I Am Charlotte Simmons

13. The Walk of Shame

In the lichen twilight, dusky, rusky as could be, around the corner of the house he swaggers, stops, puts his fists on his hips, paralyzes Charlotte with a stare. It’s already too dark to see his face, but she knows it’s him, and she knows he’s staring straight into her eyes, and she can’t move her legs at all, much less run. Desperately she looks toward the house, for Daddy, Momma, Cousin Doogie, the Sheriff, but there’s no one, not even a light, and Channing swaggers straight up to her, smirking and saying, “Party time,” even though she can’t actually hear the words. He reaches around to the back side of his jeans and produces a chaw bag of Red Man, digs in with his fingers, and shoves a plug of it into his mouth until his left cheek lumps out the size of a walnut. Smirks—sneers?—at her, does Channing, with a tilted smile, vile brown juice dribbling out of the lower corner of his mouth. He twists his body halfway around so she can see him slide the chaw bag into the jeans’ rear pocket, leaving two inches of it sticking out in the accepted fashion. He starts patting it, the chaw bag in his pocket, and leering at her and doing some heavy breathing, Unggh hunh, unggh hunh, unggh—

—hunh, unggh hunh—Charlotte woke up in the dark, and she could still hear it, Unggh hunh, unggh hunh, and her heart started pounding. It’s in here, in this room! Utter darkness! Lunged for the lamp on the little bedside table—crash—knocked it off onto the floor beside the bed. With another lunge jackknifed herself over the side of the bed, and even before she could find the stem switch on the lamp’s neck, it had started crying and whimpering, “Charlotte…Charlotte…” Charlotte turned the lamp on—

Not two feet away, on the floor, on all fours—Beverly. The crashed lamp cast a huge shadow of her onto the wall opposite. She was on—all fours!—slowly crawling forward on her hands and knees. The way her high heels stuck up in the air behind her made them seem ludicrously superfluous. Her black pants were stretched across her scrawny rear end. A mess of flattened streaked-blond hair hung this way and that.

Charlotte, still in the hypnoidal state: “What’s the matter , Beverly…”

Beverly looked at her blearily, trying to stanch her tears, her gasps, her whimpers, her bleats of “Charlotte” long enough to say—

Before she uttered a word, even the hypnoidal mind knew that the big high-heeled creature on all fours was drunk, and not just a little bit.

“Charlotte…Charlotte…Where are the lacrosse players? Where are the lacrosse players?”

“What lacrosse players?”

“This guy—I’ve got to go back and talk to him…Charlotte, Charlotte!”

“How can you go anywhere? You’re like—I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

Beverly looked up into her face with the eyes of a bewildered patient. “Him, too, Charlotte! That’s the only time they talk—when they’re drunk! Charlotte!…This is my only chance…He was talking to me, Charlotte!…He says he doesn’t want to get involved…But I don’t care! I have to hook up with him tonight.” More tears, whimpers, gasps. “Where are the lacrosse players!”

Charlotte said, “He says he doesn’t want to get involved? Isn’t that a kind of a hint?”

“But he was talking to me! I gotta go find him while he’s still interested…”

“Then why did you leave him?”

“He said he had to talk to some guy and he’d call me on my cell in ten minutes. That was five minutes ago—my cell in ten minutes five minutes ago…” Beverly lowered her head and began sobbing…on all fours. “I’m gonna drive back. I gotta drive back! I have to hook up with him! Charlotte!”

“Back where?”

“The I.M.!” Exasperation, as if she were repeating something for about the tenth time: “The I.M.!”

The I.M….

Charlotte said, “You can’t drive a car to the I.M., Beverly. You can’t drive a car, period.”

“Then you gotta drive me. Here are the keys.” Without getting up off her hands and knees, she tried to fish her keys out of her pants pocket. But the pants were so tight she had to twist her body and straighten one leg and dig into the pocket while supporting herself on one arm and canting her neck to one side, grimacing, eyes shut, all the while. She finally retrieved the keys and held them up toward Charlotte.

