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March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 47
see her hips and her ass, you see why
they don’t want us to wear no shorts.”
In the boardroom they were sum-
moned to, a screen slowly descended.
The three women watched their
iconic short videos play, one after
another, and couldn’t stop laughing.
“I was like, ‘God damn,’ ” says Megan.
“ ‘I’m really in trouble [for] twerking
right now!’ ”
“They was like, ‘Is this what you
guys want to be known for on cam-
pus?’ ” she continues. “In my head,
I was like, ‘Yeah, we lit! What you
mean?’ ” In exchange for their parents
not being informed of their exploits,
Megan, Kelsey, and Daren were ex-
pected to write research papers.
Whatever lessons the papers were
meant to impart, they didn’t exactly
stick. Megan is currently putting on a
twerking clinic at her own shows, and
her commitment to higher education
has only strengthened since she trans-
ferred to Texas Southern University.
Even as she became famous, she
remained a part-time student.
Megan estimates she has seven
classes left to complete her degree
in health care management. A few
days before I meet her, she admits on
Twitter that she’s rushing to finish a
six-page research paper on the health
care supply chain, due the same night
she has a photo shoot scheduled.
Even superstar rappers with a million
in the bank get worried about late
assignments.
What, exactly, does a six-page term
paper for a health care management
course entail? “Cotton balls in the hospital,
right? You have to buy X amount of cotton balls
before you even about to start running out of
them hoes to keep the shit on the floor where
it’s moved,” she says. “It’s literally a whole
system behind you even ordering fucking cotton
balls, or ordering sheets for the beds in the hos-
pitals. You would think that this is a simple-ass
process, but no.”
Her most pressing concern at the moment
isn’t how she’s going to follow up her breakout
year, or handling life as a celebrity. It’s simply
getting to graduation day. Even with her success,
she refuses to drop out of school. “My grand-
mother would be very pissed off at me if I just
stopped college right now. My mother would’ve
been like, ‘It don’t matter.’ I got to get this
degree. I already started it, and I’m interested
in what I’m doing because I want to open up
assisted-living facilities in the city.”That’s how I am. Like, ‘OK, what do
you got going on? Bitch, you look
good as fuck today!’ ”
She’s giving this mirror pep talk
while literally staring at a gilded mir-
ror in her home in Houston, wearing
an oversize Nirvana T-shirt. Rehears-
als are over, and she and her friends
are doing their makeup back at the
house before the show. Like a typical
college student, Megan lives in the
chaotic, amiable near-squalor of one’s
early twenties, a time when you’d
rather add water to the nearly empty
hand soap than run to CVS to buy
more. Unlike your typical college stu-
dent, though, Megan lives in a large
suburban house with neoclassical
pillars and a circular gravel driveway.
“Daren, she looks really sweet,
but she’s a meanie,” Megan explains
of the two women she calls sisters.
“Kelsey is very business-minded, very
organized, very on-time. I’m like,
‘You should quit your job and be my
assistant.’ ”
Megan pauses mid-monologue. Her
nostrils flare, and she looks down at
Tipsy, one of several puppies roaming
the house, in disgust. “It smells like
somebody pooped.” This prompts
Daren to worry about her dog eating
his own excrement. Megan informs
the group that Tipsy could get E. coli.
This — obviously — leads to a
discussion of how the girl in The Ring
managed to live in a well for seven
days, and how one would survive on a
deserted island with no food or water.
“I’m going to happily die,” Kelsey says
with glee. “I ain’t drinking my piss.”
“You want to die!” Daren exclaims.
“No, I’m not going to drink it.”
“You going to have to drink that pee, bitch!”
Since she’s become a public figure, Megan
has had to change her life — occasionally at the
expense of the clique’s social life. “Sometimes
I feel like, damn, maybe we shouldn’t go to the
club and get no Staten Islands tonight.” [Editor’s
note: Megan may have meant to refer to the
popular alcoholic beverage the Long Island Iced
Tea.] “You got to be careful what you’re doing in
public because sometimes people spin it like it’s
something else.”
Much of Megan’s life as a celebrity is colored
by a specific misogyny reserved for young black
women. If she’s photographed next to a man
— whether it’s Daniel Kaluuya at the BET Hip
Hop Awards or Trey Songz at a club — it quickly
becomes an all-consuming story [Cont. on 94]There’s another small problem: someone
Megan calls her “biggest hater.” “I made an in-
complete on one of my classes because this lady,
the teacher, she was really hating on me because
I told her that I was about to go on tour,” Megan
says, exasperated. “But we ain’t going to quit.”W
HILE TALKING TO Megan, I let
slip that I, personally, did not
have a hot girl summer in 2019,
despite the heights to which
her philosophy rose across the nation. “I don’t
know what pain you holding onto,” she says,
concerned.
“First step, you got to spend more time in the
mirror,” Megan explains — for me, but possibly
for herself as well. “Because once you get in the
mirror and you start finding shit that you do
like about yourself, you’re going to stay in the
mother fucking mirror trying to perfect that.Megan onstage
at Astroworld,
November 2019