A-List 09: Beautiful Stranger by Zoey Dean

Author:Zoey Dean
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: JUV014000
ISBN: 9780316041607
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2008-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Sophisticated Laughter of the Upper Ten Percent

“Ladies and gentlemen, look to your right.”

Anna dutifully turned to her right. Sitting on the folding chair next to her was a hirsute guy—bushy red hair on his head along with a thick, wiry beard, and flip-flops on his feet. He wore black pants and a white shirt flecked with hot pink and black paint. She noticed that his thatch of hair traveled into the collar of his shirt, both in front and in back. She wondered idly if it mingled with chest and back hair in a sort of pelt. It was an odd thing to wonder, but then, she was feeling particularly odd at that moment.

“And now, to your left.”

Anna turned again. To her left was a girl so slender and pale she was nearly opaque. Her face was tightly pinched, with close-cropped, boyish dark hair, and she wore red tights under black walking shorts and layers of baggy tops, which had to have been designed to disguise her alarming boniness. Anna peeked at her seatmates’ name tags. The guy had a first and last name of so many syllables that it barely fit on the tag. The young woman’s name was Abernathy Hathaway-Birch. Anna guessed she came from an East Coast WASP family of the type with which she herself was all too familiar. Who else would name their daughter Abernathy?

All around the room—an impressive, wood-paneled meeting area in the venerable Yale Club in New York City—incoming freshmen from the New York metropolitan area were doing the same thing, following the instructions of the Yale dean of students, a slightly built thirty something man in wire-rimmed glasses with short brown hair, who wore a light brown sport coat over a white Oxford shirt and navy blue tie. Anna would have bet anything that he was wearing corduroy pants, though an official Yale podium blocked the view.

“Okay.” The dean began in the confident voice of a man who was used to being treated with respect. “I don’t want to scare you, but statistics prove the following: one out of three of Yale’s entering students end up married to each other. So the person to your left or right could end up as your husband or wife. Or, since we’re in the twenty-first century, it might not be going too far to say perhaps both.”

There were chuckles around the room, the sophisticated laughter of the upper ten percent. It was laughter that Anna knew well; the laughter of the living room when her mother held dinner parties, the laughter she heard in her AP classes at Trinity when a teacher made a clever joke. It was laughter she hadn’t heard in eight months, since she’d moved to California. Not that the West Coast didn’t have its own brand of elitism, because it definitely did. But somehow she couldn’t help but feel it seemed too trivial to seem important. She didn’t care how much Universal or Paramount was paying Angelina or Meg for her next movie, or whose boobs were real and whose weren’t.

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