I Am Charlotte Simmons

27. In the Dead of the Night

The last six miles up Route 21 are what makes a person realize just how high up in the mountains Sparta is. The old two-lane road winds and winds and remains so unremittingly steep the whole way, it makes even a passenger feel, in her gizzard, the car or the truck struggling struggling struggling to make it—any car, any truck. In a bus, particularly a full bus, it used to make Charlotte feel as if at any moment the clutch would snap and they would go careening backward down the mountain; but buses no longer go to Sparta, not because of the steep grade—although 21 can become impassable pretty quickly when it snows—but because of a grim slide in demand. Ever since the factories moved to Mexico, and the movie theater, the only one in all of Alleghany County, shut down, Sparta hadn’t been what one would call a prime destination, except for vacationers and tourists who loved the county’s beauty, which was pristine, undefiled by the hand of man.

On those last six miles up Route 21, on this particular December night, all was pristine. The first real snow of the season had just begun to fall, and the way the wind blew it—in a darkness made yet darker by the towering woods that came right up to the edge of the road and obscured most of the sky—the two-lane hand of man would suddenly vanish before the driver’s eyes as great skiffs of snow came rolling across it; and then it would reappear, and Daddy would keep hunching forward, squinting and muttering imprecations, since he knew the road would only disappear again. The old pickup was struggling struggling struggling, and once or twice it had skidded slightly on a curve. Daddy had become so single-minded he was no longer asking Charlotte, who was squeezed in next to him in the front seat, all sorts of questions about Dupont. Momma, who sat on her other side, had stopped talking, too. Momma was looking ahead as intently as Daddy, and she had begun shadow-braking the car with her right foot an instant before Daddy did it for real and then twisting her torso an instant before Daddy turned the wheel to navigate the next curve; and as Daddy switched from low beam to high beam and high beam to low beam to see if there was any angle of light that would help him define the road amid the skiffs and swirls of snow, she would hunch over and lean forward the same way he did, as if moving their heads closer to the road’s surface was actually going to help them see it better.

Only Buddy and Sam, jackknifed into the little excuse for a backseat, remained oblivious enough of the driving conditions to continue the ebullient family fusillade of questions about the awesome college their own sister had come back from on her Christmas break.

“Charlotte,” said Buddy, eleven years old last week, “What’s Treyshawn Diggs like?”

“I don’t know him,” said Charlotte. She said it flatly, tonelessly, even though she knew the least she should do was say, “I’m afraid I never have met him, Buddy,” and say it with a congenial lilt. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t manufacture any lilt.

“You don’t?” Both surprise and disappointment were in Buddy’s voice. “But you’ve met him.”

“No,” said Charlotte in the same dead voice, “I never have.”

“But you’ve seen him, I bet. What’s it look like, him being seven feet tall?”

Charlotte paused. She knew this performance was inexcusable, but she was so depressed that Self-destruction couldn’t come down off her pedestal, so enamored was she of Grief.

“I’ve never seen him, Buddy.”

“You’ve seen him play.” It was spoken like a plea.

“I’ve never seen him at all. It’s almost impossible to get a ticket for a game, and it costs a lot of money. I haven’t even seen him on television.”

Sam said, “How about André Walker? He’s really cool.” Sam was only eight, and he knew who André Walker was. It seemed so odd and sad somehow. “I’ve never seen him, either,” she said. She couldn’t have said it more lifelessly.

“How about Vernon Congers?” said Sam.

“Nope.”

A groan of disappointment in the backseat—Buddy’s. A slightly whining sigh, Sam’s.

After all other emotions have died, guilt survives. To her own surprise, Charlotte found herself saying, “I do know one of the players. Jojo Johanssen.”

“Who’s he?” said Sam.

“I think I heard of him,” said Buddy. “Which one is he?”

“He’s a forward, I think,” said Charlotte. “He’s white.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Buddy. “Dupont’s got this white guy. They were playing Cincinnati. Is he any good?”

“I guess,” said Charlotte.

“Is he big?” said Sam.

“Yeah, he’s very big,” said Charlotte. Poor Jojo, she thought. Even my little brothers know about Vernon Congers, and nobody knows about you. It was merely that, however, a thought. There was no emotion attached to it. It all seemed so pointless.

“How big?” said Sam, persevering.

“I don’t know.” She started to leave it at that, but guilt intervened. “When I stand next to him, he might as well be ten feet tall. That’s how big he is.”

“Wow,” said Sam.

More guilt. Jojo’s height was the only “colorful” detail about Dupont she had volunteered since she got off the bus in Galax. Galax was just over the state line, in Virginia. Eleven-thirty p.m. the bus had arrived, and all four of them, Momma, Daddy, Buddy, and Sam, had been there waiting for her, beaming smiles of joy—no, more than that, excitement!—that lit up the night. Our daughter—our sister—is home for the first time in four months from the legendary Dupont. Just imagine! Our little girl—our big sister—goes to Dupont! And here she is!

Charlotte had forced herself to smile, but she was aware that the smile didn’t involve the rest of her face. And God knows how her face must have looked. She hadn’t been able to sleep for two nights now. Maybe she should have gone to the Health Center. Maybe they would have put her in the hospital…Maybe God would have come to take her away in the night. She couldn’t imagine a better solution.

Daddy as well as Momma had immediately begun spraying her with questions about Dupont. Their blissful assumption that she would be as excited as they were to talk about it—that she would react with the same joy of triumph with which she had approached Dupont in August—struck her as naïve and irritating. How irritating, how childish it was of them to stand there with big smiles, displaying enthusiasm concerning something they knew absolutely nothing about. In other words (which she never said to herself), how uncool was that?

It made her extremely nervous, all these questions. How was Beverly? Were they getting along? What was living in the dorm like? They were so proud of her grades, even though they had just known she would set Dupont on fire. What courses did she like best? Then Buddy chimed in and asked her, teasingly, if she had a boyfriend. And Daddy said, teasingly, he wanted to hear the answer to that one.

Only Momma noticed that her little girl was deflecting the questions, saying she just didn’t know, even acting dumb, but Momma obviously wanted the weariness of the ten-hour trip to account for it. She wasn’t yet ready to consider the fact that her little genius might be moody or, as it happened, worse than moody.

The fact was, Charlotte had not minded the length and the grind of the trip at all. The trip had been the sort that people refer to as “endless.” The depressed person wants trips to be literally endless, because as long as she is in transit from one point to another, her worries, her despair, are removed from where they originated…and where they will inevitably resume. Under the circumstances, what could be better than being in a soft reclining chair in a spaceship with strangers, a spaceship in that it moves fast and makes you feel detached from earth (way up here in this chair) as you behold, from behind big sheets of thick plate glass so darkly tinted that no one outside can even see you, blissfully alien landscapes drifting by…Please, God, let it last forever—or else come take me away in the night.

In the here and now, in the struggling old pickup, Charlotte peered out at the snow, which now looked wild and demonic, lit up the way it was by the headlights. Maybe they would skid, turn over, plunge into the darkness over there on the left, down that nearly sheer incline, tumbling end over end until the old vehicle burst open and came apart. A crash—her consciousness departs, there is nihil; and ex nihilo, God comes and takes her away in the night.

Such plunges, such fatal wrecks, had occurred before on 21—but what would happen to Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam? No one would emerge unscathed from such a crash. She wasn’t so far gone as to wish anything to happen to their lives just to create an acceptable end to hers, one that would provide no satisfaction, no super-delicious schadenfreude for the Beverlys, the Glorias, the Mimis…and no frat-boy notoriety for…for…No, nothing must happen to Daddy and Momma, who loved her, loved her unquestioningly, Dupont or no Dupont, who would undoubtedly take her back into their bosoms, as unclean as she was. She tried to think of ways the wreck could occur so that God would come take only her away in the night.

Hours from now, when daylight came, it would be too late. Oh what a genius Charlotte Simmons is, but the little genius would not be nearly smart enough. How long would it take Momma to see clear through her and know that something fundamentally wrong had occurred—that her good girl had committed moral suicide? How long, Momma? Twenty minutes? Thirty? A whole hour? And what was she to say to Miss Pennington? That everything was fine? That she had never felt more vibrantly alive in her life—alive with the life of the mind?—and in that way allow her, the teacher who saw Charlotte Simmons as the justification for the entire forty years she had spent toiling at a country high school up in that Athens of the Blue Ridge Mountains called Sparta—allow her to have three and a half or four more weeks of illusions before little Justification’s grades for the fall semester come home in a letter to Momma and Daddy? They didn’t comprehend Rhodes scholarships and cénacles and matrices of ideas, much less Millennial Mutants. They didn’t know how nearly perfect your grade point average had to be to go to graduate school at any major university in America. But Miss Pennington would know about such things.

Daddy didn’t plunge off the road into the void. He didn’t even take as long as a depressed girl might have reasonably hoped for. In no time, there they were in the middle of Sparta, stopped at one of the three stoplights, the one where 21 crossed 18. The stoplight, which was suspended over the intersection, was rocking in the wind. The snow was really beginning to stick. There was nobody walking along the street, nobody anywhere on the street. There was the old redbrick courthouse, looking suitably ancient and mute in the darkness and the drifting snow. Could have been a movie about the early 1800s, except for the big, modern polished granite marker that had been erected on the Main Street side. They moved on…past the spot where she had jaywalked behind Regina because she didn’t have the fortitude to refuse to break the law…

“Recognize that?” said Momma, pointing to the right.

