I Am Charlotte Simmons

1. That Single Promise

Alleghany County is perched so high up in the hills of western North Carolina that golfers intrepid enough to go up there to play golf call it mountain golf. The county’s only big cash crop is Christmas trees, Fraser firs mostly, and the main manufacturing that goes on is building houses for summer people. In the entire county, there is only one town. It is called Sparta.

The summer people are attracted by the primeval beauty of the New River, which forms the county’s western boundary. Primeval is precisely the word for it. Paleontologists reckon that the New River is one of the two or three oldest rivers in the world. According to local lore, it is called New because the first white man to lay eyes on it was Thomas Jefferson’s cousin Peter, and to him its very existence was news. He was leading a team of surveyors up to the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which form part of the Continental Divide. He reached the top, looked down the other side, and saw the same breathtaking sight that enchants outdoorsy outlanders today: a wide, absolutely clear mountain stream flanked by dense, deep green stands of virgin forest set against the immense ashy backdrop of the Blue Ridge, which from a distance really does look blue.

Not all that long ago the mountains were a wall that cut Alleghany County off from people in the rest of North Carolina so completely, they called it the Lost Province, when they thought of it at all. Modern highways have made the county accessible, but an air of remoteness, an atmosphere primeval, remains, and that is what the summer people, the campers, the canoers, the fishers, hunters, golfers, and mountain crafts shoppers love about it. There is no mall, no movie house, and not one stockbroker. To the people who lived in Sparta, the term ambition didn’t conjure up a picture of hard-driving, hard-grabbing businessmen in dull suits and “interesting” neckties the way it did in Charlotte or Raleigh. Families with children who were juniors or seniors in the one high school, Alleghany High, didn’t get caught up in college mania the way families in the urban areas did—college mania being the ferocious, all-consuming compulsion to get one’s offspring into prestigious universities. What parents in Sparta would even aspire to having a son or daughter go to a university like Dupont? Probably none. In fact, when word got out that a senior at the high school, a girl named Charlotte Simmons, would be going to Dupont in the fall, it was front-page news in The Alleghany News, the weekly newspaper.

A month or so later, one Saturday morning at the end of May, with the high school’s commencement exercises under way in the gymnasium, that particular girl, Charlotte Simmons, was very much a star. The principal, Mr. Thoms, was at the podium up on the stage at one end of the basketball court. He had already mentioned, in the course of announcing the various citations for excellence, that Charlotte Simmons had won the French prize, the English prize, and the creative writing prize. Now he was introducing her as the student who would deliver the valedictory address.

“…a young woman who—well, ordinarily we never mention SAT scores here at the school, first, because that’s confidential information, and second, because we don’t like to put that much emphasis on SATs in the first place”—he paused and broke into a broad smile and beamed it across the entire audience—“but just this once, I have to make an exception. I can’t help it. This is a young woman who scored a perfect sixteen hundred on the SAT and perfect fives on four different advanced-placement tests, a young woman who was chosen as one of North Carolina’s two Presidential Scholars and went to Washington, to the White House—along with Martha Pennington of our English department, who was honored as her mentor—and met with the ninety-eight students and their mentors representing the other forty-nine states of our nation and had dinner with the President and shook hands with him, a young woman who, in addition, was one of the stars of our cross-country team, a young woman who—”

The subject of all this attention sat in a wooden folding chair in the first row of the ranks of the senior class, her heart beating fast as a bird’s. It wasn’t that she was worried about the speech she was about to give. She had gone over it so many times, she had memorized and internalized it just the way she had all those lines when she played Bella in the school play, Gaslight. She was worried about two other matters entirely: her looks and her classmates. All but her face and hair were concealed by the kelly-green gown with a white collar and the kelly-green mortarboard with a gold tassel the school issued for the occasion. Nevertheless, her face and hair—she had spent hours, hours, this morning washing her long straight brown hair, which came down below her shoulders, drying it in the sun, combing it, brushing it, fluffing it, worrying about it, since she thought it was her strongest asset. As for her face, she believed she was pretty but looked too adolescent, too innocent, vulnerable, virginal—virginal—the humiliating term itself flashed through her head…and the girl sitting next to her, Regina Cox, kept sighing after every young woman who. How much did Regina resent her? How many others sitting beside her and behind her in their green gowns resented her? Why did Mr. Thoms have to go on with so many young woman who s? In this moment of stardom, with practically everybody she knew looking on, she felt almost as much guilt as triumph. But triumph she did feel, and guilt has been defined as the fear of being envied.

“…a young woman who this fall will become the first graduate of Alleghany High School to attend Dupont University, which has awarded her a full scholarship.” The adults in the rows of folding chairs behind her murmured appreciatively. “Ladies and gentlemen…Charlotte Simmons, who will deliver the valedictory address.”

