Adam's face began to burn with anger and humiliation. Goddamn it! The smug, heavy-handed way the big lout had acted happy to see him ⦠the utterly transparent simulation of contrition, when he had undoubtedly known for a long time that this paper would be due tomorrow ⦠the way he had put his arm around him in a sickeningly fake show of camaraderie â¦
You the man
! ⦠Goddamn that muscle-bound sonofabitch! He had grabbed him and lifted him off the floor as if he owned his very hide! “You the man”âand what he was really saying was, “You're not a
man
at all! You're my servant! You're my little slavey boy! I
own
your ass!”
A great muffled yawp of manly laughter from behind. Jojo and his roommate were laughing at him! Couldn't contain themselves! Adam scurried back on tiptoe and stood outside the door to their suite. They were laughing again!âbut it turned out they were laughing about Vernon Congers and how Charles kept teasing him, and Congers hadn't a clue about how to deal with it. All right, so they weren't laughing at slavey boy ⦠at that moment ⦠Nevertheless, Adam trudged along the hallway, head down, thinking of all the devastating remarks he should have obliterated the giant with. He had long ago come to terms, at least on a rational level, with the masterservant aspect of the job. For that matter, not every athlete he tutored acted superior. A few were grateful the way any needy child might be or should be, in which case a traditional teacher-pupil relationship existed, and the psychic rewards were his. In any event, the three hundred dollars a month he
was paid for this service was crucial to his existence at Dupont, as was the approximately one hundred a monthâall of it in tips, none in wagesâhe made delivering pizza, mainly to students' rooms, for a franchise operation called PowerPizza. Of course, delivering pizza for tips created a masterservant relationship, too, but these days, students and young people generally shrank from being anything but egalitarian in their dealings with the working poor.
No matter which job he was working at, he had to make a trade-off. The downside of delivering pizza was that it was mindlessly repetitive, and your time wasn't flexible. Whenever you worked the job, you were committed to a six-hour stretch. In tutoring athletes, you had to submit to the egos of large, stupid people who could summon you by beeper anytime they felt like it, and you had to accept the fact that you were abetting an institutional farce known as “the student-athlete.” On the other hand, the work was varied and occasionally interesting, you could do much of it on your own time ⦠and your dim-witted charges were in some way dependent upon you, regardless of how they behaved.
A little farther down the hall, he could hear, coming from behind the door he was just passing, an old Tupac Shakur CD going full blastâthe classic track, the song about his mother ⦠That would be the freshman hotshot Vernon Congers, whose room looked like a Tupac Shakur shrineâtwo entire walls papered with photographs of that legendary martyr of the rap music wars. Adam had substituted for one of Congers's regular tutors once. He passed another door, which was open a few inches ⦠Fireball movie sounds and a male voice saying, “Treyshawn, just between you and me, I don't play âat shit. You know what I'm saying?” Ah, yes, Treyshawn “the Tower” Diggs ⦠Inside the suite opposite it, two males were laughing, and a female was squealing in mock denigration, “Curtis, you a
girl's
what
you
are!” Louder squeal: “Keep yo' hands offa me, you old nancy!” ⦠Curtis Jones. Adam kept on walking ⦠From behind that door, this door, this door, that door, came the unmistakable cracking sound of opposing forces colliding in video games. Ah, the hallway symphony of the basketball greats, the living legends at their midnight ease. Adam smiled. But fuck! “The personal psychology of George the Third as a catalyst of the American Revolution” ⦠for a brick skull that didn't contain a clue as to what “catalyst” meant â¦
Â
Â
Far from being quiet at midnight, the historic Charles Dupont Memorial Library was humming. The rustle of many people in motionâplus the occasional sharp, piping chirp of sneakers on the great stone floorâechoed off the vaulted arches of the main hall. So grand and so gloomy, the cavernous space swallowed up the light from the chandeliers and rendered it feeble. Nevertheless, the hall and the huge computer cluster off to this side and the vast reading room off to that side and the circulation and reference desks up there were alive with students. Many undergraduates never began doing homework until midnight, and there were always plenty of them still at it when the sun rose. Dupont Memorial never closed. Staying up until two, three, or four a.m., weekdays included, was part of the conventional, if eccentric, cycle of student life at Dupont.
Two girls, chattering away in hushed voices while glancing this way and that, walked right across Adam's path. Whatever they were looking for, it wasn't him. Both had on eye makeup, lip gloss, and earrings. One wore a low-cut, lacy peignoir-sort-of top, the other wore a tight T-shirt, and both were deeply cloven behind by tight jeans. None of this was remarkable except that these girls were
totally
slutted up. Many girls got dressed up to go over to the library at midnight for the simple reason that boys would be there.
