I Am Charlotte Simmons

3. The Mermaid Blushed

Daddy, at the wheel of the pickup truck, Momma, over by the passenger-side door, and Charlotte, sandwiched in between, were driving down Dupont University’s showiest approach, Astor Way, an avenue flanked by sycamores whose branches arched over from either side in the summer months until they met to form a lush, cool green tunnel with a thousand little places where the sun peeked through. The sycamore trees were so evenly spaced they made Charlotte think of the columns she had seen in Washington when she was there with Miss Pennington.

“Well, I’ll be switched,” said Momma. “I never in my life—”

Instead of finishing the sentence, she lifted her hands and made a tunnel shape like the arch of trees and looked at Charlotte with a wide-eyed smile. It was about two p.m. Ever since four-thirty this morning, when they left Sparta in the dark, Momma had been primed to be impressed by Dupont.

Daddy turned into a tree-shaded parking lot marked LITTLE YARD, and their old pickup became part of a busy swarm of cars, vans, SUVs, and at least one yellow Ryder rental truck, disgorging freshmen, parents, duffel bags, wheelie suitcases, lamps, chairs, TV sets, stereos, boxes…and boxes…box after box…boxes of every conceivable size, or every size Charlotte could think of. What on earth were her new classmates bringing in all those boxes—and what did she lack? But that was a fleeting concern.

Young men wearing khaki shorts and mauve T-shirts with DUPONT in yellow letters across the chest were helping people unload their cargo, piling it on heavy-duty dollies, and pushing the immense loads out of the lot and toward the building. Charlotte had been assigned to Edgerton House, “house” being the term Dupont used instead of such unclassy, bureaucratic State U. terminology as “Section E, freshman dormitory.” It wasn’t part of any “dorm,” either. It was a house on Little Yard. Little Yard would be home to all sixteen hundred incoming freshmen. It was the first dormitory ever built at Dupont. A hundred years ago it had housed every student in the university.

The parking lot was so busy and the trees had such dense foliage, Charlotte barely saw the building itself at first. In fact, it was gigantic and seemed even more so thanks to its heavy, brownish rusticated stone walls. The wall she was looking at extended the entire length of the long block it was built on. No fortress ever looked more formidable, but only intangible matters concerning that huge structure were on Charlotte Simmons’s mind. They had obsessed her thoughts throughout the ten-hour drive from Sparta: namely, what her roommate would be like and just what the ominous term “coed dorm” actually meant.

All spring and all summer Dupont had been a wondrous abstraction, the prize of a lifetime, the trophy of all trophies for a little girl from the mountains; in short, a castle in the air. Now it was right in front of her at ground level, and this was where she would be living for the next nine months, and dealing with—what? Her roommate was a girl named Beverly Amory, from a town in Massachusetts called Sherborn, whose population was 1,440, and that was really all she knew about Beverly Amory. Well, at least she was a small-town girl, too. They had that much in common…As to what coed dorm life really was, she knew even less. Whatever it was, the concept, now that the time had come, was alarming.

Charlotte, Momma, and Daddy had gotten out of the pickup, and Daddy was heading toward the rear to open the fiberglass camper top and the tailgate, when one of the young men approached, pushing a dolly, and said, “Welcome! Moving in?”

“Yeah,” said Daddy in a wary tone.

“Can I give you folks a hand?”

He was smiling, but Daddy wasn’t. “No thanks.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. If you change your mind, let one of us know.” Whereupon he went off, pushing the dolly toward another vehicle.

Daddy turned to Momma and said, “He’d want a tip.”

Momma nodded sagely over this insight into the wiles of life here on the other side of the Blue Ridge.

“I don’t think so, Daddy,” said Charlotte. “They look like students to me.”

“That don’t matter,” said Daddy. “You’ll see. When we git in’ere, you’re gonna see those ‘students’ standin’ere waiting and folks digging into their pockets. ’Sides, what we got, h’it won’t take much to tote it.”

So Daddy opened the fiberglass camper top and lowered the tailgate. Charlotte really hadn’t brought a whole lot, just a big duffel bag, two suitcases, and a box of books. Daddy had gone to the trouble of putting the camper top over the bed of the pickup, not so much to protect her things from the weather, which the TV said would be fine all over the East, as to provide some privacy in case he and Momma had to spend the night here for some reason. They had their sleeping bags rolled up on the truck bed and an Igloo cooler with enough sandwiches and water to get by.

True to his word, Daddy toted the two heaviest things himself. He put the duffel bag up on his shoulder and somehow carried that whole box of books under his other arm. Goodness knows how he did it, except that he was strong as a bull from all the hard work he’d done in his life. The literature from Dupont had said to come dressed ready for “moving in,” and so Daddy had on an old short-sleeved plaid sport shirt that hung out over a pair of the thorn-proof gray twill pants he wore when he went hunting. Charlotte immediately monitored the parking lot and was relieved to see that most of the other fathers were dressed more or less the same as Daddy: casual shirts and pants and, in some cases, shorts…although there was something different about theirs. Naturally, she checked out the other female freshmen with that same swift sweep of the eyes, and that was a relief, too. She was afraid they might be all dressed up, although she didn’t really think they would be. Practically all of them were wearing shorts, just the way she was. Hers were high-waisted denims with her sleeveless cotton print blouse tucked in—“blouse” was the word Momma used—an ensemble designed to show off not only her trim athletic legs but also her small waist. She saw immediately that most of the other girls were wearing flip-flops or running shoes, but she figured her white Keds fit in fine with the running shoes. She didn’t see any other mothers dressed quite like Momma, who had on a T-shirt and a denim jumper that came down below her knees. A pair of athletic socks rose up from out of her striped sneakers as if to meet the hem of the jumper. Never in her life had Charlotte possessed the strength to entertain…Doubts…about Momma’s taste, any more than her authority. Momma was Momma, which was all there was to say about Momma.

Momma carried the bigger suitcase and Charlotte the other one, and they were heavy enough, but Daddy’s feat was really something. People were staring at him, probably because they wondered how one man could carry such a load, which made Charlotte proud, or marginally proud; but then she noticed that the way Daddy had his arm around the box made his forearm look huge, which in turn made the tattoo of the mermaid look huge…and reddish from the strain…which in turn made the mermaid look as if she were blushing. Was that what they were all actually staring at? Despite herself, Charlotte felt shamed, for she did entertain doubts about Daddy’s taste and the tattoo in particular.

Amid a rumbling caravan of dollies, they went through the Little Yard’s great arched entryway and its fifteen-foot-high stone corridor and out into a courtyard…the Little Yard, which turned out to be a quadrangle the length of a football field, with ancient trees on a lush green lawn bordered by boxwood hedges and big red-orange poppies blazing amid beds of lavenderish blue nepeta and crisscrossed by worn walkways that looked as if they had been there forever. The entire yard was enclosed by the rows of houses, which, by the looks of them, had been built in different stages and in slightly different styles. The place conjured up a picture of a fortress whose interior drill ground has been magically transformed into an idealized, arboreal, floribunda landscape. The rumbling, the rattling, the aluminum clanking, the creaking, the squeaking, the jerking, the jouncing of the dollies ricocheted off the walls. What colossal heaps of things the young men in the mauve T-shirts were pushing and pulling and humping to the houses! At Edgerton, they, the boys in mauve, were carting everybody else’s belongings onto the elevator, but Daddy was having none of that. He marched right on with his prodigious load. He was sweating, and the mermaid was really blushing now.

Charlotte caught two of the boys in the mauve shirts sneaking glances at it. One said to the other in a low voice: “Nice ink.” The other tried to suppress a snigger. Charlotte was mortified.

Charlotte’s room, 516, was up on the fifth of the building’s six floors. When she got off the elevator, she found herself looking down a long, gloomy old corridor in which frowning adults were popping in and out of doorways, pointing this way and that, yammering about God knows what, amid a tumbled clutter, extending as far as the eye could see, of empty boxes, some gigantic, lying every which way from one end of the corridor to the other, with so much in the way of lurid lettering and illustrations and so many closure flaps thrust out it looked like an explosion. Boys and girls stood by phlegmatically, secretly appalled in varying degrees that their parents insisted on walking the face of the earth in plain view of their new classmates.