Tremendous ovation. As Charlotte stood up to head for the stairs to the stage, she became terribly aware of her body and how it moved. She lowered her head to indicate modesty. With another twinge of fear of being envied, she found herself looking down at the gold of her academic sash, which went around her neck and down to her waist on either side, showing the world or at least the county that she was a member of Beta, Alleghany High’s honor society. Then she realized she didn’t look so much modest as hunched over. So she straightened up, a motion that was just enough to make her mortarboard, which was a fraction of an inch too big, shift slightly on top of her head. What if it fell off? Not only would she look like a hopeless fool but she would also have to bend way over and pick it up and put it back on her head—doing what to her hair? She steadied the board with one hand, but she was already at the stairs, and she had to use that hand to gather up her gown for fear of stepping on the hem as she ascended, since she held the text of her speech in the other hand. Now she was up on the stage, and the applause continued, but she was obsessed with the notion that the mortarboard might fall off, and she didn’t realize until too late that she should be smiling at Mr. Thoms, who was stepping toward her with a big smile and an outstretched hand. She shook his hand, and he put his other hand on top of hers, leaned toward her, and said in a low voice, “We love you, Charlotte, and we’re with you.” Then he half closed his eyes and nodded his head several times, as if to say, “Don’t worry, don’t be nervous, you’ll do fine,” which was her first realization that she looked nervous.

Now she was at the podium, facing everybody sitting in folding chairs on the basketball court. They were still applauding. Right before her was the green rectangle formed by her classmates, the seniors in their caps and gowns. Regina was clapping, but slowly and mechanically and probably only because she was in the front row and didn’t want to make her true feelings entirely obvious, and she wasn’t smiling at all. Three rows back, Channing Reeves had his head cocked to one side and was smiling, but with one corner of his smile turned up, which made it look cool and sarcastic, and he wasn’t clapping at all. Laurie McDowell, who had a gold Beta sash, too, was clapping enthusiastically and looking her right in the face with a genuine smile, but then Laurie was her friend, her only close friend in the class. Brian Crouse, with his reddish blond bangs—oh dear, Brian!—Brian was applauding in a way that seemed genuine, but he was staring at her with his mouth slightly open, as if she weren’t a classmate, much less anything more than that, but some sort of…phenomenon. More applause, because all the adults were smiling and beaming at her and clapping for all they were worth. Over there was Mrs. Bryant who ran the Blue Ridge Crafts shop, Miss Moody who worked in Baer’s Variety Store, Clarence Dean the young postmaster, Mr. Robertson the richest man in Sparta, owner of the Robertson Christmas-tree farm, beaming and clapping wildly and she didn’t even know him, and over on that side in the second row Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam, Daddy in his old sport jacket it looked like somebody had wrestled him into, with the collar of his sport shirt pulled way out over the collar of the jacket, Momma in her short-sleeved navy dress with the white bows, both of them suddenly looking so young instead of like two people in their forties, clapping sedately so as not to seem possessed by the sin of pride, but smiling and barely holding back their overflowing pride and joy, and, next to them, Buddy and Sam, wearing shirts with collars and staring at their sister like two little boys in a state of sheer wonder. In the same row, two seats beyond the boys, sat Miss Pennington, wearing a dress with a big print that was absolutely the wrong choice for a sixty-some-year-old woman of her ungainly bulk, but that was Miss Pennington, true to form—dear Miss Pennington!—and in that moment Charlotte could see and feel that day when Miss Pennington detained her after a freshman English class and told her, in her deep, gruff voice, that she had to start looking beyond Alleghany County and beyond North Carolina, toward the great universities and a world without limits because you are destined to do great things, Charlotte. Miss Pennington was applauding so hard that the flesh of her prodigious bosom was shaking, and then, realizing that Charlotte was looking at her, she made a fist, a curiously tiny fist, brought it almost up to her chin, and pumped it ever so slightly in a covert gesture of triumph, but Charlotte didn’t dare respond with even so much as a smile—

—for fear that cool Channing Reeves and the others might think she was enjoying all the applause and might resent her even more.

Now the applause receded, and the moment had come.

“Mr. Thoms, members of the faculty, alumni and friends of the school”—her voice was okay, it was steady—“parents, fellow students, fellow classmates…”

She hesitated. Her first sentence was going to sound awful! She had been determined to make her speech different, not merely a string of the usual farewell sentiments. But what she was about to say—only now did she realize how it would sound—and now it was too late!

“John, Viscount Morley of Blackburn”—why had she started off with such a snobby name!—“once said, ‘Success depends on three things: who says it, what she says, and how she says it. And of these three things, what she says is the least important.’ ”

She paused, just the way she had planned it, to let the audience respond to what was supposed to be the witty introduction to the speech, paused with a sinking heart, because her words had all but shrieked that she was an intellectual snob—

—but to her amazement they picked up the cue, they laughed appropriately, even enthusiastically—

“So I can’t guarantee this is going to be a success.”

She paused again. More laughter, right on cue. And then she realized it was the adults. They were the ones. In the green rectangle of her classmates, a few were laughing, a few were smiling. Many—including Brian—looked bemused, and Channing Reeves turned to Matt Woodson, sitting next to him, and they exchanged cool, cynical smirks that as much as said, “Vie count wha’? Oh gimme a break.”

So she averted her eyes from her classmates and looked beyond to the adults and soldiered on:

“Nevertheless, I will try to examine some of the lessons we seniors have learned over the past four years, lessons that lie beyond the boundaries of the academic curriculum—”

Why had she said lie beyond the boundaries of the academic curriculum, which she had thought was so grand when she wrote it down—and now sounded so stilted and pompous as it fell clanking from her lips—

—but the look on the faces of the adults was rapt and adoring! They looked up in awe, thirsty for whatever she cared to give them! It began to dawn on her…they saw her as a wonder child, a prodigy miraculously arisen from the rocky soil of Sparta. They were in a mood to be impressed by whatever she cared to say.

