I Am Charlotte Simmons

26. How Was It?

Like a fool—and she knew it—Charlotte glanced back at the Suburban just before she reached the archway tunnel into Little Yard. She knew it wouldn’t happen, but somehow it had to happen—he would be standing beside the driver-seat’s door, looking across the roof of the Suburban, shouting, “Hey! Yo! Char! Come here!” Instead, what she saw was Gloria, risen from the back row, where she had lain motionless and soundless for the entire trip—staring at her. Right at her. Her nose was practically up against the window. Her dark hair was a big, messy wreath around her face. Her eye sockets were a pair of mascara sinkholes. She didn’t smile, wave good-bye, or betray any other sentiment. No, Gloria was…studying little Charlotte Simmons, still clutching her canvas boat bag…a specimen of…what? The Suburban started pulling away just as Charlotte saw Gloria turn her head toward the front seat. She was grinning and saying something…about what?—and then the Suburban was gone…But Charlotte already knew, didn’t she…

By the time Charlotte took her first few steps into the tunnel, she had an ache in her throat, the ache a girl gets after a long period of trying to hold back tears. Rejection and dismay turned into an all-enveloping fear of imminent doom. She who had departed soaring, she thought, in social ascension, she who knew how to handle herself, she who had been so aloof from girls who just lay down and gave it up, she who had announced that she had Hoyt Thorpe trained like a dog—Charlotte Simmons had returned. Oh, yes, she, Charlotte Simmons, the girl of the hour. What was she going to tell everybody? Above all, Beverly—of the boarding school elite she professed to have only contempt for—who had warned her not to go off on an out-of-town fraternity formal with Hoyt Thorpe, of all frat boys on God’s earth…I am not a good liar, thought Charlotte. I am not even a half-decent actress. In our house nobody ever showed you how to deceive. Momma—but I can’t let myself think about you right now, Momma.

Momma!—Before she had even made it through the archway tunnel, the ache in her throat became so severe that she truly didn’t know if she could make it all the way back up to the room without bursting into tears. If Beverly was in the room—she’d die.

She approached the courtyard with such apprehension that she could actually hear her heart beating whenever she opened her mouth to take a deep breath. It made a rasping sound from down deep, as if the wall of her heart were scraping against the underside of her sternum with every beat. Thank God…practically nobody around, just a few people on a crosswalk…over there…She wanted very badly to run to the door of Edgerton—but someone might look down and wonder what’s wrong with her. Inside, she didn’t take the elevator, because everybody took the elevator. She walked up four flights, opened the fire door—

The Trolls…What were they doing at this end of the hall? It was as if some sadistic god really had created them specifically to make Charlotte Simmons suffer. Why? Why else would they be here now? A sunny Sunday afternoon—why had the Trolls set up their gauntlet…for this moment? At the less-traveled end of the hallway? She had never seen so many of them…eight? nine? ten Trolls? Don’t even look at them. Act as if they—do—not—exist. But once again she felt powerless…against the strange little shrimpy Maddy and those huge E.T. eyes of hers. “What’s the matter, the elevator’s not running again?” Charlotte got away with just shaking her head no—but there were so many more of them to go. The knees ahead began pulling up to the chests one by one, as if choreographed specifically to drive Charlotte Simmons mad. And once more, Helene said, “Hey, how was your weekend?”—and Charlotte couldn’t think of any way to answer that one with a gesture, either, and once more guilt convinced her autonomous nervous system that she had to respond to black girls—and she responded as brightly as she could—“Good!” Good came out at such a high, frantic pitch, she prayed to God the Trolls would take it as meaning it had been such an amazing weekend, she was ecstatic—or would they divine the truth and realize it was the first flash of a flash flood of tears?—which nothing could hold back now. Sure enough, Maddy again, from the rear: “Anything wrong?”

She barely managed to get to the door, duck inside, close it—take one look about—no Beverly!—thank you, God!—and dive onto her bed and put the pillow over her head—to muffle the sound—and give way to sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs racking racking racking racking racking racking convulsive sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs with a polyester down pillow muffling her head. Far from disliking the pillow, she wished it were bigger, big enough to enclose her whole body, muffle her existence at Dupont University, where there was nothing left for her. How could she possibly face all those girls she had so proudly lorded her virginity over—had so proudly shocked with her contempt for Dupont’s easy virtue—had bragged to about her ability to control guys and keep them at bay, most specifically a guy named Hoyt Thorpe? What had she done? How could she have allowed herself to do it? She was unclean, she had let herself be used in the filthiest way, she was a ratty hotel washrag, a cum dumpster. That was what Charlotte Simmons was, a filthy cum rag that had been tossed onto the floor of a hotel bathroom with the rest of the slop. Here she was, trying to hide from herself under a pillow, from her Diesel jeans, on which she had spent one fourth of her money for the semester, and her red T-shirt, which she had thought looked so cool and now seemed so juvenile and tacky…And that wasn’t the end of it, was it. This was Bettina’s T-shirt, and those were Mimi’s dress and heels in that pathetic boat bag…and she would have to return those things, tomorrow at the very latest, and there was no way she could face either one of them and proceed to lie about what had taken place. They would want a minute-by-minute description of the formal—and they were not to be denied. She might be able to lie to Beverly, but she would become such a nervous wreck doing it, Beverly would know she was lying.

Hoyt…hah. She said the hah to herself with such force, it popped out of her mouth in the form of a rueful sigh. Right now, at this moment, Hoyt was probably smoking pot with Julian and Vance and some other brothers of “the best fucking fraternity at Dupont,” mellowing his way through his hangover, listening to Dave Matthews or O.A.R., mellowing mellowing mellowing the afternoon away while she lay here with a pillow around her head and the Trolls whispering and sniggering about her on the other side of the wall. Oh…let them whisper and snigger all they want. The best she could hope for from them was that they would maintain their delusion that she considered herself too cool to talk to them. She wasn’t about to confide in them and give them some inkling of what had taken place over the past twenty-four hours, the past twenty-four hours of debasement and humiliation, of floundering in muck and slime. Every time she closed her eyes, she flashed back to that fitful sleep…in which she was lying there on a hotel bed…while the rest of them were playing drinking games, talking about her, talking about her body—about her old-fashioned hillbilly beaver—about knocking the dust off her. That was what her losing her virginity in such a squalid way meant to them: a few chuckles about knocking the dust off a musty up-country beaver, a little stray that somehow had wandered down from the hills.

She took the pillow off her head and rolled over onto her back. Doing so must have raised dust from the pillow, because the sun was coming into the room in such a way that she could see the particles suspended in the air above her, stuttering and jittering every which way in the light—and she flashed back to the day Channing and the others invaded the yard for the sole purpose of humiliating her and showing the world their contempt for her fine airs…and she had lain down on the bed in her little slot of a room…watching dust particles dance in a shaft of afternoon sunlight and thinking of how impossible life would now be in Sparta—now that the whole county knew about Daddy threatening to castrate Channing if he so much as laid a finger on his perfect little girl again. And oh God the memory of how she had been revived by the sight, on television, of the most-talked-about politician in American, the governor of California, possibly the next President of the United States, giving the commencement address at this place that was to be her salvation, Dupont University, the most magnificent setting in which the great man could address the nation last spring, a Gothic tower soaring behind him, a pageant spread out before him, a field of mauve and gold robes—a rich mauve that had entered the language as “Dupont mauve”—the flags of forty-eight nations represented by the graduates, heraldic banners representing God knew how many mysteries of Christendom a thousand years ago, kept alive on the looms of the twenty-first century because they went so well with the compound arches and rib-rife vaulted ceilings, the random Chaucerian casement windowpane etchings of ancient Gothic buildings erected en masse in the 1920s. This great eminence, who had so stirred and girded her loins—her loins!—was known at Dupont as the ridiculous, fat-flanked cottontop stooge of a fellationic farce known as the Night of the Skull Fuck, starring a drunk frat boy named Hoyt Thorpe, with Master Vance Phipps of the Phipps Phippses in a supporting role…