The young men in the mauve T-shirts were pushing their heavy dollies through this cardboard chaos like icebreakers. On the landing of a stairwell near the elevator, there was a huge garbage can the color of drained veal with boxes, bubble paper, lacerated shrink-wrapping, Styrofoam peanuts, and other detritus gushing out of it. On the floor of the hallway, what you could see of it, were…dust balls…more dust balls than Charlotte had ever seen in her life…everywhere, dust balls. Toward the far end of the corridor Charlotte spied two barefoot boys. One was clad in only a polo shirt and the towel he had wrapped about his waist. The other wore a long-sleeved shirt with the tail hanging out over a pair of boxer shorts, and he had a towel slung across his shoulders. Boxer shorts? Both boys were scampering across the corridor into the men’s bathroom, judging by the towels and the toilet kits they were carrying. But no pants? Charlotte was shocked. She glanced at Momma—and was relieved to see that she hadn’t noticed. Momma would have been more than shocked. Knowing Momma…she would have brought God’s lightning down on somebody’s head. Charlotte hurried her into the room, 516, which was fortunately just ahead of them.

Given the grandeur that was Dupont, the room seemed terribly bare and, like the hallway, worn and exhausted. A pair of tall double-hung windows, side by side, equipped with yellowish shades but no curtains, looked out onto the courtyard. The courtyard appeared rather grand from up here, and the windows let in plenty of light. That much you could say for the room. But the rest of it was gloomy and tired: a pair of single beds with cheap metal frames and mattresses rather the worse for wear, a pair of plain wooden bureaus that had seen better days, a pair of small wooden tables that couldn’t properly be called desks, a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, yellow ocher walls that could have stood a coat of paint, small dark wood baseboards and ceiling cornices that might have been handsome once, a wooden floor gone gray with use…and crawling with dust balls.

Daddy unzipped the big duffel bag and allowed as how they might as well take out the bedclothes and get started making up the bed, but Charlotte thought she ought to wait for her roommate and not just arbitrarily decide which side of the room would be hers, and Momma agreed. Then Momma went to the windows and said you could see the top of the library tower from here and a couple of smokestacks. Daddy was of the opinion that the smokestacks meant that Dupont had its own power plant, it was so big. And they waited.

They could hear the dollies rolling out in the hallway and the young men in the mauve DUPONT T-shirts grunting and occasionally swearing under their breath as they bulled their loads through the sprawling dump of boxes. At one point, there was the unmistakable shriek of two girls thrilled by the fact that they had run into each other. That gave Charlotte a hollow feeling. It hadn’t occurred to her that there might be entering freshmen who already…had friends. From somewhere down near the elevator a boy exclaimed, “Gotcha! Who’s your daddy?” Came the reply: “Oh, man, ‘Who’s your daddy.’ How completely douche-baggy is that?” Then a woman’s mannered voice: “Kindly spare us your…‘colorful’ terminology, Aaron.” Charlotte could tell by the boys’ stressed voices that they were trying to assert themselves as manly and cool purely out of a nervous fear that the other males in this dorm might think they weren’t.

By and by, she heard a girl talking out in the hall near the door, apparently to herself: “Edgerton. We just got here. Eeeeeeyew, there’s like trash all over the place, and they’ve got this like big plastic garbage can—are they all like this? This one’s beat up and busted, if you ask me…” The voice was coming closer. “Ummmm, we did…He’s cute…Ken, I think, but it could’ve been Kim. Would they name a boy Kim?…I can’t just walk up and say, ‘So, what’s your name?’…Ummmm, I don’t really think so…” Now the voice was just outside the door. “Fresh meat?”

In the doorway appeared a tall girl with a cell phone to her ear, a canvas sling over her shoulder…a girl so tall and thin that Charlotte thought she must be a model from a magazine!…long, full, straight brown hair with blond streaks…big blue eyes set in a perfectly suntanned face…but a terribly thin face, now that Charlotte got a better look, so thin it made her nose and her chin look too big, giving her a slightly horsey look. A long, terribly thin neck rose up out of a pale, chalky blue T-shirt…even Charlotte could tell it was one of those fine cottons, like lisle…hanging outside a pair of khaki shorts…perfectly tanned, long, long, oh-so-slender legs…so slender they made her knees seem too big…just as her elbows seemed too big for her awfully skinny arms. Still on the cell phone, she kept her eyes cast down at some nonexistent point in midair without so much as a glance inside the room…a mock grimace, and she said, “Eeeeeeyew, that’s gross, Amanda! Fresh meat.”

Then she looked up, saw Charlotte, Momma, and Daddy, and—the cell phone still at her ear—opened her eyes wide as if in surprise, gave them a big smile, and made a little fluttering gesture with her other hand. Then she cast her eyes down again, as if drawing a curtain, and said into the cell phone:

“Amanda—Amanda—Amanda—I’m sorry, I have to go now. I’m at my room…Uh hunh, exactly. Call me later. Bye.”

With that, she pushed a button on the cell phone, slipped it into the canvas bag, and beamed another big smile toward Momma, Daddy, and Charlotte.

“Hi! I’m sorry! I hate these phones! I’m Beverly. Charlotte?”

Charlotte said hello and managed a smile, but she was already intimidated. This girl was so confident and poised. Somehow she immediately took over the room. And she already had a friend at Dupont, apparently. They shook hands, and Charlotte said in a timid voice, “These are my folks.”

The girl directed her smile toward Daddy, looked him right in the eye, extended her hand, and said, “Hi, Mr. Simmons.”

Daddy opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He just nodded deferentially and shook her hand…limply, Charlotte could tell, and she could feel shame weighing down her confidence. Oh God, the mermaid! Charlotte thought she saw the girl flick a glance at Daddy’s forearm…When he took her hand, it disappeared inside his. What does that big callused hand feel like to her?

The girl turned to Momma. “Hi, Mrs. Simmons.”

Momma wasn’t at all intimidated. She shook the girl’s hand and sang out, “Well, hi there, Beverly! It’s real nice to meet you! We been looking forward to it!”

A woman’s voice: “That says five sixteen, doesn’t it?” Everyone turned toward the doorway.

In came a middle-aged woman with a lot of pineapple blond hair teased and fluffed and brushed back in a certain way, followed by a tall, balding man, also middle-aged. The woman wore a simple sleeveless dress that came down to just above her knees. The man had on a white open-necked polo shirt, revealing the puffy onset of jowls, and a pair of khakis and some sort of leather moccasins—and no socks. Behind them, in came one of the young men in the mauve T-shirts…rather handsome…carefully pushing a dolly over the threshold. There must have been a ton of stuff on it, piled six or seven feet high.

“Mummy,” said the girl, “come meet the Simmonses. Dad…”

With a big, friendly smile the man came over to Daddy and shook hands—Charlotte could have sworn that he, too, took a quick look at the mermaid—and said, “Hey! How are you? Jeff Amory!”

“Billy,” said Daddy. That was all he said: “Billy.” Charlotte was mortified. The man shot a glance at Daddy’s gray work pants. Charlotte shot a glance at Mr. Amory’s khakis and at Mrs. Amory’s dress. To a girl from Mars, or Sparta, North Carolina, they were dressed essentially the same as her parents. So what was it about them—

Mr. Amory was greeting Momma, saying, “How are you? Jeff Amory!” Then he turned to Charlotte, pulled his head back, beamed a big smile, opened his arms as if coming across a long-lost friend, and said, “Well—you must be Charlotte!”

Charlotte couldn’t think of what on earth to say, and so she just said, “Yes, sir,” and felt like a child.

“This is quite a day,” said Mr. Amory. “Are you ready for all this?” He swept his hand toward the windows, as if to take in the whole campus.

