Samantha Heather Mackey is a 25-year-old creative writing graduate student at the prestigious Warren University. School is starting again, and the Narrative Arts department has a welcome-back party for the MFA students. As the word “party” is too common for the sophisticated university, the program calls the party a “Demitasse.” People eat salmon and duck and talk about grants to translate poets that few want to read. Samantha and Ava, her best friend, think Warren is hellish and a bubble—the town surrounding Warren is dangerous.

Ava calls Samantha “Smackie,” and the teachers don’t know her real name. She avoids a tattooed man—the Lion—and notices Jonah, a poetry student, who, like Samantha, is ostracized. The Bunnies, a clique of four female fiction students, call Jonah “Psycho Jonah.” The Bunnies are wealthy, conspicuously twee, and odious. All the Bunnies have braids and call each other Bunny.

At the party, the Bunnies coo about how much they miss each other. Ava stares at Duchess, one of the Bunnies, and soon the other three—Cupcake, Creepy Doll, and Vignette—look over. Ava is good at staring and once won a staring contest with a Romani woman on the Paris subway.