I Am Charlotte Simmons

6. The Most Ordinary Protocol

About eleven o’clock the next night, Charlotte happened to be standing by the window in her pajamas and bathrobe, taking a break from medieval history, when a round of shrieks and manly laughs erupted in the courtyard below. Not that there was anything unusual about that; various adolescent cries were part of the ambient sound of Little Yard. But this time she peered down and searched the darkness. There had been a shower earlier, and the ground gave off a damp, ionized smell. Was it just girls and boys or girls with boys? She wanted to see them, but the lamps on the perimeter of the courtyard and the light from the windows across the way were hopeless against the gloom.

Now the cries were echoing in the big tunnel-like corridor that led from the courtyard out to the street. It definitely sounded like girls with boys. Moreover, they were leaving, going out, and it was eleven p.m. on a Thursday. What easy, sly, glib, coquettish charm did you have to have? She thought of the blond giant, who she had since learned was some sort of celebrated basketball player. She could still see the way the veins wrapped around his huge forearms. He was so sure of himself, and he had wanted her to go with him somewhere…The boy last night in the library, the one who was so rude and hostile one minute and suddenly came on to her the next—there was nothing frightening about him, and he wasn’t bad-looking, but he seemed so devious. He was totally manipulative and opportunistic.

She remained standing by the window, imagining she could still hear the songs of other students’ happiness heading off into the unimaginable world of “going out.” Her pity for herself knew no bounds…no longer had any home whatsoever…just a tiny room poisonous with the scorn of a tall, skinny, sarcastic, snobbish Groton girl who wouldn’t be caught dead having a normal conversation with some nobody of a country girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains…a bathroom where she could find only the opposite of privacy…the intrusion…the vulgar affront!…of bands of adolescent boys who gloried in the noxious noises and smells of bowel movements—gloried in them!—groaned, strained audibly, sighed ostentatiously with satisfaction, laughed at basso pig-bladdery blasts from the rectum and things that went plop or poot, and shouted running commentaries glorifying their own adolescent grossness.

She turned away from the window and became aware of the happy, noisy—drunken?—traffic of boys and girls in the hallway outside her door. She could hear the simpleminded chords and percussion of a CD somebody was playing too loud…Well, they could all go on living from impulse to impulse. Self-discipline was one of the things that had always made Charlotte Simmons…Charlotte Simmons…that, and her power of concentration. She had a medieval history test in the morning, and it was time to return to her desk for a final thirty minutes over the pages of Blue-eyed Bondage: Caucasian Chattel Slavery in Northern Europe in the Early Middle Ages.

Could have been lively, this book…the part about how Welshmen were sold as slaves on the Dublin slave market, so many, in fact, that the Old English word for slave was walsea—Welshman—just as the word slave came from the Slavs the Germans routinely kidnapped and pressed into forced labor…but it was so pedantic…lying there on the desk under her nose reflecting light, thanks to the cheap, slick paper university publishers printed pedantic books on…on…on the other hand they had singled her out on their own…No matter what they were like, the blond giant and the dark-haired conniver, they had been attracted, hadn’t they, they had noticed something about her…and they liked it…But why kid herself? Two wholly accidental encounters lasting a few blinks of the eye…What on earth could they do for a girl who was so lonely!

“Ohmygod, ohmygod…Seriously…Me?…Me, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction…” A girl’s voice just outside the door—Beverly.

The door opened, and in she came. As usual, she had her head cocked, the cell phone at her ear, and her eyes cast down and to the side toward some point in midair that didn’t exist. Walking in behind her was another girl, a blonde. Quite striking she was, thanks to her fine square jaws. Without really looking at Charlotte, Beverly flashed a smile and gave a distracted wave by way of acknowledging her roommate’s presence by the window. She removed her lips from the cell phone just long enough to gesture behind her at the blonde and say, “Charlotte…Erica,” whereupon she sat her skin and bones down on the edge of her bed and poured herself back into the little black device.

“Hi,” Charlotte said to the girl, Erica. Vaguely she recalled the Amorys talking about an Erica who had been a year ahead of Beverly at Groton.

“Hello,” said the girl in a clipped, perfunctory fashion. She gave Charlotte a wide, flat, dead smile, then ran her eyes over Charlotte’s plaid bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers…slippers, pajamas, and bathrobe. That done, she turned her attention to Beverly and never looked at Charlotte again.