The snow was coming down so hard, it was hard to see it at first, but there it was, about two hundred feet from the road, on the upslope of the hill, looking as ghostly as the courthouse…the high school. Charlotte leaned forward, almost across Momma, and peered into the darkness and the snow. At first she felt nothing. There it was, that was all…There was the extension where the basketball court was, where the young woman who had held forth as valedictorian. There it was—it was just a building, a dark, dead building in the middle of a storm. The tears caught her unaware. They seemed to be pouring down from the sinuses beneath her cheekbones. Thank God she had a handkerchief. She stifled them by burying her head in it and feigning a coughing fit, and Daddy inadvertently helped by saying, “Look’t the motel.” Mo-tel. “All I see’s three automobiles.”

They were already beyond the town. The only lights now were the old pickup’s headlights reflecting off the snow, which was coming down in great gusts and spinning crazily before the dusky rusky forests.

“Well, good girl,” Momma sang out, “know where we’re at?”

Charlotte pretended to come awake with a start.

“Look familiar?” said Momma. “You been away for four whole months!”

Charlotte managed to croak out, “It’s good to be home, Momma,” whereupon she pressed her face against the shoulder of Momma’s rough work jacket so that Momma would just think she was being sweet and loving and not see the tears rolling down her cheeks.

She managed to hold herself together until they entered the house and went into the living room and Daddy clicked on the light…and there it was, the picnic table, only there was a nice, freshly pressed white tablecloth over it and an arrangement of pinecones, pine sprigs, and red holly berries in a little wicker basket in the middle of it. There were some light next-to-nothing bentwood chairs she hadn’t seen before. There was the Christmas tree, as usual. There were little holly wreaths, brilliant with the red berries—must have been six wreaths—hung about the room at eye level on the walls. That was something new. The floor had been waxed. Every square inch of the room was spick-and-span. Momma had done all this…for her. Daddy was already stoking the grate in the potbellied stove. Charlotte took a deep breath. The countrified odor of a room saturated over the years in coal fumes rushed in—suffused all of her, it felt like.

A burst of laughter and a strange bray of music—the TV set was on. On the screen—a man dressed in black with a pale, totally bald head shaped like a bullet clamped by big black earphones was standing, laughing at what must have been the funniest thing in the world and pressing both hands into some sort of electrified keyboard. The keyboard was making the braying sound. Buddy and Sam, of course; first things first; turn on the TV.

Daddy stood up from the potbellied stove and went over to the boys. “Hey, turn that off! It’s after midnight! This iddn’ TV time. It’s bedtime. The Sandman’s who you boys best be turning on.”

The Sandman…Charlotte couldn’t hold back any longer. She burst into tears, although quietly. Momma put an arm around her and said, “What’s wrong, little darling?”

Thank God, Daddy and Buddy and Sam were involved in the TV set and its imminent fate. Charlotte managed to stop crying, but she could tell her eyes were red, puffy, and bleary.

“It’s nothing, Momma. I’m just so tired. That bus ride…and I had to stay up so late studying all week…”

The TV set—off. Momma still had her arm around her, the good girl. Charlotte was ashamed to look at Daddy and her little brothers, because there was no hiding the fact that she had been crying.

Momma said, “She’s just tired.”

Jes tarred. It was all Charlotte could do to keep from crying again.

When she got into bed in her old room, that little five-foot-wide slot of a room, she lay there unable to sleep, which she knew would happen. Her mind was a machine turned up high, and it wouldn’t slow down. She kept thinking about the day, her trip back home, but not the way a calm person would, in terms of sequences in the flow of time or incidents. The whole day was like scenes on a stage—dark scenery, a forbidding backdrop for the…dreaded thing, which was closing in on her still—no exit, only the end, which was inevitable. When was Momma to learn that she was unclean, polluted beyond all redemption? When was Miss Pennington to learn that her special creation, the girl who was the glory of her career, anointed in her name to keep her eye on the future and create a glory that would light up the world—when was poor Miss Pennington to learn that her prize pupil had thrown away her future, wrecked it in four short months in the most sordid and juvenile way, besotted with a frat boy—a frat boy!—the epitome of all that is immoral, mindless, childish, cruel, irresponsible, affectless, and vile among American youth?

Perhaps she should tell everybody…everything…first thing in the morning and get it over with. But what would that change? These were not matters you “put behind you and moved on” from. She was no closer to knowing what to do than she had been at the bus stop in Galax.

The wind was howling now. Good. Please make this storm long and dark, dear Lord. If morning must come, let it be grim and gray. Let the snow pile deep and paralyze the world.

She lay there listening to the storm and trying not to feel her heartbeats, which she knew were too rapid again, and praying that the moaning and keening of the wind would put her to sleep at last. Would she ever be able to sleep again? Here in her old bed, the snug harbor…where Daddy used to get on his knees and lean over her and say, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secure—ahhh,” and she always fell asleep before he could complete the crooning three times, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy—”

She decided to chant it to herself. In a tiny, low voice she said, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secure—ahhh…Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secure—ahhh…Warm, toasty, cozy—”

She stopped and slid out from under the covers. It was freezing, but that was the least of her worries. She got on her knees beside the bed and closed her eyes and pressed her palms together and let her fingertips touch her chin. She said to herself in a very low voice:

“Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Bless Momma, Daddy, Buddy, and Sam and tell them, after—”

She paused. She wanted to get it right.

“—and after, dear Lord, you descend in flight

and take a soulless one away this night…”

Charlotte remained stricken with insomnia throughout the storm, which began to let up around three or four a.m. She would have never known she had slept at all except for the fact that she had a dream shortly before she woke up. She was in the City of God, and it was unpleasant. Beyond that she couldn’t retrieve a thing.

Daylight created a blazing frame around the shades—whereas she had prayed for, counted on, heavy gray skies…as a shield. She could hear children romping in the snow. She got out of bed and pulled the shade back. The snow was a blinding white sheet of light that ran into the woods. There were Buddy and Sam and little Mike Creesey from just down the road, him and Eli Mauck, all of them bundled up in puffy quilted jackets that made them look like four hand grenades, playing some sort of game that had them feinting this way and that on either side of a tarpaulin-covered hulk out back.

She wanted to stay in her bed forever; but with the sun up that high, it must be well into the morning, and the dread of Momma having to come back and pry her out of bed and thereby sense how depressed she was—that was even worse than her dread of facing the world. She forced herself to rise and get dressed…in the tapered jeans and cardigan sweater she had brought from home to Dupont and worn exactly once. She hadn’t dared come home with the Diesels—on which she had blown twenty-five percent of her allowance for the semester. All were incriminating evidence…of her self-degradation. Her mind was racing again. Her head felt like the ashes from the coal grate.

She went into the kitchen and found Momma, who seemed to be puzzling over a recipe. Please, Momma, don’t say a word. Just keep on doing what you’re doing. You’re not obliged to make any fuss over me whatsoever. Only a girl who has experienced it herself has any idea of how conversations pain girls who are depressed. She vowed to summon up the willpower to act like a normal girl home for Christmas—but could she even remember?

Momma looked up from her book and smiled ever so cheerily and said, “Well! She is arisen! Did you have a good sleep?”

“I did,”—dee-ud—said Charlotte, forcing a smile. “What time is it?”

“Oh…pert’ near ten-thirty. You slept nine and a half hours. Do you feel better?”

“Sure do,” said Charlotte. “I was so tired last night.” She slipped a little bit of down-home tarred into the word and then figured she’d establish a hedge against whatever might be…crushing…later on. “I still feel sort of…like woozy. I don’t know what the matter is. What are you fixing, Momma?”

“Remember once, when you were nine or ten—might a been your birthday—I been trying to recollect—and I fixed something I’d never fixed before—and you called it ‘mystery,’ and it was the first mixed vegetables you ever did like? You always wanted things plain—plain-long mashed potatoes, plain-long boiled snaps, and you hated things as had carrots in ’em, but you liked ‘mystery’? Well, we haven’t had mystery for a long time, but I thought we oughta have it tonight, you being home.”

“Tonight?” Charlotte just said it as a response. Whether they would have mystery tonight or not was not something her mind could tarry on.

“I didn’t tell you last night, you were so tired”—tarred—“but tonight—” Momma halted and broke out a big smile. “You notice something new in the living room last night? I don’t think you did.”

The conversation was already such a burden, so heavy, inexplicably heavy, such an invasion of her mind, but Charlotte soldiered on. “No, I don’t think I did, either—oh, wait a minute. You mean the holly wreaths?”

“I reckon they are new,” said Momma, “but I’m talking about something bigger’n holly wreaths.” Big, beaming smile again. “Come on!” She headed toward the living room. Charlotte followed.

The light reflecting from the field of snow across County Road 1709 was dazzling. It lit up the living room brighter than Charlotte remembered ever seeing it. The very air in the room seemed to be lit. It was magical…but in a terrifying way to a depressed girl who sought refuge in light dimmed, in the snuffing out of the light—as they called it in Momma’s Church of Christ’s Evangel—the light at the apex of every human soul.

“You see it yet?” said Momma. “It’s practically under your nose!”

Snapped back into the here and now, Charlotte concentrated on—what was practically under her nose…But of course! The chairs, eight of them, old bentwood like the ones they used to have at the little tables near the soda fountain in McColl’s drugstore, with wooden seats and the simplest sort of bent rods of wood as the backs—all of them newly sanded, oiled, stained, and polished, by the looks of them, and drawn up close to the picnic table in neat ranks, so that the backs almost touched the white tablecloth.

“The chairs?” said Charlotte. “They really were here last night?” A wisp of memory of chairs from last night…during that terrible moment of tears and agony.

“The chairs and what else?” said Momma. “What do the chairs go with?”

Charlotte studied the chairs again. “The chairs are right up against the top of the picnic table? You took those big old benches off?”

“Look at it real close.”

