Harvard Hottie (2 page)

Chapter Two

Let’s be clear about one thing:

Lucas Thayer the third, heir of Thayer House, was obnoxious but also extremely good-looking. Eleanor Jenson, of Hoboken, New Jersey, heir of Mike and Susan Jenson, was not.

I wasn’t ugly. That’s probably the best I could say for myself. My face was plain and I was far too skinny, to the point of being bony. I wore the best clothes Walmart had to offer, and even though I’d heard of make-up, I’d really never seen it up close and personal. But the worst of it was my hair.

Up until I was about six or seven, there was nothing wrong with my hair. Then when I hit pre-adolescence, my hair just exploded into a huge mass of frizz. It went everywhere, did whatever it wanted, said whatever it wanted. God forbid it rained—I’d need an extra seat for my curls on the T.

I had no clue how to tame it. Truthfully, I didn’t try too hard. When you’re working hard to be valedictorian of your high school, there just isn’t time for hair maintenance. But lately, I was beginning to worry my hair was becoming a major liability.

“You know who you look like?” Delia said to me once.

“Who?”

Roseanne
Roseannadanna,” she said. When I looked at her blankly, she explained, “She’s this character Gilda Radner played on
Saturday Night Live
. She had this huge pouf of hair.”

We looked up a photo of her online, and as it turned out, this was
not
a compliment.

“Let me try using a curling iron on it,” Delia begged me.

Delia was obsessed with her curling iron. I already had one run-in with it, when she inexplicably left it on my desk, heated up. Why, Delia?  I spent the night nursing a huge burn on my finger.

“No,” I said.

“Please?”

“No!”

“Fine,” Delia grumbled. “But Luke isn’t going to like you if you look like Roseanne Roseannadanna.”

“Good!” I shot back.

“Oh, come on,” Delia said. “You two would be great together.”

“That is definitely not true,” I said. It really wasn’t. “We have absolutely nothing in common. He’s a rich asshole and I’m poor as dirt.”

“Exactly!” Delia cried, clasping her hands together as she got a dreamy expression on her face. “He’s rich and you’re poor, but he’ll love you anyway. But his parents won’t approve so they’ll disinherit him. Then you’ll have to work to support him through law school, but your love will carry you through. Except one of you will die young and tragically.”

I rolled my eyes. “Delia, I’m pretty sure that’s the plot of
Love Story
.”

“Oh yeah, you’re right,” Delia said.
Love Story
is the ultimate Harvard movie, which they showed to us about a million times during orientation week, because apparently it’s also the
only
Harvard movie. “I think I’ve seen that movie too many times. But still, that doesn’t mean you and Luke aren’t meant to be.”

Truthfully, even if I liked him (which I
didn’t
), I knew there was no way Luke would ever like me, even if I scalded my hair with Delia’s curling iron. After the first week of school, I’d seen Luke walking hand in hand with a very pretty blonde-haired girl. Not only was she beautiful, but she seemed to have been perfectly constructed to compliment his own looks. Even I had to admire how good they looked as a couple. If I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Luke holding hands with someone like me, the image just seemed laughable. Lucas Thayer the third did not fit with Ellie Jenson. That was an immutable fact.

***

Aside from choice of majors, the other thing that separated the poor/smart kids from the rich/dumb kids was how we paid for our education. I’m sure Luke Thayer’s dad (also named Luke, I guess) just withdrew his petty change from one of his Swiss bank accounts to pay Luke’s tuition, but my grade school teacher parents didn’t have enough money to afford their third child’s private college tuition. So I ended up with loans and work scholarships. The work scholarships meant that I got to pay off some of my tuition by scrubbing the toilets of my classmates.

It was the ultimate humiliation to have to clean the bathrooms of the students I had just been sharing a lecture hall with hours earlier. I preferred it when I was assigned the upperclassman dorms because it meant I at least wouldn’t recognize them. But because all the freshman dorms were in Harvard Yard and that was where I lived as well, my assignments were almost invariably to the freshman rooms.