Beverly was saying into the device, “I mean, I was sitting at this table at the I.M. with Harrison and this other lacrosse player who’s a Phi Gam and some girl named Ellen, and I had on my low-cut Diesels? And I happened to look down, and eeeyew, my ass—it was like I just gave birth! It was like my waist had this tube the size of a garter snake around it—and you’re the one who’s always telling me, ‘Oh, go ahead! One slice of chocolate cake won’t kill you.’ I had this little…tube—and my ass!”

Erica emitted a short burst of laughter and said, “Ohmygod, Beverly, the day you get a big ass—”

Beverly said into the cell phone, “That was Erica. She thinks I’m joking…Come on, I’d be honest with you…What? Him? I know you’re only trying to change the subject, but did I tell you he wanted to hook up in this little sports car he has? It’s got two seats with all this manual shift shit sticking up in between—”

The square-jawed blonde chuckled, sighed, covered her eyes with her hands, said, “Ohmygod,” and pulled faces.

“I’m glad it was dark in the I.M., anyway,” Beverly was saying. “I mean, whatta I do about my fucking waist?…Hahhh! You always say that. I wish I was skinny.”

The friend, Erica, laughed and laughed. She never looked at Charlotte to get her reaction to all this, not even once.

“I’ll be there!” Beverly was saying. “But can I borrow the prick-tease shirt?…The one that’s open down the front. It’d make me look like I’ve got boobs.”

Charlotte was plunged into consternation, four or five kinds of it. Beverly’s language shocked her. She had heard her use the occasional expletive, usually Oh shit, once or twice an Oh fuck, but she had never heard her go on and on in this completely smutty fashion like…like…like Regina Cox, only worse. The sheer sexual bluntness shocked her. The fact that she would blithely say such things in front of other people shocked her. The fact that her friend Erica, far from being shocked, thought it was hilarious shocked her. And the fact that neither of them deigned to bestow so much as a flick of the eye upon her throughout this extraordinarily vulgar cell phone performance—somehow that made it worse. For a moment she felt that the whole awkward situation must be her own fault. The very fact that she existed in this room had become an unfathomable embarrassment. How could she remain standing here by the window, watching and listening to two girls who ignored her?

Neither gave her so much as a glance as she went to her desk and sat down. She resumed reading Blue-eyed Bondage. Or rather, staring at it; she couldn’t very well keep her mind off the two girls, who were barely three feet behind her, talking and laughing.

Beverly had at last snapped her cell phone shut and was declaring, “I have nothing to wear.”

Out of the corner of her eye Charlotte could see that she had her fists on her hips. Then she opened a bureau drawer and slammed it shut.

“I have…nothing to wear!”

“I think I’m gonna have to cry, Bev,” said Erica.

Beverly began sighing and going through more drawers and then her closet. Erica seemed to find all this immensely amusing.

“Well, I guess it’s not the end of the world,” said Beverly.

“Oh, no, Bev, it totally is the end of the world.”

They chattered away. Charlotte tried to tune out, but she heard Erica saying, “That’s not Sarc Three, Bev, that’s only Sarc Two. I mean, it’s almost as obvious as Sarc One. I can’t believe they let you out of Groton without passing Sarc. Sarc One is when I look at you, and I say, ‘Ohmygod, a cerise shirt. Cerise is such an in color this year.’ That’s just ordinary intentionally obvious sarcasm. Okay?”

“You really don’t like this shirt, do you?” said Beverly.

“Oh, please give me a fucking break, Bev! I’m just giving you an example. I’m trying to enlighten you, and you—touchy, touchy, touchy. Now…in Sarc Two you say the same thing, only in a sympathetic voice that sounds like totally sincere. ‘Oh, wow, Bev, I love that color. Cerise. That’s like so-oo-o cool. Unnhhh…no wonder it’s so like…in this year.’ By the time you get to the ‘so in this year,’ your voice is dripping with so much syrup and like…sincerity, it finally dawns on the other person that she’s getting fucked over. What you’ve really been saying is that you don’t love the color, you don’t think it’s cool, and it’s not ‘in’ this year. It’s the delay in it dawning on her that makes it hurt. Okay?”

“And you’re sure you’re just being nice and giving me an example?” said Beverly.

“I’m sure you’re going bitchcakes on me, be-atch. That’s what I’m sure of. If you don’t cool it, I’m not going to explain Sarc Three to you.”

Silence.

“Okay. In Sarc Three you make the delay even longer, so it really hurts when she finally gets it. We’ve got the same situation. The girl’s getting ready to go out, and she has on this cerise shirt. She thinks it’s really sexy, a real turn-on, and she’s gonna score big-time. You start off sounding straight—you know, flattering, but like not laying it on too thick. You’re like, ‘Wow, Bev, I love that shirt. Where’d you get it? How perfect is that? It’s so versatile. It’ll be perfect for job interviews, and it’ll be perfect for community service.’ ” The very thought made Erica laugh.