Charlotte lifted up the end of the white tablecloth—and there was no picnic table at all, but a real table. She looked at Momma in a wondering way. Momma’s smile was as happy as a smile could be. Charlotte pulled the cloth back farther. It was a very plain old table, with no carved ornamentation and made of loblolly woods at best, the kind of table they used to refer to as a kitchen table. It must have actually been a worktable, because there was a line of drawers with metal pulls beneath the top on both sides. But like the chairs, it had been restored to within an inch of its never-elegant life, arduously waxed and polished until a certain luster had been coaxed out of its close, bland grain.

“Where’d it come from, Momma?”

“Over’t the Paulsons’ in Roaring Gap.” She proceeded to recount, with considerable pride, how the Paulsons had wanted Daddy to take it to the dump, but he hauled it home and worked on that table for mighty near a week solid and took it all apart until the whole thing was in pieces and then put it back together until it was true and steady as a rock and got new pulls for the drawers—the ones on them when he got it were all rusty—and sanded and oiled and waxed and polished the whole thing until it was a new table.

“And don’t tell him I told you, but you know why he did it? Because his little girl was coming home from college. He knew what you must’ve thought about eating on that picnic table. He wanted to surprise you. Your daddy dud’n say a lot, but he sees a whole lot.”

“What happened to the picnic table?”

“It’s out back where it ought to be. They’re made for outdoors.”

Whereupon Momma led her back to the kitchen door and pointed out the covered hulk out in the snow. Buddy was chasing Mike around it, and Sam and Eli were laughing at them. “It’ll be real nice to have it out there in the spring.”

As soon as they returned to the living room and Charlotte laid eyes on the “new” table again, she began weeping, without even realizing it was going to happen. She forced a smile through the flowing tears and threw her arms around Momma’s neck and sobbed out, “Oh, Momma, Daddy’s such a…good…person…and you’re such a…good…person…and you all are…so…good to me…” She buried her face beneath Momma’s chin.

Momma evidently didn’t know what to say, because she just held her close for a bit. Finally she said, “There’s nothing to cry about, my little girl. I think maybe part of you’s still my little girl.”

“A whole lot of me is, Momma. That’s one thing I learned, and I had to go all the way to Pennsylvania to learn it.” Pennsylvania. For some reason she didn’t want to utter the name Dupont. “I don’t care about everyone else. I just don’t want to let you down.”

“How could you let me down? I can’t figure out what’s going through your head, my good girl. Ever since you got off that bus last night, I’ve been wondering.”

Well—would there ever be a better moment to tell her everything, to confess to everything and beg forgiveness? But what would that solve—forgiveness? Momma would never be able to call her “my good girl” again, never look at her as the same person again. Knowing it would mortify her, no matter how she found out, what were the proper words for the confession? Could she possibly look Momma in the face while she told her—and watch the face of her mother change before her very eyes as she realized what her good girl had become? But this was the moment—

—and how was she to seize it? “I’m fine, Momma.” She gulped back some tears. “It’s just this past week. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s been…awful, Momma. I’ve been under so much stress?” She regretted “stress.” She knew Momma would spot it right away for the trendy term it was. What was stress, when you got right down to it, but just plain weakness when it came to doing the right thing? “We had tests all week—and I never got half the sleep I needed—I’ve been lonesome, Momma. I never thought I’d get lonesome. Miss Pennington was always telling me how independent I am and how unique and everything. I’m not unique, Momma. I get lonesome like anybody else. I had to go all the way to Pennsylvania to realize how many folks I’ve always had around me here at home, folks who will do about anything to help me.”

Momma disengaged from the embrace, although she kept an arm around Charlotte’s waist. She smiled and gestured toward the table Daddy built. “Then you’re going to love tonight.”

“Tonight?” A shadow passed over Charlotte’s face, but Momma didn’t notice that.

“Tonight we’re going to get a chance to see just how good Daddy’s table really is. I—we’ve invited some folks over for supper, folks I know you’ll want to see—”

Horror at the thought: “You have?”

Momma didn’t pick up the horror, merely the surprise. “Just a few special folks…Miss Pennington…Laurie…Mr. Thoms and Mrs. Thoms. They’re all dying to hear about Dupont and all.”

“No, you can’t, Momma!” It just burst forth from her throat before she even considered how it might sound.

Momma looked at her, baffled.

“Not tonight, Momma! I just got home. I need a little time—” She couldn’t dream up what for.

“But you know you like them all. I invited them special.”

Charlotte realized that her reaction had revealed exactly what she wanted to hide. On the other hand, that didn’t relieve the pain of such a prospect at all. With a manufactured calm she said, “I know, Momma, but you never asked me or anything.”

“Well, darling, I’m real sorry. I was thinking it would be a nice surprise. Laurie? Miss Pennington? Mr. Thoms? You want to tell me why you’re so upset?”

“I’m not upset, Momma. The only thing is…” She couldn’t think up what the only thing was. She couldn’t dream up a serviceable lie. It occurred to her that never before had she had to dream up lies in this house, other than little white lies. On the other hand, deep down she realized that lying was not foreign to her nature. Anyone—or certainly she—who has been praised so highly so regularly and for so long keeps within her the means of patching up punctures on the road. “I guess I was surprised, that’s all.”

She knew she didn’t have it in her to ask Momma to call it off. But ohmygod, Laurie and Miss Pennington. She wasn’t actress enough to fool them even if there were nothing serious to fool them about.

How could she possibly get through it? The machine was racing again, punched up to maximum power with the heat on HIGH. It didn’t slow down even when it had stretches of nothing to do. It dug out and inflamed shortcomings that had been in a dormant state. At graduation Mr. Thoms had announced her as the winner of Alleghany High’s prizes for French, English, and creative writing. At supper tonight there would be nothing to indicate to him that she had kept any special interest in these fields at Dupont. She knew there had always been a self-centered side of her character that showed itself publicly as thoughtlessness in her treatment of others. After last night it was obvious that she should have brought Buddy and Sam some kind of souvenirs of Dupont for Christmas…T-shirts or, if they cost too much, photographs of Treyshawn Diggs and André Walker, any little thing—or for Momma and Daddy, for that matter, maybe Dupont coffee mugs or something…but had she? Ohhhh no; and there was no way to get them now. Instead, she’d have to get the boys the usual piece of junk from Kyte’s…which always looked like it came from Kyte’s.

Just give her time. There would be many more things she would root out to torture herself with. She was in that state.

All day she manufactured reasons why she shouldn’t leave the house—the snow…town would be a mess (of people she didn’t want to see…they would be ringing out like bells with questions about “Dupont”)…on a day like this she should just do some reading to prepare for finals…the finale…She should be on hand in case the angel decided to come during the day…She puzzled over what would look like an accident…If she stumbled and fell before a car or, better, a big high pickup barreling along 1709, fell in such a way that the driver himself wouldn’t even be able to tell that she “threw herself” in front of his vehicle…But nobody was barreling along 1709 today in a pickup truck or any other vehicle—1709 hadn’t been plowed yet, and even the biggest pickups were just inching along like everybody else.

Fortunately, Momma was so busy getting ready for the supper—she insisted on calling it supper, because having four people over for “dinner” sounded suspiciously like a party—that she didn’t pay all that much attention. When Charlotte told her she was studying for her final exams, it didn’t seem odd. The truth was, Charlotte couldn’t read in her present state. To a depressed girl, words on a page become irrelevant, impertinent, as do images on a screen. She had brought home a barely two-hundred-page book Mr. Starling had recommended, The Social Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, who was famous for studies of patients in whose brains the neural pathways connecting the two halves of the brain, the corpus callosum, had been severed. A month ago she had found Gazzaniga’s work fascinating.

Sitting on the “easy chair,” she opened the book at random. “Why is it the more a human (brain) knows, the faster it works, while the more an artifact (computer) knows the slower it works?” The sentence did not connect with her mind. She would find no reason to answer the question. What on earth did it matter whether the brain worked faster than the computer, or vice versa? Who in God’s name had the luxury of caring? How irrelevant it was! What did it have to do with her getting fucked—there! there you had it—getting her pop-top popped—by a known twisted serial sex offender, a callous frat boy who then broadcasts the delicious news to the entire Dupont University campus—and it fucking freaked him out because she was a virgin! In a delirium of juvenile boyfriend madness she had sacrificed everything—virginity, dignity, reputation, plus her ambitions, her mission, her promises and obligations to everyone who had stood by her, educated her, served as her mentor—and tonight she would have to look Miss Pennington in the eye.

She sought to slow down the passage of time by breaking the afternoon into half-hour segments. For the next half hour I have nothing to fear. No one will invade my life. I can do what I want, which is to lie back in this chair and do nothing, not even think. (Fat chance of that, of course. She knew the machine would not slow down for a moment, would not cool down even this much in the next half hour any more than it had in the last half hour.) I have the entire half hour, and after that, another one, but I’m not going to look ahead. Ahead, in due course, about four-thirty, the sun will go down, but I do not exist in the period from now to four-thirty. I live only in this half hour, which is entirely removed from the rest of time.

The boys—Buddy and Sam and their friends Mike Creesey, and Eli Mauck—came into the kitchen from outside, breathing hard, giggling, taunting each other—“Here’s the way you throw!” Sounded like Buddy.

“Buddy—” That was Momma.

“You throw that way your ownself, Pants on Fire Girl!”

“Buddy! You boys take your boots off before you come in the house. Look at you!”

“Awww…”

Buddy, Sam, Mike Creesey, Eli Mauck…the machine was racing so fast…racing so fast so fast so fast…

How could it be? The half-hour segment was already over, used, spent fruitlessly—and she was ten minutes into the next! There weren’t many left. By five o’clock, there might as well have been none. The guests were invited for “supper” at six, and in Alleghany County, people were on time.

