Well, Charlotte thought as the elevator reached the ground floor, at least there's the Common Room. She would have someplace to lie down while she despised herself for her innocence and her weakness in giving in to Beverly's sudden, besotted, utterly phony posture of friendship and intimacy.
In the Common Room, the couches and easy chairs were back at their appointed posts beneath the glum light of three big medieval-type wooden chandeliers, along with an array of dark wooden tables and straight-backed chairs.
Charlotte scanned the room. In the middle, amid this sea of furniture, a pair of enormous old couches upholstered in chestnut-brown leather were backed up, one on this side, one on the other, against a long, heavy old dark wooden library table, lit by a pair of tall but dim old Arts and Crafts lamps. In this gloomy, elephantine cluster of furniture sat the only three souls Charlotte could spy. At the far end of one couch sat a girl with her chunky legs crossed, reading a paperback book. On the other couch, a slender girl, her back to Charlotte, sat on the edge of a seat cushion, leaning forward, talking in a low voice to a slender boy who was leaning toward her from the edge of the armchair. Both wore T-shirts and blue jeans.
The girl reading the bookâwhat on earth was
she
wearing? Apparently nothing but a floppy T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxer shorts, the kind boys wore. Not only that, the fly was popped open from the way her legs were crossed. Charlotte couldn't imagine a girl just sitting like that in a public place, not even at two-thirty in the morning. It was bad enough having to be here in pajamas and a bathrobe.
She decided to sit far from all three, somewhere deep in the Middle Gothic recesses of the Common Room. She started walking that wayâbut her body wouldn't obey. It was as if something independent of rational motor control was taking command. The new commander had had enough of isolation, enough scouring loneliness, and refused to venture beyond the settlement before her, with its plush leather, its ancient hand-carved wood, the snug light of its olden lamps, and its human beings.
But not even the commander could make her actually approach a human and strike up a conversation, and so she sat in a chair at the other end of the couch from the chunky girl with the open fly. True, this put her opposite the couple in the blue jeans, but there was the depth of both huge couches plus the width of the table plus the fact that both were leaning forward from the edges of their seats seemingly engrossed in each other ⦠to make her feel properly distanced from them.
The chunky girl with the open fly glanced up at her from the depths of the couch as Charlotte sat down in the chair, but she immediately returned to her book. Her book ⦠reading her bookâCharlotte felt an overwhelming need to not appear to be some hopeless refugee adrift in the dead of the night, not even to these three young strangers. Now it was essential to be busy at something, which is to say, anything.
She looked about ⦠At the end of the table, near her, was a magazine. Blushingâactually feeling the rush of blood to her faceâfor fear one of them would notice that she was so desperate as to start reading anything she could lay hands on, she got up, put one knee on the seat of the couch, reached way over and picked up the magazine, and hurried back to her chair.
Only then did she notice the title:
Cosmopolitan.
Charlotte had heard of the magazine, and had the impression it had been around a long time, but she had never read it. It wasn't in the Alleghany High library, and she had certainly never bought it. The price on the cover was $3.99, and that wasn't for a year's subscription. That was for this
one issue
. She had never seen
any
slick magazine in their house at home. Who was going to go out and pay
four dollars
for a magazine? On the cover a blond girl with big eyes was smiling at her in a friendly way. There were headlines all over the cover. The biggest one said, “99 SEXY WAYS TO TOUCH HIM. These Fresh, Frisky Tips Will Thrill Every Inch of Your Guy (Our Favorite Requires a Glazed Doughnut).” Couldn't possibly mean what it suggested. She riffled through the magazine, which was very thick, until she found it ⦠“You want to be his best
ever
. And that's a goal we can definitely get behind. So get ready to step up and assume your rightful title of sex deity. After consulting some eager experts (gorgeous guys with loose lips and tons of sexrated secrets to spill), we have 99 of the most erotic and ingenious ways for a girl to tantalize, tease, and thrill every inch of him.” The first one said, “Help me button my shirt or adjust my tie in the mirror. When you dress me, I just want to get undressed again.” The second one said, “Tugging on my earlobe just a bit with your teeth makes me lose all sense of the English language” ⦠Sort of naughty overtones, Charlotte reckoned, but otherwiseâthen she hit “When we're having sex and you're on top, cup my balls and tug on them lightly. It's an unexpected, awesome feeling.” And “Put the condom on me. It's such a turn-on to see you prep me that way” and “Swirl your tongue around the tip of my penis, and then, without warning, take all of me in your mouth” and “Take your panties off, throw them in the freezer, then
caress my bod with them. Don't laugh. It's actually awesome” and “My girlfriend gets a glazed doughnut and sticks my penis through the hole. She nibbles around it, stopping to suck me once in a while. The sugar beads from her mouth tingle on my tip”â
Charlotte closed the magazine and studied the cover again. Was this some sort of pornographic parody of
Cosmopolitan
? She opened it to the contents pages ⦠a list a mile long of directors, managers, assistant managers, associate publishers, and then: “Published by Hearst Communications, Inc., President and Chief Executive Officer: Victor F. Ganzi.” It was all quite unbelievable. She put the magazine in her lap and looked straight ahead at nothing. The chunky girl glanced up at her but, as before, immediately returned to her book.
Charlotte's face was blazing red. Suppose somebodyâanybodyâeven one of these three strangersâ
saw
her reading this ⦠blatant pornography! It would be mortifyingâterminally!
As nonchalantly as she could, which is to say, with her hands shaking only a little, she got up, knelt on the couch again, reached over, and put the magazine back on the table, then turned it over so that the cover would be face-down.