The sight roused within Adam a familiar, smug feeling of superiority. So many students treated Dupont as an elite playground where they played for four years with bright and, for the most part, wellborn people like themselves ⦠while he and a small Gideon's army, most of whom he knew personally, were here at Dupont as “Millennial Mutants”âhis friend Greg Fiore's termâwho would â¦
Another surge of anger. Long after Jojo Johanssen and his ilk had been reduced to pissing away the remainder of their lives sitting on the curb somewhere drinking malt liquor out of brown paper bags, Adam Gellin and his confreres wouldâ
âwould
what
?
Poof
. All his superiority vanished in an instant,
just like that
, as if it had never been anything but air in the first place. Jojo could get laid anytime he felt like it. He had only to step outside onto the campus and point. Jojo had expressed it to him just that way onceâ“and point”âand Adam believed him. Whatever else he was, Jojo wasn't boastful. He had described actual examples. He thought it was funny. One had stuck in Adam's mind. Jojo had finished a class and was walking across the Yard, not even
thinking about any such thing, when he saw an athletic-looking blonde in a tennis outfit, a tall, slender girl with “these long legs and buff shoulders and tits like
this
”âhe had cupped his hands to indicate the size and where on the torso they were placedâhustling toward the tennis courts where she and a friend had booked a court, and he just stepped in her way and came on to her, and ten minutes later they were in his room slogging away at it. It was simple as that if you were a basketball star. And that girl's voice in Curtis's roomâshe wasn't in there to ask him for a basketball ticket. Adam wheeled about and took a second look at the girls in the tight jeans. Both these little midnight scholars would get themselves laid within the hour. He could be sure about that. Sex! Sex! It was in the air along with the nitrogen and the oxygen! The whole campus was humid with it! tumid with it! lubricated with it! gorged with it! tingling with it! in a state of around-the-clock arousal with it!
Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrutâ
He tried to visualize how many of Dupont's 6,200 students were rutting away at it at this very moment, visualize in the sense of being able to see through walls and spot the two-backed beasts herkyjerky humping bangbangbang ⦠up
there
, in that bedroom in Laphamâ
there
, in that room in Carruthersâup
there
, on the floor of that empty seminar room in Gilesover
there
, in the euonymus shrubbery because, bursting with lust, they couldn't make it all the way back to a bedroomâand
there
, up against a locked rear door on the other side of the tower, because doing it where they might get caught gave it a fetishistic kick they couldn't resistâand here was himself, Adam Gellin, so superior in so many excellent ways ⦠and a virgin. A senior at Dupont and still a virgin. Even in his own thoughts he said it softly. It was a failing he was desperate that the world not know of. The whole campus was rutting away like dogs in the park, and he remained a virgin. As soon as he could, at the end of his sophomore year, he had moved out of Carruthers College, away from roommates for good, and into a squalid little apartment off campusânothing more than a slot for humans created when two ordinary bedrooms in a rotting nineteenth-century town house were converted to four “apartments,” all using one bathroom out in the hallârather than have others gradually come to realize ⦠there was something wrong with himânamely, a bad case of virginityâand now it was getting terribly late, because he knew nothing about it ⦠and he would be perfectly ineptâhe
felt
itâand whatever he could do wrong, he would do wrongânervous impotence, premature ejaculationâand how did they
manage to stop just
before â¦
and put on the condom in some suave wayâdid it require a joke?âwould just unsheathing the damned thing and touching the tip of his dong with it cause him to ejaculate?â
Damn
. The library catalog computer cluster was mobbed. There were some twenty computers arranged in a horseshoe behind a low retaining wall of oak carved with High Gothic tracery, and he had to locate some volumes of British and American history, and all those computer screens glowing with twenty-first-century electronic jaundice behind grand fourteenth-century flourishes of conspicuous wood-sculptural waste were occupied. But wait a minuteâin the very back corner, hard to spot, a screen with nobody sitting in front of it. He began speed-walking toward the cluster. If it wouldn't have looked so totally dorky, he would have made a run for it. Barely fifteen feet away whenâ
Shit!
âa girl with long brown hair, looked like a kid, came in from the side and went straight to that one last screen.