Whenever I got assigned to clean bathrooms in Thayer House, I’d think about Luke. It seemed like every day, Dr. Cole let him dominate the class discussions, and no matter how valiantly I fought against him, I always left class feeling like he’d gotten the better of me. Worst of all, he always argued on the side of the most despicable character in the story, as if they were a personal friend of his. It was so blatantly obnoxious, there were times when I wanted to get up and punch him in the face. But then I’d go off to my Computation Theory class and he’d go off to his Macroeconomics class and we’d never be forced to talk again, thank God.

It was good to think about Luke as I scrubbed toilets. I’d think about our most recent class discussion, the things I said, and the things I wished I could have said if the professor wasn’t there. Then I could take out my anger on the Thayer toilets.

One day in October, I was scrubbing a particularly filthy bathroom in Thayer. Most bathrooms were just grimy, but this one had dirty towels tossed all over the floor and boxer shorts hanging off the sink. I picked them off and threw them into the living room, trying my best not to inhale. What a bunch of slobs. You just knew this bathroom belonged to a bunch of rich brats who had no experience cleaning up after themselves.

“Hey!” a voice interrupted my thoughts. “It’s the twelve-fingered girl who never read Shakespeare!”

I looked up and there he was: Luke Thayer. I guess it made sense he’d live in Thayer House. He was watching me with an amused expression on his face. I really, really wished I hadn’t admitted I’d never read Shakespeare.

“Aren’t you going to say hello?” Luke pressed me.

I gave him a dirty look.

“I guess they didn’t teach you manners in school either,” he said with a shrug.

My blood boiled. I grabbed a dirty, moldy towel from the floor and hurled it in his direction. I had wicked aim and it nailed him right in the head. He pulled it from his face, looking pissed off. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he snapped. “You know, I could get you in a lot of trouble for that, Twelve Fingers.”

“My name is Ellie,” I said through my teeth. “And it’s
your
goddamn towel, douchebag.”

“Actually, it’s Steve’s towel,” Luke said. “He’s the slob around here.”

“Sure, whatever you say.”

Luke watched me for a second. The towel had mussed his yellow hair and as much as I hated to admit it, he looked very sexy like that. It was frustrating that someone I hated so much could be so physically attractive.

“So tell me, Ellie,” he said. “What’s the trick to getting a toilet so spotless and clean?”

“Go to hell,” I replied.

“If you’re not going to tell me,” he said, “maybe I should watch.”

The thought of Luke watching me clean his bathroom was almost too humiliating for words.

“You can’t watch me,” I said.

“Then how will I know you didn’t dunk my toothbrush in the toilet?” he said.

“I would never do that!” I was totally planning to do that.

“I bet you wish you had kept those other fingers,” he mused. “You’d probably be much faster at scrubbing toilets.”

That did it. I struggled to my feet, using the toilet brush for support. I poked him in the chest with the brush. Hard. “Hey!” he cried, looking down at the splotch the brush left on his chest. “You got toilet water on my shirt!”

“Listen, Thayer House,” I said. “You can’t talk to me that way, just because your great-great-great-grandfather was some rich asshole who gave the college a bunch of money.”

“Geez, you’re touchy, Twelve Fingers,” he said. “Are you on your period or something?”

I swear to god, I nearly decked him. “That’s it!” I snapped. “You can clean your own goddamn toilets!” And I stormed out in a huff. Unfortunately, I left all my cleaning supplies behind and had to sneak back later and get them.

***

A week later, we got our grades back from our first paper. Dr. Cole handed them out in the last five minutes of class, and I was horrified to find a big red B on the top.

I never got Bs in high school. Never. Maybe an A-, if I’d been battling the flu or something. But a B? How could I get a B? My paper was brilliant! I could argue any point expertly—didn’t Dr. Cole know that I was captain of the debate team?