“I can’t drive you anywhere,” said Charlotte, “least of all the I.M. You’ve had enough to drink. Here, why don’t I help you go to bed.”

Charlotte was just about to swing her legs over the side of the bed when Beverly grabbed one sleeve of her pajama top and tried to drag her toward the door. She was strong, too.

“Hey, let go! You’re going to rip my pajamas!”

“You gotta drive me!—drive me!—drive me!”

“Stop it, Beverly!”

Beverly let go and keeled over on her back, then struggled up into a sitting position. “Aw right, aw right, don’t drive me. Next time, no thanks, I’ll do the same for you. Don’t do me any favors…” Baffled, she began feeling about on the floor for her keys, finally found them, and looked up angrily at Charlotte. “Thanks a lot. I’m gonna go, I don’t care—”

She tried to get her feet beneath herself, but the high heels skidded and her bottom hit the floor hard. She began crying again. She rolled over toward her own bed, got up on all fours, and managed to pull herself upright by steadying herself on the metal bed frame. She glowered at Charlotte, then lurched off balance toward the door.

Charlotte sprang up and blocked her way. “You can’t do that, Beverly. You can’t drive! You can’t even walk!” Big sigh. “Okay, I’ll drive you there. I don’t even know why you want to, but I’ll drive you. You’ll get yourself killed. Just let me put on some pants.”

She stepped out of her pajama pants and into a pair of shorts without stopping to put on underwear, slid on her sandals and said, “Okay, now give me the keys.”

Beverly handed them over with the smile of a little girl who has gotten her way.

Outside in the dark, in the dead of the night, Charlotte regretted her generosity. She was still groggy. The massive wall of Little Yard seemed to pitch forward at an ominous angle, about to collapse and bury them under tons of stone. Windows were lit up here and there, and somebody was playing a country music song whose hook went “I’m not slick’s you, but I’m gon’ fix you. I’m gon’ eighty-six you hick sombitch.” There appeared to be no one else about down here at ground level. Beverly had left her car almost three feet from the curb in a no-parking zone on the drive that ran between Little Yard and the parking lot. The vehicle was enormous. Charlotte knew that Beverly had a car, but she never dreamed she had a monster like this one. It was a black thing called a Denali, an SUV, but as big and heavy as the pickup truck Daddy drove. The driver’s seat was so high Charlotte had to take two great pumping steps, one up to a running board, the second up to the seat itself. It was like sitting on a leather-upholstered throne. There was tan leather everywhere and superfluous panels of wood with a showy, highly polyurethaned grain. The windows were tinted black. The whole thing was disorienting. How could it be that she was way above the ground at the wheel of a leather-upholstered monster of a vehicle, getting ready to take a besotted girl back to a bar…in the dead of the night?

The I.M.—the bar’s name came from the Internet function “Instant Message”—was near PowerPizza and other enterprises geared mainly to students, on a strip just off campus on the edge of a slum known among students as the City of God, after a cult movie of that name about packs of homicidal boys in Rio de Janeiro. Under other circumstances it would be an easy walk.

As she drove, Charlotte said to Beverly, “Why do you like lacrosse players so much?”

“Why?” said Beverly. She turned away and looked out the side window, as if the matter was too obvious to bear explaining.

After a bit Charlotte said, “What’s his name?”

Beverly continued looking straight ahead. “His name?” A dark cloud formed, and she burst into tears again.

Charlotte said, “How about if I take you back and you go to bed? Come on.”

“No!” Beverly abruptly stopped crying but still didn’t bother to look at Charlotte or wipe off the tear tracks where they coursed through the makeup on her cheekbones. “I know his room number. He lives in Lapham. They all live in Lapham! All the lacrosse players!” Now she looked at Charlotte. “And he’s drunk.” (Don’t you understand?) “That’s the only time they talk to me!” (Please understand!)

“I thought you said he was at the I.M.”

“He is! Where’dya think I just fucking came from?”

Charlotte pulled up in front of the I.M. At this hour there was almost no traffic. Beverly opened the door, wriggled and lurched out of her soft leather bucket seat. The high heel of her right shoe slipped off the running board, and she nearly pitched face forward onto the pavement, finally staggering to a stop like an ice-skater who has lost control. She was listing perilously to port.

