I Am Charlotte Simmons

10. Hot Guys

Bettina, Charlotte, and their new friend, a freshman named Mimi, had just returned from PowerPizza to Bettina’s room and the usual stew of unmade sheets and blankets, contorted pillows, strewn clothes and towels, abandoned catalogs, manuals, instruction sheets, CD cases, beauty-enhancement magazines, empty contact lens packets, stray rechargers, and dust balls dust balls dust balls.

“That place is a rip-off!” said Charlotte.

“Forget rip-off,” said Bettina. “My jeans will never fit again.”

“Yeah, I’m so-o-o-o full!” said Mimi. “But that was so good.”

“Now what should we do?” said Charlotte.

Silence. That was, indeed, the question, for that question led straight to a larger one.

Bettina’s roommate, Nora, was out…naturally. After dark she was always out…and Bettina, wearing a polo shirt and tight blue Diesel-brand jeans that made her legs look even chunkier than they were, had settled back into Nora’s techie-looking desk chair. Mimi, wearing likewise fashionably exhausted Diesel jeans and a sweatshirt, sat on one bed with her back propped up against the wall and her knees pulled to her chest. Mimi was a big-boned blonde with a lot of hair, the type boys at Dupont called a Monet, meaning a girl who looks great twenty-five feet away and not that great up close. Up close you became aware that Mimi’s nose was too long for her face. Charlotte sat on the edge of the other bed in a T-shirt, sweater, and shorts. Wearing shorts at night this late in October was pushing it, but she was determined to show off her legs, and besides, she now realized that her only jeans, the inky-blue ones Momma bought her just before she left Sparta, were not faded, were not low-cut at the waist, had tapered legs, and made you look about as un-Diesel as you could get. So here they were, the three of them, assessing their situation, which was that it was Friday night and they were sitting in a dorm room with nothing to do.

Finally Mimi said, “I need—I’m gonna go to the gym.”

“It’s ten-thirty on a Friday night!” said Bettina. “The gym’s probably closed. Besides, that would be lame. We’re not that pathetic.”

“Well, what do you propose we do?” said Mimi.

Charlotte said, “Anyone have any cards or board games?”

“Oh—come—on!” said Bettina. “We’re not in high school anymore!”

“Wanna play drinking games?” said Mimi.

“Drinking games?” said Charlotte. She tried not to reveal her alarm.

“Yeah, ever heard of them?”

“Yeah—” said Charlotte, who hadn’t.

“Where are we going to find alcohol?” said Bettina.

“Good point,” said Mimi.

More silence. Charlotte felt enormously relieved. She didn’t want to look like a moralistic little mouse in front of her new—and only—friends. On the other hand, there was no way she was going to take a drink of alcohol. Momma’s powerful embrace had her arms pinned to her sides when it came to something like that. Did Bettina drink? Charlotte rather desperately hoped not. Bettina was the motor, the energy, the gregarious force, the enterprise, that had brought the three of them together on a Friday night, so that, whatever their circumstances, at least they weren’t alone. But Mimi was the one with…experience. Mimi had gone to a private day school in Los Angeles. She was the one who was up on subjects Charlotte had never heard of, everything from “morphing” with computers to “doing lines” of cocaine and “rolling” at “raves”—which seemed to be some sort of orgies people who used the drug ecstasy went to—and sexual matters such as “the seven-minute seduction,” which Charlotte still didn’t comprehend but didn’t want to ask too many questions about, for fear of appearing hopelessly innocent. In short, Mimi was the sophisticate of the trio, the one with the sharp wit, the amusing cynicism, the world-weariness. She also seemed to have plenty of money to spend on things like going out for supper at a restaurant just because it might be fun. To Charlotte, even going out to PowerPizza was an extravagance. The real reason she had called the place a rip-off was to manufacture a reason why she had ordered so little.

Bettina got up and turned on her absent roommate’s television set. An unseen commentator was yelling, “That did it! That did it! Look at that choke hold! Now she wants to twist her head off!”

“Eeeeyew,” said Bettina, “mud wrestling.” She turned to Mimi and Charlotte. “WWE, CNN, or 90210 reruns?”

“Um—90210, I guess,” said Mimi.

“Reminds you of home, hunh?” said Bettina.

“Totally not,” said Mimi. “It’s so-o-o-o unrealistic, if you actually know anything about Beverly Hills. But I like it anyway.”

Bettina looked at Charlotte.

“Oh yeah,” said Charlotte, “90210, definitely.”

“So 90210 it is.” Bettina began clicking the remote.

Screams rose up from the courtyard, the unmistakable screams, once more, of girls singing their mock distress over the manly antics of boys. Very loud they were, too. The boys sang their choral response of manly laughs, bellows, and yahoos. To Charlotte, this bawling had become the anthem of the victors, namely, those girls who were attractive, experienced, and deft enough to achieve success at Dupont, which, as far as she could tell, was measured in boys.

“What are they doing screaming so loud?” she said.

“It’s Friday,” said Mimi. “Hello-oh?”

“Well, they don’t have to be that loud.”

Still more silence. Then Bettina stood up and put her fists on her hips. “This is ridiculous. We’re not sitting here watching 90210 reruns on a Friday night. What happens when people ask us what we did all weekend? What are we gonna say? ‘Watched TV’?”

Charlotte said, “We could go bowling?”

“Okaaay…” said Mimi, drawling the word out dubiously. “Do either of you two have a car?”

“No.”

“No.”

“Well, that kind of rules that idea out.”

“Still, why don’t we go out,” said Bettina. “You know…like try a frat party or something. There’s supposed to be a big party at the Saint Ray house.”

“Are you invited?” said Charlotte. She looked at Mimi, too, including her in the question.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Bettina. “Sometimes they keep guys out, but they always let girls in.”

“We won’t know anybody,” said Charlotte.

“That’s the whole point,” said Bettina. “We’re supposed to meet people there. How are we supposed to meet anybody if we never go outside this dorm full of rejects?”

“How far is it?” said Charlotte. “How would we get there? How would we get back?”

“Hopefully we won’t,” said Mimi.

“What do you mean?” said Charlotte.

“Well, maybe we’ll meet some hot guys and not have to come back.”

“Nora certainly has that one down.” Bettina motioned with her head toward her roommate’s side of the room. “She used to sexile me. Now…” She rolled her eyes meaningfully.

“Oh, I’ve seen Nora,” said Mimi. “I bet she hasn’t slept in this room for like two weeks, has she?”

“Nora’s okay,” said Bettina, “but she’s such a slut. Did you see what she was wearing tonight to go to dinner?”

“Yeah,” said Mimi. “Could her skirt be any tighter?”

“Maybe she has a date,” said Charlotte.

“Yeah,” said Mimi, “a date with her pimp.”

“Do we really have to stay over there?” said Charlotte.

“No, of course not,” said Mimi. “Let’s go. Seriously. It could be fun.”

“But suppose it’s real late? How do we get back?”

This provoked such a sigh from Mimi that Charlotte discarded the travel barrier and returned meekly to the first roadblock she had tried to erect. “And you’re sure we can get in?”

“Yes! Come on!”

“They’re not even gonna notice us,” said Bettina. She turned to Mimi. “What do we wear?”

Charlotte broke in. “Have you ever been to one before?”

“Obviously! Yes, of course,” said Mimi. “They’re like totally cool. Upperclassmen are way hotter than freshmen. They don’t look like they just got off the school bus.”

“Was everyone really drunk?” said Charlotte.

“Where are you from? What do you think? No, they drank apple juice the whole time.”

That left Charlotte speechless. She knew she should act cool about it; in fact, she looked anxious.

“Come on!” said Mimi.

“Well, maybe,” said Charlotte. “I mean if we’re all gonna go.”

“I’ll lend you my makeup case,” said Bettina. She was brimming with enthusiasm for the adventure ahead.

“Hey, can I borrow that red halter top of yours?” said Mimi.

“Yeah sure,” said Bettina.

