(Untreed Reads, April 2023)

From her very first day at Willard College for Women in the late seventies, Elizabeth Breedlove is trapped. The school’s motto promises an oasis “where a woman chooses her own destination,” but so many faculty members and students have already decided what Breedlove’s destiny should be—based solely on her small-town high school picture in the frosh photo pamphlet, Mugs and Plugs.

She magically lands a choice room in Fey House, the upper-class dorm, and a gorgeous “Big Sister” keen to help her navigate the social world of Willard. And even though she’s an English major, her assigned advisor is the notorious feminist psychology professor Jojo Crews—who immediately makes her feel she is part of some double-blind gender clinical trial. That’s especially true after her new late-night poker buddies warn that everyone at Willard is instantly branded either “a Virgin, a Debutante or a Lesbian Vampire.” And she struggles to explore her own identity in a thick web of academic rivalry, secret codes of domination, all manner of swordplay, and the constant threat of long-ticking secrets about to explode. Everyone wants a piece, or a bite, of her.

Which makes her story an intensely dark and witty saga of friendship, lust and, at long last, love.

Diane Ayres is a fiction writer, poet, illustrator and editor. After graduating from Chatham College, she worked as a contributing editor at Pittsburgh magazine, a PBS documentary researcher for WQED, and co-director of a Shakespeare exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. She has taught at the Young Writers Conference at Penn and was featured in the acclaimed Philadelphia Noir short story collection. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, author Stephen Fried.