In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The seventeen-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this beauty wherever it will take her. When Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class with the remote, brilliant older woman, she is intimidated at first, but gradually becomes Anne Arden's student outside class as well. Whatever the subject - Baudelaire, lipstick colors, or how to travel with a lover - Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day she learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.