Ordinary vanity disappears when a girl is depressed. In fact, for most girls, that is the only time after they reach puberty that that particular unnatural state is ever encountered—i.e., when they are severely depressed. The depressed girl wants only to disappear. The notion of “looking her best”—she doesn’t deserve to look her best. Looking her best is a mockery of what she really is. She put on the same old print dress she graduated in (and first went to the Saint Ray house in!), taking the precaution of letting the hem out, which brought it down practically to her knees.

Momma called out from the kitchen, “Charlotte! You about ready?”

“Yes, Momma!” It irritated Charlotte to have to report in for duty like that. For someone who didn’t give parties—merely had folks over for supper—Momma was awfully nervous. The rich smell of roast turkey was in the air…and mashed sweet potatoes whipped up with mashed carrots, plus white raisins, if Charlotte wasn’t mistaken—the wonderful “mystery” that had been the delight of her childhood—and the sharp odor of the vinegar that would be poured over chopped onions to put on the boiled snap beans…The smells brought back all the wonderful Thanksgivings and Christmases of her childhood, those moments of special excitement—which she now experienced all over again with the poisonous residue of nostalgia. How much more completely delusional could those peaks of childish well-being have been? What warning did the little genius have that her first stop beyond the olfactory heaven that Momma created would lead in a few frantic blinks straight to sheer rot, sheer animal rutting, to spiritual as well as physical debauchery, to the present moment, when she dared not show her shamed face to the world, not even to lifelong friends—especially to lifelong friends?

Momma said, “Now, Charlotte, I’m counting on you to remind me that Mr. Thoms’s wife is named Sarah, not Susan. I’m always about to call her Susan. Don’t see her very often.”

Momma was smiling, but Charlotte could see that she was nervous. She was insecure about having the Thomses over. There were no what you might call social classes in Alleghany County; there were just respectable people and people who weren’t respectable. Respectable people were churchgoing, devout, took education seriously even if they weren’t well educated themselves, didn’t go out drinking where people could see them drinking, were hardworking—assuming they could find work within a fifty-mile radius of Sparta—and were neighborly in a good old country way.

Nevertheless, within the ranks of the respectable, there were different levels of status, and wealth and position did not go unnoticed. Mr. Thoms had no wealth, or none that anybody knew of, but he had position. He was a good-natured man who always acted like Just Folks, and he had taken a real interest in Charlotte; but his wife, Sarah not Susan, was something of an unknown quantity. Neither was from hereabouts, but Mr. Thoms was from Charleston, West Virginia, and he fit right in. Both were college graduates with M.A. degrees. Mrs. Thoms was hired right away, as soon as Martin Marietta opened their plant. She was from Ohio or Illinois or one of those states and was considered a bit standoffish, or reserved, depending on how much it mattered to you. Charlotte would have bet anything that Mrs. Thoms’s presence was what Momma was nervous about.

Headlight beams swept over the two front windows and then slid to the side as a car pulled into the driveway.

“Somebody’s here,” Momma sang out cheerily…and began looking about the room as if giving it one last inspection. Cheerily, yes, but it wasn’t like Momma to simply say the obvious. Charlotte took it as another sign that Momma was nervous. But what was nervous compared to petrified, doomed? Who would it be? Please God, don’t let it be Laurie and Miss Pennington! Laurie was supposed to pick up Miss Pennington and drive her over. Let it be Mr. and Mrs. Thoms! They know less! Please, God, just one more segment, I beg of you, just fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes with only the Thomses to deal with! I beseech thee—for so little, for only fifteen minutes with those who are only mildly threatening, which is to say, ever-so-slightly more innocuous! Is that too much to ask?

Presently, a rap on the front door, where Daddy had rigged up a homemade knocker. Charlotte’s heart was kicking up again, beating far too fast. Daddy opened the door—

—the beaming face of Mr. Thoms (the way he smiled at her at graduation as she mounted the stage!). As he shook hands with Daddy, you could see the plaid liner of his raincoat, his navy blazer and necktie, his dark wool pants—the thought flashed through Charlotte’s mind: how unusual wool pants were—you could go for weeks at Dupont without laying eyes on a pair—and he backed up against the doorway to usher his wife in—very pretty she was, a brunette, beautiful in a way, a strong but perfectly formed nose, lips that seemed to be curved into a continual flirtatious smile, drowsy eyes, rather heavily made up for Sparta, but she had a chilly look about her, a lean, grim set to her jaws and the faint vertical line of an ever-incipient frown in her forehead. Her clothes were not at all unusual or fashionable, a plain slate-blue dress and a magenta cardigan sweater with a somewhat prissy line of pearl buttons down the front. Momma was greeting the Thomses with great animation.

“Well, hel-lo, Sarah!” she sang out. She obviously had been fixing that Sarah into her memory…to last.

Mrs. Thoms took a deep breath and quickly scanned the room. Charlotte was sure the funk of coal and gas fumes had shocked her and made her look about the poor little room in a judgmental fashion.

Charlotte had instinctively hung back. So Momma introduced Mrs. Thoms to Buddy and Sam first. The boys shook her hand and said “Yes, ma’am” to whatever it was she had asked them. Meantime, Momma was busy making a fuss over Mr. Thoms, who was too polite to take a deep breath and investigate the premises, even though he had never been here before, either.

“Oh, Land o’ Goshen, Mr. Thoms, you’re so nice to come!” She called him, whom she knew fairly well, Mr. Thoms, and her, whom she barely knew at all, Sarah. Charlotte started to try to figure that out—but for what earthly reason did it matter? All that mattered was—when would they leave?

Mrs. Thoms approached by herself. “Charlotte,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve seen you since graduation last spring. I never did get a chance to tell you what a wonderful speech you gave.”

Charlotte could feel herself blushing. It wasn’t from modesty in the face of praise. “Thank you, ma’am,” said Charlotte. Then she tensed and blushed, expecting the next words out of her mouth to be about Dupont.

“Right after your speech, I told Zach”—it seemed so strange, this Zach—Charlotte had a recollection that Mr. Thoms’s full name was Zachary M. Thoms, but it had never occurred to her that there might be people who called him Zach—“he ought to have a public speaking program at the high school. I think every student ought to be able to do what you did—maybe not as well, but they ought to not be afraid to. You didn’t even look at a note.”

Charlotte felt herself turning crimson all over again, not so much because of Modesty’s proper embarrassment as because she couldn’t think of any appropriate reply. Should she say thank you again? Somehow it didn’t fit. She just wanted this whole evening to be over.

Seeing Charlotte stuck, Mrs. Thoms filled the conversation vacuum. “Oh, I wanted to ask you, Charlotte. My brother married a girl from Suffield, Connecticut, and one of her sister’s daughter’s best friends—she met her when they both went to Saint Paul’s School in New Hampshire—you know Saint Paul’s?”

Charlotte hadn’t followed any of this genealogical excursion, but she did get the part about Saint Paul’s, and she said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, her friend goes to Dupont—I think she wanted to go to Dupont, too, but she ended up at Brown. I shouldn’t say ‘ended up,’ I guess—she’s a senior now, and she can’t say enough good things about Brown. Anyway, her friend is a senior at Dupont—”

This conversation, innocuous though it was, was already weighing down on Charlotte, already an immensely heavy burden for a depressed girl. The last thing in the world she wanted to chitchat about was somebody’s daughter at Brown’s former friend at Saint Paul’s who is now a senior at Dupont.

“—and she—I’m talking about my brother’s wife’s…sister’s…daughter’s friend”—she started laughing at herself—“What does that make her? If my brother’s wife is my sister-in-law, then what does that make her sister—also my sister-in-law?—or my sister-in-law once removed—” She laughed again. “I think I’ve been in the South too long! I can’t believe I actually said that, ‘brother’s wife’s sister’s daughter’s friend’—anyway, she’s a senior at Dupont and she says she knows you.”

“Knows me?” Charlotte was startled—frightened. Her amygdala had removed the safety and was primed in the fight-or-flight mode.

“That’s what she said. The girl’s name is Lucy Page Tucker.”

The blood began draining from Charlotte’s face. She stared at Mrs. Thoms with a ferocious intensity, looking for…even the slightest tip-off to—

“You know her?” said Mrs. Thoms.

“No! Not at all…” Charlotte realized that her voice was weak and shaky and terribly wary, but she had no control over it. “I mean, I think I like…know who she is. But I’ve never met her? Golly, I don’t think I’d know her if I saw her. And she says she knows me?”

I’m being too defensive! she thought. Now she’ll know she’s onto something! Charlotte’s brain was boiling, and the steam rose.

“That’s what my sister-in-law said. I just talked to her this afternoon. I got the impression that you and this girl were in the same crowd.”

Now Mrs. Thoms seemed to be studying her face for…any little giveaway. Charlotte knew she should be…cool…but it wasn’t in her.

“Oh, not at all!” she said. “I mean, I think she’s like…president of a sorority or something! I don’t even have any crowd. I’m just a freshman. I’m not even—” She didn’t try to complete the sentence. She shrugged.

“Well,” said Mrs. Thoms with a cheery smile, “maybe she’s considering you as a candidate!”

Was that smile fake…ironic? How much did she know? All of it? Gloria talking to Lucy Page at Mr. Rayon…the lioness…She wouldn’t forget that big face and its mane of blond hair in a thousand years.

“Oh, she wouldn’t be considering me. I’m just—I mean, nobody’s ever even heard of Sparta or Alleghany County or the Blue Ridge Mountains, most of them. They went to private schools? I mean, like…we’re completely different? I’d never join a sorority. I mean, I might as well like…join the…uh…uh…Afghanistan army or something—”

Mrs. Thoms laughed at that, but Charlotte didn’t even have it in her to laugh along with her. She hadn’t even meant it as funny. Nothing is funny to a depressed girl. She had to spit all of it out.

