in a distant corner of the library, crying, I kept it to myself. Partly to protect him and partly to keep the encounter safe from another harsh Alexis Bancroft bubble-bursting.

I didn’t see him at first. I came around the corner, pushing the trolley to shelve the books. That section of the library is seldom used and poorly lit like so much of Swithins. I heard him before I saw him. The sound he made was low and deep, wrenched unwillingly from his diaphragm.

I wasn’t sure it was him at first. I only saw a man’s form standing at the end of the stack. His arms were extended up, gripping the shelf, his shoulders rounded and he half bent with the emotion he was trying to control.

“Are you all right?” I left the trolley and took a step toward him.

That’s when he turned and I saw his face. Lysander Stark. Even with his features twisted by grief, he still took my breath away. His handsome face was raw with vulnerability, a thing I had not seen since I arrived at Swithins.

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