Charlotte got up—it made her dizzy—could her body still be drunk?—trying not to see what she couldn’t help but see out the window, which was the highest-soaring of Dupont’s many soaring tributes to the glory of God, the library tower, and went over to Beverly’s side of the room—what did “Beverly’s side of the room” matter any longer?—and rifled through her heap of CDs until she found the Ben Harper CD and brazenly lifted the lid of Beverly’s CD player—what did “brazen” mean any longer?—and flipped to song number 3, “Another Lonely Day,” and sank back onto her own bed and listened to Ben Harper’s sentimental young voice sing about how the whole thing wouldn’t have worked out anyway and how all that’s left is just another lonely day. She couldn’t help it…she couldn’t keep her face from scrunching up or the tears from bursting forth from her eyes, from her aching throat, from the deepest reaches of her lungs, her solar plexus, her convulsively contracting abdomen. She put the pillow over her head again so the Trolls couldn’t hear, but not so forcefully that she herself couldn’t hear the slow, sad ballad of the inevitability of loneliness. Her entire nervous system was depressed by her hangover, in any event, and it became a relief, bordering on joy—the feeling was so near the absolute limit—to give up, let all her defenses collapse, capitulate, wallow in the hopelessness of her ruined life at Dupont. On the other hand, she made sure the Trolls couldn’t hear her—

Would Hoyt ever call? She knew he wouldn’t. She knew he’d never speak to her again. He’d already dumped the cum rag into the slop. She could never set foot in the Saint Ray house again. Never again in the Saint Ray house…What will Bettina say about that? It was ironic. Bettina was the one who had first led her there that night, which now seemed so very long ago. What would Mimi say? No doubt they had had conflicting emotions when they learned that Charlotte Simmons was going off on a formal with a senior, a very cool senior. It didn’t take much imagining…They were envious. But her ascension also gave them hope. She had seen it in their faces when the three of them met in this room and Beverly and Erica had barged in. They wanted to see her on that bridge, the bridge to the frat world, where sorority girls would be apprised of your presence at Dupont and cool guys would regard you as hot and hookupable and you would be invited wherever the cool and the hot and hookupable went to have their fun and display their status…

Charlotte Simmons wasn’t going to be invited anywhere. She had gambled. She had let her classes slide, she had let Adam and the Mutants and her dreams of a cénacle slide…and her promise to Miss Pennington, the one and only thing she had asked of her—yes, that, too—so sure had she become that Charlotte Simmons was about to ascend from clueless public school hillbilly girl hidden up-hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to the summit of female competition at the great Dupont. How foolish, how egotistical, how shallow her goal, how low her aim, how twisted her priorities—

O Hoyt! O Hoyt! She wanted that smirk again! She wanted him to press her against the back wall of an elevator again! She wanted him to want her! He would call her any moment now—

With that one, she realized just how crazy she had become. He would never call. The very idea would make him recoil. No, he wouldn’t even recoil. Recoiling presumes an emotion, and nothing about Charlotte Simmons would any longer rouse an emotion in Hoyt Thorpe.

As she lay there on her back, the flood tide rose again, and she could feel the tears spilling from the corners of her eyes and pooling inside the lids, and so she opened them—and the particles were no longer dancing in the air, or at least she could no longer see them. The light had dimmed. A cloud must have passed across the sun. She looked toward the window, and her eye hit on the library books stacked up on her desk—oh God she didn’t need this! She had a paper due in the morning in modern drama on Susan Sauer’s interpretation of the work of the performance artist Melanie Nethers—which was so convoluted and lit’ry and tortuously dull and lifeless…what little she had read of it…she would have to read every word of it from the beginning and staple every word into her brain—they were such floating little wisps of thought, those words. There was no way she could possibly concentrate on any such task. There was no sense even beginning. She’d have to get up tomorrow early and do it before class, and she knew that would never happen. There was no holding back the inevitable. What use was it?—what earthly use? Why struggle with the metaphysical idiocy of something Susan Sauer wrote?

She was so wretched, so completely ruined, the only possible course left was to stop resisting in this doomed struggle with misery. O how knotted her throat was! Not just sore but twisted into a knot! Surrender, Charlotte—even though she could tell that this crying jag would be different from all others, this jag would have its own head, this jag would rack and wrench her body and soul beyond all hope of relief through surrender—and here they came, the tears, scrunching the muscles of her lips, her chin, her neck, her brow, bursting through her optic chiasma to force their way out between her eyelids, flooding her nose, her entire rhinal cavity, in a stinging rage—

What was that!

She could swear she heard a girl’s voice syncopating in the sort of one-sided conversation you overhear during other people’s cell-phone calls—

Never was there a quicker-acting antidote for a crying jag. Off went the waterworks. Charlotte rolled toward the wall and pulled her knees up into the fetal position, feigning sleep, barely in time—

The door swung open and, “Ohmygod!…Yeah, totally—” Good and loud.

Charlotte could see every inch of her roommate in her mind’s eye, the very angle at which she canted her head into the cell phone, the way her eyes lolled, focusing on nothing, the cockeyed dip her new Takashi Muramoto bag took as it hung from the crook of her elbow, with all this stuff about to fall out of it—

“Yeah…yeah…yeah…like totally! I can’t wait to hear about it!” Beverly shrieked into the phone. “Where are you studying tonight?—wait, hold on a sec—Charlotte, you bitch! That’s my CD—ohmygod, sorry, babe, my roommate’s playing my fucking CDs now”—as she simultaneously yapped into the phone and went to the CD player and stopped Ben Harper and switched the CD to Britney Spears’s In the Zone—“Okay, yeah, going to the café tonight, definitely—oh, wait, he’ll be at the library? Maybe we should go there—ooooh, we can sit next to them! Awesome, okay, meet you at seven.”

Whereupon she clicked the phone shut and let her bones collapse on her swivel chair, by the sound of it.

“Hung over?” Beverly said in a hearty voice not to be denied.

“Yeah,” croaked Charlotte, as if Beverly had interrupted an afternoon hangover nap. She didn’t dare turn over and let Beverly see…

Beverly’s response to that was, “So—spill it!” She really barked it out. She wasn’t about to let her roommate hide behind this nap shit, as she would have no doubt put it.

Charlotte could hear Beverly making little breath sounds in time to Britney Spears. Britney Spears! No doubt Beverly’s head and shoulders were bobbing to the beat, too. Part of her was deep inside the music, half whispering, half singing, “Come on, Britney, lose control!” The rest of her was right here in the room with a real lungful: “I can’t hear you, Charlotte!”

“It was fun,” Charlotte said, extra-foggily.

“Fun? What else? What’d you do?” Under her breath: “Shake it, Britney, shag and roll…”

The groggy fog who faced the wall: “Do? We went to dinner and went dancing and stuff.”

“You must have stayed up all night! You sound like shit! You’re all curled up on the fucking bed in the middle of the afternoon with the sun shining—ohmygod, I can’t believe you! You! Of all people—hung over! My roomie! Got fucking ripped with Hoyt Thorpe! I mean where did little Miss Charlotte Library Stacks go? What were you doing all night, anyway?”

“I told you, Beverly.”

“You didn’t tell me anything! I want details. Come on! Ohmygod, I never thought I’d be fucking living vicariously through you! I mean, you have to tell me everything—I mean everything!”

“There’s nothing to tell. I’m so tired, really, I just have to take a nap.”

“Well, I mean, you shared a room, right?”

Awkward pause…Charlotte wanted to lie, but she couldn’t even imagine what the lie would be. She now realized that no Saint Ray, least of all Hoyt, would be caught dead providing a private room for a date. It wouldn’t be so much the cost as the…whipped, unmanly wussiness of it. Beverly would see right through that one.

So she gave in and said, “Yeah.”