“I think so,” said Charlotte. “I hope so.” Why couldn’t she come up with anything more than this juvenile politeness?

“When I was starting out as a freshman here—”

“In the Dark Ages,” said his daughter.

“Oh, thank you, dear. See what a respectful roommate you have, Charlotte? Anyway, as I recall”—he aimed a wry smile at his daughter—“through the fog of my Alzheimer’s onset”—he beamed once more at Charlotte—“is that it’s big, or it seemed big to me at the time, but you really get used to the place very quickly.”

Beverly’s mother was saying to Daddy, “How do you do? Valerie Amory. It’s so nice to meet you. When did you arrive?”

Before Daddy could say anything, Mr. Amory said, “Oh, brother. Let’s see where we’re gonna put all these things.”

He had turned around and was talking to the young man who was tending the dolly…tall, slender, athletic looking…sun-bleached brown hair brushed down just slightly over his forehead. Charlotte took in every detail. The dolly bore an enormous heap of…stuff.

Mrs. Amory was greeting Momma. She took her hand and said, “Mrs. Simmons…” with a smile, a deep look into the eyes, and an inflection that bespoke a sympathetic if inexplicable confidentiality. “Valerie Amory. This is such a pleasure.”

“Why, thank you, Valerie,” said Momma, “it’s just real nice to git the chance to meet you all! And you can call me Lizbeth. Most everbuddy does.”

Out the corner of her eye, Charlotte caught, or thought she caught, Beverly staring at her waist-high denim shorts.

“Beverly,” Mr. Amory said, “you sure you didn’t for get anything?” He stared at the mound of things on the dolly and shook his head and then smiled at Momma and Daddy. He surveyed the room and said to his daughter, “Where do you think you’re gonna put all this?”

From the graphics on the cartons, Charlotte could make out a kitchenette refrigerator—that was the really big box—a microwave, a laptop computer, a fax machine, a digital camera, an electric toothbrush, a television set…

Mrs. Amory had turned to Charlotte and, clasping her hand with both of hers, was saying, “Well…Charlotte.” She brought her face closer to Charlotte’s and peered profoundly into her eyes. “We’ve been so anxious to meet you. I can remember this very day so well myself. It wasn’t here, it was at Wellesley, and I’m not going to tell you when! But four years from now”—she snapped her fingers—“you’ll wonder where on earth—”

“Oh, Dad,” Beverly was saying, “you have to worry about everything. Just put it anywhere. I’ll take care of it.”

Mrs. Amory turned abruptly to Beverly and said, “Hah hah hah, darling.” Then she said to Momma, “I hope Charlotte’s better organized than—”

A thump on the floor—“Oh, shit!” said Beverly.

Everyone turned toward her. She was already stooping over to pick up her cell phone. She stood up again and, surprised by the silence, looked about quizzically. Charlotte saw Mrs. Amory glancing sideways at Momma, who looked like she had turned to stone. If anyone had said Oh, shit in her presence in her house—anyone—Momma would have let her know she had no mind to tolerate it.

Mrs. Amory forced a laugh and, smiling and shaking her head, said, “Beverly…did I just hear you say, ‘Oh, darn’?”

Beverly obviously didn’t know what she was talking about. Then it dawned on her, and she opened her eyes wide and put her fingertips over her lips in the classic attitude of mock penitence.

“Oops,” she said, looking about and misting the air with more effusions of irony. “Sorry.” Without skipping a beat, she turned toward the handsome young man in the mauve T-shirt who was beginning to unload the dolly. “Just anywhere…Ken.” She gave him a coquettish smile. “I’m terrible with names. It is Ken, isn’t it?”

“Just anywhere?” said Mr. Amory. “You’ll need a loft for just anywhere.”

“Kim,” the young man said.

“Anhh…I thought I heard Kim, but I just didn’t—I’m Beverly.” It seemed to Charlotte that she looked at him a couple of beats longer than necessary before continuing in a small but somehow flirtatious voice, “What year are you?”

“I’m a senior. All of us”—he gestured toward the trolley—“are seniors.”

Mrs. Amory had turned back to Daddy, eager to change the subject to…any subject, and Boring be damned. “I’m sorry, when did you say you arrived?”

“Oh, ’bout half hour ago, I reckon.”

“You live in the western part of North Carolina.” She smiled. Charlotte thought she noticed her eyes dart ever so quickly to the tattoo.

“Yep. ’Bout as far west as you kin git and still be in the state of North Carolina. Well—not quite, but it took us purt’ near ten hours to drive here.”

“My goodness.” She smiled.

Daddy said, “How did you folks git here from Massachusetts?”

“We flew.” She smiled.

Charlotte could see Mr. Amory’s eyes run up and down Daddy…his ruddy face with its reddish brown field hand’s sunburn…the mermaid…the sport shirt out over the gray twill work pants, the old sneakers…

“Whirred you fly in to?” said Daddy.

“An airport five or six miles out of town—Jeff, what’s the name of the field we flew into?”

“Boothwyn.” He smiled at Momma, who wasn’t smiling.

“Well, I’ll be switched,” said Daddy. “I didn’t even know they had an airport here.”

Charlotte could see Beverly Amory running her eyes up and down Momma…down to where the denim jumper descended below the knees and the athletic socks rose up…

“Oh, it’s very small,” said Mrs. Amory. She smiled. “It’s not really an airport, I guess. That’s probably not the right term.” She smiled some more.

The smiles seemed not so much cheery as patient.

“Anything else I can help you folks with?” said the porter, Kim, who had now removed everything from the dolly. The way he had pushed them together, the boxes created a massive little edifice.

“I think that’s just about it,” said Mr. Amory. “Thank you very much, Kim.”

“No problem,” said the young man, who was already heading out the door with the dolly. Without stopping, he said, “You all have a good time.” Then he looked at Beverly and Charlotte. “And a good year.”

“We’ll try,” said Beverly, smiling in a certain way.

She’d practically struck up an acquaintance with him! Charlotte felt even more inadequate. She couldn’t think of anything to say—to anybody, much less to some good-looking senior.

Momma cocked her head and stared at Daddy. Daddy compressed his lips and shrugged his eyebrows. All right—the boy hadn’t stood around waiting for a tip.

A muffled ring, oddly like a harp being strummed. Mr. Amory reached into the pocket of his khakis and withdrew a small cell phone. “Hello?…Oh, come on…” His sunny demeanor was gone. He scowled into the little mouthpiece. “How could that possibly…I know…Look, Larry, I can’t go into all this now. We’re in Beverly’s room with her roommate and her parents. I’ll call you back. In the meantime, ask around, for God’s sake. Boothwyn isn’t so small that they don’t have mechanics.”

He closed up the cell phone and said to his wife, “That was Larry. He says there’s some sort of hydraulic leak in the rudder controls. That’s all we need.”

Silence. Then Mr. Amory smiled again, patiently, and said, “Well…Billy…where are you and…Lizbeth…staying?”

Daddy said, oh, they wouldn’t be staying, they were going to turn around and drive back to Sparta, and Momma and Mrs. Amory had a little discussion about the rigors of such a long round-trip in one day. Mrs. Amory said they would be flying back as soon as they could to get out of Beverly’s hair and let her and Charlotte arrange things for themselves, and besides, wasn’t there a meeting of all the freshmen in this section in a couple of hours? Hadn’t she seen that on the schedule? That was true, said Beverly, but would they mind terribly not getting out of her hair until they had something to eat—hello-oh?—since she, for one, was starving? Both Mr. and Mrs. Amory gave their daughter a cross look, and then Mr. Amory smiled at Momma and Daddy like Patience on a monument smiling at Grief and said that, well, it looked like they were going to go have a quick bite to eat, and if Momma, Daddy, and Charlotte would care to come along, they were welcome. As he remembered, there was a little restaurant in town called Le Chef. “Not fabulous,” he said, “but good; and quick.” Daddy gave Momma an anxious glance, and Charlotte knew what that was about. Any unknown restaurant named Le Chef or Le anything sounded like more money than he was going to want to spend. But Momma gave Daddy a little nod that as much as said that they probably should sit down and have one meal with Charlotte’s roommate’s parents, since they had suggested it.