Beverly said, “Hah hah. You sure that’s not Sarc Four—and you’re just fucking with me??”

Erica laughed and laughed. “Bev, I love you—you’re totally paranoid!”

“I’m taking this shirt off,” said Beverly.

“If you take that shirt off, I’m gonna—Bev, that’s an awesome shirt, and you know it.”

Charlotte flushed with anger. Ignorant snobs! Beverly’s square-faced Erica had said a single word to her—a single, curt hello—and then treated her as if she were invisible. Just like that, she knew why. Beverly had told her friend ahead of time that her roommate was a person of no significance. Hence the bare-minimal hello and the dead smile. And who did they think they were? Charlotte had an idea of who they thought they were. By now she knew what Beverly had actually meant when she said, the day they met, that she had gone to “high school in Groton, Massachusetts.” Groton was the name of a high school, but it was no high school in the sense that a Charlotte Simmons thought of a high school. It was a private school, so fancy, so prestigious it needed no descriptive appendage after its name. It was enough to say “Groton,” and students didn’t just “go” there, they boarded there, away from home.

Beverly Amory of Groton didn’t “room” with Charlotte Simmons of Alleghany High School, either. She put up with her. She was never unpleasant. In fact, she was always cheerful, in her distant fashion. She conversed with her only about impersonal subjects, such as the cost of cell phone service. Even then she was vague about it; obviously somebody else took care of the bill. Charlotte wasn’t about to humiliate herself by asking or coaxing or trying to steer Beverly into sharing this year at Dupont with her on a more comradely level. She had thrived alone in Sparta, and she could thrive alone here. The invincible truth was, she possessed a brilliance unparalleled here or anywhere else. The day would come, in due course, when Beverly and the cold fish with her would look up to Charlotte Simmons in awe and berate themselves for not having made friends with her when they had the chance. And when that day came, she would—cut—them—dead.

While Charlotte stared at Blue-eyed Bondage and seethed, Beverly changed clothes rapidly. Charlotte could hear her groaning and saying Oh shit and breathing hard. The room became brighter. Beverly must have turned on her vanity mirror. There was a waft of perfume.

Presently Charlotte was aware that Beverly was standing just behind her.

“Well, Charlotte, bye-bye.”

Charlotte looked up. Beverly had done something amazing with her face. Mauve-purple shading and pencil liner and mascara or something made her eyes stand out like two big jewels. At the same time, she had somehow whitened the creases below the lower lids. Her lips were their natural color, but they glistened. Charlotte couldn’t imagine how she had done it, but she looked sexy and, more than that, provocative. Erica was finally deigning to gaze upon Charlotte…benevolently, the way you might bestow a moment’s attention upon some deserving urchin.

“Have a good time,” said Charlotte. Tiiiime. She said it without a trace of a smile or a note of goodwill. No doubt the resentment showed on her face. She should have been cool about it, of course, and acted breezily congenial, but she couldn’t begin to summon up the artful hypocrisy required to do it.

As the pair went through the door, Charlotte could see Erica leaning in toward Beverly’s ear and moving her square jaws. No doubt she was whispering, “What’s her problem?”

After they had gone, Charlotte got up from the desk and headed back toward the window to catch them laughing at her expense as they went out into the courtyard. But why lacerate herself like that? She stopped and stood there in the middle of the room instead, staring at Beverly’s vanity mirror, which was still on. Where were they going at this hour? Who would they see? Boys…and what would Beverly talk to boys about? Her ass? Would she talk that same way to boys? And to think that one of the bonuses, supposedly, of being so brilliant as to be admitted to Dupont was that I, Charlotte Simmons, will now ascend forever above the cheap, sordid, vulgar milieu and aimless vices of the Regina Coxes and the Channing Reeveses. What exactly did Beverly expect to achieve with a cerise silk shirt open down to there?

Charlotte went over to Beverly’s vanity mirror and studied her face under its hot little lights. Then she went to Beverly’s closet and opened the door and studied herself in Beverly’s full-length mirror. She wasn’t merely smarter than Beverly, she was prettier. There was something emaciated about Beverly…There was something…sick…about all of Beverly.