Even as she did so, Charlotte was aware that she was out of control, and she only hoped that all the question marks in her declarations had neutralized their—desperation. How much Mrs. Thoms knew, which also meant how much Mr. Thoms knew—boiling, boiling, boiling, boiling, Charlotte scanned Mrs. Thoms’s face square millimeter by square millimeter—

A drop in the noise level of the little room as the front door opened—

“Why, Miz Simmons”—gasp—“land’s sakes, it’s just real nice”—gasp—“to see you!”

The unmistakable good-hearted contralto of Miss Pennington. She and Momma had always remained Miss Pennington and Mrs. Simmons to each other, and more than once Charlotte had wondered if it was because of her. Charlotte could hardly believe it, but Miss Pennington went up and gave Momma a hug, and Momma hugged her, too. Charlotte knew intellectually that the very sight should fill her with happiness. The two most important women in her life had closed whatever gap there was between them—but ohmygod, think of the peril! What one knew, the other would know, too! And what Mrs. Thoms knew—they would soon know, too!

Behind Miss Pennington came Laurie. She immediately frightened Charlotte—because she looked so radiant—actually radiant it was, her complexion; actually winning it was, her smile; actually contagious, they were, her high spirits—Laurie lit up the room.

“Mrs. Simmons!” she said. “It’s been a month of Sundays!” Whereupon she gave Momma a big hug.

“Merry Christmas!” The jolly contralto of Miss Pennington as she shook Daddy’s hand and then put her other hand on top of Daddy’s hand, creating an affectionate sandwich.

Daddy was beaming over such a merry and sincere expression of fondness, and his eyes followed her as she embraced Mr. Thoms and then made a fuss over Buddy and Sam.

The boys had been smiling and dancing a little jig ever since she and Laurie came through the door.

“This is for you and the family!” said Laurie, hoisting her other hand, two fingers of which were looped through the neck handle of a half-gallon plastic jug of apple cider, non-fermented, one could be sure. There was a green-and-red plaid Christmas ribbon about the neck. “This is from Miss Pennington, too. Merry Christmas!”

Momma took the jug in both hands. “Well, I’ll be switched,” she said. “You all surely did bring this to the right house. Buddy and Sam are sort of partial to apple cider themselves!”

She looked at them. Buddy put on a comic grin, and Sam copied him, and everybody laughed.

“What do you say, boys? ‘Thank you, Miss Pennington, thank you, Laurie! And Merry Christmas to you!’”

Charlotte stood where she was, next to Mrs. Thoms. She was fully aware of what a marvelous Christmas moment this should have been…the family assembled round the potbellied stove…dear friends arriving on a snowy night bearing gifts…cheeriness so rich and thick you could cut it like fruit-cake…Laurie looking absolutely glorious, a girl in the prime of youthful joy, generosity, and love for the folks around her…and Charlotte Simmons, on her first trip home from the field of triumph—she goes to Dupont—in a state of panic over what somebody right here in the room knows. She wanted to rush forward and hug her beloved mentor, who had plucked her out of obscurity in the Lost Province and sent her off to the great world arena “where things happen.” She wanted to shriek “Laurie!” in unrestrained, girlish camaraderie upon seeing her best friend from high school—the one constant when she took her stand against Channing and Regina and all the rest of the Cool clique—and rush toward her and embrace her with the sheer uplifting joy that gladdens the heart of every grown-up looking on, because she knows she’s witnessing a bond of sisterhood that will last a lifetime, regardless of their fates in terms of wealth, the status of their husbands, or anything else. But Charlotte could barely force herself to put a civil smile on her face, and a rush toward anyone was out of the question.

Charlotte could see Momma coming about. “Where’s Charlotte?” she said. “Charlotte! Look who’s here! Oh, there you are! I can’t see for looking!”

From the expression on Momma’s face you could tell that she was just waiting for her daughter to come forward, rush headlong, and put on the show of affection the moment demanded. And so was everybody else. Charlotte made the gravest smile one could imagine—and she knew it—and could do nothing about it—and moved forward, away from Mrs. Thoms, ever so slowly. She wanted to move faster…con brio…but she couldn’t command her legs to do it. She could feel her smile growing steadily more feeble by the moment.

In the few seconds it took her to reach Miss Pennington, something must have happened to her poor feeble face, because she saw Miss Pennington’s big Christmas smile grow puzzled. She threw her arms around the big woman’s neck and said, “Oh, Miss Pennington, Merry Christmas.” The words were right, but the music was off, the notes, flattened by panic and something more, which was guilt.

Miss Pennington must have detected something herself, because this wasn’t the kind of homecoming embrace in which both parties rock this way and that before finally stepping back to make a beaming appraisal of one another. No, they parted pretty quickly, and Miss Pennington sounded as if she were speaking in some official capacity as she said, “Well, Merry Christmas to you, Charlotte. When did you arrive?”

Charlotte told her when she arrived and what a time they’d had driving up the mountain in the snowstorm. What on earth had the woman seen in her face? Then she turned to Laurie and tried hard to do better. “Laurie!”—and she held out her open arms.

“Why, it’s the Dupont girl!” said Laurie.

They hugged each other and even put their cheeks next to one another’s; but as hugs go, it felt like sheer protocol. Whatever it was about her expression—her manner—

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Thoms! Mrs. Thoms!” Laurie had already turned to the Thomses. Her ebullience had immediately returned. Her cheeks were rosy. Her smile was sunshine itself. Youth! Joy! Hope! Rude animal health! Beauty! Laurie wasn’t really beautiful, but her radiance made up for any flaw. What did it matter, the faintly puffy quality of the end of her nose? She was the girl—the confident, warm-spirited, buoyant, loving young woman—any parents would love to see coming home from college. Charlotte didn’t envy her, however, because envy was irrelevant. Envy was a luxury of those who still had hopes for the future. No, Laurie merely made Charlotte pity herself all the more. She forced her to see in the most graphic way all the qualities Charlotte Simmons no longer possessed. She no longer had the strength to pretend, either. Anything anybody said, any look anybody gave her—for that matter, the mere presence of anybody in this room—bore down on her with an abominable weight and made her anxious to be somewhere else. The entire planet now orbited menacingly around her deep worries. All else was irrelevant.

Momma wasn’t the sort who was given to having people stand around talking and drinking refreshments—not even unfermented cider or lemonade or branch water—before sitting down to have supper. Charlotte decided she was just going to have to find the strength to get through it. There would be some pretty good talkers at the table, Momma, Miss Pennington, Mr. Thoms, and, as she now realized, Laurie (who had gotten fucked, same way she had) and Mrs. Thoms wouldn’t be bad at it, if she had to guess. That left only her and Daddy. So she would just let all the talkers talk and talk and talk, and she would get through it by forcing a smile and nodding a lot, and if anybody asked her about something at Dupont, she would just turn it over to Laurie and ask her how that thing is at N.C. State.

She was stunned when Daddy—Daddy—said, “Charlotte, we’re gonna put you right”—riot—“here at the head a the table, so’s you can tell everybody”—everbuddy—“about Dupont. Everybody’s gonna be real interested”—innerested. He looked about at the Thomses, Miss Pennington. “Isn’t that right?” In’at riot?

Murmurs, burbles of confirmation, and Laurie’s “Like totally!”

Charlotte experienced a pain that wasn’t physical but might as well have been. A great pressure squeezed her head from either side and bore down on the top of her skull. There was no worse fate than the sentence Daddy had just meted out. In the same instant it struck her just how countrified Daddy’s speech really was, Momma’s, too—and just how collegiate Laurie’s had become: Laurie’s with all the like totallys and cools and awesomes and ohmygod s.

Charlotte blurted out, “No, Daddy!” She knew she should demur in a calm, somewhat light way, but she was long past wily levity. She was in pain. “Nobody wants to hear me go on about—school!” School. She avoided the name Dupont at all cost; too painful. “Laurie—please!—you sit here. I want to hear about N.C. State!”

Friendly protests all around, as if her reluctance was mere modesty. So she found herself sitting at the table on one of the drugstore bentwood chairs Daddy had brought back to life. The inquisitors stared at her down both sides of the table. On one side were Mr. Thoms, sitting closest to her, Laurie, and Momma—or rather, that’s where Momma would be sitting—right now she was in the kitchen—and on the other side were Miss Pennington, sitting closest, Mrs. Thoms, and Daddy. Mrs. Thoms!—she was Death, sitting there with a hypocritical smile on her face, waiting for the perfect moment in which to cut her down. And Miss Pennington, barely twenty-four inches away from her—Miss Pennington was…the Betrayed…a pending broken heart as big as the moon…in a word, guilt. The rest were merely eyewitnesses to the self-destruction of Charlotte Simmons. Merely? Two of them were Momma and Daddy, still ignorant of the truth, whom she had made the proudest parents in Alleghany County…before her hollow, sham character revealed itself…One was Mr. Thoms, the elder who had officially and sonorously proclaimed her to all of Alleghany County as the young woman who…and the other was the young woman who…had scarcely been noticed because Charlotte Simmons’s eminence had cast such a long, deep shadow—Laurie, the runner-up who had proved to be everything the illustrious Presidential Scholar wasn’t. She had taken her inevitable fucking and come back from it as a whole person who was a delight to have around, a young woman who…was ready to head forth, promising as the dawn, into a limitless future.