Daddy said to Mr. Amory, “There’s a Sizzlin’ Skillet just before you git to the campus? Bet it’s not more’n half a mile from here. I ate at a Sizzlin’ Skillet near Fayetteville once”—wunst—“and it was real nice; real good and real quick.”

More silence. All three Amorys looked at each other in a perplexed fashion, and then Mr. Amory turned on the most patient smile yet and said, “All right…let’s by all means go to the Sizzlin’ Skillet.”

Charlotte stared at Mr. and Mrs. Amory. They both had deep suntans and absolutely smooth, buttery skin. Compared to Momma and Daddy, they were so soft—and sleek as beavers.

Daddy excused himself and left the room. A few minutes later he returned with a bemused look on his face. “Strangest darn thing,” he said to the room. “I was looking for the men’s bathroom? And some folks down ’eh, they told me iddn’ any men’s bathroom. Told me this is a coed dorm, and there’s one bathroom, and it’s a coed bathroom. I looked in ’eh, and I seen boys and girls.”

Momma compressed her lips severely.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Mrs. Amory. “Apparently they get used to it very quickly. Isn’t that what Erica said, Beverly? Beverly has a good friend from school, Erica, who was a freshman here last year.”

“Certainly didn’t bother Erica,” said Beverly in an airy, nothing-to-it manner.

“I gather the boys are very considerate,” said Mrs. Amory. Charlotte could tell she was making an effort to calm the country folks’ fears.

Momma and Daddy looked at each other. Momma was doing her best to hold herself back.

The six of them went down to the parking lot, and Daddy pointed out their pickup truck with the camper top and said, “Whyn’t we all go in our pickup? Me’n’ the girls can sit in the back.” He looked optimistically at Beverly. “We got some sleeping bags back ’eh we can sit on.”

“That’s nice of you, Billy,” said Mr. Amory with his patient smile, “but we might as well take ours. We’ve got six seats.” He pointed at a huge white Lincoln Navigator SUV.

“Well, as I live and breathe!” said Momma in spite of herself. “Whirred you folks git that? I don’t mean to pry.”

“We rented it,” said Mr. Amory. Anticipating the next question, he said, “You call ahead, and they’ll bring it right out to the pla—to the airport for you.”

So they drove to the Sizzlin’ Skillet in the Lincoln Navigator. It was all leather inside, with windows as dark as sunglasses and strips of exotic wood, polyurethaned, here and there. Charlotte was glad they hadn’t seen what was under the old pickup’s camper top, or inside the cab, for that matter.

The Sizzlin’ Skillet had quite a sign on its roof: an enormous black skillet, eight or nine feet in diameter, with THE SIZZLIN’ SKILLET written in huge curvy letters on the pan. Around the skillet were rings of red and yellow lights.

From the moment one walked in, an astounding array of hot, slick colors screamed for attention from every direction. Everything was…big…including, straight ahead, up on the wall, some alarmingly detailed color photographs of the house specials: huge plates with slabs of red meat and gigantic patties of ground meat fairly glistening with…ooze…great molten slices of cheese, veritable lava flows of gravy, every manner of hash brown and french-fried potato, fried onion, and fried chicken, including a dish called Sam’s Sweet Chickassee, which seemed to consist of an immense patty of skillet-fried ground chicken beneath a thick mantle of bubbling cream sauce, all of it blown up so large in the photographs that slices of tomato—the only vegetable depicted, other than lettuce and the fried potatoes and onions—created an impression of overwhelming weight.

There seemed to be a lot of people peering into the dining area but not going in, and Mr. Amory said rather hopefully, “Looks pretty crowded, doesn’t it. I guess we ought to try someplace else.”

Charlotte swung her head about to see what Beverly thought—and there she was, her back turned, holding on to her mother’s arm and leaning her skin and bones against her shoulder, pointing at the photographs of the deluges of gravy and cream, and, no doubt thinking the Simmonses were looking the other way, made an eeeeyuk face, as if she wanted to throw up.

Suddenly talkative, or talkative for him, Daddy assured Mr. Amory that they’d get a table sooner than it looked like. See there?—you go up to that podium there and let them know you’re here, and you’ll be surprised how fast things move. So Mr. Amory set his jaw and led their procession up to the podium, which turned out to be a gigantic wooden thing, like a podium on a stage but much wider and made of massive slabs of wood. Everything at the Sizzlin’ Skillet was…big. There was a short line just to get to the podium, but it did move along.

Behind the podium stood a bouncy-looking young woman dressed in a red-and-yellow—evidently the Sizzlin’ Skillet colors—shirt-and-pants outfit. The shirt was adorned with some kind of brooch—in fact, a three-inch-long miniature of the Sizzlin’ Skillet sign outside.

She gave Mr. Amory a perky smile. “How many?”

“Six. The name is Amory. A, m, o, r, y.”

She wrote nothing down. Instead she handed him something the size and shape of a television remote. It had a lot of little lenses in a circle on one end and a number—226—on the other. “We’ll signal you when your table’s ready. Have a sizzlin’ good meal!”

Mr. Amory looked at the object as if it had just crawled up his leg. On its shaft was an advertisement: “Try our Sizzlin’ Swiss Steak. You’ll yodel!”

“It’ll go off when our table’s ready,” said Daddy, pointing to the device. “That way we don’t have to git in a line. We kin go over’t the gift shop or something.”

Daddy led them to the gift shop, where there seemed to be a lot of souvenirs, dolls, and candy bars, all of them abnormally big, even the candy bars. Mr. Amory held the…device up in front of his wife without comment. “Hmmm,” she said, cocking her head and smiling in a way that made Charlotte uneasy.

The Amorys kept looking at the people milling about. Many, like Mr. Amory, were holding the device. Immediately in front of Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Amory was an obese man, probably forty-five or so, wearing a cutoff football jersey with the number 87 on the back. Between the bottom of the jersey and the top of his basketball shorts a roll of bare flesh protruded. Next to him was a young woman in black pants who was so wide her elbows were cushioned on the tube of fat around her waist, and her forearms stuck out to the side like little wings.

“Do you and your parents go to Sizzlin’ Skillets often?” Beverly said to Charlotte.

Charlotte caught a whiff of condescension. “We don’t have anything like this in Sparta,” she said.

Near the see-through, where you could look in and see the cooks working in the kitchen, a single sharp piping whistle sounded, and red and yellow lights began whirling around. It was the thing in the hand of a big woman wearing what looked like a mechanic’s jumpsuit. She beckoned impatiently to two little girls and headed for the dining area.

“See?” said Daddy. “Now she’s gonna go over’t the podium and show the woman the lights going around and the number, and somebody’ll show ’em straight to their table.” Over there…another piping whistle. “What’d I tell you?” said Daddy. “It don’t take long. And I pledge you my word, you won’t be leaving hungry.” He was smiling at all three Amorys, going from one face to the other.

Mrs. Amory smiled briefly, but her eyes had gone dead.

Even though he was prepared for it, when the high-pitched whistle burst out of the thing and the red and yellow lights started whirling, Mr. Amory jumped. Daddy couldn’t help laughing. Mr. Amory gave him a 33º Fahrenheit smile and a single chuckle: “Huh.” He carried the thing to the podium with his thumb and forefinger, the way you might transport a dead bird by the tip of one wing.

Their table had a slick bright yellow vinyl-laminate top. The room was packed. The surf of what seemed like a thousand enthusiastic conversations rolled over them. Cackles, chirps, and belly laughs erupted above the waves. The waitress, wearing one of the little skillet pins, arrived not with an order pad but with a black plastic instrument that looked like a pocket calculator with an aerial. The menus, coated in clear plastic, must have been fifteen inches tall and were full of color photographs similar to the outsize ones on the wall. After considerable study, Mrs. Amory ordered a fried-chicken dish and asked the waitress to please leave off the skillet-fried hash browns and the deep-fried onion rings. The waitress said she was sorry but she couldn’t, because—she held up the black instrument—all she could do was enter the number of the dish, which was instantly transmitted to the kitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Amory looked at each other and accepted this setback patiently, and everybody ordered, and the waitress pushed a lot of buttons.