His mind spun. He couldn't afford to be his passive, play-by-the-rules self, not this time. Besides, the girl looked so young. Unless his judgment was seriously off, she would be the sweet, pliant type who gives way to avoid friction. He entered the bull pen. It was packed with the hunched-over backs of students clattering away on the keyboards. The glow of the screens gave their faces a sickly dry-ice pallor. Resolute, he marched up to the girl, who was already seated, and said:
“Excuse me, but I was getting ready to use that one”âhe gestured toward the screenâ“when you cut in front of me, and I mean, I've
got
to use it.” He spoke as sternly as he could. “I've got a paper due in the morning. How about letting me use it for just a minute? Okay? Do you mind? How about it?”
He stood right over the girl. Stern insistence; no smile. She looked up at him warily, a touch of fear in her eyes, studied his face, deliberated, and finally managed to say in a frightened little voice, “Yes.”
“Grrrrreat! Thanks! Hey, I really appreciate it.” He let his face soften for the first time.
The girl hesitated again and then said in the same small voice, “I meant yes I
do
mind.”
She didn't move, she didn't change her expression, and he couldn't stare her down. Her big blue eyes were fixed on his face. She wouldn't budge.
It was he who wilted, as a flood of impressions swept over him all at once. The way she pronounced the i in
I
and
mindâIiii meant yes Iiii do miiind
âa flat, drawn-out way that made him think of one of those Southern racial-conflict-turned-racial-amity movies where everybody sings “Amazing
Grace” at the end. She wasn't pliant, wouldn't yield in the slightest, and she was beautiful in a way he wasn't used to seeing, not in the slutty atmosphere of Turning Boys On at Dupont. She had an absolutely clear, open, guileless beauty. A graceful neck, big wondering eyes, no earrings, no eye makeup, no lip glossâand such perfectly formed, untouched lips they were! Virginal ⦠that was the only word for this sort of face. And she wouldn't give an inch.
It was he who became pliant. “Well ⦔ He lapsed into a weak, ingratiating smile. “Okay if I just stand here and wait till you're through?”
The girl said, “All right.” Came out
allriot.
“Thanks. I promise I won't
hover
or anything.” Bigger ingratiating smile. “By the way, I'm Adam.”
A
bout eleven o'clock the next night, Charlotte happened to be standing by the window in her pajamas and bathrobe, taking a break from medieval history, when a round of shrieks and manly laughs erupted in the courtyard below. Not that there was anything unusual about that; various adolescent cries were part of the ambient sound of Little Yard. But this time she peered down and searched the darkness. There had been a shower earlier, and the ground gave off a damp, ionized smell. Was it just girls
and
boys or girls
with
boys? She wanted to see them, but the lamps on the perimeter of the courtyard and the light from the windows across the way were hopeless against the gloom.
Now the cries were echoing in the big tunnel-like corridor that led from the courtyard out to the street. It definitely sounded like girls
with
boys. Moreover, they were
leaving
, going out, and it was eleven p.m. on a Thursday. What easy, sly, glib, coquettish charm did you have to have? She thought of the blond giant, who she had since learned was some sort of celebrated basketball player. She could still see the way the veins wrapped around his huge forearms. He was so sure of himself, and he had wanted her to go with him somewhere ⦠The boy last night in the library, the one who was so rude and hostile one minute and suddenly came on to her the nextâ
there was nothing frightening about him, and he wasn't bad-looking, but he seemed so devious. He was totally manipulative and opportunistic.
She remained standing by the window, imagining she could still hear the songs of other students' happiness heading off into the unimaginable world of “going out.” Her pity for herself knew no bounds ⦠no longer had any home whatsoever ⦠just a tiny room poisonous with the scorn of a tall, skinny, sarcastic, snobbish Groton girl who wouldn't be caught dead having a normal conversation with some nobody of a country girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains ⦠a bathroom where she could find only the opposite of privacy ⦠the intrusion ⦠the vulgar affront! ⦠of bands of adolescent boys who gloried in the noxious noises and smells of bowel movementsâ
gloried
in them!âgroaned, strained audibly, sighed ostentatiously with satisfaction, laughed at basso pig-bladdery blasts from the rectum and things that went
plop
or
poot
, and shouted running commentaries glorifying their own adolescent grossness.
She turned away from the window and became aware of the happy, noisyâdrunken?âtraffic of boys and girls in the hallway outside her door. She could hear the simpleminded chords and percussion of a CD somebody was playing too loud ⦠Well, they could all go on living from impulse to impulse. Self-discipline was one of the things that had always made Charlotte Simmons ⦠Charlotte Simmons ⦠that, and her power of concentration. She had a medieval history test in the morning, and it was time to return to her desk for a final thirty minutes over the pages of
Blue-eyed Bondage: Caucasian Chattel Slavery in Northern Europe in the Early Middle Ages
.
