Excerpt from THE GILDED BUTTERFLY EFFECT by Heather Colley:
Trip Swindle prided himself on a few different things: the fact that he was a pre-med student who actually knew what sort of doctor he wanted to be (dermatologist), the fact that he could down five Jager bombs in one hour and still function okay, and the fact that he was indelibly handsome.
Most college girls were charmed at the beginning, because he had all the appearance of a content, Illinois-raised schoolboy, gentlemanly to a fault, and sheepish in conversation. But the days have their way with people; good looks make their way out, and other things crowd for space. It took due time, and a good amount of investigation, for some people to realize that Trip Swindle wasn’t handsome at all.
At college he lived in a Church. It sat prettily on the corner of South U and Church Street, and nothing had changed of this Church since its creation except for everything inside of it. Gone were the pews, the candles, the illusion of spirituality. Gone was any presence of God, if ever there was one. If you could go into that Church, and feel His spirit anywhere at all, you must be of someplace holier entirely.
On Friday night, three young women headed there, dressed all in black and skin. Loretta led the triad. She was beautiful in a Midwestern sort of way, with long blond hair that reached past her shoulders, and fluttered sweetly around her face. When she turned to talk to her new friends, her hair swung and grazed the deep dimple in her cheek, which was elevated by a smile of light pink lips and straight white teeth. She was lean and muscular, the body of a girl who used to swim. This is all to say that she was the type of beautiful that everyone mostly forgets about upon college graduation.
But now, on her first night out as an undergraduate, it seemed and felt like what she wanted was hers, and everyone and everything was working in conjunction to ensure that her time here would be terribly good.
She had no trouble getting into The Church, she felt practically recruited there from her place amongst the other wandering freshmen, all of whom would feel like failures if they did not call home next morning with choppy tales of fraternity houses and what-we-did-at-three-AM.
Once inside, few were unaware of her presence. She broke onto the dance floor, which wasn’t a task, since the whole floor was the dance floor. The Church fraternity (who had official letters, of course, but preferred the gloating irony of being called simply The Church) had their own established ethos, like all of the fraternities did. And they believed that any floor was a dance floor, if you didn’t think too hard about it.
Trip Swindle looked at her three times: once by accident, once on purpose, and once to establish his plan. He watched Loretta lead two other freshmen, neither of whom were graced with the former’s proud walk and apparent ease, over to the bar, where the new target held three fingers up to a recent pledge recruit, Sam, who poured three cups of pink wine from a plastic bag. Sam leaned over the bar on his elbows, said something only to her. Trip realized that any time he spent watching, and waiting, and ascertaining, was time enough for somebody else to bag the girl.
The basement of The Church was a place of senseless frenzy in which no one knew exactly who they were talking to, who they’d just finished off talking to, who they were going to go home with later, or where the exit was. It was a dreamscape for Loretta, who thrived off the energy of movement and terrible music. It was all beeps, and boops, and drops, and everybody pretended to understand.
Loretta’s two companions followed her around, whenever she switched from the bar to the stairs to the center of it all, which bothered Loretta, because these were the just-hatched, embryonic type of collegiate friends, formed purely out of geographic convenience. They lived just across the hall, but the only thing they shared between them was womanhood, and that was not enough to hold them together.
She burned straight through the middle of the writhing crowd, and her wine sloshed lazily onto her slender fingers. Up her hands went. She might have been on the front page of an advert on the rising quality of the college experience. This was life at wellness capacity.
Fraternity brothers, however, are not so easily entertained. Their attentions darted from the dance floor to the girls, to the bedrooms, which were situated in separate halls, out of the party’s entropy. Their shadowy faces moved amongst the party, girls would see one, and target, but then he’d disappear, and where had he gone? In Trip’s case, to the bedrooms, with brothers alongside him, and that was where he was now, in a musty room with Jimmy Crawford, and the pledge Sam, who had taken a break from his post at the bar. They carried on there with things as usual; the first party of the semester begged for coke, and some other complements to it which they shoveled out of their pockets, and they sat around in ecstatic stupidity, thinking what a year they were set to have.
When Trip reappeared in the basement, he was still flanked by the other two, who were both mildly handsome but altogether uninteresting. His eyes were glossed red and etched with bright veins, and his smile was slacked, and his walk was swaggered. He zeroed in on the moving target, led his friends on a route that appeared quite random, and as he crossed her, he grinned and laughed at things so empty and stupid that they made you wonder if you’d missed something. You hadn’t. Loretta saw that he was good looking enough, but much more important was her abrupt desire to get in on that laughter that seemed to come so easy.
There was trouble with her confidence. Because in her experience, distant male admiration never resulted in much by way of actual approach, which made her think that she might’ve imagined the admiration to begin with. Because what’s attention, without somebody there to prove it? She habitually convinced herself of her own unattractiveness when men’s watchful eyes didn’t translate to even dull party chit- chat. When Trip walked right up to her, and took her hand above her head to drift her around, she was so restored in confidence that she locked her arms around his neck, and kissed him right there under the lights, and pink wine spilled all down the back of his shirt.
An unflinching yet humorous perspective on modern campus life, from the highs of the non-stop party scene to the lows of prescription drug abuse, exploring issues of body dysmorphia and campus sexual assault. Perfect for fans of Mona Awad’s Bunny, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with a nod to the campus literary tradition of Elif Batuman’s Either/Or.
Stella, a sorority girl, meets Penny, a loner who travels to Ann Arbor from her small liberal arts college, as they experience the start of the academic year. Stella is dealing with the aftermath of a freshman-year relationship with Trip Swindle – the self-styled leader of a “top-tier” fraternity known as The Church – which culminated in a traumatic event that haunts Stella and causes her to manipulate her psychiatrist to obtain anti-depressants, “uppers,” and appetite suppressants. As Stella tries to sort out her romantic life, the fraternity brothers, led by Trip, begin their annual “Pig Roast” contest, competing to bed and photograph those they view as the most unattractive women on campus. Stella and Penny become close friends, and eventually form an uncanny and obsessive relationship that makes them both feel as though they’re looking at alternative versions of themselves. They spiral downward simultaneously, all the while trying to maintain a façade of impossible beauty standards, non-stop partying, and campus elitism.
The Gilded Butterfly Effect is the debut novel by author Heather Colley, whose short fiction has writing won The Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize, the Hopwood Award, and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize Shortlist.
Audiobook Narrator- Kate Wisniewski
Literature and Fiction Literary | Women's Fiction Friendship [Three Rooms Press, On Sale: October 21, 2025, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781953103628 / eISBN: 9781953103635]
Heather Colley’s debut novel THE GILDED BUTTERFLY EFFECT is forthcoming from Three Rooms Press in October 2025. Her short fiction has won awards including the Oxford Review of Books short fiction prize, the Hopwood Award, the BNU-Oxford short fiction prize (runner-up), and the Desperate Literature Prize shortlist. Heather is a PhD student in English Literature at Oxford University. She holds a master’s degree in literature from St Andrews University and a bachelor’s degree in the same subject from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
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