The dishes arrived with astonishing speed—prompting Daddy to give Mr. Amory a cheery, comradely smile, as if to say us fellas are in this thing together, aren’t we.

The dishes were…big.

“Jes what I told you, iddn’ it, Jeff!” Daddy was now beaming at “Jeff,” as if good times among comrades didn’t come much better than this.

Each plate was covered, heaped, with skillet-fried food. Daddy launched into his cream-lava-ladled Sam’s Sweet Chickassee with gusto. Mrs. Amory inspected her fried chicken as if it were a sleeping animal. No more smiles, no conversation.

So Momma, apparently recovered from the Oh, shit incident, said to Mr. Amory, by way of filling the conversational vacuum, “Now, Jeff, you have to tell us what Sherborn’s like. I been real curious about that.”

A smile of tried patience: “It’s a…just a little village, Mrs. Simmons. The population is…oh…perhaps a thousand?…perhaps a little more?”

“Go ’head and call me Lizbeth, Jeff. That’s whirr you work?”

A frown of tried patience: “No, I work in Boston.”

“Whirr at?”

Patience at the breaking point: “An insurance company. Cotton Mather.”

“Cotton Mather! Oh, I’ve heard a them!” They-em. “Tell us what you do at Cotton Mather, Jeff. I’d be real interested.”

Mr. Amory hesitated. “My title is chief executive officer.” As if to cut off all queries regarding this revelation, he quickly turned to Daddy. “And Billy, tell us what you do.”

“Me? Well, mainly I take care”—keer—“of a house some summer people got over’t Roaring Gap? Used to be I operated a last-cutting machine over’t the Thom McAn factory in Sparta, but Thom McAn, they relocated to Mexico. Maybe you know about these things, Jeff. I keep hearing on TV that this ‘globalization’ is good for Americans. I don’t know why they think they know that, because nobody ever tried it before, but that’s what they keep telling us. All I know is, it ain’t particularly good for you if you live in Alleghany County, North Carolina. We lost three factories to Mexico. Martin Marietta came in and built a plant in 2002. They only employ forty people, but thank God for’m anyway. That’s Mexico, three, Alleghany County, one.”

Momma said, “Billy.”

Daddy smiled sheepishly. “You’re right, Lizbeth, you’re right as rainwater. Don’t let me git started on ’at stuff.” He looked at Mrs. Amory. “You know, Valerie, one thing my daddy told me. He told me, ‘Sonny’—he never called me Billy, he called me Sonny—‘Sonny, never talk about politics or religion at the dinner table. You either gon’ rile ’em up or else clean bore’m to death.’ ”

Mrs. Amory said, “Sounds like a wise man, your father.”

Daddy said, “Oh, ’deed he was, when he had a notion.”

Part of Charlotte was proud of Daddy for not caring to put the slightest gloss on the way he made a living. He was perfectly comfortable with who he was. Part of her cringed. She had a general idea what a chief executive officer was, and Cotton Mather was so big, everybody had heard of it.

Mr. Amory had no response to Daddy’s remarks except to nod four or five times in a ruminating mode.

To rescue a drowning moment, Mrs. Amory said, “Charlotte, I feel like we know hardly anything about you. How’d you happen to come to—to choose Dupont? Where’d you go to secondary school?”

“Secondary school?”

“High school.”

“In Sparta. Alleghany High School it’s called. I had an English teacher who told me to apply to Dupont.”

“And they gave her a full scholarship,” said Momma. “We’re real proud of her.” Charlotte could feel her cheeks turning red, and not because of modesty. Momma said, “Whirred you go to high school, Beverly? How many high schools they got in Sherborn?”

Beverly glanced at her mother. Then she said to Momma, “Actually, I went to school in another town, called Groton.”

“How far away was ’at?”

“About sixty miles. I was a boarder.”

Charlotte didn’t know exactly what Beverly was saying to Momma, but somehow the way she had put it to her was patronizing.

“Jeff,” said Daddy, chowing down the last forkful of his gigantic plate of Sam’s Sweet Chickassee, french fries, and tomato slabs, “this was a great idea of yours! You need sump’m that’ll stick to your ribs if you’re gon’ do what we’re fixing to do, drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight. One thang they know at these Sizzlin’ Skillets, they know how to give folks enough to eat.”

From Mrs. Amory’s plate only one thing had disappeared—a morsel of chicken breast, less than an inch square, from where she had peeled back the fried skin. The vast plate remained a mountain of food. Warily, gingerly, Beverly put a piece of hamburger about the size of a nickel into her mouth and chewed it slowly for a very long time. Without a word, she got up and left the room. In a few minutes, she came back, her face absolutely ashen. Her mother gave her a look of concern—or censure.

Charlotte barely noticed. A single phrase, drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight had hit her with a force she would never have dreamed possible—not her, not Sparta’s prodigy whose future would be filled with great things on the other side of the mountains.

A little later on, once the Amorys and Simmonses had gone their separate ways, Charlotte stood in the parking lot of the Little Yard next to the pickup truck as Momma and Daddy said their good-byes.

Momma was smiling and saying, “Now, you remember what I said, honey, don’t you forgit to write. Everbuddy’s gonna want to know ’bout—”

Without a word Charlotte threw her arms around Momma and nestled her head next to Momma’s, and her tears began rolling down Momma’s cheek.

Momma said, “There, there, there, my good, good girl.” Charlotte clung to Momma for dear life. Momma said, “Don’t you worry, little darling, I’ll be thinking of you every minute of the day. I’m real proud of you, and you’re gonna do real well here. But you know what I’m the proudest of? I’m the proudest of who you are, no matter whirr you’re at. I ’spec’ there’s ways Dupont iddn’ gon’ be good enough for you.”

Charlotte lifted her head and looked at Momma.

“There’s gon’ be folks here wanting you to do thangs you don’t hold with,” said Momma. “So you jes’ remember you come from mountain folks, on your daddy’s side and my side, the Simmonses and the Pettigrews, and mountain folks got their faults, but letting theirselves git pushed into doing thangs iddn’ one uv’m. We know how to be real stubborn. Can’t nobody make us do a thang once we git hard set against it. And if anybody don’t like that, you don’t have to explain a thang to’m. All you got to say is, ‘I’m Charlotte Simmons, and I don’t hold with thangs like ’at.’ And they’ll respect you for that.” They-at. “I love you, little darling, and your daddy loves you, and no matter whirr you’re at in the whole wide world, you’ll always be our good, good girl.”

Charlotte laid her head back on Momma’s shoulder and sobbed softly. She could see Daddy standing right there, and she took her tears to him and threw her arms around his neck, which clearly startled him. Daddy didn’t hold with public displays of affection. Between sobs she whispered into his ear, “I love you, Daddy. You don’t know how much I love you!”

“We love you, too,” said Daddy.

He also didn’t know how much it would have meant to her if he could have only brought himself to say I.

Charlotte kept waving, and Momma stuck her head out the window and looked back and kept waving, until the poor, sad, brave pickup truck with the fiberglass camper top disappeared beyond the shade trees. Finally Charlotte turned around and headed back toward the stone fortress alone.

As she walked through the great arched entrance, a boy and a girl, presumably freshmen, too, passed her, chatting away. The arch was so deep, their words echoed off the stone. Did they already know each other, or had they become friends this very day?…I’m Charlotte Simmons…You are unique. You…are Charlotte Simmons…Momma’s and Miss Pennington’s words gave her a spurt of confidence. She had faced envy and resentment and social isolation at Alleghany High, hadn’t she…and been imperiously uncool…and gone her own way…and never let any of it hold her back in her destined ascension to one of the finest universities in the world. And nothing was going to hold her back now…nothing. If she had to do everything by herself, then she would do everything by herself.