Could have been lively, this book ⦠the part about how Welshmen were sold as slaves on the Dublin slave market, so many, in fact, that the Old English word for slave was
walseaâ
Welshmanâjust as the word
slave
came from the
Slavs
the Germans routinely kidnapped and pressed into forced labor ⦠but it was so pedantic ⦠lying there on the desk under her nose reflecting light, thanks to the cheap, slick paper university publishers printed pedantic books on ⦠on ⦠on the other hand they had singled her out on their own ⦠No matter what they were like, the blond giant and the dark-haired conniver, they
had
been attracted, hadn't they, they
had
noticed something about her ⦠and they liked it ⦠But why kid herself? Two wholly accidental encounters lasting a few blinks of the eye ⦠What on earth could they do for a girl who was
so lonely
!
“Ohmygod, ohmygod ⦠Seriously â¦
Me?
⦠Me, I wouldn't give him the satisfaction ⦔ A girl's voice just outside the doorâBeverly.
The door opened, and in she came. As usual, she had her head cocked, the cell phone at her ear, and her eyes cast down and to the side toward some point in midair that didn't exist. Walking in behind her was another girl, a blonde. Quite striking she was, thanks to her fine square jaws. Without really looking at Charlotte, Beverly flashed a smile and gave a distracted wave by way of acknowledging her roommate's presence by the window. She removed her lips from the cell phone just long enough to gesture behind her at the blonde and say, “Charlotte ⦠Erica,” whereupon she sat her skin and bones down on the edge of her bed and poured herself back into the little black device.
“Hi,” Charlotte said to the girl, Erica. Vaguely she recalled the Amorys talking about an Erica who had been a year ahead of Beverly at Groton.
“Hello,” said the girl in a clipped, perfunctory fashion. She gave Charlotte a wide, flat, dead smile, then ran her eyes over Charlotte's plaid bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers ⦠slippers, pajamas, and bathrobe. That done, she turned her attention to Beverly and never looked at Charlotte again.
Beverly was saying into the device, “I mean, I was sitting at this table at the I.M. with Harrison and this other lacrosse player who's a Phi Gam and some girl named Ellen, and I had on my low-cut Diesels? And I happened to look down, and
eeeyew
, my assâit was like I just gave birth! It was like my waist had this tube the size of a garter snake around itâand you're the one who's always telling me, âOh, go ahead! One slice of chocolate cake won't kill you.' I had this little â¦
tube
âand
my ass
!”
Erica emitted a short burst of laughter and said, “Ohmygod, Beverly, the day you get a big assâ”
Beverly said into the cell phone, “That was Erica. She thinks I'm joking ⦠Come on, I'd be honest with
you â¦
What? Him? I know you're only trying to change the subject, but did I tell you he wanted to hook up in this little sports car he has? It's got two seats with all this manual shift shit sticking up in betweenâ”
The square-jawed blonde chuckled, sighed, covered her eyes with her hands, said, “Ohmygod,” and pulled faces.
“I'm glad it was dark in the I.M., anyway,” Beverly was saying. “I mean, whatta I do about my fucking waist? ⦠Hahhh! You always say that. I wish I
was
skinny.”
The friend, Erica, laughed and laughed. She never looked at Charlotte to get her reaction to all this, not even once.
“I'll
be
there!” Beverly was saying. “But can I borrow the prick-tease shirt? ⦠The one that's open down the front. It'd make me look like I've got boobs.”
Charlotte was plunged into consternation, four or five kinds of it. Beverly's language shocked her. She had heard her use the occasional expletive, usually
Oh shit
, once or twice an
Oh fuck
, but she had never heard her go on and on in this completely smutty fashion like ⦠like ⦠like
Regina
Cox
, only worse. The sheer sexual bluntness shocked her. The fact that she would blithely say such things in front of other people shocked her. The fact that her friend Erica, far from being shocked, thought it was hilarious shocked her. And the fact that neither of them deigned to bestow so much as a flick of the eye upon her throughout this extraordinarily vulgar cell phone performanceâsomehow that made it worse. For a moment she felt that the whole awkward situation must be her own fault. The very fact that she existed in this room had become an unfathomable embarrassment. How could she remain standing here by the window, watching and listening to two girls who ignored her?