A bit more confident now, she continued. “We have learned to appreciate many things that we once took for granted. We have learned to look at the special environment in which we live, as if it were the first time we had ever seen it. There is an old Apache chant that goes, ‘Big Blue Mountain Spirit, the home made of blue clouds, I am grateful for that mode of goodness there.’ We seniors, centuries later, are grateful, too, grateful for the way…”

She knew it all so completely by heart, the words began to roll out as if on tape, and her mind began to double-track…Try as she might to avoid it, her eyes kept drifting back to her classmates…to Channing Reeves…Why should she even care what Channing and his circle of friends and admirers thought of her? Channing had come on to her twice, and only twice—and why should she care? Channing wasn’t going to any college in the fall. He’d probably spend the rest of his days chewing and spitting Red Man while he pumped gasoline at the Mobil station or, when he lost that job from shiftlessness, working out in the Christmas-tree groves with the Mexicans, who did all the irksome toil in the county these days, a chain saw in his right hand and the nozzle of a fertilizer spreader in his left, bent from the weight of the five-gallon tank of liquid fertilizer strapped on his back. And he’d spend his nights rutting around after Regina and girls like her who would be working in the mail room at Robertson’s…

“We have learned that achievement cannot be measured in the cold calculations of income and purchasing power…”

…Regina…she’s pathetic, and yet she’s part of the “cool” crowd, the “fast” crowd, which shuts Charlotte Simmons out because she’s such a grind, such a suck-up to the faculty, because she not only gets perfect grades but cares about it, because she won’t drink or smoke pot or go along for drag races at night on Route 21, because she doesn’t say fucking this and fucking that, because she won’t give it up…above all, because she won’t cross that sheerly dividing line and give it up…

“We have learned that cooperation, pulling together as one, achieves so much more than going it alone, and…”

But why should that wound her? There’s no reason. It just does!…If all those adults who were now looking up at her with such admiration only knew what her classmates thought of her—her fellow seniors, for whom she presumed to speak—if they only knew how much the sight of all those inert, uncaring faces in the green rectangle demoralized her…Why should she be an outcast for not doing stupid, aimless, self-destructive things?

“…than twenty acting strictly in their own self-interest…”

…and now Channing is yawning—yawning right in her face! A wave of anger. Let them think whatever they want! The simple truth is that Charlotte Simmons exists on a plane far above them. She is not like them in any way other than that she, too, happened to grow up in Sparta. She will never see them again…At Dupont she will find people like herself, people who actually have a life of the mind, people whose concept of the future is actually something beyond Saturday night…

“…for as the great naturalist John Muir wrote in John of the Mountains, ‘The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s workshops.’ Thank you.”

It was over. Great applause…and still greater applause. Charlotte remained at the podium for a moment. Her gaze swept over the audience and came to rest on her classmates. She pursed her lips and stared at them. And if any of them was bright enough to read her face—Channing, Regina, Brian…Brian, from whom she had hoped for so much!—he would know that her expression said, “Only one of us is coming down from the mountain destined to do great things. The rest of you can, and will, stay up here and get trashed and watch the Christmas trees grow.”

She gathered up her text, which she hadn’t looked at once, and left the stage, and for the first time she let herself bathe in the boundless admiration, the endless applause, of the adults.

The Simmonses had never before had a party out at their place on County Road 1709, and even now Charlotte’s mother wasn’t about to call this a party. Being a staunch member of an up-country denomination, the Church of Christ’s Evangel, she regarded parties as slothful events contrived by self-indulgent people with more money than character. So today they were just “having some folks over” after commencement, even though the preparations had been under way for three weeks.

It was a beautiful day, and thank God for that, Charlotte said to herself, thinking mainly about the picnic table, which was over next to the satellite dish. The folks were all out back here in the yard in the sunshine, although it wasn’t exactly a yard, more like a little clearing of stomped dirt with patches of wire grass that blended into the underbrush on the edge of the woods. The curiously sweet smell of hot dogs cooking was in the air, as her father manned a poor old spindly portable grill. The folks could help themselves to hot dogs from the grill and potato salad, deviled eggs, ham biscuits, rhubarb pie, fruit punch, and lemonade from off the picnic table. Ordinarily the picnic table was inside the house. If it had rained and all these people—Miss Pennington, Sheriff Pike, Mr. Dean the postmaster, Miss Moody, Mrs. Bryant, Mrs. Cousins who had painted the Grandma Moses–style mural in Mrs. Bryant’s shop—if they had had to cram themselves inside the house with all her kinfolk and her father’s and mother’s friends and had discovered that the only table the Simmons family had in their house to eat on was a picnic table, and not only that, the kind that has a bench—a plain plank, built in on either side in place of chairs—Charlotte would have died. It was bad enough that Daddy was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Everybody could get a good look at the tattoo of a mermaid that covered the meaty part of his right forearm, product of a night on the town when he was in the army. Why a mermaid? He couldn’t recall. It wasn’t even drawn well.