“I’ll come in with you!” said Charlotte.

“No!” said Beverly, offended, like most drunks, by any insinuation that she needed someone to babysit her.

A row of downlighters illuminated the front entrance. Beverly’s blond hair, cerise shirt, and the waifish bones of her backside beneath the black pants shimmered as she passed beneath the lights and opened the big plate-glass door. A rush of drumbeats, electrified wails, and the voice of an adolescent curdling his vocal cords in an attempt to sound like a hardened country-slacker, veteran of a thousand jook houses…and the door closed. Charlotte kept the engine running. What am I doing here?…Two-thirty a.m….

By and by Beverly emerged, walking at a terrific pace even though weaving slightly, opened the door of the Denali, and began blubbering and sobbing again.

“He…wasn’t…there…” She broke there into two long, plaintive, tear-sodden syllables.

“That’s all right,” Charlotte said almost maternally. “Let’s get in, and let’s go back and get some sleep.”

“No! I gotta find him! He was talking to me before! I know where he lives. You gotta take me to Lapham. You gotta!”

Beverly said it with such monomaniacal belligerence, Charlotte was intimidated. She was afraid of what the inebriated girl would do if she said no. So she drove her over to Lapham College. Everybody knew Lapham, thanks to the huge baroque gargoyles along the edges of its parapets. Here in the middle of the night, the faint streetlights threw the gargoyles and the building’s architraves, compound arches, and stone facing into deep relief.

This time Charlotte insisted on going inside with Beverly. She wasn’t going to wait out here in the SUV for the rest of the night.

Obviously this wasn’t Beverly’s first visit. She headed immediately for a side entrance secured by heavy, ornate wrought-iron gates and an oak door studded with iron bolts in the medieval fashion. Without hesitation, she punched a numerical code into a lock panel to the right of the gates. A low hum sounded, and she opened the gates and the door. They entered a small Gothic vestibule; straight ahead, a narrow staircase; to the right, another stout wooden door; to the left, the door to the elevator. The elevator took forever to arrive. Beverly was swearing under her breath. At last, with much ancient rattling and clanking of the outer and inner doors, it appeared, and they ascended. When they reached the fourth floor, Beverly lurched out, still listing to port. As she staggered down a corridor, she managed to do a regular tattoo on the floor with her high heels. The noise reverberated between hard-plastered yellow-ochre walls. Halfway down, she stopped—then flung herself upon a door and began hammering it with her fists. The door was so thick, this produced nothing more than muffled thumps, whereupon she started crying again and screaming, “Harrison! I know you’re in there! Harrison!” A couple of doors opened down the way; boys’ heads poked out, saw it was only some drunk girl, and withdrew. From inside the room…nothing.

Charlotte pulled back a few steps to distance herself from her roommate. Beverly hung her head and cried some more. In a burst of fury, she took off her shoes and began hammering the door with the high heels. A terrific racket. The door opened, and a tall, lean youth appeared, clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts hanging on his hip bones, exposing the slabs of weight-room muscle on his shoulders, chest, arms, and abdomen. He had close-cropped curly brown hair and a lean face that at this moment looked fatigued and annoyed. He stared at Beverly and took a stance blocking the doorway.

Wearily, contemptuously: “What the fuck are you doing, Beverly?”

Beverly shrank into a little-girl voice. “You said you’d call me.”

Exasperated sigh. “I said if I could.”

“The fuck you said if I could!”

Male controlled rage: “Goddamn it, Beverly, I’m trying to sleep, and you’re fucking blitzed outta your mind. Go home.”

“Go…home,” said Beverly, breaking into a mournful sob and sinking, obviously on purpose, to her knees and then to all fours. “Go…home…”

Charlotte stepped forward to try to put an end to the spectacle.

The all but naked lacrosse player noticed her for the first time. “You with her?” He said it rather crossly.

“Yes.” Quickly adding, “I’m trying to get her to come back to the room.”