Neither gave her so much as a glance as she went to her desk and sat down. She resumed reading
Blue-eyed Bondage
. Or rather, staring at it; she couldn't very well keep her mind off the two girls, who were barely three feet behind her, talking and laughing.
Beverly had at last snapped her cell phone shut and was declaring, “I have nothing to wear.”
Out of the corner of her eye Charlotte could see that she had her fists on her hips. Then she opened a bureau drawer and slammed it shut.
“I have â¦
nothing to wear
!”
“I think I'm gonna have to cry, Bev,” said Erica.
Beverly began sighing and going through more drawers and then her closet. Erica seemed to find all this immensely amusing.
“Well, I guess it's not the end of the world,” said Beverly.
“Oh, no, Bev, it totally is the end of the world.”
They chattered away. Charlotte tried to tune out, but she heard Erica saying, “That's not Sarc Three, Bev, that's only Sarc Two. I mean, it's almost as obvious as Sarc One. I can't believe they let you out of Groton without passing Sarc. Sarc One is when I look at you, and I say, âOhmygod, a
cerise
shirt
. Cerise is such an
in color
this year.' That's just ordinary intentionally obvious sarcasm. Okay?”
“You really don't like this shirt, do you?” said Beverly.
“Oh, please give me a fucking break, Bev! I'm just giving you an example. I'm trying to enlighten you, and youâtouchy, touchy, touchy. Now ⦠in Sarc Two you say the same thing, only in a sympathetic voice that sounds like totally sincere. âOh, wow, Bev, I love that color.
Cerise
. That's like so-o-o-o cool.
Unnhhh
⦠no wonder it's so like â¦
in
this year.' By the time you get to the âso
in
this year,' your voice is dripping with so much syrup and like ⦠sincerity, it finally dawns on the other person that she's getting fucked over. What you've really been saying is that you
don't
love
the color, you
don't
think it's cool, and it's
not
âin' this year. It's the delay in it dawning on her that makes it hurt. Okay?”
“And you're sure you're just being nice and giving me an example?” said Beverly.
“I'm sure you're going bitchcakes on me, be-atch. That's what I'm sure of. If you don't cool it, I'm not going to explain Sarc Three to you.”
Silence.
“Okay. In Sarc Three you make the delay even longer, so it
really
hurts when she finally gets it. We've got the same situation. The girl's getting ready to go out, and she has on this cerise shirt. She thinks it's really sexy, a real turn-on, and she's gonna score big-time. You start off sounding straightâyou know, flattering, but like not laying it on too thick. You're like, âWow, Bev, I love that
shirt
. Where'd you get it? How perfect is
that
? It's so
versatile
. It'll be perfect for job interviews, and it'll be perfect for community service.'” The very thought made Erica laugh.
Beverly said, “Hah hah. You sure that's not Sarc Fourâand you're just fucking with me??”
Erica laughed and laughed. “Bev, I love youâyou're totally paranoid!”
“I'm taking this shirt off,” said Beverly.
“If you take that shirt off, I'm gonnaâBev, that's an awesome shirt, and you know it.”
Charlotte flushed with anger. Ignorant snobs! Beverly's square-faced Erica had said a single word to herâa single, curt helloâand then treated her as if she were invisible.
Just like that
, she knew why. Beverly had told her friend ahead of time that her roommate was a person of no significance. Hence the bare-minimal hello and the dead smile. And who did they think
they
were? Charlotte had an idea of who they
thought
they were. By now she knew what Beverly had actually meant when she said, the day they met, that she had gone to “high school in Groton, Massachusetts.” Groton was the name of a high school, but it was no high school in the sense that a Charlotte Simmons thought of a high school. It was a private school, so fancy, so prestigious it needed no descriptive appendage after its name. It was enough to say “Groton,” and students didn't just “go” there, they boarded there, away from home.
Beverly Amory of Groton didn't “room” with Charlotte Simmons of Alleghany High School, either. She put up with her. She was never unpleasant. In fact, she was always cheerful, in her distant fashion. She conversed with her only about impersonal subjects, such as the cost of cell phone service. Even then she was vague about it; obviously somebody else took care of the bill. Charlotte wasn't about to humiliate herself by asking or coaxing or trying to steer Beverly into sharing this year at Dupont with her on a more comradely level. She had thrived alone in Sparta, and she could thrive alone here. The invincible truth was,
she possessed a brilliance unparalleled here or
anywhere else
. The day would come, in due course, when Beverly and the cold fish with her would look up to Charlotte Simmons in awe and berate themselves for not having made friends with her
when they had the chance
. And when that day came, she wouldâcutâthemâdead.