Excerpt from The Blondes by Emily Schultz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

For a legal reason I didn't understand, the hotelier wouldn't let me keep the room for more than fourteen consecutive days. I hadn't been in Manhattan long enough to know about squatters' laws-that if they let me stay longer in one room I could deem it my permanent residence. I'd been in New York only fourteen days times two, and was moving for the third time already.

I had started out in an apartment-an old railroad flat, just a room for rent-but it was overrun with roaches and roommates. The bugs darted up along the shower pipe in the tub in the morning, and we rinsed them down before we stepped into it. One of the girls was a student, the other a stripper (although it was never said). How they knew each other-or even if they did-I have no idea. I had found the place online, sight unseen, a bad idea. All of our rooms were one after the other, with me in the middle, and not even a window. I didn't sleep for the first two days-it was ninety degrees and the air in the room was so dense. Of course, the student had the least privacy of all: her space was not really a bedroom so much as a cot and a desk in a screened-off dining area that the stripper and I had to walk through. The third morning I saw two rats in the alley, scuttling from one garbage heap to the next. So I found the Dunn Inn in Chelsea. It was overpriced but clean. And now I was moving from one hotel room to another as if playing musical chairs at a birthday party. I've always hated birthday parties.

But the hotel was quiet, and I didn't have to sign a lease, so I stayed. It was close to NYU, and I could go in and out at night as I pleased. I admit it was kind of thrilling to be right in Manhattan, even though I didn't have many places to go. The courtyard that my rooms-plural-looked onto was still, as if not in the city at all. It made me meditative and I found it easy to think about my thesis, my excuse for being there.

I remember the landlady asked me, "What is it you're workin' on?"

She was really the concierge, but I preferred to think of her as my "landlady," perhaps as some sort of dodge around the fact that I was living in a hotel, not an apartment. Was it even a real hotel, or just a flophouse? I wasn't the only occupant, but the halls had a transient feel. A few tourists, a few students.

Bent over behind the desk, looking for my new key, the landlady wasn't really waiting for an answer. I was about to try to explain "the study of looking," also known as "aesthetology," when I found myself staring at the top of her hair: a permed and dyed chestnut head. Redheads are an interesting grouping, and one I'm quite familiar with. We've been labelled by society as cold but competent. A study back in 1978 found that 80 percent of those surveyed expressed a dislike of redheads; the same test group ranked the skin colour of redheads the least desirable of eight hues. Of course, 1978 was a long time ago-I wasn't even born yet-but here was my landlady, who had chosen this colour of her own accord. A red-brown, really. The colour of squirrels. Her sister, with whom she ran the place, was dark and I was sure my landlady's hair was naturally the same colour. She was bobbing around near an ancient computer she used for the bookings. Beside her was a stack of business cards that doubled as breakfast vouchers at the coffee shop next door.

"It's an essay on what women look like and what we think they look like."Aesthetology, or the study of looking, began when the Harvard School of Anthropology created an advanced course of studies in partnership with Empire Beauty Schools as a way to increase female enrollment in the sciences. It was still a buzzed about subject last year, and I selected it as a banner for my studies explicitly to attract a particular adviser. Also known as Professor Karl Mann. Also known as your father. Also known as Grace's husband.

The landlady came up with the key. "Three-oh-five. Don't forget to undo the tap lock with this one," she said, holding up one of the two keys. She spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent even though we were at Seventeenth Street. She meant "top lock." We'd had a funny exchange around that phrase the other time I switched rooms, where I said what? and sorry and pardon? and she kept repeating herself until something clicked and I figured it out. When I first arrived, she had also asked me if I needed to "pork" my car. I told her I didn't have a car, then mulled over the phrase all the way upstairs to my room.

Excerpted from The Blondes by Emily Schultz. Copyright © 2015 by Emily Schultz. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.