What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Dayang returns, this time as a university student who attends Cambridge and is invited to join a women’s society at the school called The Homely Wench Society. She learns about the society from the welcome email. In 1949, Giles Rutherford, then president of the Bettencourt Society, called for the men of the society to find the “homeliest wench” at the university to join him at their annual dinner (to which they usually invited the most attractive women). The men made a list of candidates, who eventually found out about the list and formed a society of their own to crash the Bettencourters’ dinner. They pranked the men by causing a disturbance that mimicked a haunting; when the men went to investigate, the “homely” women invited themselves to the party. Since then, the Homely Wench Society has become its own organization, though the membership had dwindled.

To join, Dayang must write her own response describing who she sees as the “homely wenches” of today and why she is one of them. Dayang struggles to think of an answer to the question, especially because the Wenches tell her that her answer is a “key” to unlock worlds and ask her to “make it as full a bigarurre as it can be” (224). She looks up “bigarurre” and finds that it means “a medley of sundry colors running together” and “a discourse running oddly and fantastically, from one matter to another” (226). With that in mind, she decides to write about her friends from Suffolk, recounting the night she’d met Homely Wench members Hilde and Willa on a train after a night on the town with her friends Pepper, Luca, and Thalia. Some rugby boys boarded the train after them and eyed her group of friends, who didn’t conform to gender norms, with ire and disgust. Dayang and her friends were bracing themselves for a fight. However, as she and her friends tensed, so did Hilde and Willa, who had been sitting across from them. Eventually, a man on the train told the rugby boys to leave them alone, and given the number of people they would have to face confronting the women, the boys left. Dayang was impressed by Willa and Hilde, who introduced themselves and gave her a card inviting her to join the Homely Wench Society. In that moment, she decided she could be a Homely Wench, too. She answers the other question, “Who are the Homely Wenches of today” (225), by explaining how her first boyfriend, Michael, who expresses his gender fluidly and changed his name to Pepper, found that identity through their friends Luca and Thalia.

Dayang joins the Homely Wenches, who meet in each other’s rooms and apartments. She hosts the February meeting, in which they discuss their articles for The Wench, their newsletter. Dayang also fights her attraction to a young first-year law student named Hercules Demetriou, who is good-looking but a Bettencourter. The members of the Homely Wench Society, which include Willa and Hilde, as well as Marie, Thalia, Ed, and Theo, are all working on various interviews and editorials for the newspaper. Grainne, another longstanding member, wants to be known as Grainne “the Irrepressible,” but can’t get anyone else to refer to her as such. Dayang is enamored of all of them but isn’t quite sure where she fits in.

The youngest Homely Wench, Flordeliza, announces that a Bettencourter has taken interest in her, much to the shock and dismay of the other Wenches. Dayang assumes she is dating Hercules and pretends not to be jealous, but she can’t stand the thought of them together. She hopes that Hercules is awful to Flordeliza so that Dayang will be able to stop herself from feeling flustered around him and finally lose her attraction. It turns out, however, that Flordeliza is dating a boy named Barney Chaskel, whom the Wenches are shocked to hear her describe as “sweet.” Though Flordeliza likes Barney, she reveals to the Wenches that she has seen Barney punch in the code to the Bettencourt Society headquarters and remembers it correctly.

The Wenches decide to sneak into the Bettencourt headquarters but don’t know what to do once there. Dayang suggests that they swap out several of the Bettencourters’ books with books by female authors, taking the ones that are of interest to them. They all agree to Dayang’s idea, and the plan is set in motion.

Dayang sees Hercules at the library, sitting at her usual desk. Annoyed, she moves to the desk where he usually sits, but he pulls up a chair and asks her if she likes John Waters (a film director). She reluctantly admits to liking the director’s movies, and Hercules invites her to a screening of Waters’s film Female Trouble at the cinema that Hercules’s sister runs. She assumes that he sees himself as a man that any woman would want to date. He insists that he’s offering because he knows she’s a fan and gives her the two tickets to the screening. He asks her why she came to Cambridge, saying that he hoped to see whom he would meet at the school. She confronts him about being a Bettencourter; shocked, he asks if she’s a Homely Wench. She confirms that she is proud to be, and, flustered, Hercules leaves the library. Dayang invites Pepper to the screening.

The Wenches go forward with their book swap idea and enjoy themselves reading the stolen books for weeks. Meanwhile, Flor and Barney become closer, and though the Wenches find it gross, they pretend they don’t mind. Through the book swap, they have learned that the Bettencourters actually have good taste.

At the Female Trouble screening, Dayang pretends she isn’t disappointed when Hercules doesn’t show up. When she returns home, he is waiting for her on the staircase that leads to her room, reading one of the books that the Wenches left at the Bettencourters’ headquarters. He asks her if the book is hers, and she says it isn’t but that she’d read it. He praises the book and then asks her to accompany him to the Bettencourters’ dinner. She laughs at the notion that he could possibly see her as a great beauty, imagining that the other people in attendance would wonder why he’d use her. He says that the Bettencourt Society has evolved a lot over the years, but she insists that he invite someone else to the dinner.

At the final Wench meeting before Lent, the girls read and chat after finalizing plans to take a trip to Neuschwanstein Castle. Out the window, Grainne sees the Bettencourters approaching the building. The meeting is being held at Flor’s building, so Dayang assumes that Flor must be conspiring with the Bettencourters. The Wenches gather at the window, looking down at the Bettencourters, who are carrying food and drinks. Leading them is Hercules, who is cheerfully waving a white flag.