But God…she felt so alone.

Beverly was already there when Charlotte reached room 516. They decided on who was going to have which side of the room—the two sides were identical, identically bare and spare—and they set about making up their beds and unpacking. What a lot of…things…Beverly had! She left her computer, fax machine, television, refrigerator, microwave, and the rest of her electrical devices in their cartons, but she unpacked more pairs of shoes than Charlotte could even imagine one girl owning—at least a dozen—a dozen or more sweaters, most of them cashmere, skirts, skirts, skirts, shirts, shirts, shirts, camisoles, camisoles, camisoles, jeans, jeans, jeans…Charlotte possessed not even the smallest of Beverly’s various types of machines. For a computer, a necessity at Dupont, Charlotte was going to have to depend entirely on the so-called computer clusters in Dupont’s main library. Rather than a dozen or more pairs of shoes, she had three: a pair of loafers, some sturdy leather sandals—“Jesus sandals,” Regina Cox used to call them—and the pair of Keds she had on.

Beverly chatted with Charlotte in a dutiful fashion. Nothing she had to say bore even a hint of the excitement of a girl heading out with another girl, her new roommate, from another part of the country, on a four-year adventure at a great university. She spoke to Charlotte from an amicable distance. She spoke with the inflections of someone who was showing an interest. When Charlotte mentioned how fascinating the French courses listed in the Dupont catalog sounded, Beverly’s comment was that the French are so resentful of Americans these days you can like feel it in the air when you’re around them. They were majorly boring, the French.

Beverly had only halfway squeezed her clothes into the closet and the bureau when it was time to go downstairs for the house meeting. The two hundred or so boys and girls in Edgerton House convened in what was known in Dupont (and British) parlance as the Common Room. It was a little bit run-down, but its proportions and decor bespoke grand origins. The ceiling must have been fifteen or sixteen feet high, with all sorts of dark wooden arches Charlotte didn’t know the name for converging in the center. Huge luggage-brown leather sofas and easy chairs, an incredible number of them, had been arranged in a vast semicircle upon the room’s acres of Oriental rugs. More leather easy chairs remained in ornate reading bays with parchment-shaded wrought-iron floor lamps. The freshmen of Edgerton House, most of them in shorts, either crammed themselves into the leather seats or stood behind this great upholstered crescent in several rows. Others sat behind them on the edges of long oaken monk’s tables that had been brought in for the meeting. As soon as she and Charlotte entered the room, Beverly drifted away to the side, where she stood with two girls she obviously already knew. Well, so what…Charlotte already felt entirely separate from her roommate, and trotting along after her at this meeting wouldn’t change that. Actually, standing in the center amid so many other girls and boys made her feel almost…whole again. They certainly did not look intimidating. In fact, with all their shorts, flip-flops, and T-shirts, they looked like large children. Surely this room must be filled with people just like herself, bright young people anxious because they knew so little of what was to come and exhilarated by the very fact that they had come this far. They were Dupont men and women—starting with this moment.

Facing the assembly was a young woman in jeans and a man’s-style button-down shirt. Charlotte was fascinated by her. She stood there in front of two hundred strangers with such an easy confidence. She was beautiful but casual, with an athletic figure—and such amazing blond hair! It was very curly but very long, wild, yet combed just so. She seemed the very essence of collegiate glamour. She identified herself as a senior and the R.A., the resident assistant, of Edgerton House. She was there to help them with any problems that came up. They should feel free to ring her up, e-mail her, or knock on her door at any time. Her name was Ashley Downes.

“The university no longer plays the role of parent,” she was saying, “and certainly I don’t. You’re on your own. But there are some rules—not a lot, but some, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I wasn’t frank about that. First of all, alcohol is prohibited in Edgerton and every other house on Little Yard. That doesn’t just mean no drinking in public, but no alcohol in the building, period. It may not surprise you to learn that there is alcohol on the Dupont campus.” She smiled, and many of the freshmen laughed knowingly. “But it’s not gonna be here. Okay?” She smiled again. “In case you’re worried, you’re gonna discover this won’t put an end to your social life.”

Charlotte came close to letting her breath out audibly. What a relief! In Sparta she had been able to avoid the sodden, drunken milieu of the Channing Reeveses and the Regina Coxes simply by going home in the evenings and studying and ignoring the upside-down contempt she felt from them and their crowd. But here? It was well known that there was a lot of drinking in colleges, probably even at Dupont. At least she wouldn’t have to deal with it in this building where she lived, thank God. If the R.A. could just reassure her about one other thing—

But in no time, it seemed, the meeting was over, and the freshmen departed the Common Room far more animated and vocal than when they arrived. They were already getting to know one another. Charlotte started to hang back, in hopes of having a word with Ashley Downes privately. But eight or ten freshmen were clustered about her, and Charlotte didn’t want to ask her question in front of other people. She dawdled…and dawdled…for five minutes, ten minutes, before she finally gave up.

When she returned to the room, Beverly was there, standing in front of her bureau looking into a prop-up vanity mirror with tiny bulbs ablaze along the edges. She turned around. She was wearing black pants and a lavender silk shirt, sleeveless and open three or four buttonholes’ worth in front. It showed off her suntan—but also her arms, which looked almost emaciated. She made Charlotte think of an all-dressed-up stork. Her makeup did nothing for her nose and chin. They seemed even bigger somehow. She had put a peach-colored polish on her nails; it looked great on the tips of her perfectly tanned fingers.

“I’m meeting some friends at a restaurant,” she explained, “and I’m late. I’ll put away all that stuff when I come back.” She gestured toward a mountain of bags and boxes piled this way and that.

Charlotte was astonished. The very first day wasn’t even over, and Beverly was going out to a restaurant. Charlotte couldn’t imagine such a thing. For a start, she didn’t know a soul. And what if she did? She had a grand total of five hundred dollars to cover all outside expenses to the end of the first semester, four and a half months from now. She was going to have to eat every meal, seven days a week, in the university dining hall. That was provided for by her scholarship. Unless somebody took her to one, the Sizzlin’ Skillet was the last restaurant she was going to eat in for a long time.

Beverly left. Charlotte sat on the edge of her bed, hunched over, hands clasped, thinking and thinking, glancing at Beverly’s edifice of cartons, looking out the window at the dusk. She could hear people talking and occasionally laughing in the hall outside. Finally she worked up her nerve. Ashley, the R.A., had said they could knock on her door anytime. This would be pushing it perhaps, approaching her barely an hour after the meeting, but…She stood up. Now was the time to do it, if she was going to do it at all.

The R.A.’s room was on the second floor. As Charlotte walked down the hall, she was startled to see a boy in cargo shorts, no shirt, emerge from a doorway and come dashing toward her. He was holding a small spiral notebook in one hand and glancing back over his shoulder and laughing in breathless bursts. As he hurtled past Charlotte, he said, “Sorry!”—scarcely even looking at her. Now running toward Charlotte was a girl in a T-shirt and shorts, yelling, “Gimme that back, you little shit!” She wasn’t laughing. Charlotte noticed that she was barefoot. She didn’t say a thing as she ran by.

Charlotte hesitated in front of the R.A.’s door. Then she knocked. After a few seconds the door opened, and there was Ashley Downes, with her amazing mane of curly blond hair. She had changed into pants and a rather low-cut tank top. “Hi,” she said in a puzzled fashion.

“Hi,” said Charlotte. “I’m really sorry, Miz Downes—”

“Oh, come on, please. Ashley.”

“I’m really sorry. I was just at the meeting, and I tried to get to talk to you afterward, but there were so many people.” Blushing and lowering her chin: “You said come by anytime, but I know you didn’t think this soon. I’m really sorry.”

“Well—come on in,” said the R.A. She smiled at Charlotte the way you might smile at a lost child. “What’s your name?”

