Hannah shows up at Lissa’s room at three on the dot. She carries several heavy books in her arms. She knocks on the door and pulls her cuffs over her bitten fingernails. So far, for Hannah, university is not what she had hoped. She has only come to Manchester because she did not get into Oxford and her second choice—Edinburgh—was full. And so, after a year out—which she spent, not traveling like the majority of students she meets, but working to save money for clothes and books and anything extra she might need—here she is at university number three, still living at home in Burnage. Cheaper this way, so she doesn’t have to pay for her accommodation in the student halls. And her parents are happy about it. And she pretends she is too, but really she is seething. Seething because she fudged a question about Keats in the Oxford interview. Seething because her best friend Cate got in. Seething because she didn’t put somewhere far from home for her third choice. Seething that UCAS has such a stupid draconian system. Seething with the discovery that the city she has lived in all her life is infected by privileged students. For the last few months, she has had a bar job in the student union, and she, who is naturally a watcher, has learned much. Forget Feminisms—she could already write a dissertation on class. There are the boarding school kids, who wear their shirts with the collars up and play sports and roam in unadventurous braying packs. The state school kids, who occupy different tables but eye the rugby boys and match them pint for pint in the bar. The misfits, who wear their misfit status like a badge, thus signaling to the other misfits and forming misfit cliques. And then those like this blond girl whose door she stands at now. These are the ones who trouble her: they are slippery, hard to categorize. And Hannah is fond of categorization. This girl sounds posh, but does not necessarily act it. Hannah has never seen her in the student union. She is beautiful, but careless with her beauty—at the eleven o’clock seminars, for instance, she often has last night’s makeup crusted around her eyes. The tip of her index finger is stained orange from smoking. She barely seems to brush her hair. But this girl possesses something indefinable, something that, although she cannot name it, Hannah knows she wants desperately for herself.