“Do you think it would be flattering?”

“Yeah, it looks good on anyone.”

“What should I wear?” said Charlotte.

“Black pants,” said Bettina. “And a bright-colored top. That way you’ll stand out.”

“I don’t want to stand out. I’d rather look like I was supposed to be there.”

“Then wear all black,” said Mimi.

“I don’t know…” said Charlotte. “I was looking at a magazine, and that’s what they wear in New York. I’m not from New York.”

“Help yourself to my closet,” said Bettina.

“I don’t think anything will fit me,” said Charlotte. “I’m gonna have to run down the hall to my room.”

“Well—don’t take all night,” said Bettina.

In 516, all the lights were on, but Beverly was not there, not that Charlotte had thought for a second she would be. Her heart was hammering so hard that when she opened her mouth, an odd chafing sound rose from her chest with each beat, as if her heart were rubbing against her sternum. Beverly’s side of the room was as much of a mess as Bettina’s room. A pair of Beverly’s jeans were on the floor at the foot of her bed. It was as if they had dropped straight off her hips and telescoped at her feet. A round, crushed, prefaded denim pie on the floor was what they looked like. Diesels, needless to say. Charlotte’s side of the room was a model of neatness by Little Yard standards. For a start, she didn’t have enough clothes to be lazy or absentminded enough to leave some of them lying around mashed up like that. For another thing, when you grew up in a five-by-eight-foot bedroom, most of which was taken up by the bed, leaving stuff on the floor and stepping through it was more trouble than keeping it neat—not that Momma had ever left her any choice. Charlotte’s eyes remained fixed on the abandoned blue jeans, but they no longer registered. Crashing a fraternity party—and what did she think they drank, apple juice? She was breathing too fast, and her underarms and her face were abloom with heat. Somehow she had just committed herself to a dreadful test that wasn’t worth taking in the first place. Well, that was crazy, wasn’t it? One of the things that made Charlotte Simmons Charlotte Simmons was the fact that she had never let herself be bent by peer pressure. Nobody could commit her to doing anything. But Mimi was already fed up with her doubts and fears, and if she didn’t go, then there would just be Mimi and Bettina, and maybe it would remain that way, and she would have no friends. She had had only one real friend at Alleghany High, Laurie—four years at the same school, and one friend. What was it—this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an academic star, being applauded over and over again as a prodigy, take the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn’t have put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation.

She was no star here at Dupont, not so far. Nothing had altered her inexpressible conviction that she would be the most brilliant student at this famous university—but how was anyone supposed to know about it, even if she was? At Alleghany High, there was a steady flow of recognition in one form or another. If you skipped a grade in a certain subject, if you were receiving special advanced instruction, if you were chosen to represent the school in some sort of academic competition, if you made nothing but A pluses, everybody knew about it. Here, if you were so brilliant, who would know and who would care, especially if you were a freshman? At this exalted institution, what was that compared to success as a girl? What should she wear? She didn’t have any black pants, and she didn’t have any black top, even if that was what she had been dying to put on. Her blue jeans—they weren’t even a conceivable choice. She looked again at Beverly’s, lying in a clump there on the floor, faded and worn out to near perfection…She’d never even miss them. But suppose somehow she did! Besides, they were bound to be too long. Desperately she scanned the room…Mimi and Bettina were probably already drumming their fingers. Unable to come up with anything better, she put on her print dress, the same one she had worn under the kelly-green gown at commencement. It wasn’t the right thing, but at least it showed off her legs—although not enough…Ohgod. In a frenzy she took off the dress and raised the hem a good two and a half inches, using safety pins…By now they’d be ready to kill her…She looked at herself in Beverly’s door mirror. A bit primitive, the hem job, but lots of leg…Anything else?…On top of Beverly’s bureau there was Beverly’s makeup case and her vanity mirror. Charlotte snapped on the mirror lights. The face she saw, lit up that way, looked like somebody else’s, but somebody else not bad at all. She put her hand on the makeup case. She took her hand away. She’d rather die than have Beverly somehow figure out that she had used her makeup. Besides, she wasn’t sure exactly how you were supposed to use the things in that forbidden container. She left the room frantic, a little soldier about to plunge, feebly equipped, into a dangerous battle for no other reason than to keep up with some girls she knew.

Sure enough, down the hall in Bettina’s room Bettina and Mimi had severely tested patience written all over their faces. Mimi was wearing her jeans and Bettina’s Chinese red halter top, and Bettina had on jeans and a tight T-shirt, the expensive, dressy kind. But above all, there was the makeup. Both girls’ eyes were set in the shadows of the night, just the way Beverly’s always were when she went out. Both girls were fair-haired, but their eyebrows and eyelashes were now black.

Mimi looked Charlotte up and down and said, “I’m glad you don’t want to stand out.”

“Is it terrible?” said Charlotte. How inadequate she was! “Is it all wrong?”

“It’s fine,” Mimi said. “You look great. Let’s go.”

“But you’re both wearing jeans.”

“Sooner or later you’ll need to get some jeans. But not tonight. Tonight you look great.”

“Yeah, you totally do,” said Bettina. “You’ve got the body for it. I think we ought to get going.”

“It looks awful, doesn’t it?” said Charlotte. “Listen, I’m gonna—”

“Gonna what?” said Mimi. It was more of a challenge than a question.

“Oh—I’m just gonna go like this, I guess.”

Soon they were walking in the dark along Ladding Walk, which was in the very oldest part of the campus. The Walk was an extravagantly wide promenade paved with stone and lined with huge ancient trees and late-nineteenth-century mansions, built close together, now used mainly for administrative offices, and, at some juncture, if Bettina had it right, the Saint Ray fraternity house. The light from the ornate old streetlamps overhead succeeded mainly in casting the trees and the buildings into monstrous, indecipherable shadows. Such a heavy stillness enveloped the place, it was hard to believe that they were going to come upon a big fraternity party in this vicinity.

That gave Charlotte a flicker of hope. Perhaps Bettina had it wrong, and the fraternity wasn’t on Ladding Walk, or the party wasn’t tonight but some other night, or it was already over or something. Up ahead in the dark, a ping, as if someone had thrown an empty beer can onto the pavement, followed by the wooooooo! that boys cut loose with to express mock astonishment—and Charlotte’s last hope guttered out.

Soon they heard laughter and voices, although not very loud, and then music, which sounded like nothing more than a dull throbbing. Nevertheless, Charlotte’s heart sped up all over again. As they came closer, a light at the entrance was sufficient to bring a grand Palladian villa out of the shadows. The portico close to the pavement had columns, like Monticello’s. The windows were exceptionally tall but heavily curtained, so that only the faintest sort of light seeped out.

Fifteen or twenty boys and girls, mostly boys, were hanging around in clumps in the little yard out front, chatting and laughing in the subdued voices of people on edge about what might or might not happen. Just then a girl’s voice piped up. “Oh, wow, you think you’re in love. Like I totally care. You think all girls look the same upside down, is what you think.”

This rated a chorus of Woooooooo! from the boys.

A tall, bony boy appeared in front of them. He had long light brown hair parted in the middle and flopping over his ears, and he was clad in khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a polo shirt with a Dupont golf team emblem. He had a drunken, I’m-very-amusing look on his face. “Where’ve you—I mean, where’ve you been?—I mean where’ve you been?” It seemed to be directed at Charlotte. His I’m-very-amusing voice degenerated into small-animal sounds: “Enh enh enh enh enh enh enh.”

Mimi murmured out the side of her mouth, “Just make out you’re talking to somebody else.”