Charlotte told her and, once inside the room, stood there and began expounding, in an embarrassed way, upon how valuable the meeting had been and how much she thought she had gotten out of it, all the while noticing that this was a single room and a surprisingly messy one…bed unmade, clothes strewn on the floor, including a pair of dirty thong underpants. “But there was one thing…” Now that she had come to the point, she didn’t know how to put it.

“Why don’t you sit down,” said the R.A. So Charlotte sat in a plain wooden chair, and Ashley Downes sat on the edge of her messy bed.

Charlotte struggled some more with her phrasing, finally saying, “But you didn’t really talk about the coed dorm part. I mean you did, you certainly did talk about it, but there’s one thing…” Words failed her again.

The R.A. now looked at her as if she were about six. She leaned forward and said quietly, “You mean…sex?”

Charlotte could feel herself nodding like a six-year-old. “Yes.”

Ashley Downes leaned forward still further, resting her forearms on her knees and intertwining her fingers. “Where are you from?”

“Sparta, North Carolina.”

“Sparta, North Carolina. How big is Sparta?”

“About nine hundred people,” said Charlotte. “It’s up in the mountains.” Just why she had added this bit of geographical intelligence, she couldn’t have explained, not even to herself.

Ashley Downes averted her eyes and thought for a moment, then said, “Let me put your mind at ease. Yes, this is a coed dorm, and yes, there is sexual activity in coed dorms here at Dupont. What floor are you on?”

“Five.”

“Okay. This is a coed dorm, but that doesn’t mean boys are going to be running back and forth across the hall and jumping into bed with girls. Or for that matter, boys from any other part of Edgerton. In fact, if anything, it means they won’t. There’s no actual rule against it, but it’s looked down upon. It’s considered pathetic and dorky to be reduced to hooking up with someone from your own house. It’s called dormcest.”

“Dormcest?”

“Dormcest. You know, like incest. As a matter of fact, Edgerton always has a T-shirt for everybody at the end of the year listing all sorts of funny or stupid things that have happened in the house. Last year’s had a line that said DORMCEST: THREE. That’s three cases out of two hundred students. That’s how dorky it is.”

Now Charlotte could feel herself smiling like a six-year-old who has just stopped crying. She kept smiling and nodding and expressing profound thanks, and she really hadn’t meant to take up her time on the very first night.

Charlotte stood up, and Ashley stood up and put her arm around her shoulders as she walked her to the door. “I’m sorry, tell me your name again?”

“Charlotte Simmons.”

“Well, Charlotte, I’ll tell you something. This isn’t Sparta, North Carolina, but I think you’re gonna find it isn’t Sodom and Gomorrah, either.”

By eight-thirty, back in room 516 once more, Charlotte felt as tired as she had ever been in her life. She had been up since three o’clock this morning and on edge the entire time. Watching “Jeff” and “Valerie” of Sherborn, Boston, and Mather Insurance and “Billy” and “Lizbeth” of County Road 1709, Sparta, and the next thing to unemployed, fend with the problem of breathing the same air—had been draining, excruciating. She decided to take a shower, get in bed, read for a bit, and then go to sleep.

Her heart sank. My God…take a shower? In a coed bathroom? The thought was mortifying, yet she had no choice. She changed into her pajamas, her slippers, and her Scottish plaid polyester flannel bathrobe, picked up her toilet kit and her towel, screwed up her courage, and headed down the corridor. Things were quiet, thank God. On the way she nodded tentatively at a girl and then a boy, each alone and looking as lonesome as she felt.

She entered the bathroom slowly and softly, as if stealth was of the essence. It was a large, windowless, feebly lit room with rows of weary old yellowing white basins and urinals, gray sheet-metal toilet cubicles, narrow shower stalls with old mauve-gone-russet curtains for privacy…One of the showers was running…Other than that, the place seemed to be miraculously empty. Perhaps if she hurried—into a toilet cubicle. She had been sitting down no more than fifteen seconds when she thought she heard a faint grunting sound. Then—a prodigious pig-bladdery splattering sphincter-spasmed bowel explosion, followed by, in rapid succession, plop plop plop and a deep male voice—“Oh fuck! Splashed right up my fucking asshole!”

Filthy! The crudeness, the grossness, the vulgarity—above all the fact that there was a boy or a man inhere…egesting…no more than three or four cubicles down the row from her!

“Shit—a—brick!” said a deep male voice in a cubicle only slightly farther away. “What the fuck you been eating, Winnie—month-old sushi?” He made a mocking vomiting sound. “You’re fucking…morbid, dude. I need a gas mask.”

Sure enough, a nauseous, putrid, gaseous odor was in the air.

Charlotte lifted her legs and pressed her feet against the door, lest these brutes see her slippers in the space beneath the door or the walls and become aware of her presence.

“Don’t be so fucking heartless,” said the first voice. “My asshole’s cold. That was a fucking bull’s-eye.”

The second one laughed. “You’re a human disaster area, Winnie, is what you fucking are.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. That was a terrible performance, dude! Terrible! You want to see a perfect, noiseless turd? I mean perfect? Just swing on by here before you leave. I won’t flush it.”

“And you know what you are, Hilton? You’re a pervert.”

“Don’t try to talk your way out of it. You got to come by here and learn how to take a shit.”

Charlotte didn’t know whether to sit here with her feet up—or run for it. But oh God, she couldn’t sit here with her feet up forever. So in a frenzy she stood up, hoisted her pajama bottom and put her bathrobe back on, picked her toilet kit up off the floor, departed the cubicle, rushed to the row of basins. She had to wash her hands! She heard a toilet flush and then the clack of somebody sliding a cubicle side-bolt lock open. Then another.

“Hey! Yo! You didn’t come by to see, dude.”

“You’re weird. Why don’t you hang it up on the wall over your bed?”

Same deepened manly voices…Charlotte lifted her eyes, and in the mirror she could see two boys—mere boys! Neither looked more than fifteen or sixteen! Babies dropping their voices a couple of octaves in a desperate desire to sound like men! Each had a can of beer in his hand. But that was not allowed! Both were bare from the waist up. One wore a towel around his waist, only that and flip-flops. He had such a tender coating of baby fat over his cheeks, neck, and torso, it made Charlotte think of diapers and talcum powder. The other wore khaki shorts and boots. He was the leaner of the two but still at that mooncalf stage in which the nose looks enormous because the chin hasn’t caught up with it yet. He threw his head back, lifted the can to his mouth, tilted it almost straight up, drank for what seemed like forever with his Adam’s apple pumping up and down like a piston, then jackknifed his body and shook all over, as if in ecstasy, and cried out, “IT TASTES SO GOOD WHEN IT HITS YOUR LIPS!”

The baby face in the towel laughed and laughed.

They were walking straight toward Charlotte—and wound up at basins not far from hers. They clanked their cans of beer down on the narrow shelf of glass. Charlotte began drying her hands on her towel. With peripheral vision she could tell the baby-fat, baby-faced boy was looking at her.

“Hi,” he said. “Nice bathrobe.”

She ignored him.

“Seriously,” said the other, the thin one with the teenager nose. “Awesome plaid. What’s your clan?”

The baby face laughed and laughed and said, “Kmart.”

Then the outsize nose laughed and laughed.

Charlotte ignored them both and picked up her toilet kit. Her face was burning. She knew it must be scarlet.

The boy with the nose said behind his hand in a mock whisper, “No capeesh. Must be a foreign student. The Scotch count as foreign students, don’t they?”

Laughter, laughter, laughter.

Just before she turned to leave, Charlotte saw in the mirror a girl coming toward the basins. She was clad in a towel, too, but had somehow wrapped it around her body from just beneath her arms to just above her knees. There was no longer the sound of a shower running. The girl had a chubby, freckled face and wet, reddish hair plastered against her head and hanging down her back.

When she reached the basins, the baby-fat boy said, “Hi, there. We’re looking for some friendly conversation and a little sympathy.”

The girl barely even glanced at them. She turned to the mirror and brought her forefingers to one eye and spread the lids apart as if looking for something lodged in it. Still looking straight ahead, she said, “I hope you find it.”