Still stern: “Good.” Then he took a second look at Charlotte, who at a glance appeared to be wearing nothing but a pajama top.

Beverly was on all fours, whimpering.

“You’re her roommate?” He beckoned Charlotte closer and said in a very low voice, “Your roommate’s got an issue. You think you can get her outta here?”

“I think so.”

The athlete crossed his arms over his bare chest and tightened his abdominals, causing the boxer shorts to drop still lower. He gave Charlotte a second look. “You know, I could swear you and I’ve met someplace.”

“Maybe,” said Charlotte with a slight smile. “But I don’t think so.”

“Well, you and me, we got to figure it out—we got to get her some—you know—help in the long term.”

Beverly was still on her hands and knees, her head lowered, beginning to hit the high notes of a sob.

“We?” said Charlotte.

Same low voice: “Yeah…you’re her roommate. I’m her friend. I tell you what. You doing anything Saturday afternoon?”

“No…”

“You can come see me at the tailgate.”

Charlotte stared at him for a moment. He had an ever so slight smile. He wasn’t even looking at Beverly. “I don’t think so,” said Charlotte. She wondered what a tailgate was.

The athlete shrugged. “Aw…come on…” He gave her a blip of a wink, and grinned. “I couldn’t stand it if both roommates mean-mugged me. That’s where I’ll be, anyhow.” He gave her a certain smile, the smile of the coconspirator. Then he went back inside his room and shut the door.

Beverly remained on the floor on all fours. She had settled into the forlorn mode and didn’t want to be moved. It took Charlotte a good five minutes to roust her up and onto her feet again and maneuver her back to the car.

When they returned to their room in Edgerton, Beverly was on another crying jag, with lyrics such as, “Why did he think he had to lie to me?”

Charlotte put an arm around her shoulders to steady her. With a wail, Beverly broke free, teetered precariously on her high heels, and pitched face forward onto her bed. In no time her muffled sobs gave way to a low snore. She still had all her clothes on. Charlotte started to remove the high-heeled shoes, then decided not to do anything that might wake her up.

She turned off the lights, put her pajama pants back on, and slipped into bed. She lay there thinking about the lacrosse player, Harrison…He was very good-looking, very well built…What exactly was he saying to her?…But pretty soon she fell asleep.

She woke up in the dark in a stupefied haze. Click click, high heels. She was vaguely aware that Beverly had gotten up off the bed and was heading for the door, but she no longer cared. Even after she heard the jingle of car keys, she rationalized that Beverly was just going across the hall to the bathroom.

Well, she had tried, she had tried. She had done all she could…

When she next woke up, the first thing she noticed was the light coming in between the bottoms of the shades and the windowsills. It was alarmingly bright. My French class!

The little windup clock by the bed: 10:35! Forgot to set it! The class was already over! Couldn’t happen! A scalding feeling at the base of her skull…The long night wasted babysitting Beverly…Beverly—not in her bed—hadn’t touched it since she last staggered out. Must have finally sobbed, whined, wheedled her way back into the bed of her lacrosse player. Slut! Her crawling, drooling, sobbing, slobbering slut of a roommate had done this to her. And into the adrenal panic over heedlessly, pointlessly cutting a class came an ashy resentment.

Charlotte got out of bed and walked toward the windows. She was so groggy. She got down on her knees before she raised the shade about a foot. Brilliant sunlight. Gothic Dupont rose up almighty.

On a walkway out in the middle of the courtyard, near the statue of Charles Dupont, a girl was teetering along on high heels. From up here, five floors above, Charlotte was looking down at a disheveled rick of straight, flat streaked-blond hair on a head hung over toward the ground…the bony processes of her breastbone were showing from the way she had left her cerise shirt unbuttoned way down…a pair of tight black pants—then the sway and staccato of the gait, click teeter click teeter click teeter. Oh God…Her heart misfired—a premature ventricular contraction—Beverly. It couldn’t have been more obvious that she was wearing clothes from last night and was just now returning home, still intoxicated.

From a window across the way a boy yelled out, “You’re money, baby, and you don’t even know it!”

Laughter from another window somewhere.