Charlotte returned to the desk and took another look at Blue-eyed Bondage. It was either that or contend with the juvenile noxiousness and pseudo-macho foul mouths of the privileged late-teenage American males in the courtyard below and the hallway outside…and the bathroom down the hall.

Upside down she was, way down here, a band of light across the ceiling, and something had her by the shoulder, shaking it, shaking it—

“Charlotte! Charlotte! Charlotte!” Barely above a whisper, but it wouldn’t stop.

Charlotte turned her head toward it and tried to prop herself up on one elbow. A wall of light streamed through a crack in the doorway and backlit the thin, bony silhouette leaning over her.

“Charlotte! Wake up! Wake up! You gotta do me a favor!” The low, urgent voice of a close confidante. Beverly.

Charlotte managed to raise herself on both elbows. She groaned and tried to adjust her eyes to the light and make sense of things. “What time is it?”

Same low, intimate voice, as if they were the very closest of roommates: “Two, two-thirty, I don’t know. It’s not late. I need a big, big favor from you.” Billows of alcohol.

“I was sleeping,” said Charlotte. It was a complaint, but she realized it came out sounding like merely a foggy statement of the obvious.

“I know, and I’m really sorry, but you gotta help me just this one time, Charlotte.” Now Beverly was massaging her shoulder, the one she had just been shaking. “Just this one time,” she said. “I promise I’ll never ask you again, I promise.” Her voice was so urgent.

Charlotte remained propped up on her elbow, stupefied, hypnopompic. “One time…what?”

The same hushed, urgent tone: “There’s this guy—Harrison—please don’t let me down. I really, really like him. Ever since we got here—you know what I mean, Charlotte!”

Beverly had sunk to her knees by the bed, so that her head was almost even with Charlotte’s. Billows and billows of alcohol. Her eyes seemed enormous…ablaze in the sockets of a skull. Charlotte turned away.

“Charlotte!”

Charlotte looked at her roommate again. The shaft of light from the hallway made her dizzy. It came from directly behind Beverly and created brilliant highlights on the shoulders of her silk shirt. The shirt was scarcely buttoned at all.

“I need to bring him up here. I really do. You’ve gotta, gotta, gotta help me out! How about sleeping somewhere else? Just this one time? I promise I’ll never ask you to do this again. Char lotte!” Beverly closed her eyes, thrust her chin upward, stretching out her neck, brought her fists up beside her cheeks, and shook them in the vibrating gesture that is supposed to convey desperate supplication among chums.

Bewildered: “I have a test tomorrow!”

“You can sleep next door, in Joanne and Hillary’s room! They have a futon.”

“How? I hardly even know them!”

“I know them. They’ll understand. People do it all the time.”

“I have a test! I need to sleep!”

Beverly turned her head aside and went Unnhhhh! in a way that made clear her astonishment that anyone on this earth could be so dense and uncooperative, so ignorant of the most ordinary protocol. Then she looked Charlotte in the eye and, in a voice that indicated she was doing her very best to keep her temper in check, said to her, “Charlotte, listen to me. You’re not gonna lose any sleep. You’ll lie down on that futon, and you won’t be awake three seconds. Please. Do I have to beg you? It’s not a big thing. I gotta have the room. Come…on, Charlotte! Can’t you do this one little thing for me? I’d do it for you.”

Charlotte could feel her willpower weakening. She was so groggy. Beverly was drunk, but she had somehow established the notion, by the way she put it rather than what she said, that to refuse such a request was to expose yourself as ignorant of the most elementary etiquette—or else stubborn or even spiteful, a willful violator of the unwritten rules of life among college women.

Charlotte pushed herself up to a sitting position. She knew she should say no, she knew there was no reason why she should give up a night’s sleep on the eve of a test in a difficult course, give up her very bed—yet she heard herself saying, “Whose futon is it? I don’t know either one of them.” With that, of course, she had already given in.

“Hillary’s, I think,” said Beverly, rushing to reinforce her advantage. “Ask Hillary, but it won’t matter. Hillary—Joanne—but ask Hillary. They’ll like totally understand, either one.”

Slowly, dizzily, and with the sinking feeling that she had just suffered a great defeat through sheer inability to stand her ground, Charlotte slid her legs off the bed, fished about for her slippers with her feet, and wriggled into her bathrobe.

“All you have to do is knock on the door,” said Beverly. “Hillary’s like totally awesome, she’s so great about everything. She’ll do anything for anybody, she’s so great—” The hushed words gushed out in a flood aimed at sweeping her wavering roommate right out the door.