As of the moment Charlotte left the bathroom, the boys hadn’t thought of a comeback, and the girl was ignoring them.

On the way back to the room, Charlotte realized her heart was banging away. She was appalled…Coed Bathroom had seemed like a plausible, if uninviting concept, the way the Amorys had talked about it. But this was what it was! The vulgarity, the rudeness, the impudence, the virtual nudity—people parading around in towels—and drinking—barely two hours after the resident assistant Ashley’s assurances there would be no alcohol in this building, much less public drunkenness…Now Charlotte was more than appalled. She was frightened. How was she supposed to live like this?—stripped of all privacy, all modesty…Her heart kept banging away…How could this be real? This was Dupont…Channing, Matt, Randy Hoggart, and Dave Cosgrove at their drunkest would never be so vulgar.

Once inside her room, Charlotte quickly changed back into her denim shorts and her blouse, picked up her toilet kit and her towel, and went down to the Common Room. She remembered a powder room near the entrance. In the Common Room…quite a jolly burble of laughs and voices…the furniture massed in the center of the room had been moved, back to its original places, presumably. Plenty of boys and girls, her classmates, were sprawled on the leather couches and easy chairs or standing around them, having a merry time…making friends…Charlotte was too distraught to even imagine joining in…Suppose people saw her going into the powder room with a toilet kit and a towel? What would they think—or assume?

It was about as cramped as a powder room could be. She carefully locked the door and took a seat on the toilet, only to find that her excretory and egestive systems had shut down, totally. She got up. She would bathe as best she could manage. She took off her blouse and her bra. There she was in the mirror…a wretched, panicked little half-naked creature…She had forgotten to bring a washcloth. She wet one end of the towel in the tiny basin, tried to use the squirt-by-squirt soap dispenser on the wall to lather it, creating a mess mainly, and washed her armpits—

Someone was trying to open the door—only to find it locked—

Charlotte tried to speed up her primitive toilette. She needed to lower her shorts and panties, but the room was so small that if she bent over, her bottom pressed into the wall. So she stood up straight and tried to wriggle her clothes off straight down—

The doorknob began turning again, this time several times, in…an accusatory way? An ostentatious groan of a sigh came from the other side of the door.

From just outside the door a girl’s voice said, “Anybody in there?” Not very nicely, either.

Thoroughly frazzled, Charlotte said, “Not yet!”

The voice said, “Not yet?”

“I mean I’m not through yet!”

Long pause. Then the voice said, “How obvious is that?”

But she had to brush her teeth! Had to!…Finally she managed to squeeze some toothpaste onto her toothbrush. She began furiously brushing her teeth.

The voice from the other side said, “Are you really brushing your teeth in there?”

That did it. Charlotte snapped. “Shut up!” she cried. “Leave me alone! Stop sniffing at the door!”

Silence…prolonged silence…It was hard to believe, but the voice had shut up. Nevertheless, Charlotte hurried. The whole thing was too much. How long could she use a powder room as her bathroom? Maybe if she got up really early every day and brought a washcloth…

She emerged from the powder room carrying a toilet kit and a wet towel. Standing back four or five feet was a small angry girl, arms crossed over her chest. She stared sullenly at the towel and the toilet kit. She had a wide face, olive skin, a grim visage, and a mane of very long, very thick dark hair parted down the middle. As Charlotte rushed past her, the girl muttered, “Why don’t you, like, move in?”

At long last, Charlotte sat propped up against the pillow on her bed, at peace, reading a paperback of a novel Miss Pennington had recommended, Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. As the pages went by, Ethan and Mattie’s unrequited passion became more and more poignant. Involuntarily, Charlotte found herself pulling her knees up closer to her chest and wanting to close her bathrobe more protectively about her pajamas. Poor Ethan! Poor Mattie! You just wanted to help them, tell them what they could do. It’s all right for you to embrace—to declare your love—to leave that frigid little New England town where you’re trapped!

So absorbed was she that she was only faintly aware of how the noise level was rising out in the hall. Even though the door was closed, every now and then she could hear a girl shriek, and sometimes two or more girls shriek, and these were not the shrieks of girls happy to see each other after a long time, but girls expressing their hilarity, genuine or otherwise, over something stupid and juvenile some boy was doing. But these were considerations merely drifting along the margins of Ethan Frome.

Soon she felt terribly tired, however, overwhelmingly tired. She got up, pulled the shades down, turned the lights off, took off her bathrobe, and slipped under the covers. She thought she would go to sleep immediately, but the noise—the activity—in the hallway kept intensifying. Well…everybody was no doubt as wound up and excited as she was, and not everybody bottled it up the way she did. She thought she heard a boy cry out, “Not her—you’ll get awfuck’s disease!” But it couldn’t have been that, because it wasn’t followed by any shrieks or juvenile laughs. Then things quieted down a bit. She heard a little scampering, some sort of scraping on a wall somewhere, but by and by, as she lay there with her eyes shut, the sounds began to float beyond the reach of analysis. For a moment she could see Beverly’s peach fingernails framed by the tan of her fingers, but it meant…nothing. It dissolved into an eyelid movie, and she fell asleep.

She woke up with a start. A shaft of light shot across the counterpane on her bed. Heavy, syncopated thumps on a bass drum, a grunting voice—rap? What time was it? She propped herself up on one elbow and looked toward the door. As soon as she did—

“Whaaazzup, dude?”

Silhouetted in the doorway was the gangling frame of a boy in a floppy T-shirt and baggy pants. He had a long neck and a mass of curly hair that popped out above his ears. In his hand, up near his head, was the unmistakable silhouette of a bottle of beer.

“Wake you up?”

“Yes—” She was so shocked and disoriented that it came out like a dying sigh.

“Courtesy call, dude. Time to chill.” He tilted the bottle up and took a long swallow. “Ah, ah, ah.”

Groggily, “I’m—trying to sleep.”

“ ’S all right,” said the boy. “Needn’pologize. Zits happen.” He smiled goofily and said, “Oohoooo, oohoooo.”

Charlotte remained on one elbow, staring. What’s he doing! The heavy bass thuds—it was rap. Someone down the hall was playing a CD, very loudly. She could barely find her voice. Imploringly, “What—time is it?”

The boy lifted his other wrist up near his face. It was all so eerie, because he was in silhouette, with just a highlight here and there. “It says here…lemme see…it says…time to chill.”

Down the hall, a tremendous crash, followed by a boy yelling, “Well, you sure fucked that, dawg!” Raucous laughs. The rap music pounded on.

The boy’s curly head turned to look, then turned back. “Barbarians,” he said. “Exterminate the brutes. Look—uhhhh, needn’t stand on ceremony—”

With a burst of anger Charlotte pushed herself upward in bed with both arms. “I told you! I’m trying to sleep!”

“Okay!” said the boy, pulling his head back and holding his palms out in front of his chest in a gesture of mock defensiveness. “Whoa! Skooz!” He walked backward with a mock stagger. “I wasn’t even here! That wasn’t me!” He disappeared down the hall, going, “Oohoooo…oohoooo…”

Charlotte got up and shut the door. Her heart was pounding away inside her rib cage. Could she lock the door some way? But even if she could, Beverly hadn’t come in yet. She turned on the light. It was ten minutes after one. She got back into bed and lay on her back with her heart still pounding, listening to the noise. No alcohol in Little Yard. That boy was absolutely drunk! The third drunk boy she had seen with her own eyes since the R.A.’s solemn pronouncement, and it sounded like there were many more. She had the terrible fear that she wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep at all.

An hour or more must have gone by. The ruckus finally began to subside. Where on earth was Beverly? Charlotte stared at the ceiling, she stared at the windows, she lay on this side, she lay on that side. Dupont. She thought of Miss Pennington. She thought of Channing and Regina…Channing and his strong, even features. Regina was Channing’s girlfriend. Laurie said they had gone all the way. Oh, Channing, Channing, Channing. How much more time passed, she didn’t know, because she fell asleep at last, thinking of Channing Reeves’s strong, even features.