Exclusive Web-Only: An Excerpt from Robyn Schneider’s Better Than Yesterday
From p. 152-154 of the novel… Skylar, Charley, and Marissa have just come to New York to try and find their friend
Blake, who ran away from summer session at their boarding school. This portion is told through Charley’s perspective. This excerpt is reprinted with permission.
When we got off the subway and made it back onto the street, I stared at Columbia in awe. From the street, we could just see the
backs of buildings, immense pillars, and green roogs obscured behind high iron gates. We walked along the block. (It was Broadway, I saw on a street sign.
‘d always pictured Broadway as neon lights, not cafes and bookstores like there were uptown.) The street traffic was a slow trickle, not at all the vibrant crowd of college students I’d pictured.
“How many people actually do summer session here?” I asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know,” Skylar admitted, as we walked through the wrought-iron gates.
The campus was different from Harvard. Everything was squeezed together, the grassy areas fenced off, the buildings looming in the darkness. Suddenly, I realized that the three of us (or four, if Blake was nearby) would never be on a college campus together.
We wandered through the campus, then across the brick pathway and through the gates onto the next avenue, which was called Amsterdam.
There was a group of five college students standing on the corner. The guys were in blazers with their jeans, and the girls wore long tops that floated in the night air like kites. They had to be dressed to go to a party. Skylar, Marissa, and I exchanged a look and decided to follow them.
We walked across the avenue and onto another part of the campus.
They stopped outside a dorm building where a bunch of students were waiting at a security desk to sign in. We joined the line.
“Hey,” Skylar said, tapping one of the blaxered guys on the arm. “Do you know where the party is?”
“Yeah, the Philo suite. Do you need me to sign you in?”
“That would be great,” Skylar said. “This is Josh’s party, right?”
“I have no idea,” the guy said. “Andrew invited me.”
We dug for our school IDs and slapped them on the counter.
“Are you still in high school?” one of the girls asked us.
“We just graduated, “ I told her, thinking fast. She seemed to accept that.
Once we got inside the complex, I could see how different the dorms were from what we had at Hilliard. Everything was arranged in suites. Five names on construction-paper name tags on each door - co-ed, too. The door to one of the suites was quite literally pulsing with music. We walked inside and up a narrow staircase that led into a semiprivate common room. The walls had been painted red and movie posters for Kill bill and Fight Club hung above regulation blue-upholstered dorm couches. The place was packed.
The kitchen counter was littered with mostly empty bottles of liquor and plastic cups. There had been pizza - now there was just a stack of greasy boxes. Someone’s iPod was hooked up to an expensive Bose stereo system that was padlocked to a bookcase.
“Is this Josh’s party?” I asked one of the other guys we’d walked in with.
“I guess, if he’s in Philo, dude,” he told me, and I gave him a look like, Huh?
“Philolexian Society” one of the girls said. “They’re like a literary and debating club.”
“Oh, right,” i said.
From the looks of the party, it didn’t matter if I knew what club was throwing it or not.