The house was a tiny one-story wooden box with a door and two windows facing the road. The only halfway ornamental touch was the immovable awnings over the windows, made of wooden slats nailed in place. The door opened directly into the front room, which, although only twelve by fifteen feet, had to serve as living room, workroom, TV room, playroom, and dining room. That was where the picnic table stood ordinarily. The ceilings were right down on top of your head, and the whole place was soaked with a countrified odor that came from using coal stoves and kerosene space heaters. Until Charlotte was six, they had lived belowground in what was now the foundation. Charlotte had thought nothing of it at the time, since they were far from being the only ones. A lot of families started out that way if they wanted their own place. Folks would buy themselves a little scrap of earth, maybe no more than one-fifth of an acre, dig a foundation, put a tar-paper roof over it, stick the pipe from the potbellied stove—used for heating as well as cooking—up through the tar-paper roof, and live down in the pit until they could scrape together enough money to build aboveground. When they finally did, the result was always pretty much what you saw right here: the little box of a house, the rusting septic tank off to the side, and the stomped dirt and wire grass out back.

Laurie McDowell had just left the picnic table carrying a paper plate of food and a white plastic fork and seemed to be going over to talk to Mrs. Bryant. Laurie was a tall, slim girl with quite a head of curly blond hair and a face that absolutely glowed with goodwill—and goodness—even though her nose was curiously wide and blunt atop the graceful and lissome rest of her. Her father was an engineer with the state, and her house was a palace compared to Charlotte’s. But Charlotte didn’t worry about Laurie. She had been here many times and knew how things were. Nobody else from the class had been invited. There were only kinfolk and genuine friends here, and they were having themselves a real picnic, or seemed to be, and making a fuss over the star of the moment, Miss Charlotte Simmons, who stood in their midst in the sleeveless print dress she had worn under the commencement gown.

“Well, I’ll be switched, little lady!” exclaimed her father’s former foreman at the Thom McAn shoe factory in Sparta—since removed to Mexico—or China—a big, paunchy man named Otha Hutt. “Everybody told me”—everbuddy tole me—“you was smart, but I never knowed you could get up and give a speech like that!” Like’at.

Sheriff Pike, who was even bigger, chimed in. “The way you did up there”—up’ere—“I’m claiming you as a kissin’ cousin, gal, and best not be nobody trying to tell me any different, neither!”

“I can remember you when you was no more’n thhhhhis high,” spluttered one of her real cousins, Doogie Wade, “and shoot, you could talk circles around everybody way back thhhhhen!” Cousin Doogie was a tall, rawboned rail of a man, about thirty, who had lost two front teeth one Saturday night, although he couldn’t remember exactly where or how, and spluttered whenever he had to use words with th in them.

Her aunt Betty said she didn’t want Charlotte to go and forget everybody once she got to Dupont, and Charlotte said, “Oh, you needn’t worry about that, Aunt Betty! Right here’s home!”

Mrs. Childers, who did dress alterations, called her “honey” and told her how pretty she looked and bet she wouldn’t have any trouble finding beaux at Dupont, no matter how grand a place it was.

“Oh, I don’t know about that!” said Charlotte, smiling and blushing appropriately but also genuinely, since it made Channing and Brian flash into her mind. Thank God nobody else from the class was here, just Laurie.

For Charlotte’s benefit, Joe Mebane, who had a little diner out on Route 21 that offered liver-and-kidney hash for breakfast and had a lineup of chewing tobaccos and snuffs in the front window, yelled over to her father, who was busy at the grill, “Hey, Billy! Where’d all this girl’s brains come from? Must be Lizbeth’s side a the family!”

Her father looked at Joe, forced a smile, then returned to his hot dogs. Daddy was only forty-two, handsome in the ruddy, rugged fashion of a man who worked outside with his hands. After the Thom McAn shoe factory closed and then Lowe’s laid off some of its loading-dock crew over at North Wilkesboro, the only job Daddy had was fill-in caretaker of a place on the other side of the ridge in Roaring Gap for some summer people from Hobe Sound, Florida. Momma’s pay working half days at the sheriff’s office was what they actually lived on. Daddy was depressed, but even when he was happy, he was at a loss when it came to conversational banter. No doubt he was tending the grill with such diligence in order to minimize talking to all these people. It wasn’t that he was bashful or inarticulate—not in the ordinary sense. Charlotte was just old enough—just detached enough for the first time—to realize that Daddy was a product of Carolina mountain country, with the strengths and shortcomings of his forebears. He had been raised never to show emotion and, as a result, was far less likely than ordinary men to give way to emotion in a crisis. But also, as a result, he was instinctively reluctant to put a feeling into words, and the stronger the feeling, the more he fought spelling it out. When Charlotte was a little girl, he was able to express his love for her by holding her in his arms and being tender and cooing to her with baby talk. But by now he couldn’t bring himself to utter the words necessary to tell a big girl that he loved her. The long stares he sometimes gave her—she couldn’t tell whether it was love or wonder at what an inexplicable prodigy his daughter had become.

Mr. Dean, the postmaster, was saying, “I sure do hope you like basketball, Charlotte! What they tell me is, at Dupont everybody’s just plain-long wild about basketball!”

Charlotte only halfway heard what he was saying. Her gaze had strayed over to her little brothers—Buddy, who was ten, and Sam, who was eight—as they chased each other, dodging and weaving between the adults, laughing and carrying on, excited by this extraordinary thing, a party, that was taking place at their house. Buddy ran between Miss Pennington and Momma, who tried, but not very hard, to get him to slow down. What a contrast they made, Miss Pennington and Momma, Miss Pennington with her thinning gray hair and her fleshy bulk—Charlotte would never entertain a word like obese where Miss Pennington was concerned—and Momma with her lovely lean figure, so youthful looking, and her thick dark brown hair done up in a complicated plaited bun. When Charlotte was a little girl, she used to love to watch her put it up that way.