They went up four or five low steps onto the portico and through a pair of dignified old double doors into—bango!—whines, thuds, shrieks, cries, and other agonies of electric guitars, electric basses, electric keyboards, amped-up drums, digital synthesizers, and young singers screaming their throats raw in defiance of God knew what—a regular storm, in short, raging through a swarm of boys and girls yammering, yawping, squirming this way and that, rooting about like weevils in a delirious twilight rank with a sour, rich, rotting sweet odor swelling up like a gas in the heat—the ungodly heat!—of so many bodies mashing in on one another and combusting with adrenaline—

Panicked, Charlotte turned toward Bettina and Mimi with the intention of saying “Let’s leave!” but already the pressure of people who had come in behind them was forcing her toward the center of the swarm. Mimi had a vacant look, far from sophisticated. Bettina arched her eyebrows and pulled a face, as if to say, “I’m as bewildered as you are! Just press on!”

Blocking the way was a heavy wooden table commanded by two boys in blue button-down shirts, open at the throat, with great half-moons of sweat under their armpits. God it was hot in here! Behind them, arms crossed, face deadpan, stood a massive boy with a neck wider than his head and a tight green T-shirt that brought out the heft of his chest and the slabs of meat that were his upper arms, glistening with sweat. The boys in the blue shirts were shaking their heads no to three boys, two of them black, who were leaning over the table, supporting themselves on the heels of their hands. Immediately in front of Charlotte, a big girl with low-cut jeans and a bare midriff squeezed past the boys without so much as pausing at the table, and Charlotte could hear Bettina, just behind her: “Go ahead! Go ahead!” So Charlotte squeezed by, too, feeling reckless, guilty, frightened, baking with heat. She turned about. Bettina and Mimi had made it through, and the three of them huddled together.

Mimi leaned in close to Charlotte, to overcome the uproar of the revelry, and said, “See? Nothing to it!” Her face didn’t look all that confident.

They stood still for a moment, trying to get their bearings. The storm bore down on them from…where? There were evidently two different bands at opposite ends of the house. In the darkness of the far side of the hall, strobe lights were flashing, illuminating a mob of white faces one moment and abandoning them to darkness the next, so that the faces themselves seemed to be flashing on and off amid laughter, shouts, and inexplicable ululations. Ostentatiously drunk boys weaved through the crowd carrying big twenty-ounce translucent cups, grinning with their mouths open, and bouncing off people. Two boys stood side by side, their faces, eyes, necks, and hands twitching spastically, while three others looked on, convulsed with laughter. The feverishness of it all dumbfounded Charlotte. Here were hundreds of boys and girls in a state of bawling rapture—over what?…Her eyes jumped from one girl to another out in that heaving disco gloaming.

So many wearing makeup—talking to boys…So many with glistening lips—talking to boys…So many eyes blazing like jewels in their dark occipital orbits—looking up, as if enchanted, at boys…So many leather skirts ending a foot or more above the knees, so many low-cut jeans and black pants, so many abbreviated halter tops, so many belly buttons winking in between—at boys. Their flesh, wherever it showed, seemed oiled. In fact, they were merely sweating, and the sweat reflected what little light there was. The sight of it made Charlotte feel the heat herself. Her armpits were humid. She wondered if the sweat would discolor her dress. She literally couldn’t afford to ruin a dress, not even a pathetic one like this…hem hiked up by safety pins…She felt like a child…with her pale, unadorned face, her long little-girl hair, and her little print dress—hanging onto Bettina and Mimi for dear life. The very hair on her head was getting wet with sweat.

And the targets of the seductive artifices she saw all around her? The boys looked the same as they did every day, except that they were sweating. They still wore their shirts pulled out and flopping down over their jeans and khakis…They still wore T-shirts, polo shirts, khaki shorts, sneakers, and flip-flops. Exact same clothes as fifth-graders’, Charlotte said to herself—fifth-graders with faces grizzled by seven- or eight-day growths of beard…They still wore their hair unparted and unruly, so that it tumbled down over their foreheads in half bangs…except for some who had combed in hair gel to give it shape…

A group of girls walked past, bunched together, blocking Charlotte’s line of sight. They didn’t look happy. She recognized two of them as freshmen. They all wore jeans, and they were practically stepping on one another’s heels as they coursed through the crowd, glum and sweaty…a little herd of freshmen. The heat was becoming ferocious. Sweat was breaking out on Charlotte’s forearms. She felt grungy and dirty, and she just got here. Over there…another bunch of freshman girls moving about like a single organism with many denim legs, blank looks on their faces—or, if not blank, anxious, as was she, and she didn’t even have the saving grace of blue jeans. A little country girl’s daytime print dress! How could she have let Mimi intimidate her from going back to her room and taking this thing off?

She turned back toward Bettina and Mimi, but Mimi was no longer there. She leaned close to Bettina’s ear. “What happened to Mimi?”

Bettina shrugged and gestured vaguely into the midst of the crowd all around them.

“Bettina! Bettina!” Amid the heaving bodies, a girl was waving and grinning. She wore heavy scarlet lipstick, and her eyes beamed from out of a pair of deep purple dreamlike sockets. She seemed to be with three or four other girls. Charlotte recognized two of them as freshmen.

“Hadley!” Bettina shrieked the name, and Charlotte knew precisely why. She would have shrieked, too, had she been so blessed as to find a friend somewhere in this drunken rout and thereby be rescued from social oblivion on an alien planet to which she hadn’t been invited in the first place.

Bettina headed toward her Hadley, looking back at Charlotte just long enough to smile and raise her forefinger, as if to indicate she’d be back in a moment. But Charlotte knew she wouldn’t be, and sure enough, in no time Bettina and Hadley and those other girls had been swallowed up by the mob of revelers.

Barely five feet from Charlotte, a boy with big hips and heavy black eyebrows that ran together above his nose lurched through the crowd, drunk, proudly drunk, carrying a white plastic drink container and bawling, “I WANT SOME ASS! I NEED SOME ASS! ANYBODY KNOW WHERE’S SOME ASS?” and vastly enjoying the laughs he got from the boys and the mock shock on the faces of the girls. One of the boys yelled back, “Who you kidding, I.P.? You’re ass negative! All you want is a knuckle fuck!” And everybody laughed again.

The rawness left Charlotte numb and frightened, and a fast-rising fear of some as yet nameless catastrophe made things worse. Charlotte Simmons was now a castaway in the hellish uproar—and everyone would see that! How she must look in their eyes! A little country girl dressed as inappropriately as a girl could be in an atmosphere like this, wearing no makeup—a waif alone in the storm.

She stood on tiptoes and searched the crowd for Bettina and Mimi. She would fight her way through the mob and attach herself to one of them, no matter how hopeless that would make her look.

Why not just leave, for God’s sake!

But the walk back alone in the dark, back to the hollow place from which she had come—she could hear Bettina or Mimi or both asking her tomorrow, “What happened to you?” and not really caring in the slightest and not asking her to go anywhere again. She had no choice but to persevere and undertake the grim task of making this houseful of bawling boys and shrieking girls believe she was actually with someone and as deliriously happy as everybody else.

She tried smiling smugly and staring confidently at blank spots on the walls, as if she had just seen someone she knew only too well—and she was convinced they would all see that for what it was, namely, a look of curdled fear. The electric wails, whines, thuds, percussion, the bawling, the screaming, louder and louder—

Over near a wall—a line of girls. Some were talking into each other’s ears, the only way to make yourself heard in the storm, but others were talking to no one. They were merely in line. Well—no matter how haplessly, she would be…with somebody. So she got in line, too. Soon enough it became apparent that this was a line to a bathroom. Pathetic…but an identifiable role, however temporary, however lowly—that was the main thing. She could catch stray overtones of girls chattering up ahead but couldn’t make out what they were saying. The girl immediately ahead of her, a brunette with short, bobbed hair, had a worried, distracted look on her face and seemed to be alone. She should strike up a conversation with her—but how? What was there to say to a stranger in a line of girls waiting to get into the bathroom? Did she dare put her mouth up to the ear of someone she never laid eyes on before? That wouldn’t hold back Bettina for a second. Bettina had just piped up and said, “Sexiled?” Charlotte couldn’t imagine saying such a thing to a girl she didn’t know.