“Welllllll…”

“There were other people in the room, too.”

“So?”

“So there were four of us in the room. It was like a…a…an encampment. So there’s nothing to tell.”

“Wow, an encampment. You mean nothing happened? You’re such a fucking prude!”

“I didn’t say that. But nothing really major or anything.”

“Ohhhhhhh! So something did happen!”

“Look, I don’t even remember. I got so drunk I can’t remember anything.”

“Ahhh, a blackout baby. Our Miss Charlotte! Who’d a fucking thought it! Don’t you realize that every blackout baby tries to cop out with this can’t-remember shit?”

“I’m not copping out. I can’t remember.”

“You’re not going to tell me, you little bitch.” Beverly giggled. “You’re not going to tell your own roommate? Come on!”

The fog, closing in thicker: “No…I just have to get some sleep; then I have to go write a paper. I’ll tell you another time.”

Silence. Long pause. Sarcastic sigh with much musical expelling of the breath between the teeth. Finally: “You know what I say to that, Roomie? That blows. Eccccchhhhh. Pardon me while I take my finger out of my throat.”

Beverly departed. She didn’t slam the door, she merely gave it a smart clack.

Charlotte lay there with her eyes closed, trying to dream up better evasions, smoother lies, credible lies, nimble lies, numbing lies, tranquilizing lies, and then she fell into the arms of the Sandman.

The telephone was ringing. It was dark! She felt disoriented. What time was it? It was dark outside and dark in here. No Beverly. The whole thing descended on her. Was it Hoyt? He’s apologizing! She knew inside that was—was—but she rolled off the bed and leaped for the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello-o-o-o-oh!” sang Bettina’s voice. “So-o-o-oh? How was it?”

“Oh, hi,” Charlotte said in a dead, toneless, obviously disengaged fashion.

“What’s wrong with you? If it was anybody but you, I’d say you sound hung over. Was it fun?”

“Yeah, it was fun.”

“You don’t exactly sound excited.”

“Well, I’m just so tired.”

“What happened?”

“You know, I just can’t talk about it right now. I’m in the middle of an English paper.”

“Oh, come on,” pleaded Bettina. “I’m calling from the library. I’m dying to know.”

“Seriously, I’m so late getting to this paper. I can’t talk to you now.”

“Okay. Fine. See you later, I guess.” Bettina hung up, obviously offended.

The phone rang several times that evening, but Charlotte didn’t answer it again. All she wanted to do was sleep and forget Dupont ever existed, or go home to Momma and Daddy and forget Dupont ever existed. Forget? Forget about forgetting in Sparta. The one and only thing everybody in the county would want to talk about would be Dupont. What grand lie could she dream up to explain away Charlotte Simmons’s dusty, scuffling, bungling hangdog retreat from the other side of the mountain, where great things had awaited…Charlotte Simmons’s return to Sparta and the three stoplights…Up her brain stem bubbled Lucien de Rubempre’s ignominious return to Angoulême from Paris on the outside baggage rack of a carriage, hidden beneath a heap of suitcases, carpetbags, and boxes in Lost Illusions…which in turn detonated a startling reminder of the paper she had to hand in tomorrow morning. Susan Sauer’s interpretation of Melanie Nethers…She didn’t agree with the stupid thing in the first place, but the seminar leader, a T.A., meaning not a real teacher but a graduate student, meaning her knowledge of pedagogy was nil—the T.A., the irritable Ms. Zuccotti, regarded Susan Sauer on Melanie Nethers as a piece of critical genius. She had gone so far as to hand out a pamphlet about Susan Sauer on Melanie Nethers. Charlotte had scanned it and sized it up immediately as metaphysical sentimentality multiplied by itself, and how was anybody supposed to derive the square root of metaphysical sentimentality taken to the second power and hidden behind a veil of cynicism?…The whole thing was a whiff of some old lady’s breath…She was damned if she would devote another second of her concentration to some old biddy’s gauzy exegesis of another old biddy’s gauzy exegesis that no one needed in order to understand that Melanie Nethers was a sick joke. So she sat down at her desk and took some lined loose-leaf notebook sheets and a pencil and wrote out a hasty, half-baked attack on both of them. Who was this Sauer idiot, anyway? And who was this ponderous old Renee Sammelband who wrote the pamphlet? When she finished, she picked up her three pages—she had never turned in a paper shorter than six or seven before—and read them over. She knew immediately that she had written something witless that gave every indication of having been slung together in a rush. But it was done. That was the main thing. In any case, it was the limit of her energy and patience. All she wanted right now was a little oblivion. Of course, she’d have to go over to the library before she crashed, to the computer cluster, and transcribe and print it out. But first she needed a break. She lay down again. In no time, the Sandman carried her back to the Land of Nod.

Some hours later—she had no idea how many—she was aware of Beverly returning to the room in the dark…aware, and that was all…This time she didn’t have to feign sleep, and Beverly didn’t contest the matter.

The next day, Monday, Charlotte couldn’t get out of bed. Her alarm clock sounded its grating buzz over and over again, and she kept hitting the snooze button. Beverly? Gone, thank God. What was the point of getting up? What was there to look forward to except a lot of uncomfortable questions from Bettina, assuming she would speak to her again, and Mimi, plus, sooner or later, the inevitable interrogation, inquisition, by Beverly, who had picked up the scent of blood. Between now and the beginning of Thanksgiving break—Friday after this-coming—she didn’t have a great many choices. In fact, it came down to one: hide in the library, do the schoolwork, and avoid everybody—

Ohmygod, it was already 9:50—and modern drama started at 10:00! Well—might as well just blow it off. For a moment, she was Self-destruction on a pedestal, smiling at Grief. But cutting a class and sleeping would only make her feel more depressed later on. She jumped out of bed. Her jeans were still on the floor where she had left them last night. Diesel…the jeans she just had to have…She couldn’t abide the sight of them. She pulled her wrinkled old print dress over her head, and over that a heavy old pale blue sweater her aunt Betty had knit for her ages ago, and put on her sandals. She didn’t even have time to brush her hair. She darted toward the door. Wait a minute—the paper. She wheeled about—damn!—she’d never gone to the library and typed it in and printed it out! She retrieved the three loose-leaf sheets from the desk. Once outside, she started to run—sprint—to the library. Damn! Couldn’t run in sandals! So she took them off and put them in her left hand. She had the sheets of paper in the other. Now she ran, she flew, across the courtyard, out onto the sidewalk, across the Great Yard toward the three-story-high majesty of the entrance to Dupont Memorial Library tower. Students laughed at the spectacle as she rushed past, distressed sheets of loose-leaf paper in one hand, a pair of sandals in the other, barefoot, hair wild. O-kaaaaaaaay…She came barreling into the library and sprinted to the computer cluster—sprinted across the grand lobby, beneath the great Gothic-beribbed dome, barefoot. She heard students laughing. A lot. The soulless carcass of Charlotte Simmons, her frantic bones, her pale, pale hide, her bare feet, were a scream, so far as Dupont was concerned.