Thank God, Momma arrived in no time, bearing a tray with the aroma of a freshly roasted turkey, which she set before Daddy along with an old carving knife and fork and a sharpener. The aroma! A single look at the crisp but still moist skin covering the bird’s mighty breast, and even a person who had never seen such a thing before would know that here was perfection. Then came Daddy’s part, thank God, providing a further reprieve. Daddy stood up and started sharpening the knife on an old-fashioned sharpening rod. It made a rasping sound that brought Buddy and Sam right out of the kitchen to catch the show that Daddy was so very deft, so precise at, the way he first cut the skin that held the thighs and drumsticks tight against the carcass and then found precisely the crucial point where the thighbone joined the hip. He severed the joint with a single, seemingly silken strike, causing the thigh to fall away cleanly, and then he began carving the breast into slices as big and intact and yet as thin and even as you could possibly ask for. The boys were agog at the craftsmanship of it and couldn’t wait for the part where Daddy started on the other side of the breast, because he would always sharpen the knife on the rod again, and they loved to hear the rasping sound and see the way Daddy flourished the sharpening rod and the knife like a performer. Laurie said, “Bravo, Mr. Simmons!” and the others oohed and laughed and clapped, which made Daddy smile. Meantime, Momma brought out the “mystery,” which had a sweet, exotic aroma, and the boiled snap beans, which didn’t have much of an odor themselves, but the diced onions in vinegar that went over the snaps had a smell that was sharp and sweet at the same time, and then came the cranberry jelly that Momma made herself and the pickled peaches she always pickled herself late in the summer—and the aroma of the peaches was sublime, and their taste was “ambrosial,” which was a word Momma loved—and everybody was making a big fuss over Momma and her cooking.

No sooner had the applause for Momma as chef crested than Mrs. Thoms turned to Charlotte and said, “Charlotte, how is the cuisine at Dupont compared to this?”

Charlotte said, “It’s—it’s—” She was trying to think of the right word, le mot juste, but it wasn’t that at all. It was the pain it caused her to have to enter the conversation, to have to emerge from the shell she thought she had begun to create about herself. The words she sought were whatever would answer the question and shut it down and not suggest any follow-up. “It’s—there’s no comparison. Nothing compares to Momma’s cooking.” She smiled to try to show that she was keeping things light—and she herself could tell that somehow the smile flopped about, disconnected from lightheartedness or amusement.

Mrs. Thoms was not to be put off, however. “Oh, I can understand that. I’m sure nothing actually does compare to home cooking, not when it’s this good. I guess what I mean is, how would you rate the food in general at Dupont?”

“It’s not bad.”

Silence. Her response, or lack of one, had created an awkward silence.

“Just not bad?” said Mrs. Thoms, soldiering on.

Charlotte thought and thought, mainly about how toilsome it was to have to talk…to anybody about anything, especially anything to do with Dupont. Aloud she managed to say, “More or less.”

“More or less?” said Mrs. Thoms.

Silence. It was so bad that Charlotte realized she had to force herself to do something…anything. She finally managed to say, “I eat all my meals at the Abbey—the dining hall.”

She didn’t want to mention even the name of a building at Dupont. Everyone at the table wore a look that said, “And therefore?”

It was torture, this being forced to talk. “I mean, it’s mostly the same.”

Everyone looked baffled. With an agonized frown she said, “What about you, Laurie?”

“What about me what?” said Laurie.

“I don’t know…Do you eat all your meals in the same place?—I guess.”

Laurie gave her an ironic cross-eyed look of the sort that asks, “Are you trying to mess up my mind—or wot?” She drew a blank from Charlotte’s face. After a dreadful pause Laurie said, “Well, our dorm has its own cafeteria, but there are a lot of restaurants.”

“There must be a lot of restaurants around Dupont, too,” said Mrs. Thoms, looking at Charlotte.

“There are,” said Charlotte—it was so painful, forcing the words out—“but they aren’t included in my meal plan, not even the one in the middle of campus. I always eat in the dining hall.” Please! I don’t want to talk about Dupont!

Mrs. Thoms looked across the table at Laurie, Momma, and Mr. Thoms, and said, “Now, I think Charlotte’s getting around a lot more than she lets on. A sister of a sister-in-law of mine has a daughter who has a friend who goes to Dupont, a senior—as a matter of fact she’s the president of one of the big sororities—and she knows who Charlotte is. In fact she seems to know a lot more about Charlotte than Charlotte knows about her, and Charlotte’s a freshman.”

Charlotte saw Momma break into a smile, no doubt because this meant that her little genius had already established a presence on campus. A presence, all right—Mrs. Thoms was looking at her and smiling, too—but could it be with some sort of twisted Sarc 3 cruelty? Could it be that…Death was speaking? This woman was now going to tell it all…for the perverse joy of watching the insect squirm!

The reply came from the mouth of a panicked girl. “I don’t see how! I mean, I’ve never even met her. I’ve heard of her—she’s the president of her sorority and everything, but I don’t know her. I wouldn’t know her if she came walking in that door. There’s just no reason in the world why she would even know my name! I don’t have anything to do with her or any friends of hers or the kind of people who would—”

She stopped. Too late, she realized they were all looking at her in a funny way. Now they would all think there was…definitely something going on here, wouldn’t they? She had to say something that showed that this wasn’t important and didn’t disturb her. “She must have me mixed up with somebody else.”

Of course that didn’t help at all. Mrs. Thoms said with a chuckle, “Well, is there somebody else from Sparta, North Carolina, who’s a freshman at Dupont?”

Charlotte was speechless…and in greater panic. Why would Lucy Page ever mention Sparta? Because they had told her about this naïve hick freshman who kept snapping at people with her “Sparta—you never heard of it” put-down. And why would Mrs. Thoms say that? Because she knew the whole story and was set to torture her with it, drop by drop—in front of her family.

Charlotte looked at Mrs. Thoms in sheer fear. Consciously she realized that she should hate this woman who had come into her home for the perverse pleasure of humiliating her in front of her parents and her two little brothers, who were probably listening in from the kitchen. But Charlotte Simmons no longer had any right to take the moral high ground. She was too worthless to pass judgment on another person, no matter what she was doing.

The silence lengthened in a baffling way that made everybody at the table, the panicked one was sure, realize that they had all at once been confronted with some unspeakable state of affairs.

“I just don’t know,” Charlotte said finally. But why had she said it in such a timid little voice? So she added a smile—which made things still worse! What had she done but call yet more attention to her guilt?

She slogged on. Everybody was dying to hear all about the fabled Dupont, which to them obviously was Olympus, Parnassus, Shangri-la, and the peaks of Darién all rolled into one. What were the teachers like? “They’re fine,” said Charlotte. She wanted to leave it at that, but she saw six people staring at her with shortchanged looks on their faces. So she added, “…except for the T.A.s.” She immediately regretted the emendation. Who were they? What was wrong with them? “They’re graduate students. There’s nothing wrong with them. They just don’t know very much about the subjects.” Surely—there must be some brilliant teachers there? “There are,” said Charlotte, and that was the end of that. How did she find living in a coed dorm? “You sort of get used to it—” And that was the end of that. And the girls shared bathrooms with the boys? “You just sort of deal with it the best you can.” And that was the end of that—in her mind—but the grownups wouldn’t let it alone. Wasn’t it embarrassing sometimes? “Not a whole lot, as long as you keep your eyes on the tiles in the floor and the enamel in the basin and don’t look in the mirror and don’t listen to anything”—and that was as much as she cared to say about that. Did she see much of the athletes on campus? “No.” And that was that, except Momma reminded her that she had told Buddy and Sam that she knew a basketball star. “That’s true, I do know one, but I wouldn’t call him a star.” She left it at that—but who is he? What’s his name? “He’s called Jojo Johanssen.” What was he like? “He’s nice.” That was all, nice? “Well…he’s about as bright as the bottom of an old skillet.” She declined to elaborate. What was her roommate like? “She’s all right.” Just all right? “I hardly ever see her. We have different schedules.” Daddy put on a big grin and said that Buddy wanted to know if she had a boyfriend, but he never did hear the answer. Polite chuckling all around the table.

“Charlotte!” Laurie piped up. “Spill it!”

Bitterly, Charlotte saw Hoyt in her mind’s eye, then said, “No, I don’t.”

She said it deadpan, without humor, without regret, as if she’d been asked whether she had an electric blender in her room. Momma wanted to know where students went on dates. “Nobody goes out on a date, Momma. The girls go out in groups, and the boys go out in groups, and they hope they find somebody they like.”

Momma seemed appalled and wanted to know if Charlotte did that. “I did one time—I went out with some of my friends? But it was so stupid, I never did it again.”

Mrs. Thoms wanted to know what she did instead. By now she was feeling so despondent, so unworthy of human company, she said, “Nothing. I don’t go out. I’d rather read a book.” Saturday night—on the weekend—she didn’t go out at all? “No, I never go out.” Same disengaged poker face. Unconsciously she was beginning to enjoy misery and misanthropy, just the way you’d hear people in Alleghany County say, “Cousin Peggy? She’s enjoying poor health.”

Had she been going to the football and basketball games? Dupont was having a great year in sports. “I can’t go, because they charge too much money for the tickets? But I wouldn’t go if they gave them away, I don’t reckon. I don’t know why anybody gets excited. It’s got nothing to do with them—and it’s got nothing to do with me? It’s stupid, is what it is.”

What did she do for amusement? “Amusement? I guess I—I go jogging or I go to the gym and work out.” For amusement? “Well…to me it’s more amusing than all the stupid things other students do. They all act like they’re in the seventh grade or something, and all that matters is—” She broke the sentence off. She had been about to mention drinking, but she didn’t want to make Momma go ballistic. “Going around acting like idiots.”

Miss Pennington seemed concerned. “Now, Charlotte, surely…the academic side of things must be exciting.” She said it in the tones of an entreaty. She was all but begging for it to be so.