The line inched forward, inched forward, while the party raged. That was all right with Charlotte. The slower the line, the longer she would have her protective cover. When she finally came close to the bathroom door, there was an amateurish but big sign on it: BOOTING ROOM. Booting? She could hear someone inside retching and vomiting. Or was it two people? Presently a tall, skinny girl came out, her face a ghastly white. Beverly! Charlotte thought at first. But that’s not her. On the other side of the door the sound of retching went on, unabated. The only way Charlotte could kill more time before having to face social humiliation once again was by actually entering the bathroom. Finally her turn came. Two toilet stalls—one closed—the unmistakable sound of someone throwing up—and the overpowering odor of vomitus swept over her like something liquid and tangible in the air. She turned about and hurried back out into the storm.

Once more she threaded her way through the crowd, looking for Bettina and Mimi. She came upon a huddle of girls and was passing only inches from one of them, an exotic-looking girl with very long, straight black hair parted down the middle and streaming down either side of her face. The girl was saying, “Are you kidding? No way! We didn’t do anything!”—when a big, laughing boy backed up and bumped Charlotte, and Charlotte’s shoulder bumped the girl’s. The girl turned her head and glowered from out of her hood of hair.

“Sorry!” said Charlotte.

The girl inspected Charlotte’s face and her print dress without saying a thing, not even a word of reproof. She merely turned back to her friends. As if Charlotte had vanished into thin air, she said, “I get so bummed out by these freshmen. I’m a junior, and I don’t have a boyfriend, and they prance around like, ‘Hey, fuck me!’ And the guys totally love it! They’re like totally into fresh meat!”

More desperate than ever for cover, Charlotte wriggled and squirmed on through the crowd.

Another line, boys and girls—heading for what? It didn’t matter. Charlotte tucked herself into the end of the queue and began another slow shuffle forward. This one was heading for a table, behind which two old black men in white jackets were serving drinks. Drinks…what would she say when she got there? What could she possibly ask for? As she drew closer, she could see big forty-ounce plastic bottles of Diet Coke, ginger ale, Sprite, seltzer, and a big pitcher of orange juice. By the time she reached the table, she realized that in fact the two black servitors weren’t serving any alcoholic drinks at all. She walked away with a big plastic cup of ginger ale in her hand, relieved and vaguely puzzled. If they were only serving soft drinks—what about all the drunken boys? The storm raged on.

She stood at the edge of the crowd, slowly sipping her drink. A drink, a drink in her hand…not much, but as good as—perhaps even slightly better than—being in a line. Holding a drink was certification, however low-grade, that you were part of the party and not hopelessly adrift.

She sipped and sipped, slower and slower. She scanned the crowd, no longer really counting on finding Bettina and Mimi. The uproar, the lurching boys, the relentless music, the dank smell, the epileptic flashes of the strobe lights…how grueling it had become, how stultifying. Her shoulders slumped; her face went slack…

She felt the pressure of a hand on her upper arm. She turned and faced a guy who was bound to be in his twenties. He was startlingly good-looking, even though his face was flushed and his forehead was slick with sweat. Everything about him struck her as imposing—the cleft chin and square jaws, the perfect thatch of light brown hair, the hazel eyes that were unquestionably mocking her, the smile that had just a hint of smirk, the white button-down shirt so freshly washed and ironed it still had a pair of folding lines down the front, a pair of khakis not worn dirty and shapeless, as other boys’ were, but impeccably laundered and ironed with crisp creases. Everything about him said to her: authority. She had been caught. She dreaded the words he was about to utter, which would be who invited you and then what are you doing here.

“Hi!” he said, leaning his head close to hers so she could hear him. “Mind if I ask you something? I bet you get really tired of people telling you you look like Britney Spears.”

What on earth was he talking about? He had a white plastic drink container in one hand—was he drunk? It took a moment for her to entertain the notion that he might, in fact, be flirting with her. Her face turned hot, and she smiled to try to keep from looking flustered. She finally managed to say, “I don’t think so.” But in such a little voice! With such a weak, stupid smile—and such clumsy ambiguity! Was he going to think she was saying she didn’t get tired of being mistaken for Britney Spears? How awkward she was amid this swarm of sophisticates with naked belly buttons and little low-slung leather skirts!

The boy put his hand on her arm again, as if he were only trying to steady the two of them while he leaned in closer. “Well, I say you do, and Saint Rays don’t joke around.”

He must be drunk. He was so extraordinarily good-looking, it intimidated her. She ransacked her brain again for something light and deft, and came up speechless. She stood there smiling a smile she knew imparted nothing but the embarrassment of a little girl who had no experience in encounters like this.

He patted her on the arm and said, “Okay, I am kidding. You do look like Britney Spears, but if you wanna know the truth, I just wanted to say hi.” He began staring deep into her eyes from no more than six inches away. He put his hand on her shoulder and grasped it, the way a mentor might if he were about to ask his young protégée a very important question. “You having fun?”

You having fun? She had been miserable from the moment she entered this house, but how could she be frank with someone so blasé? She couldn’t even get the sickly smile off her face. “I guess so,” she said. “Mostly.”

He took his hand off her shoulder, turned it palm up, and stared at her with his mouth open. “You guess so! Mostly!” Then he put his hand back on her shoulder. “How can we change that?”

She kept smiling, gamely, which made her feel stupid. “I’m just looking for two friends of mine.”

“Male or female?”

“Two girls who live in my house in Little Yard.”

“Hey, that’s a relief. In that case—wanna dance?”

The thought terrified her. She knew practically nothing about dancing, other than the square dancing she used to do out at the Grange Hall in Sparta. At the same time, the attentions of a good-looking boy like this would certainly validate her presence here.

She finally started nodding yes and said in a little voice, “Okay.”

“Awesome!” He patted her on the arm again.

He took a sip of his drink. He placed his other hand on the small of her back and began steering her through the crowd. Well—he was only helping her, wasn’t he? It wasn’t easy getting through this mob. It was so hot, and she was sweating so much she could feel the pressure of his palm pasting the cotton dress to her skin. Wails! Thuds! The percussion shook her rib cage.

They were heading toward the back, where the strobe lights were flashing. In the roaring surf of polo shirts, T-shirts, camisoles, sleeveless jerseys, halter tops, and indefinable gossamer tops, they came upon a roly-poly boy in a blue button-down shirt and khakis, with a big plastic cup in his hand. He grinned in a cockeyed way and cried out, “Yo, Hoyto!”

Charlotte’s escort said, “W’as happenin’, Boo-man?”

There was an awkward pause as the roly-poly boy, who had a drunken, openmouthed grin on his face, gave Charlotte a frank appraisal.

“We’re taking a house tour!” said Charlotte’s escort, shouting to be heard, whereupon he slid his hand off her back and put it around her. “Boo, this is—uhhh—” He turned to Charlotte. “Have you met Boo?” He gave her a little squeeze.

The roly-poly boy chuckled and looked at his wristwatch and said at the top of his voice, “Okay, Hoyto, seven minutes, and the clock is running!”

Charlotte looked up and said, “What’s he mean, seven minutes and the clock is running?”

Good. She didn’t know. Her escort pretended to tip his plastic cup back three times in the semaphore that says, “He’s drunk,” and then added, aloud, “Beats me.”

Every few yards, it seemed, some boy or other would cry out “Hoyt!” “Hoyto!” “Hoyt-man!” or some other variation of the name Hoyt. Charlotte found herself looking up at him and smiling, not from pleasure but from the need she felt to make people think she actually knew this obviously well-known boy who had his hand on her back.

A great strapping boy wearing a polo shirt that showed off his build came up and said, “Yo, Hoytster! Where’d you get that drink?”

“I’m not drinking,” said Hoyt. “It’s water.” He lowered and tilted the cup, and sure enough, it was water. Charlotte was greatly relieved.

“Ve-ry int-ter-rest-ting,” said the great strapping boy in some sort of mock foreign accent. “So to-night…the snowman cometh.”

Hoyt shook his head. “Come on, Harrison.” Harrison put his forefinger under his nose and made a profound sniff sniff sniff sound and grinned.

