The Honors Section of Room 114

Opening scene

The mirror in your sorority bathroom has always been a friend. This morning it feels like a witness. Your skin is still clear, your hair still falls exactly the way two hundred dollars of product dictates — but there's a smudge of something at the edge of your vision, a softness under your chin that wasn't there last night, and your favorite jeans won't close past your thighs.

You tell yourself it's water weight. Stress. The three pizzas at the philanthropy mixer. But when you reach for your phone to post something reassuring, your thumb hovers — and you catch yourself thinking, with someone else's voice in your head, that you could just stay home today. That nobody in your 9 a.m. matters anyway.

That's the moment you remember the lecture hall. The girl in the front row with the cracked glasses and the knitted sweater. The way the whole room laughed at your joke, and the way she didn't laugh — she just looked at you, very calmly, and said six words you didn't catch. Your stomach drops like an elevator with a snapped cable. You said something unforgivable to the wrong person, and now something is happening to you, one morning at a time.

Turn 1 of 26

Pretend nothing is wrong and go to class. Instead of the business school, you walk into the building across from it and walk downstairs to the department of mathematics. You walk into room 114 where you see 29 other girls siting down in silence. You notice they all have pale skin, ginger hair in a style of pigtails, and are fat. Their stuff is perfectly lined up on the desks.

You tell yourself it's nothing. A bad night, a tight waistband, a mirror with an attitude. So you shower, you contour, you armor up in the sorority sweatshirt that reads KESSLER across the back like a warning label, and you march out into the gray October morning like the world still owes you something.

Except your feet don't take you to the business school. They take you across the quad, into the ugly brick building opposite, down a stairwell that smells like pencil shavings and floor wax, and through a door marked MATHEMATICS 114 before your brain catches up with your legs. The room is warm. The room is silent. And the room is full.

Twenty-nine girls sit at the desks, hands folded, eyes forward. Every one of them is heavyset, pale as uncooked dough, with ginger hair pulled into two tight pigtails that stick out like antennae. Every one of them has a pencil laid parallel to a notebook, centered on the desk with surgical precision. Not one of them turns to look at you. Which is somehow worse than if they all did.

"You're late," says a voice at the front.

The woman at the chalkboard — tall, gray cardigan, glasses thick as coasters — writes a number on the board. It's your weight. To the ounce. She underlines it twice and doesn't look at you. Your face goes hot from the collar up.

"Sit down, Emma," she says, calmly, the way you'd tell someone it's raining. "Row three. There's a desk with your name on it. There always was."

In the third row, one desk sits empty, a name card taped to its corner in careful, loopy handwriting: E. KESSLER. The chair next to it scoots back an inch. One of the twenty-nine turns her head — just her head, the body staying perfectly still — and smiles at you with a face that is almost, but not quite, a mirror of the one you're afraid to see in your bathroom at home.