Charlotte suddenly felt guilty for letting Misery out for a romp. “That’s true, Miss Pennington. I have one class—” She started to talk about Mr. Starling’s, but she decided that she shouldn’t call attention to him in view of the catastrophic grade Momma and Daddy and, ultimately, Miss Pennington would soon lay eyes on. I have one class remained suspended in the air.

“A class in what?” Miss Pennington stared at her, still in an attitude of supplication.

“Neuroscience,” said Charlotte. Awkward silence—it was such…agony…making conversation. “I never thought it could be so interesting.” She realized that her face must not have looked as if she was interested in any thing. Another awkward silence. “My teacher, Mr. Starling, says the year 1000 was just forty sets of parents ago. He always puts it that way.”

Mrs. Thoms said, “Starling…Isn’t he the one who won a Nobel Prize?”

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” said Mrs. Thoms. “You were saying, ‘just forty sets of parents ago’?”

“That was what he said. Mr. Starling.” With that, Charlotte dropped the subject. She no longer wanted to talk about the “sets.” Her voice would sound as if every set weighed a ton and she was lugging them out one by one.

Silence. Ten or fifteen seconds of it seemed like an eternity.

Mrs. Thoms plunged into the vacuum. “But I’m curious. Why did he say that?”

“I don’t really know,” said Utter Loganimity on a monument, smiling at Grief.

Silence; a gruesome silence this time. But guilt intervened. Guilt wouldn’t allow her to remain that dead. “I’m guessing, but maybe he meant the year 1000 isn’t all that long ago, but the way human beings look at themselves—in the West, anyway—has totally changed?” Not only Miss Pennington but also Momma seemed preternaturally attentive to this revelation. Then it dawned…for the first time all evening, they were getting a little of the Great Dupont from her, something deep. Charlotte became hyperaware of all sounds in the here and now, the muffled, low-crunching combustion of the potbellied stove…Daddy chewing—he didn’t always keep his mouth closed…Buddy trying to order Sam around in the kitchen in a low voice, because if Momma heard it she’d set him straight and mean it…fwop fwop fwop fwop a car with a flat tire gimping along outside on 1709…a chunk of snow sliding off the roof…

Mr. Thoms said there was certainly a lot written about multiculturalism and diversity in colleges these days. How did they manifest themselves in everyday life at Dupont?

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “I just hear about them in speeches and things.”

Laurie piped up again. “At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall—all the African Americans are over there?…and all the Asians sit over’t these other tables?—except for the Koreans?—because they don’t get along with the Japanese, so they sit way over there? Everybody’s dispersed into their own little groups—and everybody’s told to distrust everybody else? Everybody’s told that everybody else is trying to screw them over—oops!”—Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertips over her lips—“I’m sorry!” She rolled eyes and smiled. “Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they’re only out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them—unless you’re white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they’re like totally right, because you really are racist and everything, even if you don’t know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own like turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them. Is it like that at Dupont?”

Laurie was looking at Charlotte. They all looked at Charlotte. Charlotte drew her breath in through her teeth with a sharp sigh, focused her eyes at Nowhere in the distance, as if contemplating the question, and then began nodding yes with a pensive frown. She was contemplating all right, but not Laurie’s question on her “dispersity” theory. No, she was thinking of the gusto with which Laurie delivered it, her high spirits concerning the human comedy that was college life, her youthful joy in adventure, her eagerness to impart what she was learning in the great outside world. In short, she had all the qualities they had hoped to see in Charlotte Simmons—the dour little taciturn mope now sitting at the head of the table.

She didn’t envy Laurie. Not at all; from the very beginning, she had hoped Laurie would assume the role she had been designated to play. All this…talk…was so painful. Laurie’s wonderful spirit—venturing forth and exploring the world—made Charlotte realize that she herself had become worthless. Her sitting here at the head of the table was a dreadful fraud. Although Momma’s, Daddy’s, Miss Pennington’s, Mr. Thoms’s, and Laurie’s intentions were only the best, every question they asked her about her college “experience” was de facto mockery. Part of Charlotte wanted to spring it all—now. Get it over with! Go ahead, show all that was left of Charlotte Simmons’s world, which was the handful of souls at this table, how completely she had corrupted herself in a mere four months. She had no ill feelings toward Mrs. Thoms. You have to think yourself worth saving before you get angry at someone who wishes to kill you. She felt like leaning back in this poor drugstore chair, rocking back on its two rear legs, spreading her arms like Christ’s on the cross, looking straight at Mrs. Thoms, and saying, “Come, Death, take me. I have no desire to struggle any longer. Save me the trouble of doing it myself.” Being so young, she had never thought of what Death would look like. It had never occurred to her that Death might be a woman. Now, after eighteen years, the day had come, and Death was a pretty, fortyish brunette with provocative lips, posing as the wife of a country school principal. She stared at Mrs. Thoms, and Death stared at her, pretending to be puzzled.

Laurie was holding forth—very amusingly, too—about how at State, girls never used words of more than three syllables when boys were around. “You’d never talk about dressing appropriately because ‘appropriately’ has five syllables. Instead, you’d say, ‘dressing the way you ought to,’ or ‘dressing the way people expect you to.’ You’d never say ‘conversationally,’ because that has six syllables. It’s not that a boy won’t understand a five-syllable word, it’s that it makes a girl sound too—oh, efficient, I guess—or too bright, as if she might be able to take care of herself. She won’t seem vulnerable enough. She won’t seem like she needs the big brave man enough.” And Laurie was having such a good time! A delightful smile played about the corners of her lips every time she opened her mouth.

Before dessert, Laurie and Mrs. Thoms got up to help Momma take the dishes off the table. Miss Pennington started to get up, too, but Momma said, “No, Miss Pennington, don’t you move. Many hands make light work, but we’ve got too many hands already. Kitchen’s not big enough.” Miss Pennington didn’t protest very hard.

Mr. Thoms was busy talking to Daddy about something. Miss Pennington said to Charlotte in the sincerest of voices, “It’s just so good to see you, Charlotte. I’ve thought about you a thousand times since you left. I’ve had so many things I was dying to ask you.”

“It’s so good to see you, Miss Pennington,” said Charlotte. She tried to smile but wasn’t a good enough actress, and that was that. She just stared at her old mentor and idly took note of the reticulated veins in her face.

“You’re awful quiet this evening, Charlotte.” Miss Pennington cocked her head slightly and smiled in the all-knowing way she had. “In fact, I can’t figure out if you’re here in this room or someplace else.”

“I know,” Charlotte said. She sighed, and as she let her breath out, she felt as if her whole bone structure were collapsing. “But it’s not that, Miss Pennington. I just feel so tired.” She slipped a little tarred into the pronunciation, and only afterward did she consciously face the fact that she was talking Down Home solely to solicit pity as a little country girl. “I had so much to do last week—we had a test in neuroscience that was worse than a final exam. I didn’t hardly get any sleep all week.” The implicit double negative was on purpose, too.

“I see,” said Miss Pennington in a tone that indicated she didn’t see at all.

The strategist in Charlotte figured this was the moment to start laying out some excuses to cushion the blow that was coming. “It was terrible, Miss Pennington. I found out at the last minute that a whole topic I thought wasn’t going to be on the test—about the relationship of the amygdala to the Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas of the brain and things like that?—was going to be on the test after all?—and I didn’t have any time left?—I mean, the way he teaches—Mr. Starling?—he introduces a subject, and then you’re supposed to do your own research on it?—and I misunderstood. I mean, I’m real worried, Miss Pennington. It was about forty percent of the test.” Tayest—likewise calculated.

Miss Pennington looked at her for a few beats beyond the ordinary…her head still cocked to one side…ironically?…before saying, “I’m your former teacher, Charlotte, but I hope you know I couldn’t be any more interested in how you’re doing than if you were my own daughter. I haven’t heard from you in quite a little while now.”

“I know…I’m sorry, Miss Pennington, but I get so caught up—and I don’t half know where the time’s gone…”

“If you want to—if you want to—why don’t you come by to see me while you’re here. Sometimes it helps to talk to somebody who knows you but now has a little distance, a little better perspective. If you want to.”

Charlotte lowered her head, then looked at Miss Pennington again. “Thank you, Miss Pennington. I do want to. That would be—I’d like to do that.” Try as she might to make it otherwise, the words came clanking out like empty bottles in a bag.

“Just give me a call, anytime you want,” said Miss Pennington. She said it a bit drily.

Dessert was a big hit: homemade pie and ice cream. Momma had baked the pie herself, mincemeat apple it was called, made of apples, raisins, cloves, and a couple of spices Charlotte didn’t know the names of, and Momma served it hot from the oven, along with some ice cream she had churned by hand, vanilla with bits of cherries in it. The aroma of the cloves and the apples was intoxicating. Even Charlotte, who had hardly touched the rest of the dinner, lit into the pie. Compliments from all around; Momma was beaming. It was so good that Daddy became very much the Man at the table and was saying things like, “Better have some more, Zach”—he and Mr. Thoms were Billy and Zach now—“it’s right out the oven—gon’ be better now’n it’ll ever be again!” It became a blissful hiatus, a time removed from all troubles great and small. Charlotte abandoned herself to the three irrational senses, the olfactory, the gustatory, and the tactile. She wanted it to last forever.

When it didn’t, the ladies got up again to help with the dishes, Miss Pennington among them this time—all but Charlotte, who remained in her chair trying to will the interlude to last longer. Mr. Thoms had moved down the table to talk to “Billy,” and Charlotte was gazing at them idly, trying to will her disasters from reoccupying her mind. She jerked alert to find Laurie slipping into Miss Pennington’s chair and leaning close to her with a big smile on her face.