Beverly started walking faster—clickteeterclickteeterclickteeterclickteeterclickteeterclickteeter—and broke into a run for the entryway to Edgerton, sprinting on the pointed toes of her shoes. She had gone no more than a few yards when one of her high heels struck the walkway. She pitched forward, fell, rolled over the walkway’s border of green-and-white liriope and onto the lawn, where she wound up on her back. She put a forearm up in front of her face to shield her eyes from the sun. Not a sound from the windows now. She rolled over onto her abdomen and struggled up into a crawling position. Her pumps were still on. One high heel had almost completely torn away from the sole and hung at a crippled angle. On all fours now, she lifted one leg and tried to kick the pump off. No luck. A couple of students down in the courtyard just stood there, absorbed in the spectacle. After a clumsy struggle Beverly managed to stand upright. She looked about in an abstract, unseeing way and began limping the rest of the way to Edgerton, one heel high, one heel dragging lengthwise on the walkway.

Charlotte pulled the shade down and stood up. She was torn by competing emotions: sympathy for the weary and heavy-laden, revulsion at what was revolting, guilt over feeling more revolted than sympathetic at the sight of a drunken slut on her Walk of Shame. She had heard the term. Now she was witnessing it. A twinge of sympathy…a twinge of guilt…a surge of revulsion. She caught the wave and rode it for all it was worth. She got dressed even faster than she had before her mission of mercy in the middle of the night. She had babysat this…bitch…enough for one day. Her roommate was on her own now, the Sodom-bottom rotten Groton…whatever…

Charlotte gathered up some books and notes and hurried down the five flights of fire stairs to avoid having to deal with her. Halfway down, she began to relax. But the French class! She panicked all over again. Never before in her whole life had she ever just plain-long missed a class.

“Why is it your fault? I’ll show you why the fuck why,” said Jojo. He could feel the muscles in the front of his neck contracting tight as wires, he hit the why so hard. He was genuinely angry, but he wanted to look insanely angry, just to see Adam cower and squirm with fear, see him surrender his very ass in submission.

He stabbed the offending word on the offending page with his forefinger. “See that? Ma lly-dro-it. I mean shit, Adam, first he gets sarcastic because I can’t pronounce it, and then he’s straight-out making me because I don’t know exactly what it means. I know what it means, but when some asshole’s got a gun at your head saying ‘define the motherfucker’—whattaya trying to do to me? I’d never use a fucking word like that! Ma lly-dro-it…I can’t even pronounce it. Shit! He made me pronounce the fucker. How do I know how to pronounce the fucking word!”

“Maladroit,” said Adam. “It’s not that unusual a word.”

Jojo eyed him with loathing. The little nerd had a way of sounding mousy and know-it-all at the same time. “Okay, what’s it mean? Lemme hear you define it. The bastard was always telling me to ‘define it.’”

“It means like ‘clumsy’ or ‘awkward.’”

“Then why the fuck didn’t you write ‘clumsy’? I mean, shit, Adam.”

The mouse said in its little voice, “I thought it went well with meddling. ‘Maladroit meddling.’”

“Yeah, you think. But you know damned well that fancy shit’s not me. I don’t think that way.” Sardonically: “Subtle strategy and mal—that’s another thing. He’d take a word I know, a word I know how to use, like subtle, and then he’d like put a gun at my head and say, ‘Define it!’ I know the fucking word, but if somebody tells you like point-blank define it—what would you say? Lemme hear you just straight-out define it.”

“It means like ‘cunning’ or ‘crafty’ or ‘with a nice touch.’” A mousy voice and then an infuriating shrug, as if to say you have to be pretty stupid not to know that. Jojo could have strangled him.

“Well, I don’t care. You fucked me over, Adam, you fucked me over big time. Did you get some sick satisfaction out of getting me in trouble? This guy’s a prick! If I’m lucky, I just get an F and fail the course, and I can’t play next semester, which means the whole season, and if I’m unlucky, the prick tries to get me thrown out of school. Great fucking options. You…totally screwed me, dipshit!”