Now they were very close to all the white faces flashing in the strobe lights. Charlotte could see arms and hands flashing, too—a whole mob of people dancing on a big terrace enclosed by glass. At night the glass reflected like a mirror, so that it seemed as if there were strobe lights pulsing on and off from here to beyond Ladding Walk and on to infinity. The music was so loud it hurt her ears. Scores of white people, flashing in slices. Five black men, the musicians, flashing in slices, glossy with sweat. A cadaverously thin singer with dreadlocks. His head was thrown back, and he seemed to be swallowing a handheld microphone—in slices. He was screaming, “Mackin’n’jackin’—ungggh—mackin’n’jackin’.” Next to a wall near the band—flashes of a boy and girl who were dancing on top of a table—in slices. Their faces bobbed, flashed on and off—light, dark, light, dark—in slices, their arms were flailing in slices, their legs were shimmying in slices, but they were joined at the pelvis. Their pelvic saddles bucked and reared in slices but never parted. Her jeans were so low-cut that when she torqued far enough, you got a flash of the top of the cleft of her slick, sweating buttocks. The mocking wooooo wooooo wooooos of the boys massed about the table skimmed along the crest of the noise. Hoyt was now in slices. Charlotte’s own arms were in slices. Gradually her eyes adjusted to the phenomenon, and she could see there were couples everywhere on the floor, dancing that way, locked mons pubis to mons pubis. She couldn’t believe her eyes! They were simulating…intercourse! Right out in the open! It made her think of Regina’s filthy phrase, “dry-humping.” They were pressing their genitals together! Some girls were bending over so that boys could thrust thrust thrust thrust simulate intercourse from behind, like dogs in a barnyard!

Hoyt put his arm around her again, tilted his head very close to hers, and said, “You wanna dance?”

Charlotte couldn’t speak, she was so appalled. She shook her head no, almost ferociously. Hoyt said, “Hey, you can’t do that to me!”

He said it in a jocular way—or did he? Charlotte opened her mouth—and managed only a sickly smile—after all, it wasn’t his fault—as she shook her head again.

“Come on! You said you wanted to dance! I took you all the way through that mob so we could dance! Humor me! One song! That’s it!” He had to shout to be heard.

Again she shook her head and mouthed the word no.

He cocked his head and stared at her for a moment, his tongue in his cheek, as if to say, “You really think I’ll take that for an answer?”

“Let’s go!” He seized her by the hand and tried to pull her toward the dance floor.

“You”—a rush of uncontrollable outrage. “Stop it! Let go of me! I changed my mind! I don’t want to dance!”

He let go, startled by her outburst.

He held his hands up in a defensive posture. “Hey! Okay. Chill!” He smiled broadly. “Who said anything about dancing? I said house tour, and I meant house tour!”

That’s better, she thought. He couldn’t take her for granted anymore. This speck of encouragement expunged her angry stare. In fact, she found herself giving him a rueful little smile. But she still resented his attitude. All these people rubbing…their genitals together!…like dogs in heat…How dare he? She was better than the whole bunch of them! She was better than him! What did he have to be smug about?

When he put his hand on the small of her back again and began steering her out of the terrace room and into the grand hall, she knew she should jerk away from him—but Bettina and Mimi! There they were in the midst of the mob with Bettina’s friend Hadley and some other girls—and Bettina was looking straight at her! They were too far apart to even shout to one another, but Bettina arched her eyebrows and pulled a face that as much as said, “Whoa! Look at you—with a hot guy like that!” Mimi’s face fell. She stared at Charlotte with amazement and envy. She and Bettina were still stuck in a freshman herd.

Charlotte immediately looked up at Hoyt and smiled and tried desperately to think of a question to ask so he would have to turn his face toward hers and Bettina and Mimi and their herd would think they were having a great time. This Hoyt represented social triumph.

“Uh…what uh—” Why couldn’t she come up with a question! “Uh…I—”

“Beat it up!” said Hoyt, smiling and revolving his hand, encouraging her to get the words out.

“What’s uh—what’s the name of the band?”

“The Odds!” he shouted.

“The odds?”

“The name of the band! The Odds! Fuck! I can’t hear anything! Let’s go downstairs.”

Downstairs?

“The secret chamber!” Hoyt arched his eyebrows several times in an exaggerated way to indicate he was only being funny.

But what if he wasn’t! Why had he put it that way? On the other hand, she was still floating on the awed face Bettina had made and Mimi’s sullen wonder—Mimi, who had made her feel so timid, hicklike, and awkward, in short, unconnected with anything at this elite place. Charlotte craned about for another glimpse of the two of them, who she was sure were tracking her every step, but she could no longer see them.

Absentmindedly she said to Hoyt, “All right.” Whatever his so-called secret chamber was, she now felt adventurous enough to take it. The looks on their faces!

Before she knew it, Hoyt had steered her down a dim, hazy corridor paneled with carved walnut. There were small, ribbed half columns of the same wood where the panels joined. The panels were so dark they soaked up what little light there was. The haze became a churning fog, and revelers wandered about yawping and cackling in a lunatic way.

Hoyt stopped behind two boys and two girls who were hovering over a table next to the wall. Seated at it was another brute—white, massive, young, but fast going bald, with a green T-shirt tight enough to show off great slabs of muscle, those and the dark triangle of wet sweat where the two bulging halves of his chest joined above the midsection. An argument was in progress.

“Well, how do you think we got in in the first place?” said a tall boy with a wide neck and a tough-guy face softened only by the thatch of brown curls coming down over his forehead.

The brute seated at the desk crossed his arms, which made them seem twice as big, and leaned back in his chair and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I just know you gotta be a member or have a ticket to go downstairs.”

The flat-faced boy, who had the dull stare of somebody drunk, launched into some heated remonstrances. Hoyt stepped forward and said to the sentinel behind the desk, “We got an issue here, Derek?”

The sentinel, Derek, said, “He says they had tickets, but they”—he motioned upward with his head, indicating the monitors on the floor above—“took them from them when they came in.”

Hoyt slipped his arm away from Charlotte’s waist, stepped forward, and said in a challenging tone, “Who invited you? Who gave you the tickets?”

A pause. Sensing, hoping for a rude confrontation, random onlookers began gathering around. Finally the guy said, “His name’s Johnson.”

“Eric Johnson?” said Hoyt.

“Unh hunh, Eric Johnson.”

“Well, there’s nobody in this fraternity named Johnson, and there’s nobody named Eric,” said Hoyt.

A couple of the gawkers laughed. Realizing he had been made to look like a fool in front of his friends and an audience, the guy felt compelled to begin the male battle. “And so who the hell are you?”

“God, as far as this conversation is concerned,” said Hoyt. “I’m a Saint Ray.” He had no expression except for an accusing stare and a slight thrust of his chin.

The guy set his jaw and lowered one eyebrow. Charlotte, like the others, quickly sized the two of them up in terms of male combat. The would-be crasher was taller, heavier, tougher looking, and more powerfully built. “That’s very cute,” he said to Hoyt, “but you wanna know what I think?”

“Not particularly,” said Hoyt, “unless you’d like to explain why you shouldn’t be a pal and fuck off.”

The boy took a step closer, opened his mouth slightly, pressed the tip of his tongue against his lower lip, and narrowed his eyes to slits, as if trying to decide exactly which way to tear his adversary limb from limb. Hoyt maintained his insulting stare. The brute manning the desk was on his feet. He held an open hand up in front of the boy’s chest. His bare forearm was the size of a cured ham.

“Time out, tiger,” he said. “We can’t let you go downstairs, and you don’t want beef. Okay? Do like he said and take a walk.”

Furious and powerless, the boy turned and walked away. His bewildered friends followed him, and the gawkers took it all in, disappointed that things hadn’t progressed to bloodshed, cracked bone, and loosened teeth. After he had taken five or six steps, the guy wheeled about and pointed his forefinger at Hoyt.