Which they did. Without knowing how it happened, Charlotte found herself out in the hall, petrified at the thought of knocking on the door of somebody she barely knew at two-thirty or whatever it was in the morning. This Hillary had never struck Charlotte as the charitable type. She had a shrill voice and such an affected accent that Charlotte had thought she must be from England or something. In fact, she was from New York City, and about every time Charlotte had ever heard her say anything, she had worked the phrase “at St. Paul’s” into the conversation. St. Paul’s, Charlotte had deduced, was a boarding school much like Groton.

Charlotte stood there for a moment, trying to work up some courage and despising herself for being weak. Somewhere down the hall a monotonous, drawling rap CD—“Yo’, you take my testi-culls…Suck ’em like a popsi-cull”—not terribly loud but loud enough to hear out here in the hall. She looked this way and that, halfway expecting to see the boy, the one Beverly was so eager for. Instead, here came two boys and three girls, laughing as if fun couldn’t get any more intense. One of the boys kept saying in a put-on deep voice, “Your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.” Laughter, laughter, laughter. When they saw Charlotte standing there, they grew quiet. As they came by, they looked her up and down. Bathrobe, full set of pajamas, snuggy slippers…After they passed, one of the boys said, “Oh-kaaaayyyy,” and they all started laughing again.

The laughter, the mockery of that Oh-kaaaayyyy, struck Charlotte in her very solar plexus and invaded her body, her very neural pathways. She had just suffered a catastrophic defeat without fighting back. She had let herself be thrown out of her own bed, her own room, and that was all she had at the eminent Dupont, a bed in one half of a miserable room. All she had left now were the pajamas, slippers, and bathrobe she had on to cover her naked body—and somehow they made her an object of ridicule by total strangers. Charlotte Simmons! Her own name cried out inside her skull. Nothing! All that was…Charlotte Simmons…had been scoured out, and all that was left was this…this…this husk…dead but too helpless to fall down the way it should…it stands here to be mocked! Utter defeat…a feeling that immediately gave way to a desperate loneliness…not mere emotion but a condition, an affliction…Lethe! Oblivion! Not one soul to turn to—

—which left Hillary, next door, whom she didn’t even know. She took a deep breath and approached the door of 514. She took another breath, hesitated, and then knocked. Nothing. She knocked harder. From within, a boy’s voice said, apparently to somebody else in there, “Who the fuck is that?”

Dismay—but she didn’t know what else to do. She put her mouth close to the door. Softly: “Hillary, Hillary.” Nothing. Whispery but much louder: “Hillary! Hillary!” Nothing. “It’s Charlotte! From next door! Beverly’s roommate! I need—”

“Go away!”

That was Hillary. There was no mistaking that voice. She didn’t sound like the awesome person Beverly had described, the one who would do anything for anybody, but what alternative was there? “Hillary—please, can I—”

“I said GO AWAY!”

The boy was saying, “Who the fuck is that?”

Charlotte couldn’t believe it. She was stranded out in the hall, and she had a medieval history test in the morning. Crone was a very exacting professor. She had to get some sleep, but where?

“Yo, take my johnson…Knock it on some fox’s box, my cock, sucker, I’m the fucker you forgot…” The CD rapper droned on.

She abandoned 514 and stood in front of 512. Wait a minute. Two guys lived in 512. She moved on to 510. Two girls lived in there. She didn’t even know their names. But what else was there to do? She knocked on the door. Nothing. Please, God! She knocked louder. She knocked still louder. Nothing. She turned the doorknob and pushed gently. The door wasn’t locked. She pushed it open far enough to stick her head in. A slice of light entered the room. A girl groaned and turned over. There was a girl asleep on each bed, and there was one on a futon on the floor. Charlotte recognized her. It was Joanne, Hillary’s roommate. Obviously Hillary had forced Joanne out the same way Beverly had forced her out. Charlotte was conscious of her heart rattling away in her rib cage. She was beside herself. She had a test in the morning—and no place to go, no place to sleep. She was stranded out in a hallway in her nightclothes at two-thirty a.m., all because somehow another girl’s desire to bring a boy up to the room in the middle of the night took precedence over everything else.

Where could she go to even get off her feet? The R.A., Ashley…It was two-thirty, but that was what R.A.’s existed for, wasn’t it—to help?