At this moment the two women were deep in conversation, and Charlotte experienced a surge of anxiety, two kinds of it. What did Miss Pennington make of all this? Over the past four years Charlotte had spent many hours talking to her at school and at Miss Pennington’s house in Sparta, but never out here. What did she think of Cousin Doogie and Otha Hutt with his I’ll be switched and, for that matter, Momma and her Cain’t git’m do a thang and her Arland for Ireland and her cement for cement and her Detroit for Detroit? Miss Pennington probably didn’t make all that much more money than Momma and Daddy. Miss Pennington’s house, which her parents had left to her, wasn’t much bigger than theirs, either. But Miss Pennington had taste—a relatively new concept to Charlotte—and cultivation. Her house was decorated, and everything was kept just so. Her property out back was even smaller than theirs, but she had a real yard, planted all over with real lawn grass and bordered with boxwood and flower beds, all of which Miss Pennington took care of herself, even though any real exertion left her out of breath. Charlotte used to talk to Momma about Miss Pennington a lot, but she didn’t anymore. She was beginning to have the guilty feeling that Momma was jealous. In her own roundabout way Momma would ask Charlotte if Miss Pennington was sophisticated, worldly-wise, and erudite, and instinct told Charlotte to tell a little white lie along the lines of “Oh, I don’t know.”

While Mr. Dean talked on about Dupont and national championships, in the peculiarly male compulsion to display knowledge, Charlotte cut another quick glance at her mother. Momma’s face had strong, regular features, and she should have been beautiful, but her expression had narrowed and hardened within the tight limits represented by this tiny little place out on County Road 1709. Moreover, she was intelligent and shrewd enough to know most of that. She had found two means of release from her bind. One was her fervent religious faith; the other was her daughter, whose phenomenal intelligence she had recognized by the time Charlotte was two. Throughout her elementary and junior high school days, she and Momma were about as close as a mother and daughter could get. Charlotte kept nothing from her, nothing. Her mother led her by the hand through every crisis of growing up. But Charlotte reached puberty shortly after entering Alleghany High, and a curtain closed between them. Perhaps in any age, but certainly in an age like this, there was nothing more critical in a girl’s life than her sexuality and the complicated question of what boys expected from it. From the very first time she brought it up to the very last, her mother’s religious convictions, her absolute moral certainty, ended discussions as soon as they began. In Elizabeth Simmons’s judgment, there were no dilemmas and ambiguities in this area, and she had no patience for sentences that began But, Momma, these days or But, Momma, everybody else. Charlotte could talk to Momma about menstruation, hygiene, deodorants, breasts, bras, and shaving her legs or armpits, but that was the limit. When it came to matters such as whether or not she should hook up in even a minimal way with a Channing or a Brian and whether or not girls who kept it until they got married were becoming rare, Momma closed any such line of inquiry as soon as Charlotte tried to open it up, no matter how indirectly, since there was nothing to discuss. Momma’s will was stronger than hers, and she wasn’t about to experiment in this area in willful repudiation of Momma’s dictates. Instead, she worked it out in her mind that she was going her own way and wasn’t about to sink to the level of Channing Reeves and Regina Cox; and if they called her uncool, then she was going to wear Uncool as a badge of honor and be as different from them morally as she was in intelligence. The terrible moment had come, however, when even someone as nice as Brian gave up on her.

The less Charlotte talked to Momma, the more she talked to Miss Pennington, and Momma was aware of that, too, which gave Charlotte something else to feel guilty about. She talked to Miss Pennington about schoolwork, writing, and literature, and Miss Pennington assigned her books to read, including books in history, philosophy, and French, that she would never encounter in the regular curriculum at Alleghany High. Miss Pennington persuaded the biology teacher, Mrs. Buttrick, and the mathematics teacher, Mr. Laurans, to recommend advanced textbooks in their fields and to go over her answers to the questions and solutions to the problems that appeared at the end of each section. But most of all, Miss Pennington talked to her about her future and why she should aim for Harvard, Dupont, Yale, or Princeton—and for the limitless triumphs that waited beyond such universities. But Miss Pennington was a spinster and, despite her unlovely appearance, a dignified woman with perfect manners, and her interests were in things higher than the question of how far a girl should or shouldn’t go with Brian Crouse if they happened to be alone in a car or someplace after dark. The only person Charlotte could talk to about all that was Laurie, and Laurie was as confused and innocent as she was.

She was still gazing at Miss Pennington when she heard, or thought she heard—above the general burble of voices and Mr. Dean’s discourse on Dupont’s current basketball stars—the throaty revving roars of a car somewhere out front of the house, the kind of car that boys used for drag racing. Then the noise stopped, and she once again set about keeping track of what Mr. Dean was saying, in case she had to respond.

It wasn’t long, however, before she heard a boy’s loud mocking voice. “Hey, Charlotte, you never told me you were having a party!”