Oh my God!
She didn't try to get back to her chair. Instead, she sank as deeply as she could into the couch, there being no available crack in the earth into which she could disappear.
She kept very still. Her heart was drumming away. Now she was directly across the table from the couple, the boy and girl in blue jeans. She had no interest in eavesdropping, but all at once the boy's voice rose just enough for her to overhear.
“What? I don't get it. You want
me
⦠to do â¦
that
for you?”
The girl's whisper reached an audible level, too. “
Please
, Stuart ⦠don't you see? I'm a freshman. I don't know any of these guysâand for you it wouldn't be such a big thing. You're a senior. And I trust you.”
“Yeah, but what's in it for
me
?” said the boy.
“Don't you think I'm attractive?”
“You're gorgeous, in case you don't already know it, which I'm sure you do, but what's that got to do with it?”
“I'd think it would have a little â¦
something
to do with it.”
“No it wouldn't. You'd just be using me.”
“Well, I'll bet there've been plenty of timesâ”
“Brittany! I've known you since you were nine and I was thirteen. I always felt like your uncle. My God, it would be like
incest
or something.”
“I'll bet you'veâ”
“I'm not sure I could even ⦠you know,
do
it.”
“Unnhh. Then what am I gonna do?”
At that point their voices fell again, and Charlotte could no longer hear what they were saying, other than that the girl, Brittany, was using a lot of
unnhs
and
ohhhhs
and other sighs.
Charlotte's chin sank down to her collarbone as what she had just heard began to register.
“Sexiled?”
Charlotte's head jerked about. It was the girl in the boxer shorts at the other end of the couch. She was looking straight at Charlotte and smiling in a perfectly friendly manner. Charlotte must have looked dumbstruck, because the girl said it again.
“Sexiled?”
By now Charlotte had taken the term apart and put it back together again, and she said, “Yeah ⦠I guess I am.”
“Me, too.”
“You
are
? That's what it's called, sexiled?”
“Unh hunh.” The girl shrugged, as if resigned to her fate. “This is the third time in two weeks. What about you?”
Charlotte was appalled to realize that any such abomination was so common, it had a name. “It never happened to me before. I just can'tâmy roommate promised she'd never do it again.”
“Hah hah,” said the girl. She seemed rather jolly about it. “That's what mine said. I can tell you, all she means is, she won't do it again tonight. Maybe. If you're lucky.”
Charlotte pursed her lips grimly. The whole thing was overwhelming. “WellâI'm not gonna put up with it.”
Dismissively: “Ahhhch ⦠It's like totallyâit's the way it works. You've just done her a favor, so she can't very well say no when it's your turn. Who's your roommate?”
“Her name's Beverly.” She said it in a distracted fashion. What was on her mind was, Good Lord! When it's
my turn
?
“Mmmm, don't know her. You have a boyfriend yet?”
Stunned. “No.”
“Me, neither. Oh, well. Guys come up to me, and I think they're interested, and then they ask me to introduce them to some girlfriend of mine, or whatever.” She smiled and lifted her eyebrows in a self-deprecatory fashion.
The girl had a pretty face, in a rubicund country girl sort of wayâCharlotte had seen that face plenty of times around Spartaâbut she was buttery, stubby, and chubby. The chances of her ever achieving the twenty-first-century female ideal of a lean, hard, slim-hipped, well-defined body were remote, if not nil. She just wasn't made for it. Yet here she was, sitting in her boxer shorts in a public lounge in the middle of the night, looking forward to boyfriends and having her turn at sexiling her roommate. A nice, cheery normal-looking girlâwho assumed all this was the natural order of things!
“I'm Bettina,” said the girl.
“Charlotte.”
They were members of the first generation to go through life with no last names.
The girl looked at Charlotte with a slightly amused expression and said, “Where are you from?”
“Sparta, North Carolina.”
“Don't know Sparta. I
thought
I detected a little bit of the South, though. Where'd you go to school?”
Charlotte stiffened. She had regarded herself as the cosmopolitan of the Alleghany High student body, and she fancied her speech was nearly accentfree. But all she said was, “In Sparta, at Alleghany High School.” Then, to shift the subject away from Sparta, Alleghany High, and Southern accents, “What about you?”
“I'm from Cincinnati. I went to Seven Hills School,” said Bettina. “You always wear pajamas?”
The very same once-over Beverly's snobbish friend had given her! And the boys and girls in the hallway! What was wrong with pajamas, for God's sake? They were certainly better than a pair of plaid boxer shorts with an open fly! But before she could work up a good head of resentmentâ
âa shriek. A girl came running from the entry hall into the Common Room. She shrieked again. She was slim and blond and wore shorts that showed off her perfect legs, and the shrieks were ones that any girl on earth could have interpreted. They were the cries of the female of the species feigning physical fright at the antics, probably physical, of the male. Sure enough, running in after her came a tall, lean boy with short brown hair and little bangs. Moving like an athlete, he cornered her against the back of a couch and threw his arms around her as if to drag her back into the hall. As she squirmed, she cried, “No! No! Put me down, Chris! You can't make me! I'm not going to!”
The boy said, “You have to! That was the deal, dude!”
He dragged her out of the room. It was almost ⦠choreographic, this gorgeous, lissome girl and this gorgeous, tall, lean, athletic boy and their charade of a struggle. The two departed Edgerton House in melodious combat.
Charlotte and Bettina sat there without saying a word, but Charlotte knew they were both thinking the same thing. The perfect
her
intertwined with the perfect
himâ
while they sat marooned in this lugubrious desert of dried-out leather upholstery, the two sexiles.