“I’ll remember you! And next time it’ll be one on one!”

Hoyt raised his cupped hand to his mouth and pantomimed knocking back three gulps. You’re just another drunk. The gawkers laughed some more.

Charlotte flashed back to Daddy and Sheriff Pike’s confrontation with Channing Reeves and his buddies. Despite the language he had used, Hoyt’s attitude of cool command impressed her.

The brute, Derek, smiled, shook his head, and said to Hoyt, “I always love these guys who are gonna come back and do something.” Then he put the heel of his hand on the carved walnut panel on the wall behind him. It swung inward. It was like a secret door from out of a movie. The brute gestured, indicating that Charlotte and Hoyt should come on through, and then he scanned the remaining gawkers to make sure they didn’t have any ambitions of their own.

Hoyt slipped his arm around her waist again, as if he was just steering her through the doorway. She stiffened for a moment but didn’t disengage. It was just…his way of being a host.

“Where are we going?” she wanted to know.

“Downstairs,” said Hoyt.

“What’s downstairs?”

“You’ll see.”

“I’ll see what?”

“You’ll see!” said Hoyt. He assessed her wary expression and sighed. “Oh, okay, you’re ruining the surprise, but I might as well—no—I can’t do that—I can’t tell you, but there’ll be a lot of people there. We won’t stay very long. You just ought to see it.”

She was wary—no, plain-long scared.

Charlotte hesitated. Fear of the unknown and a chance at social triumph wrestled on the edge of a cliff above the abyss of doom…and…the social striver won. She followed Hoyt. The door closed behind them with a heavy thunk. The noise of the party was suddenly faint. Wherever they were, it was ten or twenty degrees cooler. They were on a landing, which was the threshold of a narrow, poorly lit stairway with black rubber treads that twisted downward around a curved wall. They headed down and around. The stairway, it turned out, led to a small cellar chamber consisting of a concrete floor painted furnace-room gray, tired-beige walls, and a wide metal door of the same color with a small square window in it. The ceiling was so low it seemed to Charlotte like some immense mass about to crush her. Hoyt pressed a button beside the door, and a scowling face appeared at the window. The face saw Hoyt and relaxed, and the door opened.

“Yo, Hoyto!”

The face belonged to a suddenly cheery big boy wearing the ever-present—fashionable?—khakis with the tail of a button-down shirt hanging outside it. The dank, sour, oddly rich odor Charlotte had detected upstairs—in here it was ten times stronger—and she realized what it was: a room the size of a living room saturated, re-saturated, eternally soaked in spilt beer. Downlighters recessed in a low ceiling cast light on a bare wooden floor, and cigarette smoke hung in the beams. The ceiling and the walls were painted a lumpy dark brown. Over the sound system came a squeaky, staccato jazz saxophone and a voice that talked the lyrics and kept saying, “Chocolate City.” Some boisterous students were clustered about something or other on the wall opposite…

“Hey, Hunter,” Hoyt said to the keeper of the gate. “Had any issues?”

“Not so far,” the boy said. He embarked on a long discourse about how “the monitors” were supposedly everywhere tonight, about how you tell one from a genuine student, and why you had to be extremely careful all the same. Throughout this conversation, neither one, Hoyt or this Hunter, made the slightest acknowledgment of Charlotte’s presence, even though Hoyt had his arm about her waist.

Her resentment was rising fast as he began steering her into the room, his arm still around her. Make him let go! On the other hand, this underground room, with its loud drinkers and smokers, made her claustrophobic, and he was her protector and her validation for being here at all. So she let him lead her that way toward the crowd. The students were hiving about an old-fashioned bar of dark wood, with a brass footrail. Happy—abnormally happy—to have made it into a special place where others couldn’t go, they babbled, laughed, and shrieked. The bottom end of a bottle arced up above the head level of the swarm. It took a moment for Charlotte to realize that the bottle was in the grip of a boy who was pouring whatever was in it straight down his throat.

Cries of “Hoyt!” and “W’as up, Hoyto!” from the crowd. The party had reached the stage at which conversation disintegrates into inarticulate jubilation over being young, drunk, and immune to disapproval in the company of others who are likewise young and drunk and what of it. Off to the side, a boy and girl were lying together on a couch in a profound embrace, bodies pressed together. No one seemed to take any notice.

Behind the bar were two middle-aged black men in white shirts, their sleeves rolled up over their forearms, their black neckties pulled up tight at the throat. The shirts had great crescents of sweat beneath the armpits. Before them, on the bar, was a lineup of bottles of whiskey, rum, wine, vodka, and other things harder to figure out. Everything—big drinks, small drinks, beer, or vodka—they served in identical plastic cups.

Still holding Charlotte tightly, Hoyt said, “What would you like?”

“Nothing, thanks.” She forced a smile.

“Oh come on. You wouldn’t dance with me! So you gotta at least have a drink!”

He said it so loud! People at the table were turning around.

Barely above a whisper: “I don’t drink.”

Hoyt boomed out, “Not even beer?”

She croaked out, “Uh…no. You’re not drinking.”

The boomer: “I will if you will!”

More people were turning around. Charlotte could feel the color surging into her face. She tried to utter the word no, but could only say it by shaking her head. The smile on her face was meant to indicate to them that this was all in fun. In fact—and she was conscious of it—it was the sickly smile of someone who thinks she has just committed a terrible gaffe.

“Well then, how about some wine? Wine isn’t even drinking! It doesn’t even count!” Everyone could hear him.

“Don’t listen to him! He’s a lapsed recovering alcoholic!”

Out the corner of her eye Charlotte could tell that came from a big, strapping boy—khakis, blue button-down shirt, tail out—near the table. He had his arm around a lissome girl in a miniskirt. Her eyes were bleary and switched off. She looked as if she would fall to the floor if he took his arm away. But Charlotte didn’t dare look at the guy, since she had no idea how she might possibly come up with an answer.

Once more looking at her, the boy said, “You know you’re standing next to the poster boy for Mothers Against Binge Drinking?”

“Fun-nee,” said Hoyt. “Why don’t you sing us a song, Julian? They say drunks can sing songs even after they start bubbling at the mouth.”

Hoyt still had his arm around Charlotte. He looked down at her, smiled, gave her a mighty squeeze, and began steering her toward the bar.

She had no idea what to say to this big guy who kept directing questions to her—or supposedly to her. Her face was aflame with embarrassment over the proprietary hugs Hoyt was giving her in front of everybody. She wanted to show everybody she didn’t belong to him—but did she dare make a scene in this secret cellar or wherever she was? Worst of all, she could feel one of her greatest strengths, the fact that Charlotte Simmons was one of those rare young people who never caved in to peer pressure, ebbing away moment by moment. She couldn’t have all these people, these sophisticated upper-classmen, staring at her as if she were some naïve freshman oddity. In the next moment, she heard herself saying to Hoyt, “Maybe some wine.”

“Way to go!” said Hoyt. Arm still around her, he led her into the throng by the table.

The big guy, Julian, edged over toward them and said, “You are so bad, Hoyt.” He said it as if she wasn’t even there.

Hoyt leaned over toward him and said in a low voice, “You know what a cock block is, Julian?” To Charlotte: “Red wine or white?”

“I don’t know. Red?”

He let go of her for a moment and started to muscle his way through the crowd to the table. He stopped and looked off to the side. Then he yelled out, “Yo! Get a room!”

The boy on the couch had thrust one denim leg between the girl’s denim thighs, and she had wrapped one leg way up practically around his waist, and they were making little thrusting motions. People started laughing, and three or four others yelled, “Yeah, get a room!” The couple disentangled and propped themselves up on their elbows, staring stupidly at their audience. The girl Julian was supporting started making a sputtering sound, like air escaping from the tiny opening of a party balloon. Her lips were flapping. Her eyes were open but saw nothing. Just like that she collapsed. Julian barely managed to keep her from hitting the floor.

“Aw, shit,” he said. He lifted up her inert form and flung it over his shoulder. “Fucking Roofies.”