I felt something kick me in the ankle. Hard. I looked up and saw Luke’s brown eyes staring into mine. “Hey, Twelve Fingers,” he said. “What did you get?”

“None of your business,” I snapped at him. I eyed the paper in his hands. “What did you get?”

He turned his paper over to show me the red A at the top. Even though I tried to check my reaction, I have to admit that my jaw dropped open. This was patently unfair. Luke wasn’t even smart! He was just a jerk with a big mouth. There was no way his paper was better than mine.

“You could read it if you’d like,” he said, grinning as he slid the paper towards me. “Maybe you could learn something for your next assignment.”

I really wanted to punch him in his smug face. Instead, I yanked the paper out of his hand, and actually read a few paragraphs of it. And just as I thought—it was awful.

Well, not completely awful. He wasn’t entirely illiterate. And he did make some good points about Raymond Carver. But it wasn’t better than mine. Clearly Dr. Cole was blinded by his good looks and inflated his grade. That was the only thing I could think of.

“Too bad they didn’t teach you to write back in Jersey,” Luke said, still grinning at me.

I didn’t punch him, but I threw his essay back in his face. He blinked at me, surprised but still clearly very amused. “Violence is your answer to everything, isn’t it?” he said. He held up his hand and bent it into a fist. “Too bad you didn’t keep those extra fingers. I bet you could pack much more of a punch.”

I was so distracted by my rage that Luke took this opportunity to yank my own essay paper out from below my left hand. He raised his eyebrows at me when he saw the B. Even though I should have grabbed it back from him, I didn’t. I wanted him to read it and realize how much better it was than his own essay. That I was the one who deserved the A, not him.

“Wow,” Luke said, as he lifted the first page and glanced at the second. “You’re certainly heavy-handed in your metaphors.”

I stared at him. That was exactly the same criticism Dr. Cole had made in her critique of my initial draft of the paper.

He lifted his eyes and grinned at me. “Maybe you should stick to cleaning toilets, Twelve Fingers.”

I snapped out of my trance and ripped my papers out of his hands. Luke still looked deeply amused, and I wanted to say something to wipe the smile off his face. I stuck my finger in his face, which surprised him, if nothing else. “At least I got in here fair and square,” I said. “And not just because my father went here and gave the college a bunch of money.”

Luke looked like he had an answer to that, but before he could give it, I jumped out of my seat and marched right out of the classroom.

***

After that, I went from disliking Luke Thayer to downright despising him. The conversations in expos class became dominated by Luke and me throwing back and forth arguments. Whatever he said, I disagreed with. Whatever I said, he disagreed with.

But in a way, it paid off. I worked so hard studying the stories to come up with perfect arguments to shoot him down, I earned an easy A on my next paper.

Delia was celebrating too, because she brought up her tragic C on the first paper to a solid B+. We decided to rent a movie to watch in the common room of our dorm together. We lived in Weld, a dorm once inhabited by none other than John F. Kennedy himself. It seemed a bit of a travesty that a nerdy computer science girl and a nerdy pre-med should occupy the same space as such a great man, but like I said to Luke that day, at least we got in here fair and square. Even JFK probably got in at least partially because of nepotism.

It was a Thursday night, so the common room was empty. On Fridays and Saturdays, you could usually count on a bunch of drunk kids in there making out. I hadn’t been drunk ever before and I’d never made out with a boy, so I generally avoided the common room on weekends. But Thursday night was safe.

Delia had a bag of popcorn, but when we went to pop it in the microwave, we found a big “out of order” sign taped to the door. “Lame!” Delia whined.

“There’s a microwave in the Thayer common room,” I recalled. I knew because I’d cleaned the bathroom in there.

“Great.” Delia shoved the popcorn bag into my hands. “I’ll see you in five.”

“Me?” I cried. “Why do I have to go?”

“Because I’m wearing my fuzzy slippers!” Delia said, pointing down at her feet, which were indeed cloaked in bunny slippers. Why did I wear my sneakers?