By the time she finished furiously typing the pages into the computer and printing them out, sweat was running down her face from her temples and her forehead. She knew she must reek from the frenzy of it all. No time for a stapler. She sprinted as fast as she had ever run in her life to Dunston, where the class was, clutching the flapping printout pages in one hand and her sandals in the other. It was chillier out than she thought. She reached the classroom door almost twenty minutes late. She hastened to put the sandals back on, opened the door, and entered. Damn! The strap of the left sandal had twisted so that the sole was half on her foot and half off. But how could she stop now and correct it? So she came limping in, as if crippled. She was breathing with huge, audible heaves, and she shook spastically as a chill hit her. Sniggers all around. Her face was splotched with red and streaked with sweat, which continued to pop out on her forehead and stream downward. Her hair was mashed flat on one side, from sleeping on it, and shaggy as a patch of ragweed on the other. She had obviously thrown her clothes on with no other aim than to cover her body rapidly. The sweater turned out to have a particularly unfortunate stain that made it appear as if she had just dribbled something down the front. A big moth hole on the side made one wonder if she were wearing a bra, which she wasn’t. More sniggers. Her face was a picture of fear…of what everybody else in the room must surely think of her. Every inch of Ms. Charlotte Simmons gave off waves and waves of shiftlessness, incompetence, irresponsibility, sloth, flabby character, and the noxious funk of flesh abloom with heat, sweat, fear, and adrenaline. Then there was the…thing…the splayed-apart piece of paper she clutched…crumpled thanks to her fierce grip, wet from sweat. It looked like something the cat dragged in. Sniggers and more sniggers. Ms. Zuccotti broke off in the middle of a sentence and said nothing more until the embarrassment settled herself into a chair at the seminar table. The other twenty-five or -six of them had ample time to concentrate on the creature as it sat there sweating and heaving and gulping air. Ecce Charlotte Simmons!—she who was about to turn in a paper that was purposely, angrily calculated to offend every critical and aesthetic standard she knew Ms. Zuccotti to possess, and was whipped off in an archly juvenile display of cynicism unalloyed by wit, mellifluousness, or pertinent content. Down at the other end of the table, one boy was writing a note for the amusement of another, and the recipient glanced her way and then grinned at the note writer. Who was he? Charlotte was certain she had seen him once at the Saint Ray house. Monday morning—and he already knew!

At that moment the paranoia factory opened for business, tooled up for a day of capacity output.

Charlotte sat slumped over in her chair throughout the class, taking notes and then turning them into doodles and looking out the window, failing to laugh when the rest of the class laughed, because she hadn’t been listening, nodding off, jerking alert, like any other morning zombie, shivering occasionally. She was no longer hung over, but however inadvertently, she was accomplishing a pretty good impersonation of someone who had gotten wasted the night before…and this was Monday morning. So bleary was she with self-loathing and paranoia, the only positive thing she could think about was going over to Mr. Rayon and getting a cup of coffee. Fleetingly, since it wasn’t really an important thing, it occurred to her that she had never drunk coffee until coming to Dupont. Momma didn’t think children should drink coffee. Until she left for Dupont, she had been Momma’s good, good girl. That ran through her mind without irony or cynicism or regret. It was the way things had always been.

No sooner had she gotten in the coffee line at Mr. Rayon than she noticed, sitting way out in the cafeteria’s mob of tables, a senior named Lucy Page Tucker, who seemed to be—she was pretty far away, but she seemed to be staring at her. She was sitting with three other girls. “Everybody,” meaning a lot of girls from the sorority set, “knew” Lucy Page—who was from Boston but went by this Southern-style double first name—because she was president of one of the two hot sororities, Psi Phi, the Douche being the other. The Psi Phi girls were known as the Trekkies, after the old sci-fi TV series, Star Trek. Lucy Page was hard to miss, even from a distance like this. She was a big girl, with broad cheekbones, wide jaws, a curiously pointed chin, and a prodigious mane of blond hair that she combed straight back, which made her look like the lion in The Wizard of Oz. Charlotte looked away for a few seconds, then stealthily cut a glance at her. Lucy Page Tucker still seemed to be staring at her—even though she was now bent way over the table, as were the other three girls, their heads barely eighteen inches apart. Charlotte felt her heart revving up. She looked away and inched forward in the coffee line a yard or two before stealing another look. Thank God! Lucy Page was no longer staring her way. At that moment a brunette whose back was to Charlotte, sitting across from Lucy Page, waved to someone off to the side, and Charlotte caught her profile. Lightning struck Charlotte’s solar plexus. Gloria! Even at this distance Charlotte knew that face! How could I be such a fool! she thought. Showing up at Mr. Rayon’s like this! The very crossroads of the campus!

She abandoned the coffee line and hurried into the women’s bathroom and went into a cubicle. She locked the door and sat down on the toilet lid, breathing too hard…so stricken with fear that she had to lock herself in here—inhaling ammonia fumes that were battling it out with the egestive funk of the place. Ohmygod—Gloria!

For the rest of the day, Charlotte went from class to class in fear. She desperately wanted to know what Gloria had told Lucy Page and if Lucy Page would tell Erica and if Erica would tell Beverly. Every time she passed someone vaguely familiar on the campus, she wondered if they knew…and then the dimensions of what they might know would grow and grow into something even more vast. She wasn’t the first girl at Dupont to be summarily dumped, she assumed. But no girl in the history of Dupont or any other college had ever been dumped under circumstances like these. She had been dumped by a member of the hottest fraternity at Dupont—and not just “a member” but a demi-celebrity, hero of the Night of the Skull Fuck, the lionhearted boy who would stand up to any man—even an ox like Mac Bolka—the frat boy who was every frat boy’s definition of Cool, as handsome a boy as ever existed—O Hoyt! How could you!

She kept her head down, in hiding and in shame, as she walked across the Great Yard. Stealthily she scanned that tableau, the vast lawn, the majestic tower at one end, that vista known all over—the world?—as the very portrait of higher education’s highest aspirations in America, and she saw bobbing ponytails and swishing manes, and bottoms going this way and that way within jeans tight as skin and worn through to perfection, the better to reveal every cleft and declivity…Had any of them ever done what she had done? Had Hoyt maneuvered them to bed, too? But they had probably lost their virginity in private, not in front of an audience of meat-show strangers, long before it was her turn. Why him? Why did an utterly callous, affect-less male possessed by the Casanova syndrome have to be the one? Had she mocked God? Momma’s God? Had she called His wrath down upon herself? Life and the Soul had departed her body. She was a pillar of salt that hadn’t blown away yet.

When classes were over, at two-thirty, Charlotte hid in the DeLierre Museum of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Chinese and Japanese art over on the other side of Lapham—not much risk of running into anybody she knew in the DeLierre—until after dark—a little after four-thirty, now that it was December—before chancing a return to Little Yard to pick up books and notebooks and hide out in the library, become Miss Charlotte Library Stacks again. Beverly…she couldn’t face Beverly. Beverly would either let loose another barrage of questions—or she wouldn’t, meaning she had already heard about it all…as it blew from Gloria to Lucy Page to Erica…to the world. She could count on Beverly to add a few Sarc 3 or even Sarc 2 or 1 comments, just to let Charlotte know she knew.

She entered Edgerton with consummate stealth, removing the sandals once again lest they slap on the floor. She peeked into the lounge to see if Bettina or Mimi was in there. The coast was clear. There was the elevator. The door was open, and no one was on it. So she got on and took a chance instead of resorting to the stairway. She made it to the fifth floor without anyone seeing her. She walked down the hallway once more, toting her sandals, silent as an Indian. She slowed down to practically a tiptoe when she got near Bettina’s room…just in case Bettina was…lying in wait. As she padded past on the balls of her feet—“Charlotte.” Someone inside was using her name in conversation. She paused, opened her mouth to take a deep breath—and heard her own rasping heart again. They would hear her! It seemed so loud, she closed her lips and forced herself to breathe only through her nose.

“I mean, this is Charlotte we’re talking about.” It was Bettina’s voice.

“Who’d a thunk it!” A merry schadenfreudish voice, followed by giggles. That was Mimi.

“I can’t believe she slept with him!” said Bettina.

“Yeah,” said Mimi. “She’s always like such a goody-goody. All those little like…homilies, she gives us…That the right word?”

“She gives us shit, is what she gives us,” said Bettina. “She makes you feel like shit if you hook up with a guy—and we don’t even do that.”

“She thinks she’s so smart, but you have to be a fucking moron to sleep with fucking Hoyt Thorpe at a fucking frat-house formal,” said Mimi in the campus-wise, all-knowing, been-there manner she had.

“I know! He may be hot, but I mean, your fucking first time, and he’s the one?”

Mimi, laughing: “And the bed—holy shit, lotsa luck going to another Saint Ray formal.”