In the elevator on the way down, she tried to think of how she might put it, and the truth of the matter hit her. She could see Ashley’s wild hair and the thong panties lying on the floor. What a naïve little child Ashley must have thought her to be! With the straightest of faces Ashley had led her to believe that there would be no alcohol in Edgerton, because that was the regulation. Sex? No problem, since “dormcest” was looked down upon. She had sent her on her way relieved and even more clueless than when she arrived. She could see Ashley holding forth with such aplomb that first day in the Common Room on the ground floor…smiling so reassuringly at all her anxious young charges. She could see all the freshmen of Edgerton House, eager for the lowdown on life at Dupont, huddled together on the leather couches and chairs that had been shoved together in a great semicircle. Barely three weeks ago it was, and already that little show seemed so cynical. To ask Ashley about anything at this point would be a humiliation.

Well, Charlotte thought as the elevator reached the ground floor, at least there’s the Common Room. She would have someplace to lie down while she despised herself for her innocence and her weakness in giving in to Beverly’s sudden, besotted, utterly phony posture of friendship and intimacy.

In the Common Room, the couches and easy chairs were back at their appointed posts beneath the glum light of three big medieval-type wooden chandeliers, along with an array of dark wooden tables and straight-backed chairs.

Charlotte scanned the room. In the middle, amid this sea of furniture, a pair of enormous old couches upholstered in chestnut-brown leather were backed up, one on this side, one on the other, against a long, heavy old dark wooden library table, lit by a pair of tall but dim old Arts and Crafts lamps. In this gloomy, elephantine cluster of furniture sat the only three souls Charlotte could spy. At the far end of one couch sat a girl with her chunky legs crossed, reading a paperback book. On the other couch, a slender girl, her back to Charlotte, sat on the edge of a seat cushion, leaning forward, talking in a low voice to a slender boy who was leaning toward her from the edge of the armchair. Both wore T-shirts and blue jeans.

The girl reading the book—what on earth was she wearing? Apparently nothing but a floppy T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxer shorts, the kind boys wore. Not only that, the fly was popped open from the way her legs were crossed. Charlotte couldn’t imagine a girl just sitting like that in a public place, not even at two-thirty in the morning. It was bad enough having to be here in pajamas and a bathrobe.

She decided to sit far from all three, somewhere deep in the Middle Gothic recesses of the Common Room. She started walking that way—but her body wouldn’t obey. It was as if something independent of rational motor control was taking command. The new commander had had enough of isolation, enough scouring loneliness, and refused to venture beyond the settlement before her, with its plush leather, its ancient hand-carved wood, the snug light of its olden lamps, and its human beings.

But not even the commander could make her actually approach a human and strike up a conversation, and so she sat in a chair at the other end of the couch from the chunky girl with the open fly. True, this put her opposite the couple in the blue jeans, but there was the depth of both huge couches plus the width of the table plus the fact that both were leaning forward from the edges of their seats seemingly engrossed in each other…to make her feel properly distanced from them.

The chunky girl with the open fly glanced up at her from the depths of the couch as Charlotte sat down in the chair, but she immediately returned to her book. Her book…reading her book—Charlotte felt an overwhelming need to not appear to be some hopeless refugee adrift in the dead of the night, not even to these three young strangers. Now it was essential to be busy at something, which is to say, anything.

She looked about…At the end of the table, near her, was a magazine. Blushing—actually feeling the rush of blood to her face—for fear one of them would notice that she was so desperate as to start reading anything she could lay hands on, she got up, put one knee on the seat of the couch, reached way over and picked up the magazine, and hurried back to her chair.

Only then did she notice the title: Cosmopolitan. Charlotte had heard of the magazine, and had the impression it had been around a long time, but she had never read it. It wasn’t in the Alleghany High library, and she had certainly never bought it. The price on the cover was $3.99, and that wasn’t for a year’s subscription. That was for this one issue. She had never seen any slick magazine in their house at home. Who was going to go out and pay four dollars for a magazine? On the cover a blond girl with big eyes was smiling at her in a friendly way. There were headlines all over the cover. The biggest one said, “99 SEXY WAYS TO TOUCH HIM. These Fresh, Frisky Tips Will Thrill Every Inch of Your Guy (Our Favorite Requires a Glazed Doughnut).” Couldn’t possibly mean what it suggested. She riffled through the magazine, which was very thick, until she found it…“You want to be his best ever. And that’s a goal we can definitely get behind. So get ready to step up and assume your rightful title of sex deity. After consulting some eager experts (gorgeous guys with loose lips and tons of sex-rated secrets to spill), we have 99 of the most erotic and ingenious ways for a girl to tantalize, tease, and thrill every inch of him.” The first one said, “Help me button my shirt or adjust my tie in the mirror. When you dress me, I just want to get undressed again.” The second one said, “Tugging on my earlobe just a bit with your teeth makes me lose all sense of the English language”…Sort of naughty overtones, Charlotte reckoned, but otherwise—then she hit “When we’re having sex and you’re on top, cup my balls and tug on them lightly. It’s an unexpected, awesome feeling.” And “Put the condom on me. It’s such a turn-on to see you prep me that way” and “Swirl your tongue around the tip of my penis, and then, without warning, take all of me in your mouth” and “Take your panties off, throw them in the freezer, then caress my bod with them. Don’t laugh. It’s actually awesome” and “My girlfriend gets a glazed doughnut and sticks my penis through the hole. She nibbles around it, stopping to suck me once in a while. The sugar beads from her mouth tingle on my tip”—

