Read an Excerpt
Off Campus
An Upper Class Novel
Chapter One
The Olivettis drive west, into the sunset that wraps New York City in fire. The buildings in the distance gleam with metallic indifference; they're not affected by the cars crawling like insects on the highways and byways around the metropolis. Nikki's in the backseat, biting her maraschino-cherry-red nails, then remembering not to and folding her hands between her thighs, and then biting them again.
"Damn, I'm having déjà vu," she says to Vic and Sharon in the front seat. Her tone is older and kinder than the tone she would have used this time last year, when she thought of them as the enemy.
Sharon catches her stepdaughter's eye in the rearview. "Oh my God, I swear I was just thinking that."
"Right?" Nikki answers.
Almost this time last year, they were in the same vehicle, heading in the same direction. Nikki can almost see another white Escalade out the window, its paint reflecting the same wild sunset, and her own self a year younger in the backseat, feet pressed against tinted glass, singing to Green Day, secretly cowering and crying and fighting what was then an unknown future. She can almost see that girl with fear on her bold face.
"How we doing for time?" Vic asks Sharon.
"We're good, babe," she answers.
But Nikki won't return to Wellington Academy until next week; Nikki's taking a red-eye to the West Coast tonight. Sharon and Victor are bringing her first to Anthony's in Queens to eat spaghetti with meatballs, buffalo mozzarella with basil and summer's last juicy tomatoes, and gnocchi with a Gorgonzola sauce.
They pull into the grimy, glittering lot and slam their doors. Sharon runs her hand down Nikki's hair as they walk, asks how she's doing.
They've had an interesting summer, sharing Us magazines by the pool and gossiping about Lindsay and Brit and Brad and Angelina, getting their nails done side by side at Lavor salon in the Bradrock mall. They had a couple doozy fights, one when Sharon shrank Nikki's dress in the wash. I'm not your maid, Sharon had finally screamed. I know that now, for fuck's sake, Nikki had screamed back, and it was a strange compliment.
"I'm starving," Nikki says now. Sharon was giving her an opening to talk, but she's too nervous to take it.
Anthony, who's standing at the phone taking a reservation, steps back, giant hand over his heart, when he sees the Olivettis walk into the restaurant. He's in pinstripes, cheeks red with the sweat of running a restaurant, and his pinkie ring has a chip of sapphire.
"Jesus, Mary," he says now. "Look how you grown up, Nicole."
Vic beams. "Looks like her mother, yeah?"
This is what old friends mean, anyway, when they see Nikki, and are so taken with the resemblance. Vic's friends, like Anthony, had loved Missy, Nikki's mom. Whenever she came in, in her leather trench coat and gold bracelets, they seated her so the whole restaurant could see her. But a year ago Vic would have avoided a mention of her no matter how much fancy footwork it required.
Nikki smiles at her father. So bizarre that leaving her family last year has brought them all closer together.
She's never flown alone, and stands nervously in line, gold sandals and white duffel on the conveyor with the string-tied pastry box in which Anthony put her "cannoli for the road." Her parents wave, blowing kisses.
"Love you, princess," her dad calls, and everyone in line turns.
The plane pulls onto a night tarmac. It's an empowering feeling, once they're amid stars, the wing's light winking: I am on my own. She squishes the pillow against the porthole, and closes her eyes.
Pictures Seth. Every minute suspended over the nation's slumbering cities and lakes and hills, she gets closer to him.
Closer to him. She opens her eyes. She hasn't slept. They've only been in the air for a half hour. Nikki's unable to push away the possibility she's been stifling since she bought this goddamn ticket. She reviews phone calls and e-mails, conversations between her and Seth, nuances, or hesitations.
What if this trip is a disaster?
Maybe he'll introduce her to some girl who's tolerating Nikki's visit but has been with Seth all summer. Seth's family will hate her. Or Seth will stop fooling around with her the first night and say: I was hoping this would feel right after all this time, but I hate to say it, Nik, it's gone. Let's just spend the rest of the trip as friends, cool?
Nikki stares at the universe, where planets spin and stars shoot, where the air is thin, too high for birds, too late for warmth, too far from home, and too close to California.
She feels like a doormat for coming back to him. Vanessa asked her twice if she was sure she should visit him, after what occurred—implying that Nikki was accepting bad treatment. The real nucleus of her fear is "the viewing room"—her code for what happened last December. The last time she kissed Seth. The first time she had sex. The only thing that came close to breaking her heart after losing her mother—after believing that her heart was permanently broken and so could not be broken again.
He fucked up. He knows it, he's written an apology, he's made apologies over the phone, sober, drunk, high. It's a ritual: the "I'm so sorry, Nik" phone call.
She's explained what hurt most: I thought you were so emotional because it was amazing. And then I realized you were shaking because you were angry. And the thirty seconds it took me to figure that out, while you were talking, Seth, was as painful as watching you draw an Exacto knife down my hand. It was just brutal. Do you understand?
I understand.
Are you sure?
Nikki, I swear to God, I'm sorry. I swear to you.
Off Campus
An Upper Class Novel. Copyright © by Hobson Brown. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