“Well, I mean, that wasn’t her fault,” said Bettina.

“Yeah, but you don’t bleed on the bed! You just don’t! And this girl Gloria—Gloria Barrone?—you know who I mean? She’s a Psi Phi? She saw it.”

“How did she see?”

“Hoyt showed her!”

“Wow, he’s an asshole. What a dick. Was it her period?”

“No. What I heard is—I heard that Hoyt told Gloria it was her first time, and he like totally didn’t know what to do. He like freaked out after.”

“What do you mean, freaked out?” said Bettina.

“I don’t know, I mean like he couldn’t deal with it. Why should he? I mean, it wasn’t like it was their wedding bed. It’s probably a little awkward to be some random girl’s fucking first time…at a frat formal!”

“That’s so awful. How did you find out?”

“My friend Sarah Rixey told me.”

“Sarah Rixey?—how did she know?”

“I don’t know. I think she said this girl Nicole told her. She’s a junior. I know they went to the same school in Massachusetts. I met her once.”

“And how did Nicole know?”

“She’s hooking up with this guy who’s a Saint Ray,” said Mimi. “I guess that’s how.”

“I still can’t believe Hoyt is such an asshole that he’d show Gloria Barrone, though. She’s like best friends with Lucy Page Tucker, who’s the president of Psi Phi.”

Charlotte had heard enough. She kept on walking…past her room. She couldn’t even deal with the remote chance that Beverly was in there. If a couple of freshmen as low down on the grapevine as Bettina and Mimi knew, then certainly Beverly, who seemed to be already wired into the sorority scene, would know. It was Monday evening, not even forty-eight hours…later…and who didn’t know! Her own friends were having a merry old time trashing her behind her back. Everyone knew! Hoyt had told two people, Gloria and Julian—and no doubt Vance, who no doubt told Crissy, who no doubt told Nicole as soon as they got together to tell war stories about the weekend—and now everybody she could possibly care about knew, and God knows how many others, as well, who might enjoy the incidental schadenfreude of pointing out the little hillbilly freshman from the mountains who “lost her pop-top” at a frat formal in a hotel.

How could he have told Gloria? Julian would have been bad enough, but Gloria? Was he utterly heartless, utterly cynical? Did he have a sadistically cruel streak? Was he so completely lacking in empathy for others—never mind sympathy—that he thought it was funny? She wanted to strangle him, kill him, obliterate him from the face of the earth. Yell at him…but in person, which meant she would at last see him again—look into his face. His hazel eyes, his smile, his cleft chin, his expression, which was not heartless at all but capable of such…love, and maybe if she had told him as soon as he invited her that she was a virgin, everything would have turned out differently, and he wouldn’t have freaked out—that must have been all that really happened—he just didn’t know, and the surprise freaked him out—yes, she had told him…just before, but by that time he was so aroused—after a certain point the male can’t restrain himself—and if he saw her, looked into her face again, he would sob an apology—O Hoyt!—

So caught up was she in this fantasy that she wasn’t aware of the Trolls just around the bend in the hallway until she was right on top of their ratty legs sticking out like a row of logs. She could scarcely believe it. Didn’t they ever move? Didn’t they have anything else to do? What were they, buzzards? The vile-looking, scrawny little Maddy turned her eyes up at Charlotte in the eerie way she had. Charlotte felt frustrated, but she steeled herself to the task of maintaining whatever cool she could. She smiled slightly, whispered “Hi,” and kept walking. Scrawny Maddy was already drawing her knees up to let her pass, when she piped up. “Hey, there.” She began giggling. “How you holding up?”

Another shock in the solar plexus—not so much the fact that the girl knew, which meant the whole bunch of them knew, as the fact that she dared to be so casually impudent about it.

“Fine,” Charlotte said curtly, as if to maintain the fiction that she still existed on a plane far above them. She continued on through the gauntlet, panicked over the possibility of other fish-eyed stares and impudent—

“You know you’re barefoot?” It was the big black girl, Helene. Giggles ran up and down the Trolls.

Charlotte rushed to the fire door and headed down the stairs toward—she had no idea where. Even the Trolls felt superior to her now! They didn’t talk to other freshmen who actually had lives. They only observed them, used them as gossip fodder, envied them, resented them, sought to tear them down like tarantulas—tarantulas. It registered on her that Miss Pennington had introduced her to the term in a moment as unpleasant as this one, although she couldn’t recall what it was. Maddy—that little limp-haired weasel-faced crone-in-embryo—even Maddy knew she had lost her virginity in the most public way—even Maddy was gloating over the fact that Charlotte Simmons and her aloof ego had gotten screwed over and plunged into the depths of campus loserdom.

She stopped at the next landing to put the sandals back on—they had dared to make fun of her bare feet! She was starting to sweat again. She was breathing in a rapid shallow fashion. She looked down the four flights of stairwell below. They were lit only by a single 22-watt circular fluorescent bulb at each landing. The walls were old-fashioned plaster, hard as rock, painted institutional green. The stair rail was some sort of molded metal painted black. When she tried to see all the way to the ground level, the stairwell became a narrow shaft full of tight right angles leading to a small terminal gloom.

It dawned on her that she had no idea what she was going to do when she reached the bottom…

Ordinarily, President Cutler received visitors not at his bombastic eight-foot-long desk, but at one of the office’s two furniture clusters. Over here was a bergère, two cabriole-legged armchairs, and an Oxford easy chair, all upholstered mauve morocco leather. Over there was the richest chestnut brown leather sofa you ever saw, a long coffee table, and chairs upholstered in cloth of assorted mauve-dominated designs—all resting on a vast custom-made tawny yellow rug with a repeat pattern of Dupont-mauve cougars, taken from the Dupont family coat of arms. The clusters provided important visitors with an intimate, personal setting—“intimate” as in inside the royal chambers and “personal” as in VIP. That, plus a festival of Gothic interior decor—windows within intricately compounded arches, a ceiling painted in elaborate medieval motifs, and so on—seemed to work wonders with prospective donors. Perversely, the breed appeared to be stimulated more poignantly in the lap of conspicuous consumption than in settings of ascetic self-denial.

But the President didn’t feel like getting intimate and personal with either of the two men he was looking at across his desk right now. They were the two worst extremists he had to deal with on the faculty, and their Weltanschauungs couldn’t have been more at odds. No, he preferred to have the immovable heft of his desk between him and them.

Where the two hotheads were seated, they were facing a painting on the wall behind the President, a famous larger-than-life full-length portrait of Charles Dupont in his riding outfit, his glossy black left boot in the stirrup shimmering with highlights as he prepares to mount his champion four-year-old, a glossy black stallion named Go to the Whip. Dupont’s stern face, broad shoulders, and mighty chest are twisted toward the viewer, as if someone has just been so foolish as to utter something impertinent. The artist, John Singer Sargent—it was his only known equestrian painting—had made the Founder’s riding crop oversize and placed it in his right hand at such an angle that he appears on the verge of whipping the offender across the mouth twice, forehand and then backhand.

But if either of the two extremists, Jerome Quat or Buster Roth, was intimidated, he hadn’t shown it yet.

Jerry Quat—a butterball clad in a tight sweater—V-necked with a white T-shirt showing in the V—was saying, “Yeah, but I don’t give a damn what the coordinate search showed, Fred! The fact remains, there is no way in the world that anabolic moron wrote that paper—and you know what, Fred? I’m not going to shut up about this until somebody”—pause, long enough to suggest that Somebody just might be the anabolic caveman sitting about three feet away from him, Buster Roth, uncharacteristically clad in a blazer and tie—“comes clean.”

