Kerri-Ann Watt

Kerri-Ann Watt is an incoming senior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose welcome to Maren and Lee shifts from practical hospitality to deliberate exclusion. She gives two travelers without a place to stay temporary shelter in her single dorm room, but treats Maren as an unwanted rival and ultimately denies knowing her to a campus guard. In a short episode, Kerri-Ann makes shelter feel conditional: an offer of help becomes a means of deciding who is allowed to stay.

Introduction and Arrival

Kerri-Ann enters the story when she picks up Maren and Lee on their way to Madison and introduces herself as a university senior about to begin the academic year. Her attention is directed chiefly toward Lee. She hardly looks at Maren, whose handshake she returns limply; Maren concludes that Kerri-Ann would have kept driving if Lee had not been with her. The seating arrangement reinforces that first impression: Lee rides in front, while Maren is packed into the backseat. As Kerri-Ann asks Lee personal questions, Maren recognizes that he is lying and suppresses a smirk, already watching their conversation as a performance from which she is excluded.

At Madison, however, Kerri-Ann offers both travelers a place to sleep because they have nowhere else to go. She has a single room and presents the invitation as a practical exchange: they can stay if they help her move in. They carry her belongings up the stairs, and the room’s painted cinderblock walls, gray linoleum, and fiberboard furniture provide an impersonal backdrop to this temporary arrangement. Kerri-Ann hangs posters of Tom Cruise in Risky Business and Right Said Fred, while Lee rolls his eyes at each addition. The gesture of offering shelter is real, but it does not make the three guests equally welcome.

Attention, Rivalry, and Exclusion

The strain becomes clearer during the walk to a campus pizzeria. Kerri-Ann walks beside Lee along the lakeside path and touches the inside of his arm when she wants to point something out. Maren finds the attention tiresome and decides that whatever she and Lee do the next morning will have nothing to do with Kerri-Ann. Her irritation is not simply a response to a stranger’s manner: Kerri-Ann’s attentiveness to Lee leaves Maren feeling pushed to the edge of a relationship and a journey in which she is already dependent on others for shelter.

Back in the room, Kerri-Ann asks Lee to assemble her loft bed while she takes Maren into the bathroom to unpack toiletries and cosmetics. She describes arranging her vanity as her favorite part of a new school year. Maren compliments her appearance, but Kerri-Ann does not thank her; she continues arranging her bottles and cosmetics, then appraises Maren and says she could be attractive if she made an effort. Maren anticipates the familiar advice that she should stop wearing black because it makes her look pale, sullen, and unhappy, and that her appearance will keep people from befriending her. Kerri-Ann answers that if Maren has heard it before, perhaps there is something to it. Their exchange turns the bathroom mirror into a scene of judgment: Kerri-Ann offers no reassurance, but repeats the social criticism Maren expects.

When it is time to sleep, Kerri-Ann assigns Lee an electric air mattress and tells Maren to use a couch in the common room down the hall, which she says she used to sleep on while watching movies. Lee questions this arrangement and offers to inflate the mattress for Maren instead. Kerri-Ann cuts him off by declaring that the mattress has a hole and asking whether he does not want Maren to get a good night’s sleep. The claim leaves Maren with the couch and makes Lee’s attempted intervention ineffective. At 11:33, with bedtime already approaching, Maren still has no place in the room to sleep; Kerri-Ann has converted an invitation to stay into a division between the guest she favors and the one she wants elsewhere.

Denial and Consequences

The division becomes explicit when a guard finds Maren asleep in the common room and brings her to Kerri-Ann’s door, explaining that the young woman says she is Kerri-Ann’s friend. Kerri-Ann looks Maren over and says she does not know her. As the guard apologizes and closes the door, Kerri-Ann gives Maren a small, triumphant glance. Her denial contradicts the hospitality she had offered only hours earlier, as well as the shared work of carrying her belongings into the room. It is not merely a refusal to let Maren sleep inside: it erases their acquaintance when acknowledging it might require Kerri-Ann to take responsibility for her guest.

The guard tells Maren that lying was wrong and that she will be reported, with a campus-police citation to follow. The exchange leaves Maren exposed to a formal consequence while Kerri-Ann remains behind the closed door. Later, Maren and Lee are still conscious that someone could come looking for Kerri-Ann, hear them, and turn them over to campus police. Kerri-Ann’s conduct therefore continues to shape the travelers’ sense of risk after her direct involvement ends.

Narrative Role

Kerri-Ann’s episode contrasts the appearance of generosity with control over access. She does help Maren and Lee reach Madison and initially offers the basic shelter they lack; her actions afterward, however, distinguish Lee from Maren through seating, flirtatious attention, sleeping arrangements, and finally denial. The scene does not explain Kerri-Ann’s motives beyond what her behavior reveals, and it does not show her facing a consequence. Instead, the consequences fall on Maren, who is left outside the room and threatened with a citation. Kerri-Ann’s significance lies in this sharp reversal: a host who appears to solve the travelers’ immediate problem becomes the person who makes Maren’s precarious position more visible.