Coming around the side of the house, by the septic tank, were four boys, Channing Reeves, Matt Woodson, and two of their buddies, Randall Hoggart and Dave Cosgrove, both of them great big football players. A couple of hours ago all four had been wearing the kelly-green robes and mortarboards, but now Channing and Matt had on T-shirts, ripped jeans, sneakers, and baseball caps on backward, and Randall Hoggart and Dave Cosgrove wore shorts, flip-flops, and “beaters,” which were white strap-style undershirts—an ensemble calculated to display their huge calves, arms, and chests to maximum effect. Channing, Matt, and Randall had big lumps of chewing tobacco in their cheeks and were expertly spurting great brown streams of tobacco juice on the ground as they came swaggering toward Charlotte.

“Yeah, Charlotte, but we know you’d a invited us if you’d a thought of it!” said Matt Woodson in the same sort of loud, arch voice as Channing’s, whereupon he looked to Channing for approval.

All four of them began flicking glances at one another and laughing in tribute to their mutual fearlessness and the finesse of their sarcasm. Dave Cosgrove had a twenty-ounce “tall boy” can of beer in his hand, but the voices, the smirks, the laughs, and the swaggers were quite enough to make it obvious that they had been drinking ever since commencement and perhaps before.

Charlotte was stunned, and in the next instant—before she could possibly explain to herself why—she was humiliated and shamed. The party grew silent. You could hear the sound of a hot dog sizzling on the grill. And then she felt fear. Smirking, the drunken band of intruders headed straight toward her with huge strides, as if oblivious to the adults and any respect that might conceivably be due them. She felt rooted, as in a dream, to the spot where she stood. In the next moment, Channing was right in front of her. She was frightened by the insolent way the flesh of his forehead showed through the sizing gap in the back of the baseball cap even more than by the noxious lump in his cheek.

Leering, he said, “I just come for a little graduation hug.” With that, he reached out and tried to take hold of her upper arm. She jerked it away, he reached out to try again, and she screamed, “STOP IT, CHANNING!”

Suddenly a huge arm was between Charlotte and the boy. Sheriff Pike—and now the entire mass of his body separated them.

“Boys,” said the Sheriff, “you’re gonna turn right around and go home. You don’t git two chances, you git one.”

Channing was clearly startled to see the sheriff, whose arms were so big they stretched the sleeves of his polo shirt. He hesitated and then evidently decided he dare not lose face in front of his comrades.

“Aw, come on, Sheriff,” he said, mustering a big grin, “we been working hard for four years to graduate. You know that! What’s wrong with a little celebrating and coming by to see Charlotte? She was our valedictorian, Sheriff!”

“You’re drunk, is what’s wrong,” said the Sheriff. “You’re either going home right now or you’re going in right now. What’s it gonna be?”

Still looking at Channing, Sheriff Pike reached over and took hold of the can of beer in Dave Cosgrove’s hand. Dave took such a deep breath he seemed to swell up. He stared at the Sheriff, then stared at someone behind the Sheriff, and surrendered the big can without a peep. It was only then that Charlotte realized that three men had come up beside her, just a step back from Sheriff Pike—Daddy, big Otha Hutt, and Cousin Doogie. Daddy still had the big long fork from the grill in his hand. Doogie was about half the size of Sheriff Pike, and Randy and Dave, for that matter, but the way he narrowed his eyes and curled his lips back in a hideous smile, revealing the big gap in his front teeth, made the teeth that remained look like fangs. Everybody in the county knew how much Doogie Wade loved to go brawling. Slugging, kicking, biting, elbows to the Adam’s apple, or plain-long old-fashioned Saturday-night rock fights, it was all the same to Doogie Wade.

The Sheriff raised the beer can up to his nose, sniffed it, and said, “If one a you’s not drunk, you git to drive the whole bunch a you outta here. Otherwise, you’re gonna walk.”

“Well now, hey, Sheriff,” said Channing, but his proudest weapon, insolence, had disappeared. He spat, but without the gusto of a moment ago.

“Filthy,” said the Sheriff, eyeing the arc of the brown spittle. “And ’at’s another thang. This ain’t your property to spit on.”

“Aw, Sheriff,” said Channing, “how can anybody”—innybuddy—“keep from—”

Before he could utter another word, Daddy, standing right beside Charlotte, said in a strange, low, even, toneless voice, “Channing, if you ever set foot on this property again, you gon’ git crawled. If you ever try to touch my daughter again, that’ll be the last time you got anythang left to want a woman with.”

“You threatening me? You heard what he said, Sheriff?”

“That’s not a threat, Channing,” said Daddy in the same eerie monotone. “That’s a promise.”

For an instant—stone silence. Charlotte could see Buddy and Sam staring at their father. This was a moment they would never forget. Maybe this was the moment the mountain code would take hold in their hearts, even now, in the twenty-first century, the same way it had in Daddy’s and his daddy’s and his granddaddy’s and his great-granddaddy’s in the centuries before. Her little brothers would probably glory in this moment, which would define for them without a word of explanation what it meant to be a man. But Charlotte saw something more, and that was what she would never forget. Daddy’s expression was almost blank, utterly cold, unblinking, no longer attached to the variables of reason. His eyes were locked on Channing’s. It was the face of someone out on an edge where there could be only one answer to any argument: physical assault. Did Buddy and Sam see that? If they did, they would no doubt come to admire their father all the more for it. But for Charlotte, those words—“the last time you got anythang left to want a woman with”—completed the humiliation of the dreadful event that was occurring.