Staring into Charlotte’s eyes from no more than eighteen inches away, she said, “Well?…”

“Well what?” said Charlotte.

“Well, I haven’t heard from you since we talked on the phone—it was almost three months ago. I believe we were talking about a certain subject.” Her smile grew even brighter.

Charlotte could feel her face turning scarlet, but she couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“I think I’m owed a little report,” said Laurie. “That’s my consulting fee.”

Laurie had put on some pounds, which made her cheeks and her chin, where it settled into the turtleneck of her sweater, look full. Somehow this made her prettier than Charlotte had ever seen her. She was happiness personified.

Blushing terribly, Agony Personified said, “There’s really nothing to report.”

“Really nothing?” said Laurie. “You know what”—her eyes seemed to brighten to about three hundred watts, and her smile became two weeks and three days wide—“I don’t believe you!”

Charlotte was speechless with panic. Mrs. Thoms had said something to her when they were both in the kitchen! Was Laurie now one of Death’s instruments—Laurie, who had always been her friend through the worst of times?

She spoke fearfully. “I don’t—there just isn’t anything…”

In a singsong voice Laurie said, “I don’t believe you, Charlotte…and I know you, Charlotte. This is your old friend Laurie, Charlotte…You can’t be gaming me, Charlotte…”

“Gaming me”—college slang.

Paranoia had a gun at her temple, but she wouldn’t just lie outright to Laurie. “Practically nothing,” she said with a dreadful tremor in her voice.

“What’s with you tonight, Charlotte? You are not happy. What’s going on?”

Just then everybody returned from the kitchen. Before she got up to return to her seat, Laurie said, “You and I have got to have a talk. Seriously.” Seriously. “Call me tomorrow,” said Laurie, “or I’ll call you. You and I’ve got to sit down and talk about life. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Charlotte. She nodded yes several times, dourly, as Laurie turned to walk away.

“Now—who’d like some coffee?” said Momma. “Miss Pennington—how about it?”

Part of Charlotte intended to call Miss Pennington and Laurie—she owed them that much, at least—but another, franker part of her, stiffened by fear, knew she wouldn’t. Laurie called Charlotte several times, and she put her off with this excuse and that, and a lifeless, moping voice, until she gave up. Day by day her guilt concerning Miss Pennington accumulated. Many evenings she vowed to call her in the morning, but in the morning she would inevitably put it off until later. That evening she would go to bed early to get away from the sidewise looks Momma and Daddy and even Buddy had begun giving her. She knew she would be lucky to get two hours’ sleep all night, but lying in bed immobile was better than being stared at or talked to.

So the next morning she borrowed Momma’s old parka with a hood and drove to Sparta…to kill time. She was strolling past the Pine Café when a good-looking boy in a waist-length trucker’s jacket came out.

Ohmygod—“Well, I’ll be switched! The Dupont girl!”

Caught flat-footed, Charlotte said, “Hello, Channing.”

“How is old Dupont?” he said.

“It’s fine.” Not a trace of emotion. “What’s up with you?”

“Well, hell,” said Channing. “Ain’t any jobs around here. After New Year’s, me and Matt and Dave’s going down to Charlotte and join the Marines. You know, I kinda hoped I’d run into you sometime. I always felt real bad about what we did over’t your house. You must’ve hated me.”

Charlotte pulled the hood away from her face. “I didn’t hate you, Channing. I never hated you. I think of you a lot.”

“You’re blowing smoke up—”

“No, I always liked you, and you knew it.”

Channing broke into a big smile. He reminded her of Hoyt. “In ’at case…I say let’s get it on, gal!” He motioned toward the café.

Charlotte shook her head no. “That was a long time ago, Channing. I just wanted you to know.” With that, she pulled the hood up over her head and hurried away.

One morning she was making one of her fifteen-foot excursions from the living room to her bedroom when Momma put her arm around her and said, “Charlotte, now I’m your momma, and you’re my good girl, and far’s I’m concerned, that’s the way it’ll always be, no matter where you are and how old you are or anything else. And right now your momma wants you to tell her what’s wrong. No matter what it is, if you’ll just let it out, it won’t be as bad as it was. That much I can guarantee you.”

Yes! Tell Momma—now—everything—and get it over with! Charlotte was on the verge—but how could she form the words and make them pass her lips—“Momma, I lost my virginity”—actually Momma, I didn’t exactly lose it, I let a frat boy get me dead drunk because I wanted to be “one of the crowd”—and then I let him grind his genitals against mine on a public dance floor, because, you have to understand, everybody was doing it, and then I let him grope and feel and explore practically my whole body on a public elevator because I did want him to want me—you can understand that feeling, can’t you, Momma?—and then we got to the room—oh, that’s right. I didn’t mention that we were staying in the same room, did I, with two beds, one couple in one bed and another couple in the other—I forgot to mention that, too—and it was interesting in a dirty way, because in the middle of the night I got to watch the other couple fucking, naked as a pair of jaybirds, and they did it the way a bull does it to a cow?—from behind?—with this really crude thrust thrust thrust?—but the drunk boy I tossed my virginity to wasn’t like that—he rolled a condom down over his erection—for some reason, it reminded me of a ball-peen hammer—and then he went thrust thrust thrust rut rut rut, but it wasn’t really that much like a bull and a cow, because he was facing me—and after it was done, he rolled off me without even looking at me—and then all he said afterward was that I had gotten some blood on the bedspread, and he acted pissed off at me—“pissed off”—that’s the way they talk, Momma—anyway, that’s about it. I haven’t even laid eyes on him since then, not counting the four-hour drive back to Dupont—Oh, I didn’t tell you we drove to Washington to do this? Anyway, that’s about it, I guess. That’s one reason I’m so depressed, but there’s also this thing that happened with my schoolwork while I was so wrapped up with this frat boy—

Ohmygod, she wouldn’t be able to complete the first sentence! Momma was an absolutist on this subject! When she said you’ll feel better right away if you let it all out, she didn’t have the faintest notion of the particular cat she was beckoning out of the bag. Momma wouldn’t hear a word after “virginity,” or even “I was staying at a hotel with a boy.” Charlotte went numb with fear and guilt at the very thought.

So what she said, in fact, was, “No, Momma, it’s nothing like that. I think I’m just exhausted. I hardly got any sleep the last two weeks before the break.”

Momma didn’t show any signs of actually swallowing that. She just gave up asking.

On Christmas morning, Buddy and Sam, as always, got up before dawn. That was no imposition on Charlotte, since she hadn’t slept all night in any event. She was in the living room with the boys, who were down on all fours wondering what was in the packages under the tree, when Momma and Daddy came in, looking half asleep. Charlotte summoned all the resources she had left and put on a pretty good impression of someone excited by Christmas morn.

It became clear that the day’s major excitement was the biggest package under the tree, which had a tag on it saying that it was to Charlotte from the whole family. They always took turns opening Christmas presents, with the youngest, Sam, going first and the oldest, Daddy, going last. This time everybody, even Sam, made sure Charlotte opened her two little presents first—and that her big one be the last present opened, even after Momma’s and Daddy’s last one.

All four of them, Sam, Buddy, Momma, and Daddy, waited in breathless silence as she commenced removing the wrapping paper.

“Go ahead,” said Momma, “and just rip it off. It won’t matter.”

Inside a box that a set of manual lawn-mower blades had come in…was a computer with a full-size screen. Charlotte had never heard of the brand name before: Kaypro. She was surprised, and she put on a pretty good show of being deliriously surprised and moved.

“Well, I’ll be switched!” she said. “I can’t hardly believe what I’m looking at!” She turned toward each of the expectant faces before her, professing profound gratitude.

“We made it!” said Sam, and it turned out that was pretty much the case. Daddy had got hold of this old, discarded machine, and he and Sam and Buddy had cleaned and repaired it and hunted down some replacement parts—which was not an easy thing to do, since Kaypro went out of business years ago—and rebuilt it. It seemed that Daddy had included the two boys on every single part of the project, so that when Sam said, “We made it,” he wasn’t far off the mark.

“It’s because you got all A’s!” said Sam. “We figured you ought to have your own computer!”

Charlotte took Sam into her arms and hugged him and then Buddy and Daddy and Momma. She would have broken down crying, but she had no tears left. Tears, no matter how sad they might be, were a sign of caring about something and therefore a sign of a functioning human being. She was admirably patient as Sam and Buddy and Daddy explained to her, with infinite Christmas delight, how it worked. Kaypro had gone under so long ago, there were no instruction manuals. They had had to learn all about it from scratch. Daddy said Sam and Buddy were much better at it than he was. He was an old dog that couldn’t learn new tricks, but they took to it like a duck takes to water. And did that make them proud! She hugged them all over again and said she just didn’t know how she had gotten along this far without it, and the best Christmas present of all was knowing that they had made it themselves, just as Sam said. Which was, in fact, true, since she had no idea where or if she could install it in her room and it was easy enough to use the ones in the library. The thought of staying in her room—where Beverly could come walking in at any moment—chilled her. The very fact that she would be returning to—that place—at all seemed remote to the point of impossible.

Nevertheless, there came a day when Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam drove her back to the bus station in Galax. Daddy personally over-saw the placement of the computer—cushioned inside the lawn-mower blade box with all manner of rags, Styrofoam, balled-up newspapers, and an old, ratty rubber bathtub mat—into the belly of the bus.

Charlotte wanted to cry when she said good-bye to them, but she was parched with a fear of the unknown that went far beyond the nervousness she suffered the first time she set out from the Blue Ridge Mountains for—that place. One thing the trip home had shown her: She could never make Alleghany County home again; nor any other place either—least of all, Du—the college to which she was heading. The bus was home; and let the trip be interminable.