Oh you little pisser, thought the President. Jerry Quat was ratcheting his impertinence up to the point where he would be forced to reprimand him or else lose face in front of Roth. Fortunately, he had already told Roth what to expect where Quat was concerned, which was free-floating resentment. But look at Roth. He’s clenching his teeth. At a certain point he’s going to explode over cracks like “anabolic moron.” That’s as much as accusing him of feeding his team steroids. Either of these hotheads was too much to have to deal with, and having both on his hands at the same time…how was he going to butter up Jerry Quat—whose life was one long, inflamed itch for revenge against the Buster Roths of this world—without detonating Buster Roth, who regarded the Jerry Quats of this campus as unsexed subversives out to sink “the program”?

Well, here goes: “Now, Jerry,” said the President, “I hope you realize that I don’t want you to shut up. I really mean that. One of your greatest contributions has been calling things by their right names, which makes it very hard to just finesse or bury the issues.” He smiled warmly. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this—I may be asking for more than I’m bargaining for—but I want you to keep on calling a”—he started to say “a spade a spade,” but that was not acceptable any longer, even though it was an old, old expression and had nothing to do with “spade” as a piece of vulgar slang for African American—“calling things as you see them. You’re an outstanding history scholar, Jerry, but right now that’s one of the most important things you can do—keep everybody’s eyes open and thinking clearly, as only Jerry Quat can do it.”

The President was relieved to see that Quat’s grim frown failed him just long enough for a smile of childish pleasure to flicker at the corners of his mouth. Just a flicker, of course; he immediately returned to looking every inch a bitter and obnoxious little shithead. Look at him…in his late fifties…him and his Lenin goatee, his shapeless, baggy, unpressed khaki pants and a grim gray sweater so tight it hugged every fold and flop of flab of his upper body, making his chest look like breasts lying on a swollen gut. Nothing under it but a T-shirt, the absence of a collar fully exposing his frog’s swell of a double chin…into which has settled a round face whose fat smoothness is interrupted by the bags under his eyes, a pair of age-narrowed lips, and gulleys running from each side of his nostrils down past his lips, almost down to his jawline…and the goatee…all of which is topped by a thinning stand of black hair turning scouring-pad gray, cut short with no part, like an undergraduate’s. What is this look, this getup, supposed to represent? His aloofness from the Neckties and Dark Blue Suits (such as the President was wearing) who still run the world? His solidarity with rebelling youth (if any)? Or just a simple eternal adolescent bohemian poke in the eye? A combination of all that, probably.

Oh, the President knew the type very well by now, being Jewish himself. Only a fool would ever talk about it, of course, but there was more than one type of “Jewish intellectual.” The President, like Jerry Quat, probably, was three generations down the line from a penniless young immigrant from Poland named Moiscz Kutilizhenski. Immigration changed his last name to Cutler, and life on the streets of New York changed his first name to Mo. Mo became an electrician, started out on his own in New York as Cutler Commercial Wiring, and flourished in the building boom following World War I. Under his son, Frederick, a City College of New York graduate, the firm became Cutler Electric, which grew so big during the building boom of the 1950s and 60s that Frederick began to mix easily—on a business-social level—with the old Protestant establishment, and he became a member of the Ethical Culture church, one of two churches of choice for Jews who decided to completely assimilate, the Unitarian Church being the other. Frederick named one of his four sons Frederick junior, which was a true gesture of assimilation, since no traditional Jew ever named a child after a living person. By now the Cutlers were so well off that he enjoyed the luxury of packing Fred junior off to Harvard to study the higher things, as certified in due course by the boy’s B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton. After a brief teaching stint at Princeton, he became a career diplomat, serving for years as first secretary to the American embassy in Paris. Fred junior’s son, Frederick Cutler III, B.A., Harvard, Ph.D., Dupont, had a sterling academic career as a Middle East historian and at this moment, sitting at this vast desk, was the president of Dupont.

The man sitting across from him, the butterball grotesquely squeezed into a dark gray sweater, was of another sort entirely, despite the fact that they were both Jewish and agreed on practically every public issue of the day. Both believed passionately in protecting minorities, particularly African Americans, as well as Jews. Both regarded Israel as the most important nation on earth, although neither was tempted to live there. Both instinctively sided with the underdog; police violence really got them steamed. Both were firm believers in diversity and multiculturalism in colleges. Both believed in abortion, not so much because they thought anyone they knew might want an abortion as because legalizing it helped put an exhausted and dysfunctional Christendom and its weird, hidebound religious restraints in their place. For the same reason, both believed in gay rights, women’s rights, trans-gender rights, fox, bear, wolf, swordfish, halibut, ozone, wetland, and hardwood rights, gun control, contemporary art, and the Democratic Party. Both were against hunting and, for that matter, woods, fields, mountain trails, rock climbing, sailing, fishing, and the outdoors in general, except for golf courses and the beach.

The difference, as the President saw it, was that Quat was a resentful petit bourgeois Jewish intellectual, as the Marxists used to say. Not that Frederick Cutler III had ever enunciated this insight to a living soul, other than his wife. He hadn’t lost his mind, after all. In the Cutler theory, the Jerome Quats of the academic world were born to parents in the middling strata of American society who told them from as far back as they could remember that life was a Manichaean battle—i.e., the forces of Light versus the forces of Dark, of “us” against the goyim, with white Christians, especially the Catholics and White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, being the most powerful and most treacherous. Every incoming Jerry Quat on the Dupont faculty immediately established the fact that despite the last name, Buster Roth was not Jewish. He was of German stock, stone German and stone Catholic. In Fred Cutler’s taboo theory, the parents of the Jerome Quat types had never reached the business and social elevation where non-Jews at that altitude very much wanted you in their orbit, and your self-interest and theirs became interdependent. In the eyes of Jerome Quat, whose father had been a mid-level civil servant in Cleveland or some such place, there could never be a true accommodation. The WASPs and Catholics could make all the protestations they wanted, but they would forever remain insensitive, powerful, treacherous, and by now genetically anti-Semitic. Or to put it another way, the Quats were the usual little people with limited vision. The Cutlers were men of the world.

Figuring he had lubricated little Jerry with enough praise and acknowledged his position as leader of the forces of Light at this great university, the President now cupped both hands and brought his palms within inches of one another and twisted them this way and that as if he were making an imaginary snowball and said, “At the same time, Jerry—”

“Don’t you start at-the-same-timing and but-on-the-

other-handing and still-neverthelessing me, Fred!”

The President couldn’t believe it. The little shitbird insisted on putting him right against the wall.

“You know, I know, and Mr. Roth here knows that Jojo”—uttered contemptuously—“Johanssen, whose SAT scores, if we had access to them, which we don’t”—he gave the President a sharp look—“and why not, Fred?—would no doubt prove to be lower than his hat size, assuming he knows what a hat is, other than an adjustable baseball cap, which he wears sideways—”

“That’s not true, Professor! You’re dead wrong about his SATs.”

Buster Roth couldn’t hold back any longer, and the President knew he had to jump in fast lest the whole meeting turn into a pissing match. Merely being called “Professor”—just that, Professor rather than Professor Quat or Mr. Quat—was enough to set Jerry Quat off, since Jerry would know that in the mouths of coaches and recruited athletes the title Professor, all by itself, carried the connotation of Pretentious Fool.

“Oh yeah?” Quat snapped. “Then why won’t anybody—”

“Mr. Quat! Mr. Roth!” said the President, “Please! Let’s remember one thing! Whatever any of us may think, Mr. Johanssen retains some basic rights here!”

He knew the word “rights” would get to Jerry Quat. To Jerry, rights would be the civic equivalent of angels. Sure enough, Quat shut up, and Buster Roth was shrewd enough to shut up, too, and let the President argue the case for Jojo’s “rights.” The President continued: “Now, I gather we all agree that Mr. Johanssen’s paper was suspiciously far above the rhetorical level of any other work he had submitted.”

“Rhetorical level?” said Jerry Quat. “He doesn’t even have a clue what the words mean!”