Charlotte closed the magazine and studied the cover again. Was this some sort of pornographic parody of Cosmopolitan? She opened it to the contents pages…a list a mile long of directors, managers, assistant managers, associate publishers, and then: “Published by Hearst Communications, Inc., President and Chief Executive Officer: Victor F. Ganzi.” It was all quite unbelievable. She put the magazine in her lap and looked straight ahead at nothing. The chunky girl glanced up at her but, as before, immediately returned to her book.

Charlotte’s face was blazing red. Suppose somebody—anybody—even one of these three strangers—saw her reading this…blatant pornography! It would be mortifying—terminally!

As nonchalantly as she could, which is to say, with her hands shaking only a little, she got up, knelt on the couch again, reached over, and put the magazine back on the table, then turned it over so that the cover would be face-down. Oh my God! She didn’t try to get back to her chair. Instead, she sank as deeply as she could into the couch, there being no available crack in the earth into which she could disappear.

She kept very still. Her heart was drumming away. Now she was directly across the table from the couple, the boy and girl in blue jeans. She had no interest in eavesdropping, but all at once the boy’s voice rose just enough for her to overhear.

“What? I don’t get it. You want me…to do…that for you?”

The girl’s whisper reached an audible level, too. “Please, Stuart…don’t you see? I’m a freshman. I don’t know any of these guys—and for you it wouldn’t be such a big thing. You’re a senior. And I trust you.”

“Yeah, but what’s in it for me?” said the boy.

“Don’t you think I’m attractive?”

“You’re gorgeous, in case you don’t already know it, which I’m sure you do, but what’s that got to do with it?”

“I’d think it would have a little…something to do with it.”

“No it wouldn’t. You’d just be using me.”

“Well, I’ll bet there’ve been plenty of times—”

“Brittany! I’ve known you since you were nine and I was thirteen. I always felt like your uncle. My God, it would be like incest or something.”

“I’ll bet you’ve—”

“I’m not sure I could even…you know, do it.”

“Unnhh. Then what am I gonna do?”

At that point their voices fell again, and Charlotte could no longer hear what they were saying, other than that the girl, Brittany, was using a lot of unnhs and ohhhhs and other sighs.

Charlotte’s chin sank down to her collarbone as what she had just heard began to register.

“Sexiled?”

Charlotte’s head jerked about. It was the girl in the boxer shorts at the other end of the couch. She was looking straight at Charlotte and smiling in a perfectly friendly manner. Charlotte must have looked dumbstruck, because the girl said it again.

“Sexiled?”

By now Charlotte had taken the term apart and put it back together again, and she said, “Yeah…I guess I am.”

“Me, too.”

“You are? That’s what it’s called, sexiled?”

“Unh hunh.” The girl shrugged, as if resigned to her fate. “This is the third time in two weeks. What about you?”

Charlotte was appalled to realize that any such abomination was so common, it had a name. “It never happened to me before. I just can’t—my roommate promised she’d never do it again.”

“Hah hah,” said the girl. She seemed rather jolly about it. “That’s what mine said. I can tell you, all she means is, she won’t do it again tonight. Maybe. If you’re lucky.”

Charlotte pursed her lips grimly. The whole thing was overwhelming. “Well—I’m not gonna put up with it.”

Dismissively: “Ahhhch…It’s like totally—it’s the way it works. You’ve just done her a favor, so she can’t very well say no when it’s your turn. Who’s your roommate?”

“Her name’s Beverly.” She said it in a distracted fashion. What was on her mind was, Good Lord! When it’s my turn?

“Mmmm, don’t know her. You have a boyfriend yet?”

Stunned. “No.”

“Me, neither. Oh, well. Guys come up to me, and I think they’re interested, and then they ask me to introduce them to some girlfriend of mine, or whatever.” She smiled and lifted her eyebrows in a self-deprecatory fashion.

