We Are All Good People Here

We Are All Good People Here Chapter 1 BELMONT
Roanoke, Virginia, 1962

Daniella's father steered the Dodge Pioneer up the serpentine drive of Belmont College, home to more than five hundred girls renowned for their Beauty and Brains, or at least that was what the boosterish tour guide who had shown Daniella around the previous spring had claimed. Just as the main quad came into view-a pleasing vista of faded brick buildings with white columns, the Blue Ridge Mountains serving as backdrop-they passed a gang of cheering students holding signs painted with the school colors of green and white: "We Love Our New Girls!" and "Honk If You're a Monty!" and "Welcome to Heaven!"

Daniella's father beeped his horn at the cheering girls, causing them to yell all the louder.

"How fun!" remarked Daniella's mother, a woman who should have graduated from a school like this but had dropped out of Sweet Briar (only an hour's drive away) after her second year, when she became pregnant with Daniella's older brother, Benjamin, by the visiting history professor, the handsome, young, and Jewish Dr. Gold. The Golds parked in the visitors' lot and, passing other pretty, fresh-faced girls carrying suitcases and pillows-many of whom were followed by their fathers, lugging trunks-they made their way to Monty House, the redbrick Colonial that was to be Daniella's new home. There was a portico out front and a large Palladian window above the open front door. Waiting just inside was a stout woman who wore her silver hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. She introduced herself as Mrs. Shuler, Monty House's dorm mother.

A faded Oriental rug, so thin in spots it was almost translucent, partially covered the dark wood floor of the entryway. Against the wall ticked a grandfather clock, and beside it hung an oil portrait of Georgina March, whose father founded the college. The whole place smelled of oranges, as if someone had polished all of the wooden surfaces with citrus oil. Mrs.

White, Susan Rebecca Susan Rebecca White is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, Bound South, A Soft Place to Land, We Are All Good People Here, and A Place at the Table. A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program at Hollins University, Susan has taught creative writing at Hollins, Emory, SCAD, and Mercer University, where she was the Ferrol A. Sams, Jr. Distinguished Chair of English Writer-in-Residence. An Atlanta native, Susan lives in Atlanta with her husband and son.

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