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 roomâand a sludgy brown stream was running down the back of one leg. It was putrid. Feces.
Charlotte went, “HoytâHoytâ” 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 horribleâbut 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 relaxedâor trustfulâall 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!âand 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 drinkingâmeaning serving alcohol where people under twenty-one were presentâand 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, andâ
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 ascensionâshe had a hot guy hovering over her!âwas 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 â¦
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 Simmonsâmagically 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 luminousâand frenziedâwhen 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 hallâor 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 â¦
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 nightâexcept 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 bedâwhat 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 eyesâdeep, deep, and deeperâand 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 meâ”
“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.”
“Vanceâ”
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 roomâ
you
have this room! And
we
won't ever be throughâbecause
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 knowâ”
“You
don't
know!” screamed Charlotte. “You're gross!”
“Hey! Keep it down!” said Hoyt. “I meanâshit!” 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 brunetteâ
Hoyt called out, lamely, “Heyâwait!”
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 Jojoâ