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“No,” she said now, making up her mind. “No, I have to go. It’s better to know.”
“You know it’s bullshit, right?” April said. She put her hand on Hannah’s arm. “You do know that? It doesn’t count for anything.”
Hannah nodded. But it wasn’t true. Right in that second, that list was everything.
* * *
SOME TEN MINUTES LATER HANNAH was walking down the corridor towards Dr. Myers’s office door, her palms sweating against her jeans. Even from this distance, she could see there were three pieces of paper tacked against the wood, and a girl Hannah recognized as third-year English was bending down, reading the rightmost one. As Hannah neared she stood and turned, a satisfied smile on her lips.
“Good luck,” she said to Hannah. “Hope you get what you wanted.”
“Thanks,” Hannah said, “you too. I mean—I hope it was. What you wanted, I mean.”
The girl smiled again, a little patronizingly this time with a slight calm down, dear air, and then moved past Hannah, leaving her alone to study the short lists of names.
The left-hand one was first-years, and she looked automatically halfway down, where J normally sat in the alphabet, before realizing that it wasn’t in alphabetical order but some other, confusingly randomized system. Her tutorial partner, Miles Walsh, was roughly where she would have expected her own name. Beside each name was a list of symbols—βα, β+ Hannah read beside Miles’s name. And γ++, β- beside another’s. A lump rose in her throat. What did it mean? Was this some kind of particularly cruel Oxford trick, dangling her marks in front of her in some kind of impenetrable code?
“Oh, hi,” said a voice behind her, and Hannah whirled around to see Jonty Westwell, the boy from Dr. Myers’s party, standing in the hallway. “Checking out your mark? Same here. Wish he wouldn’t put them up publicly. Most tutors only do that for prelims. What did I get?”
“I have no idea,” Hannah said, her voice stiff with a rage she could only half contain, “because they’re in some kind of fucking foreign script. What does that even mean? What’s a bloody y plus when it’s at home?”
“Oh!” Jonty began to laugh. “God, yeah, sorry. They used Greek grading at my school so you forget how weird it must be to people who’re used to percentages. That’s not a y, it’s a gamma—you know, like… alpha, alpha minus, beta, gamma plus, all that. Oh look, here I am.” He ran his finger down the second-year list to a position about halfway down. “Beta alpha, gamma plus plus. Could have been worse. I knew I fluffed the second essay. Where are you?” He looked over at the first-year list curiously, and then laughed. “Well, you don’t need me to translate that.”
Hannah looked at where he was pointing—to her name at the top of the list, with α, α written beside it.
“What do you mean?” she asked uncertainly, and Jonty grinned.
“Myers writes them out in order of class position. So from the fact that you’re first, you can probably guess you’re home and dry. But in case you hadn’t worked it out, that’s alpha, alpha.” And then, when she didn’t answer but only stared at him, waiting for the translation, he clarified. “There is no alpha plus. Alpha is the best mark. You got it for both papers. I’d say you did okay.”
* * *
“CHAM-FUCKING-PAGNE,” APRIL CROWED, when Hannah came back, blushing and unable to hide her huge grin.
“I can’t,” Hannah said. “I really can’t. It’s—” She looked at her phone. “It’s nearly six, I’ve got an essay I’ve got to get done for tomorrow, and besides, I’m broke.”
“Hannah.” April was severe. “It’s not every day you come out top of your class in your first exams. I am taking you out for a drink, whether you like it or not.”
“Okay,” Hannah said, a little reluctant, but laughing. “But just one, okay? Seriously just one. I have to get back for supper and I have to get this essay done. It’s due in first thing tomorrow.”
“Just one,” April said seriously. “Pinkie swear. And I know the perfect place to take you.”
* * *
SOME FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, HANNAH found herself wearing her new Chantecaille lipstick and a pair of borrowed heels, balanced on a stool in a private members’ bar that she had never even noticed, with a Bellini in her hand that she didn’t remember ordering. As April chatted away about Valentine’s Day balls and the dress she was ordering from London, Hannah took a gulp of the cocktail and felt the alcohol filtering through her blood, giving everything a distant, unreal quality, as if she were looking down on herself from a great height. It wasn’t just the drink, though, she knew. Every day she spent with April she felt increasingly dissociated from her old self, the gulf between this gilded existence and humdrum Dodsworth gaping wider and wider until it seemed that no train could bridge it.
“Smile,” April instructed, and held up her iPhone high above the bar, angling her head towards Hannah’s with a provocative little pout that made her lips look like two plump red cherries. Hannah smiled—and the camera clicked, and then April was uploading the picture to an app on her phone, with the caption It’s a Shirley Temple, Daddy, promise *kiss emoji*
“That is definitely not a Shirley Temple,” Hannah said, pointing at the Bellini in April’s left hand. “It doesn’t even look like one.”
“No, but my father doesn’t look at my Instagram, so it all cancels out,” April said, rather sourly. Hannah looked at her curiously as she sat there, swinging one leg and scrolling down her feed, a frown between her finely plucked brows. She was never quite sure how much April’s poor-little-rich-girl act was just that—an act. On the one hand, she hadn’t witnessed any evidence of April’s parents at all—the closest thing she had seen to a parental figure was Harry, the minder/bodyguard who had accompanied April to Pelham that very first day. On the other, that was true of lots of people at college. Some parents had done a swift drop and run. Others had hung around for a few hours, making indulgent conversation, before being shooed away. And many students, particularly the international ones, had arrived without any parental escort at all. April wasn’t alone in that.
“What about your mother?” Hannah asked now, with the sensation of treading on rather thin ice, unsure how deep the water was beneath her feet. She knew that April had a mother, because she had referred to her in passing once or twice—but there was something about the tone April used in discussing the topic that warned Hannah that there were complicated emotions beneath the surface, quite different from Hannah’s own mix of affectionate exasperation with Jill.
“Oh, she’s a professional fuckup,” April said. She took a swizzle stick off the bar and stirred her Bellini thoughtfully. “You know, Prozac before lunch, Stoli after. Little Vicodin chaser before bed.”
“Stoli?” Hannah echoed, puzzled, and April rolled her eyes.
“Vodka, darling. You’re such a little provincial.”