“All right, it looks suspicious in terms of vocabulary, too. But that is prima facie evidence, which presents us with a problem. No one has less tolerance for plagiarism than I do. No one is more of an absolutist when it comes to the penalties for plagiarism than I am. But the language of the judicial code is very clear on this point. Plagiarism must be proved by discovering the source of the material in question. Stan Weisman has done the best job he could, it seems to me.” He was careful to use the man’s name, which was Jewish, rather than his title, judicial officer. “He did a coordinate search of all the usual suspects, all the rogue Web sites that offer to provide students with papers. He did a coordinate search of every other paper submitted for that assignment, including those from three of Mr. Johanssen’s teammates. And he came up with nothing. He interrogated Mr. Johanssen, who denies receiving any help other than the books cited in his bibliography. He interrogated Mr. Johanssen’s tutor, a senior named Adam Gellin, who denied writing the paper or even assisting on it.”

“Adam Gellin?” said Jerry Quat. “Why do I know that name?”

“I believe he works for The Daily Wave,” said the President, who by now knew very well that he did.

“Well, I’ve seen the name somewhere.”

“Professor—”

Oh shit. Buster Roth was piping up again with his Professor.

“We’re very firm about that with the tutors. That’s the first thing we tell them. They’re there to help the student-athlete”—Quat’s lips and nostrils twisted sarcastically at the very term—“but they’re not there to do their work for them. Writing a paper for somebody—no way.” He shook his head and slashed the air with the edge of his hand, to emphasize the “no way.” “This is Adam Gellin’s third year working with student-athletes, as fine a young man as I ever met, and I never heard a him doing nothing that wasn’t strictly by the book. I talked to him myself after this thing came up, and he got mad at me for even suggesting—you know what I’m saying? I never saw him lose his temper before, but this?…No way!” He slashed the air again. “I know Adam—and Adam? They don’t come any more decent and honest than Adam Gellin…No way!” Another slash for good measure.

The President let out his breath. Bravo, Buster. He could have used a little help in the grammar and syntax department, but he had managed to be pretty convincing. This was all very tricky stuff for the President. Circumstances had forced him to become a temporary ally of Buster Roth. Roth had approached him and warned him—although not in so many words—that if Johanssen was forced out for even one semester, the scandal would hurt not merely “the program” but the entire university. It wasn’t that Buster was so concerned about losing Johanssen himself—he was gradually being replaced by a hot freshman named Congers, anyway—but such a turn of events would make “the program” look so sleazy and hypocritical. For years the university had built up and promoted its reputation of being a national power in football, basketball, ice hockey, and even minor sports—track and field, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, soccer, golf, squash—without compromising academic standards by so much as a millimeter. A case indicating that Dupont had tutors who wrote the athletes’ papers for them would explode all that in the public eye. It might, he had hinted in guarded terms, open up a whole can of worms. Where did the players’ new SUVs come from? What about this list of “friendly” courses? What about these rumors that four of the team’s players had SAT scores of under nine hundred? The President thought about that. For a start, it would knock Dupont from second, behind Princeton, in the U.S. News & World Report rankings down to…God knew where. U.S. News & World Report—what a stupid joke! Here is this third-rate news weekly, aimed at businessmen who don’t like to read, trying desperately to move up in the race but forever swallowing the dust of Time and Newsweek, and some character dreams up a circulation gimmick: Let’s rank the colleges. Let’s stir up a fuss. Pretty soon all of American higher education is jumping through hoops to meet the standards of the marketing department of a miserable, lowbrow magazine out of Washington, D.C.! Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Dupont—all jumped through the hoop at the crack of the U.S. News whip! Does U.S. News rate you according to how many of the applicants you offer places to actually enroll in your college and not another? Then let’s lock in as many as we can through early admissions contracts. Does U.S. News want to know your college’s SAT average? We’ll give it to them, but we will be “realistic” and not count “special cases”…such as athletes. Does U.S. News rate you according to your standing in the eyes of other college presidents? Then a scandal indicating that all our lofty pronouncements about the “student-athlete” at Dupont are not only a joke but a lie—well, anybody could write the rest of that story.

But there was no instructing the faculty to keep mum about such things and cooperate. You had to become a college president to realize how powerful the faculty could be when aroused. We are the university, was the attitude of the Dupont faculty. Consequently, they resented not only the vast amount of money that went to sports, they also resented the glory. Why should a collection of anabolic morons such as the Dupont basketball team, led by a man who goes by the ridiculous name of Buster, be idealized at one of the world’s greatest institutions of learning? The President had wondered about the same thing himself, for years; and when he was a young faculty member, he had been resentful and contemptuous the same way Jerry Quat was, although not with such bitterness. It wasn’t until he was promoted from chairman of the history department to provost of the university that he began to understand. Contrary to what most people believed—himself included in days gone by—big-time sports did not make money for the university, did not help to underwrite the academic departments, etc. National championship teams receiving big postseason television fees lost still more money, more than all the minor sports, baseball, tennis, squash, lacrosse, swimming, the lot put together. Big-time sports were a stupendous drag on the financial health of the university. In a practical sense, they were like sticking a .45-caliber revolver barrel in your mouth and pulling the trigger. Nor did alumni donations increase or decrease with the fortunes of the teams. It was something subtler and grander at the same time. Big-time sports created a glorious aura about everything the university did and in the long run increased everything sharply—prestige, alumni donations, receipts of every sort, as well as influence. But why? God only knew! These great athletes—Treyshawn Diggs, from a lower-middle-class black neighborhood in Huntsville, Alabama; Obie Cropsey, all-American quarterback, a redneck from rural Illinois—none of the athletes in the major sports resembled the vast majority of the real students, not intellectually, not socially, not temperamentally. Nor did the two groups mix at Dupont. The athletes were received with awe wherever they went, but few real students had anything to do with them personally, and vice versa. Part of it was that the other students thought the athletes existed up on a plane so far above them, they shouldn’t presume to intrude. And in truth, the Athletic Department saw to it that they spent so much of their day in mandatory physical training, mandatory practice, mandatory dining at training tables, mandatory study halls in the evening, and certain “suggested” “athlete-friendly” courses that their contact with real students would be minimal in any event. They were alien mercenaries paid in kind and in glory. So why would the real students, the alumni, the parents of prospective applicants, the world at large, care how our aliens performed against their aliens? Fred Cutler had no idea. He had puzzled over it for more than ten years now, and he had…no idea…But one thing he did know for sure: a winning coach like Buster Roth, Low Rent grammar and all, was…a demigod. He was a far bigger figure than President Frederick Cutler III or any Nobel Prize laureate on the faculty. He was known across the nation. He now had his own castle, the “Rotheneum.” Officially he, Frederick Cutler III, had authority over Roth. On paper, in the catalog, Buster Roth was on the faculty. But he also made more than two million dollars a year. Because of his private deals with sports equipment companies, his television product endorsements, lectures, and other public appearances, it was hard to determine how much with accuracy. The President’s salary was four hundred thousand a year, one fifth as much or perhaps less. And there you had it. He had the official power to oppose Roth at any juncture. But he could only do so gingerly, with his own job in his hands—because there was one thing he couldn’t do. He couldn’t fire him. Only the board of trustees could do that—and they could also fire the President.

Ironically, only someone much lower down the ladder—some faculty member with tenure—dared speak out, dared cause trouble. And who was the hothead, the firebrand, who did the most to inflame the entire faculty’s resentment of how the natural and rightful order of things had been turned upside down? That hothead, that sorehead, was the blob sitting right across the desk from President Frederick Cutler III.

“Jerry,” said the President, “there’s one thing that makes this case a little different, and I thought I’d run it by you. Stan Weisman”—I’ll keep that name front and center, he said to himself—“discovered an interesting thing. After Johanssen turned in his paper, but before the question of plagiarism came up, he seems to have undergone something of a conversion, as it were. He decided—or so he told his friends—to become serious about his academic work. He shifted out of a one-hundred-level survey course of modern French literature to a two-hundred-level course on the nineteenth-century French novel with Lucien Senigallia, where all teaching and discussions are in French. He shifted out of a one-hundred-level Philosophy of Sports course into a three-hundred-level course Nat Margolies teaches—the Age of Socrates, I believe it’s called. And Nat, as you may know, is pretty demanding and cuts no slack for anybody—any body.”