He turned to carry the girl out of the room—and a sludgy brown stream was running down the back of one leg. It was putrid. Feces.

Charlotte went, “Hoyt—Hoyt—” She was horrified.

“Ecch,” said Hoyt. “Nothing to worry about. Girl’s crazy. She takes muscle relaxants.”

In due course, Hoyt came back from the bar with two cups, one for her and one for himself. He raised his, as if making a toast. Still terribly embarrassed and convinced that the entire room was waiting to see what she would do, she raised her container, and Hoyt tapped it with his. Not knowing what else to do, she put hers to her lips and took a sip. It wasn’t all that horrible—but she felt a jolt of shame. The only reason she was holding this drink in her hand was to keep from looking uncool in front of a bunch of drunks she didn’t even know. But she took another sip, a bigger one, and then another, bigger still. Only then did she notice Hoyt hadn’t even brought his drink to his lips.

He kept sneaking glances down into her cup. Spreading the warmest and sincerest smile imaginable across his face, he looked deep into her eyes. Then he motioned toward the metal door. “I told you we wouldn’t stay down here very long,” said the man you could always trust. “Let me show you what’s upstairs.”

Charlotte nodded and took another gulp.

Charlotte hadn’t felt this relaxed—or trustful—all evening. Instead of the chill of anxiety that had gripped her ever since she first stepped into this house, something warm and mellow now coursed through her veins. This good-looking boy, Hoyt, who had excited and frightened her at the same time, had proved to be a gentleman, albeit an extremely “hot” gentleman, to use Mimi’s word. The look on her face!—and Bettina’s! That was what she could see as she looked into Hoyt’s eyes. She didn’t mind at all when he took her by the hand as he led her back up the winding stairs.

At the top he turned the handle of the secret door, but it wouldn’t open. No doubt the bouncer had locked it, he told Charlotte. The guy must have spotted a monitor, or somebody who might be a monitor. It seemed that the university sent snoopers around to report underage drinking—meaning serving alcohol where people under twenty-one were present—and it was hard to keep them out. That was why both the alcohol at the secret bar downstairs and the soft drinks at the bar on the main floor were served in identical white containers. That way the monitors couldn’t tell a container of beer from a container of Sprite. The administration had begun enforcing the drinking rule with a vengeance. The vengeance was directed at the very system itself: fraternities. The administration was looking for any way possible to force them off the campus and eliminate them, and—

Charlotte didn’t hear anything after underage drinking. She was at this very moment doing something illegal. It had never occurred to her! But the jolt of panic soon passed. She took another swallow of wine. While delivering his exegesis, Hoyt put his arm around her again. This time it wasn’t at all disturbing. Somehow he had become her protector.

Hoyt tried the door again, and now it opened. They emerged into the full onslaught of the music. The bouncer turned around in his seat at the desk, smiled wryly, and said something to Hoyt. It sounded like, “All clear, Hoyto.”

The crowd in the great hall had swollen. Boys and girls, practically all of them white, were crammed together from one end to the other. The heat was worse than ever. The girls grinned with their mouths open and laughed at anything and nothing at all. The music was a never-ending chain-reaction freeway pileup with slivers of human cries and shrieks.

She hadn’t wanted anybody seeing him touch her in any way, least of all Mimi and Bettina, but now a thrill of sudden social ascension—she had a hot guy hovering over her!—was overriding everything else. And what if they did see her with his arm around her? What was actually wrong with that? Was there a better-looking boy in the whole place? Take a good look, Mimi! Mimi’s condescending attitude would never survive seeing her with this boy in tow…Charlotte looked about, halfway expecting to see them. But there were so many bodies, so much noise, such a delirious humid haze…and the strobe lights kept throbbing…

Hoyt was steering her toward the grand staircase. It was just ahead, its banister sweeping upstairs in a luxurious curve. She stiffened with a twinge of the Doubts…Was it really wise to go “upstairs,” whatever that might possibly mean? But there were already boys and girls going up the staircase and coming down the staircase, a regular stream of them. It wasn’t as if she and this boy would be up there by themselves.

Getting through the crowd wasn’t easy. Boys kept trying to get over to Hoyt. “Hey, Hoyt!” “Yo, Hoyto!” Charlotte Simmons—magically beamed up into the very center of things!

Boys and girls, pelvises locked together, were grinding away as before, except that now they were sweating so much their arms and faces looked luminous—and frenzied—when the strobe flashes hit them.

Up close, the staircase wasn’t quite so grand. Coats of paint had dulled the great curved banister. The steps, which must have been four feet wide, had patches of practically bare wood in the center.

“Yo, Hoyt! Where you going?” Whuh yuh gon’? “Crawl the hall—or sump’m else?”

It was a fat boy yelling in a slurred voice from below. He was leering. An egregious pair of black eyebrows ran together over his nose. Wait a minute. Hadn’t she seen him before? He held a white drink container at a perilous angle in one hand. His shirtfront was sopping wet.

Hoyt ignored him.

“Who’s that?” said Charlotte. “What’s he mean, crawl the hall?”

Hoyt shrugged in a Who knows? sort of way and said, “That’s I.P. He’s one of our mistakes.”

At the top of the stairs was a landing three times the size of Charlotte’s living room in Sparta. She never saw such a high ceiling upstairs in a house. In the center, where there had no doubt once been a chandelier, was a fluorescent fixture that gave off a harsh, gaseous blue light. Down a wide hallway Charlotte could see students crowded in front of open doorways, convulsing with laughter, erupting with cheers, whoops, and applause of obviously mock approval, and groans and boos of mock disappointment, all the while drinking from their big cups.

“What are they doing?” said Charlotte.

Hoyt didn’t even pause. He never let up on the pressure of his arm on her back as he steered her toward the staircase that went up. “I don’t know,” he sighed, shaking his head as if to say that whatever it was, it was something pointless, wearisome, and juvenile, not even worth investigating. “Come on, I’ll show you the rooms. They’ll blow your mind.”

Leading off the third-floor landing was a hall as wide as the one below, but the doors seemed to be closed, and there was nobody hanging out in the corridor. Hoyt steered her along it, his arm ever more tight around her. From behind the doors came random muffled laughter, real and from TV laugh tracks, drunken male yawps, the burble of conversations, the deep unghhs of animated brutes getting pulverized in video games…

Hoyt stopped in front of a door, paused to see if he could hear anything, then opened it. It was a large bedroom packed with boys and girls sitting on the edges of the beds and on the floor in a cloud of funky, sweetish smoke, not saying a word. They stared at Hoyt and Charlotte with the wary, wide-eyed look of raccoons caught out back by the trash bin at night—except for a girl who held a wrinkled cigarette up to her lips between her thumb and forefinger and inhaled deeply with her eyes shut.

“Peace,” said Hoyt as he closed the door and withdrew.

He opened another. It was dark except for the light from the hall, which was enough to reveal a double-decker bunk bed on either side. Hoyt clicked a wall switch on. A sandy-colored blanket with American Indian designs on it was tucked beneath the upper mattress, pulled straight down, and tucked beneath the lower mattress, creating a sort of tent. Charlotte heard a male voice whisper, “Who the fuck’s that?”

Hoyt switched the light off and closed the door.

“Did you hear somebody say something?” Charlotte asked.

“Maybe in their sleep or something,” said Hoyt. “I think there’s somebody sleeping in there.”

He hurried her down the hall. Another door. He opened it and stuck his head in. The lights were on. Two beds. One bed—what a rat’s nest! Sheets, blanket, and a pillow all twisted together, and a lot of bare mattress showing. On the other bed the blanket was pulled all the way up over the pillow in a stab at neatness, but there were inexplicable lumps and humps under it. Hoyt beckoned Charlotte in and closed the door. Resting an arm lightly across her shoulders, he gestured toward the wall opposite.

“Look at those windows. Must be eight or nine feet tall.”