The girl had a pretty face, in a rubicund country girl sort of way—Charlotte had seen that face plenty of times around Sparta—but she was buttery, stubby, and chubby. The chances of her ever achieving the twenty-first-century female ideal of a lean, hard, slim-hipped, well-defined body were remote, if not nil. She just wasn’t made for it. Yet here she was, sitting in her boxer shorts in a public lounge in the middle of the night, looking forward to boyfriends and having her turn at sexiling her roommate. A nice, cheery normal-looking girl—who assumed all this was the natural order of things!

“I’m Bettina,” said the girl.

“Charlotte.”

They were members of the first generation to go through life with no last names.

The girl looked at Charlotte with a slightly amused expression and said, “Where are you from?”

“Sparta, North Carolina.”

“Don’t know Sparta. I thought I detected a little bit of the South, though. Where’d you go to school?”

Charlotte stiffened. She had regarded herself as the cosmopolitan of the Alleghany High student body, and she fancied her speech was nearly accent-free. But all she said was, “In Sparta, at Alleghany High School.” Then, to shift the subject away from Sparta, Alleghany High, and Southern accents, “What about you?”

“I’m from Cincinnati. I went to Seven Hills School,” said Bettina. “You always wear pajamas?”

The very same once-over Beverly’s snobbish friend had given her! And the boys and girls in the hallway! What was wrong with pajamas, for God’s sake? They were certainly better than a pair of plaid boxer shorts with an open fly! But before she could work up a good head of resentment—

—a shriek. A girl came running from the entry hall into the Common Room. She shrieked again. She was slim and blond and wore shorts that showed off her perfect legs, and the shrieks were ones that any girl on earth could have interpreted. They were the cries of the female of the species feigning physical fright at the antics, probably physical, of the male. Sure enough, running in after her came a tall, lean boy with short brown hair and little bangs. Moving like an athlete, he cornered her against the back of a couch and threw his arms around her as if to drag her back into the hall. As she squirmed, she cried, “No! No! Put me down, Chris! You can’t make me! I’m not going to!”

The boy said, “You have to! That was the deal, dude!”

He dragged her out of the room. It was almost…choreographic, this gorgeous, lissome girl and this gorgeous, tall, lean, athletic boy and their charade of a struggle. The two departed Edgerton House in melodious combat.

Charlotte and Bettina sat there without saying a word, but Charlotte knew they were both thinking the same thing. The perfect her intertwined with the perfect him—while they sat marooned in this lugubrious desert of dried-out leather upholstery, the two sexiles.

Part of Charlotte wanted to get out of the place immediately, even if it meant walking around aimlessly until dawn. She refused to be lumped with this…well…homely girl.

Then she faced up to it: leaving was the last thing in the world she was about to do. She could live with the business about the accent. She could forgive the implied insult regarding pajamas. She could roll with those punches and a dozen more like them. She was dislodged, rooted out of her own bed, thrown out of her own room, discarded, adrift, helpless, deracinated practically, but at least she was not alone. At least, for however brief an interval, she had a sunny, friendly face to look into. She was eye to eye with a human being whose fate she shared—and never mind how demeaning or miserable the fate—someone she could talk to…even open up to, assuming she could find the courage—

If only she could call Miss Pennington…or Momma…Hello, Miss Pennington? Momma? You know Dupont, on the other side of the mountains? The Garden of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, where great things are to be done? Well, Miss Pennington, Momma, I plumb forgot to ask: did anybody ever tell you about being sexiled? About being marooned in a public lounge in the middle of the night so that your roommate, so-called, can rut like a pig with some guy she just picked up?

It seemed terribly important to keep the conversation with Bettina going. She ransacked her brain and finally came up with “Who were they?”—nodding toward the corner where the perfect guy had swooped up the perfect girl.

“I don’t know who he is,” said Bettina, “but she’s a freshman. I saw her the other two times I was sexiled, too. She’s always up late and got some guy chasing her. She’s hot, I guess, but she’s terribly, you know, all Oooo Oooo Oooo Oooo Oo.” Bettina cocked her head and opened her eyes wide and fluttered them in the baby coquette fashion. “If she wanted to swap legs, I wouldn’t say no, though.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Charlotte. But she said it in a dull, flat manner, because she was merely being agreeable. Deep down inside she wanted to say, “Then wait’ll you see mine. I used to run cross-country in the mountains.”

That revived her a bit. So gutted, disemboweled, scoured out had she been, by loneliness, she had all but forgotten the Force: I am Charlotte Simmons.