Buster Roth spoke up, looking at Jerry Quat. “Oh, I’ve never been prouder of any of my boys than I was when Jojo came to me and told me he wanted to take that course, the Age of Socrates.” Buster Roth smiled at the recollection and shook his head, as if to say that was really some turn of events. “I wanted to make sure he understood what he—the commitment he was making. I said, ‘Jojo, have you ever taken a three-hundred-level course before?’ He said he hadn’t, and so I said, ‘These are advanced and very serious classes. They can’t wait for you if you fall behind,’ and I’ll never forget what Jojo said. He said, ‘Coach, I know I’m taking a risk, but I feel like I’ve just been grinding out credits up to now. I’m willing to take a risk to get myself to a higher level. The way we look at the world today’—he said, or something like that—‘it all starts with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, so that’s where I want to start.’ And then he’s telling me about Pythagoras, I think it was, and how he was great in math but pretty backward in philosophical thought—I mean, I had no idea he was into all this stuff. I was really impressed, but it was more than that. I was proud of him. Here was the kind of young man you’re always looking for. Oh, I know people get excited over sports qua sports, the competition and all that—”

Qua? The President couldn’t believe it. Buster Roth was sitting here saying “sports qua sports”? He wondered if he’d planned it.

“—but I like to think of my role as an educator first and a basketball coach second. You know? I think it might a been Socrates himself who said, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ a sound mind in a sound body, and a lot of people forget—”

Oh shit, Buster, thought the President, you just blew it. Socrates, he don’t speaka the Latin. You just buried that beautiful qua of yours. And you didn’t have to translate mens sana in corpore sano for a Jerry Quat.

“—that that’s the ideal. There’s a beautiful synergy there, if we can only make it happen. And there’s a guy like Jojo, the kind a big, plainspoken guy people are gonna call a ‘dumb jock’—you know what I mean?—and he’s coming to me on his own to tell me he don’t wanna miss the chance he’s got to make that synergy work at a great university like Dupont.”

The President studied Jerry Quat to gauge his reaction to Buster Roth the Greco-Roman scholar. He expected the worst, but Quat was actually studying Roth. He didn’t look convinced—but neither did he have the typical Jerry Quat sarcastic look, turning his face away from the speaker and tilting his gaze upward as if bird-watching until the mindless boor shuts up. He was trying to decide—the President devoutly hoped—if there was more to this great side of beef with a Dupont-mauve blazer on than he had thought.

“I’ve never been prouder of one of our athletes in my life,” Buster Roth was saying. “This was all Jojo’s idea. It’s one thing to take chances on the court. Jojo is used to that. He’s a kid who’s used to doing the unexpected under pressure. But it’s another thing for a kid to take a chance in a thing that’s just as important where he don’t qualify as a star.”

The President was beginning to get nervous. The he don’ts were piling up. All it would take would be the notion that Buster was just blowing smoke up his tail.

“So how is our newborn scholar doing in the Big Risk?” said Quat.

Buster Roth and the President looked at each other for a moment. “I’ve checked with Mr. Margolies,” said Roth, “and he says Jojo’s struggling a bit, but he’s working hard and getting his assignments done, and he’s been taking part in class discussions and so on.”

The President jumped in and said, “I’ve talked to Herb myself, and that’s pretty much the same thing he told me. This is an unusual situation.”

“It’s not unusual,” snapped Jerry Quat, “and it’s not even a situation, if by situation you mean some state of affairs that is not easy to interpret and deal with. Unfortunately, it’s not ‘unusual’ for ‘student-athletes’”—pronounced affectless felons—“to engage in the most egregious cheating. Your Mr. Jojo is lazy, ignorant, and a simpleminded cheater. Let’s keep our eyes on that ball. What he has or hasn’t done for Herb Margolies couldn’t interest me less. I’ve looked your Jojo’s callous, contemptuous disregard for the core mission of this university in the face, and I don’t like what I’ve seen, and I don’t intend to put up—”

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. The President could see the Cutler-Roth strategy tanking right before his eyes.

“—with any such thing ever again.” The hotheaded little ball of fat, resentment, and revenge wasn’t addressing his tirade to Buster Roth, however—he didn’t dare look that force of nature in the eye—but to the President. “If Mr. Roth wants to deal with a bunch of seven-foot bab—uh—brainless athletes, that’s his business, but I think—”

The President was positive that Quat had been on the verge of saying “baboons.”

“—he has an obligation to do what he can to keep them out of courses where teachers are serious about—”

Buster Roth’s face had turned red. He leaned toward Jerry Quat, trying to get him to look him in the eye. “Now, you hold on! You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

“I don’t?” said Jerry Quat, although he still wasn’t looking straight at Buster Roth. “I’ve got four of your ‘student-athletes’ in my class, and they all sit together side by side like lengths of lumber. I call them the Four Monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, and Comprehend Nothing Whatsoever.”

A pissing match. The President had to step in and break this thing up. “You sure you want to say monkeys, Jerry?”

“What? Am I sure—” He halted.

The President looked on with some satisfaction as it dawned on the butterball that three of the four athletes he was referring to were black.

He began sputtering, “I didn’t mean it—I mean, it’s just an old expression—a cliché in a way—I mean it’s totally removed from—I mean, I retract that. It was just a manner of speaking…” He began backpedaling as fast as he could. “One of them, a Mr. Curtis Jones, does wear a baseball hat to class, on sideways, and when I—” He paused. His face turned redder than Buster Roth’s. He was boiling with anger again. He looked straight at Roth. “The bottom line is, I want your student-athletes out of my class, all four of them! I don’t intend to teach your fucking ‘Jojo boys’ ever again! They belong in fucking junior high school! Jesus Christ, you guys are such a fucking disgrace! I don’t want to have to fucking think about it again!”

He stood up abruptly, and the globs of fat on his body oozed this way and that beneath the sweater, and he glowered at Buster Roth and the President, both. “Nice chatting with you…about pediatrics.” With that, he turned his back on them and walked out of the room.

Speechless, the President and Buster Roth looked at one another. The President wondered idly why so many Jews of a certain age used the expression “Jesus Christ.” You never heard it from undergraduates anymore, Christian or Jewish.

Only Adam and Greg and the usual Jolt stains, empty pizza boxes, crumpled straw sleeves, and abandoned white plastic forks and spoons were to be seen in the office of the Wave. Adam was excited enough for a whole office-full.

“Now Thorpe calls me and says he’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want to run the Skull Fuck story after all. As if he’s running it.”

“What did you tell him?” said Greg.

“I said I’d tell you that. So I’ve told you—and fuck him. I didn’t say we wouldn’t run it. Don’t you see, Greg? Something’s up, and he’s scared all of a sudden, and the story’s hotter than ever.”

“Well…I don’t know,” said Greg. “This is still something that happended last spring…”

You don’t know? thought Adam. Or you’re still as scared shitless as he is?

Beverly had already left, and even with the door closed Charlotte could hear others on the floor yodeling cheery good-byes and rolling their wheelie suitcases down the hall as the great Thanksgiving exodus began. Thank God! Solitude! No one around to look cockeyed at Charlotte Simmons. Thank God she and Momma and Daddy had long ago agreed that the Thanksgiving break and the Christmas break were so close to each other this year—barely two weeks apart—that she shouldn’t take two trips and spend all that money.

It turned out there were quite a few other freshmen who had made the same decision. And thank God she didn’t know them. They all smiled at each other in a same-boat fashion as they ate their three meals a day in the gloomy Abbey. The Abbey drummed up a roast turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day for all the holiday orphans. For the next four days, all she had to worry about was Christmas. There was no way around that one.