Pleading—Jojo took a morbid, useless satisfaction in the plea in his little tutor’s voice—Adam said, “Jojo, come on—you gotta back up. I mean, do you remember what time it was when you called me to write that paper? It was almost midnight! And you had a ten-page paper to hand in at ten o’clock! And that wasn’t a paper where you could just go to a textbook or go online or get some Cliffs Notes!” He went on—pleading, pleading, to describe his grueling all-nighter in Jojo’s behalf. “I was lucky to get the words down at all, Jojo! There was no way I could go back and—you know”—the little bastard was obviously ransacking his brain for a euphemism—“go back over it and translate it into like another…idiom.”

For an instant Jojo wondered if “idiom” had anything to do with “idiot,” but he had to admit, although he didn’t feel like doing so out loud, that Adam had a point. That had been pretty bad…He’d been embarrassed to even call the poor sonofabitch so late. His anger began to diminish.

More pleading, whining: “You didn’t even come over to the library with me, Jojo. You stayed here with Mike and played video games.”

The anger spiked back up. “What the fuck did it matter what I did!”

“I don’t know why you’re so angry, Jojo. I mean, come on, didn’t you at least read it over before you handed it in?”

“Who had the fucking time to do that?”

“Jojo, I slipped it under your door about eight-thirty. How could you not have time?”

Jojo felt his whole frame go slack. He clasped his hands in front of him and lowered his head. He looked away from Adam. “Aw, shit…” Then he turned back toward him. “Okay, I’m sorry, Adam. It wasn’t your fault…But I’m still fucked. Quat is one of those pricks who’s so anti-athlete—I don’t know how the fuck I even got steered into that fucking course. Nothing would give him more pleasure than kicking my student-athlete ass out of the fucking school.” Jojo looked away again and now, feeling a bit guilty about how he had been yelling at his tutor, suddenly realized something. “You know, this guy’s vicious. He’s the kind that would come looking for you, too.”

Adam practically flinched with shock. The blood drained out of his face.

“Me?”

“He’s the type, that’s all I can tell you. He knows I didn’t write it. So he’s gonna say ‘Who?’ you know? Don’t worry, I’m not admitting any body did. But if he decides to get really shitty and start asking around and all that shit…”

“Well, I didn’t actually write it for you, Jojo…”

“Hah. In fact, that’s what you actually did do.” He smiled, but it was a smile of fellow feeling. “Don’t worry, you didn’t even help me, okay? I wrote it all myself, I got those words out of some book, all right?”

Adam was biting his lower lip. “If worse comes to worst—maybe I helped you smooth out some rough edges. What about that?”

“Awww, don’t get worked up. If worse comes to worse, Coach’ll take care of it.” Everything had gotten turned around. Now he felt like he had to be Adam’s therapist or camp counselor.

“You think he can?”

Or mommy. The poor little omega male was looking at him in the most frightened way.

“Well, sure he can. But I shouldn’t have even mentioned it. It’s not gonna come to that. I’m gonna hang tough. The guy can’t prove a god-damned thing. At least it wasn’t downloaded from the Internet. They can check that shit with computers now. Treyshawn got in trouble last year…or sort of…” He laughed. “Treyshawn can’t get in trouble around here. If it comes to that, the fucking president goes first, not Treyshawn the Tower Fucking Diggs.” Big grin.

Adam tried to smile, too, but he was too shaken up. “Okay. Okay.” He looked away with his eyebrows contorted, obviously thinking, thinking, thinking. Then he turned back with an urgent expression. “Look. Here’s what we have to do in the meantime. In fact, why don’t we do it right now. We go over the paper together, word by word. The thing to do is, you get to know every word, every idea, every bit of history in the damned thing. Then, if anybody asks you anything—you were just rattled when Quat first brought it up. I say let’s get started.”

Adam’s expression was so nerve-wracked, Jojo couldn’t help saying, “I can’t do that now.”

“Why not?”

“I got to make a booty call.”

“Jojo!”

“I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding.” His eyes wandered. He was stricken with remorse. “There’s no reason something like this shoulda ever happened. Shit…I can do better than this. I’m not a fucking moron…”