Sheriff Pike was saying to Daddy, “Ne’mind all that, Billy.” Then he looked straight at Channing while seeming to still be talking to Daddy. “Channing’s not stupid. Like he said his ownself, he’s a high school graduate now. He knows from now on, won’t nobody have any truck with it if he acts like some damn-fool little boy. Right, Channing?”

Trying to salvage one last shred of impudent honor, Channing didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no, and he didn’t nod this way and he didn’t nod that way, and he gave the Sheriff one last look that didn’t signal respect and didn’t signal disrespect. He kept his eyes away from Charlotte’s father altogether. He turned tail and said to his comrades in a voice that didn’t say surrender and didn’t say hold fast, either, “Let’s go. I’ve had enough of this bullsh—” He said the word and didn’t say the word, and they retreated, managing to summon up their old swagger until they got beyond the septic tank and around to the front of the house. None of them spat, not even once.

Charlotte stood there with her fingers pressing into her cheeks. The moment the intruders disappeared, she bent over and surrendered herself to hopeless sobs that seemed to well up from out of her lungs. Daddy lifted his hands and tried to think of what to do with them and what to say to her, while the Sheriff, Otha Hutt, and Cousin Doogie looked on, paralyzed, in the age-old way, by a woman’s tears. Momma took charge and put her arm around Charlotte’s shoulders and squeezed until Charlotte’s head rested against her own, just the way she had always done when Charlotte was younger, and said to her, ever so lovingly, “You’re my good girl, darling. You’re my dear, sweet good girl, and you know that. It don’t do for you to waste one drop a tears on trash like those boys. You hear me, darling? They’re trash. I’ve known Henrietta Reeves all my life. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, and I can tell you one thang. They won’t be bothering you any more.” How eagerly her mother was seizing this chance to treat her once again as a child, a genius-in-embryo in the womb of Momma’s devotion. “You see the look on that boy’s face when your daddy looked him in the eye? Your daddy looked him deep down inside. That boy’s never gonna get fresh with you again, my little darling.”

Get fresh. How completely Momma misunderstood! Channing’s behavior once he and his sidekicks got here—it was irrelevant. That they wanted to hurt her in this way—that was what mattered. Looks, boys, popularity—and what good were looks if you had failed so miserably at the other two? And Daddy’s solution to the problem—his mountain man’s promise—to castrate Channing if he ever dared approach his little girl again—ohmygod! How grotesque! How shaming! It would be all over the county by nightfall. Charlotte Simmons’s great day of triumph. She couldn’t stop crying.

Laurie came over, and Momma let her take over the consoling for a moment. Laurie embraced Charlotte and whispered that underneath Channing Reeves’s supposed good looks and cool personality was a cruel bastard, and everybody in the class knew that when they were honest with themselves. Oh, Laurie, Laurie, Laurie, not even you understand about Channing, do you? She could still see his face. Why not me—Channing—

Miss Pennington was a few yards away, looking on, not sure it was her place to step in and do something or say something that might be construed as maternal. When Charlotte finally pulled herself together, the guests tried to continue the party, to let her know they weren’t going to let four drunken louts spoil things. It was no use, of course. There was no breathing life back into this particular corpse. One by one the guests began saying their good-byes and slipping away, until it became a general exodus. Momma and Daddy were heading around the house to where the cars were parked along the road. Dutifully, Charlotte was following them, when Miss Pennington came up from behind and stopped her. She had a sort of live-and-learn smile on her broad face.

“Charlotte,” she said in her deep contralto, “I hope you realize what that was all about.”

Crestfallen: “Oh, I think I do.”

“Do you? Then what was it about? Why did those boys come here?”

“Because—oh, I don’t know, Miss Pennington, I don’t want—it doesn’t really matter.”

“Listen to me, Charlotte. They’re resentful—and they’re attracted, intensely attracted. If you don’t see that, I’m disappointed in you. And they went out and got drunk enough to make a spectacle of it. All they got out of that commencement was that one of their classmates is exceptional, one of their classmates is about to fly out of Alleghany County to the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, far above them, and there’s always the type of person who resents that. You remember we read about the German philosopher Nietzsche? He called people like that tarantulas. Their sole satisfaction is bringing down people above them, seeing the mighty fall. You’ll find them everywhere you go, and you’ll have to be able to recognize them for what they are. And these boys”—she shook her head and gave her hand a little dismissive flip—“I’ve taught them, too, and I don’t like saying this, but they’re not even worth the trouble it takes to ignore them.”

“I know,” said Charlotte in a tone that made it obvious that she didn’t.

“Charlotte!” said Miss Pennington. She raised her hands as if she were about to take her by the shoulders and shake her, although she was never demonstrative in that fashion. “Wake up! You really are leaving all that behind. Ten years from now those boys will be trying to sound important by telling people how well they knew you—and how lovely you were. It may be hard for them to swallow right now, but I’m willing to bet you even they’re proud of you. Everybody looks to you for great things. I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t. I started to tell you when we were in Washington, but then I figured it would be a mistake, because I ought to wait until you graduated. Well…today you graduated.” She paused and smiled her live-and-learn smile again. “I think I know about what most students think of somebody being a high school teacher, but it never has bothered me, and I’ve never tried to explain how mistaken they are. When you’re a teacher and you see a child achieve something, when you see a child reach a new level of understanding about literature or history or…or…anything else, a level that child would have never reached without you, there’s a satisfaction, a reward, that can’t be expressed in words, leastways not by me. In some way, no matter how small, you’ve helped create a new person. And if you’re so fortunate as to find a student, one student, a single student—like Charlotte Simmons—and you spend four years working with that student and seeing that student become what you are today—Charlotte, that justifies all the struggle and frustration of forty years of teaching. That makes an entire career a success. So I’m not going to let you look back. You’ve got to keep your eyes on the future. You’ve got to promise me that. That’s all you owe me—that single promise.”