They were big, all right, but their eminence in the world of windows was compromised by splotched and mottled old shades that sagged down full length, helplessly, never to roll up again, from bare wooden spindles whose spring mechanisms were done for.

“…and look at the height of that ceiling,” Hoyt was saying, “and those what do you call them? Cornices, cornice moldings. And this place was built as a fraternity house! Two alumni back in whatever it was put up the money for it. They’ll never build anything like this again. Of that you can be sure.”

“Is this your room?” said Charlotte.

“No,” said Hoyt. “Mine’s downstairs where all those people were. It’s actually bigger than this one, but this one’s pretty typical. You know what? I really love this house.”

He compressed his lips and shook his head, as if to indicate that he was feeling an emotion too profound to express. Then he gave her the smile of a man who has seen an awful lot in his time on this earth. He looked deep into her eyes—deep, deep, and deeper—and gave her an almost bashful smile.

At that moment the door to the room opened and a virtual yodel of happy conversation filled the doorway. Without relaxing his grip on Charlotte, Hoyt swung about. Coming into the room was a tall, slim boy with tousled blond hair. He had his arm around a cute little brunette who was practically popping out of a short spaghetti-strap camisole and a pair of low-cut jeans, while her belly button winked in between.

Hoyt barked out, “Damn it, Vance, get outta here! We’ve got this room!”

The little brunette stood stock-still with a now irrelevant smile frozen on her face.

“Sor-ree,” said Vance, his arm still around her. “Chill, chill, chill. Howard and Lamar told me—”

“Do you see Howard and Lamar in here?” said Hoyt. “We’re here now. We got this one.”

The boy looked at his watch and said, “I don’t know, Hoyt, but it looks like a lot over seven minutes to me.”

“Vance—”

Vance turned the palms of his hands up toward Hoyt and said, “Okay, that’s cool. Just let me know when you’re through? Okay? We’ll be down on the second floor.”

We got this room! Okay, let me know when you’re through!

Charlotte’s hands went cold. Her face was on fire. She wrenched herself free of Hoyt’s grip and said, “For your information, you’re wrong! We don’t have this room—you have this room! And we won’t ever be through—because we won’t ever begin!”

Hoyt shot a quick glance at Vance and the brunette in the doorway, then canted his head back and off to one side, rolled his eyes upward, and opened his arms in a helpless, crucified way. “I know—”

“You don’t know!” screamed Charlotte. “You’re gross!”

“Hey! Keep it down!” said Hoyt. “I mean—shit!” The eternal male, eternally mortified by the female Making a Scene.

“I won’t keep it down! I’m leaving!”

With that, she stormed past him, tears streaming down her face, past Vance and his little brunette—

Hoyt called out, lamely, “Hey—wait!”

Charlotte didn’t look back. She tossed her long brown hair over her shoulder in anger and kept going. As she ran down the big curved stairway, the bacchanal below raged on. All was uproar. Downstairs in the big entry hall, she frantically, physically, bodily forced her way between the revelers, who bobbed and shrieked and ululated and exulted in bawling music drunken screaming stroboscopic girls in slices boys dry-humping in-heat bitches he’s not cool got little dickie his cum dumpster is what she is oh fuck that sucks it’s so ghetto scarfed a whole line with a green straw from the heel of her Manolo gotta get laid she scored Jojo—

—“she scored Jojo?” That little lick of conversation caught Charlotte’s attention, but she was far beyond the gravitational pull of gossip in her headlong flight through the double doors and out onto Ladding Walk into God’s own air!—not befouled by decadence and lust—

—except for five or six stricken boys and girls crawling, lolling stuporously, bending over on the little fringe of a lawn in front of the Saint Ray house vomiting and chanting into the void in Fuck Patois. Charlotte ran down the Walk into the darkness and the monstrous shadows until her throat ached and she could no longer hold back the tears. She slowed to a walk, let her head slump over, held her forehead with her hand, and convulsed with sobs. Get outta here! We’ve got this room! Okay, that’s cool. Just let me know when you’re through. Okay? Oh dear God, was there any way Bettina and Mimi could find out?—about her cool guy and her terminal humiliation and what a fool she was?

She felt so small here in the infinite terminal darkness of Ladding Walk, all alone, sobbing and sobbing and racking her thorax, slogging pointlessly toward Little Yard, a little mountain girl—she couldn’t have pitied herself more—in an old cotton print dress hiked up two and a half inches with pins so she could show off more of her legs.

The dark hulks of the buildings along Ladding Walk, which were menacing, the stony silence—except for her own sobs, which she held back and then let out—held back, let out—there was a certain morbid, self-destructive pleasure in letting them out, wasn’t there?—a sick, morose self-abnegation in surrendering to the swirl of deceit she had been subjected to by Hoyt Whoeverhewas—the walk back to Edgerton was a nightmare, part of whose pain was that it seemed like it would never end.

When she stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor, into that dead-silent vestibule, it seemed like a sanctuary, or the only one Charlotte Simmons would have, and she indulged herself in a real wailing sob as she headed down the hallway—then she heard whispers…Ohmygod!—six? seven? eight? girls sitting in a row, bottoms on the floor, backs against the wall, legs, or most of them, sticking straight out in a lineup of distressed jeans, shorts, sneakers, flip-flops, bare feet, lumpy knees—eyes, every eye, pinned on her. They were all freshmen who lived on this floor. What were they doing here out in the hall in the middle of the night? What must she look like to them? Tears, puffy eyes—her nose felt twice as big as it was, it was so congested from crying—and they were bound to have heard her wail when she left the elevator. They were a gauntlet. They would have to lift their legs in order for her to get to her room. If she had to speak to them, ask them to let her by—she couldn’t!—she would burst into tears again! She bit her lip and told herself to be strong, be strong, come on, don’t let on, hold it in. The first pair of knees and ratty jeans jackknifed to let her by. The puniest pair imaginable they were, too, those of a skinny, chinless girl with the palest of faces and hair the color of chamomile tea and cut like a young boy’s, a girl called Maddy—a wretched case despite the fact that she had won some big national science competition last spring, Westinghouse or something. Charlotte couldn’t stand looking at her, but she couldn’t escape those abnormally big eyes as they turned up toward her and runty Maddy said, “What happened?” Charlotte kept her head down and shook it, which was as close as she could come to a gesture signifying, “Nothing.” That only sharpened Maddy’s appetite. “We heard you crying.” The knees ahead began pulling up to the chests one by one. Each time, the big eyes studied her face, which Charlotte knew very well was contorted like that of a girl who would convulse with tears if she so much as opened her mouth. From behind, little Maddy wouldn’t give up. “Can we help?” A couple of other girls in this strange crew of now tiny, now skinny, now keg-legged, now obese, now plain ugly girls said, “Yeah, what happened?” She couldn’t tell which ones, because she avoided looking at any of them—these…these…these witches, assembled on the floor solely to torment her! But then she made the mistake of peeking—and locked eyes with a big black girl named Helene. As Helene raised her knees, she said with a voice of deep sisterly concern, “Hey, where’ve you been?” implying “Who did this to you?” Charlotte couldn’t think of any way to answer that one with a head motion—and besides, she had it in her mind, from social osmosis, that it was proto-racist to slough off what black students had to say—even a black girl like this one, whose father, as everybody on the floor seemed to know, was one of the biggest real estate developers in Atlanta—no doubt richer than all the Blue Ridge Mountain Simmonses in history put together—and so Charlotte fought to reinforce the dam holding back the flood and uttered just two words, “Frat party.” That did it. That was more than enough. The dam broke, and she staggered the rest of the way sobbing and convulsing. The little witches fired away from the rear. “Which frat?”…“What’d they do?”…“Sure you don’t want us to come help you?”…“Was it a guy?”

By the time she turned the doorknob, she could hear the whole misshapen gauntlet clucking, whispering, sniggering, mock-sympathizing…

“This really rounds it out,” Charlotte said to herself amid the tears. The wreck of Charlotte Simmons was their Friday night.