He was terribly proud of his girlfriend, Deanna, a colleague from Musix. A Southern heiress, she was tall and fair and had been educated in Europe. He showed Nola a copy of Town & Country, featuring Deanna’s large family in front of their Virginia mansion. When Deanna joined Wade and Nola for a late-night bite, he gazed at her with unabashed awe while, in between nuzzles to his neck, Deanna inquired about Nola's progress and made suggestions. Wade and Deanna’s affection and harmony in shared interests excited Nola. She had never been this close to a couple in love.

But if she had anticipated that life in the city would be glamorous, she saw none of it. “Hectic” was more like it. Wade selected a jazz dance school for her. With years of ballet behind her, the transition between disciplines was easy. Six times a week she moved across the floor of the Upper West Side studio in fast, complicated step combinations, her body falling into the new movements as into ready grooves.

The new downtown high school was less welcoming.

When Wade accompanied her on the first day of school, she felt like a kid starting first grade. Everything was new and strange. She wished she could hold Wade's hand.

“You’d do better at a private school, I know, but they won’t allow you to cram two years into one.” Wade pointed at the concrete schoolyard, where a crowd of youngsters with tattoos and peacock-colored hair carried more boom boxes than book bags. “Treat this place as your chance to meet your future audience. Get to know the lives of teenagers in every city across the country.”

It was too late to break into the cliques of mostly minority students, many of whom had been born to single welfare mothers. To fit in, Nola left her hair uncombed in the morning and made up her eyes with Kohl. But her suburban speech, combined with the refined manners drilled into her at Mini-Nazi’s, set her apart more than her fair skin alone did. Once more, she was the oddity in a sea of “normal” kids. But she was worse off than they; at least they had a mother.

She understood why Jenna hated school.

At home, Nola teetered on her high heels because Wade had said it showed when a woman was unaccustomed to them, while Wade’s Mama hovered around her with tenderness the likes of which Nola had never known.

Late at night Mama pushed aside Nola's books. “You get blind doing homework so late.” She placed a glass of milk and a slice of cake on her desk. “Eat. You lose weight since you come live here, and you are too skinny to begin with.”