Charlotte’s eyes misted over. She wanted to throw her arms around this big, gruff woman’s neck, but she didn’t. What if Momma happened to come back around the corner and see her?

Daddy, Momma, Charlotte, Buddy, and Sam, just the five of them, had supper at the picnic table, which Daddy and Doogie had managed to move back into the house. It weighed a ton. It was a pretty morose suppertime, since Daddy, Momma, and Charlotte couldn’t forget what had happened earlier, and the boys sensed their mood.

As soon as they finished eating, while they were all still sitting on the picnic table’s plank benches, Daddy turned on the TV. The evening news was on, and so Buddy and Sam ran off to play outside. Some correspondent or other wearing a safari jacket had a microphone in his hand out in front of a hut, talking about something that was going on in the Sudan. Charlotte was too depressed to care, and she got up and went back to her room, which was in fact nothing but a five-foot-wide enclosure that had been partitioned off from one of the house’s two bedrooms when Buddy was born. She propped herself up on the bed and started reading about Florence Nightingale in a book called Eminent Victorians she had taken out from the library on Miss Pennington’s recommendation, but she couldn’t get interested in Florence Nightingale, either, and she began aimlessly studying the dust dancing in a shaft of light from the sun, which was so low in the sky it hurt her eyes to look out the window. Out there, about now, all over the county, people would be talking about what happened at Charlotte Simmons’s this afternoon. She just knew it. A rush of panic. All they would have heard would be Channing Reeves’s version. He and Matt and Randall and Dave went over to visit Charlotte after commencement, and it turned out the Simmonses were having a party and didn’t want them there, and so they sicced the sheriff on them, and Charlotte’s daddy threatened Channing with a big grill fork and said he’d castrate him if he ever tried to have anything to do with his precious genius daughter—

Just then Daddy called from the front room, “Hey, Charlotte, come here. You wanna see this?”

With a groan Charlotte got herself up off the bed and returned to the front room.

Daddy, still sitting at the picnic table, gestured toward the TV set. “Dupont,” he said, smiling at her in a way that was obviously intended to dispel the gloom.

So Charlotte stood by the picnic table and looked at the TV. Yes, it was Dupont, a fact she noted with an empty feeling. A long shot of the Great Yard with the breathtaking library tower at one end and a mass of people in the center. Charlotte had been there only once, for the official tour during the application process, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the famous Yard and the stupendous Gothic buildings around it.

“…in his appearance today at his alma mater amid the pomp and ceremony of the university’s one hundred and fifteenth commencement,” the voice on the TV was saying. A much closer shot of a vast audience. Up a broad center aisle a procession of mauve robes and mauve velvet academic hats was marching toward a stage erected in front of the Charles Dupont Memorial Library, a structure as grand as a cathedral, with a soaring tower and a three-story-high compound arch over its main entrance. At the head of the procession a figure in mauve carried a large golden mace. The pageantry of it made Charlotte blink with wonder, despite her conviction that all was surely ruined. A closer shot…the stage…mauve robes from one side to the other against a backdrop of gaudy medieval banners. In the center, a podium made of a rich-looking polished wood with an intricately carved cornice, bristling with microphones, and at the podium, also in mauve robes, a tall, powerful-looking man with square jaws, an intense gaze, and thick white hair. He’s orating…You can see his lips moving and his arms gesturing and his voluminous mauve sleeves billowing, but you can hear only the voice-over of a broadcaster: “The California governor struck what is likely to be the keynote of his all but certain bid for the Republican presidential nomination next year—what he calls ‘re-valuation,’ and what his harsher opponents call ‘reactionary social conservatism.’ ” A closeup of the Governor as he says, “Over the next hundred years, new sets of values will inevitably replace the skeletons of the old, and it will be up to you to define them.” The face of the broadcaster filled the screen: “He called upon the current generation of college students to create a new moral climate for themselves and for the nation. The governor arrived in Chester two days ago in order to spend time with students before speaking at today’s commencement.”

The evening news switched to the accidental beheading of two workers in a sheet metal factory in Akron, but Charlotte was still forty miles southeast of Philadelphia, in Chester, Pennsylvania, at Dupont…That wasn’t the local news, that was the national network news, and that wasn’t just any commencement speaker, it was a famous politician the whole country was talking about, and he was a Dupont alumnus speaking there, in the Great Yard!—robed in Dupont mauve!—calling for a new moral order to be created by this generation of college students—her generation! A surge of optimism revived her depleted spirits. Sparta, Alleghany High, cliques, hookups, drinking, resentments, tarantulas—Miss Pennington was right. All that was something happening up-hollow in the mountains at dusk as the shadows closed in, something already over and done with, whereas she…

“Just think, Charlotte,” said Momma with a smile as earnestly encouraging as Daddy’s, “Dupont University. Three months from now, that’s where you’ll be.”

“I know, Momma. I was thinking the exact same thing. I can hardly believe it.”

She was smiling, too. To everybody’s relief, including her own, the face she had on was genuine.