At that moment the paranoia factory opened for business, tooled up for a day of capacity output.
Charlotte sat slumped over in her chair throughout the class, taking notes and then turning them into doodles and looking out the window, failing to laugh when the rest of the class laughed, because she hadn't been listening,
nodding off, jerking alert, like any other morning zombie, shivering occasionally. She was no longer hung over, but however inadvertently, she was accomplishing a pretty good impersonation of someone who had gotten wasted the night before ⦠and this was Monday morning. So bleary was she with self-loathing and paranoia, the only positive thing she could think about was going over to Mr. Rayon and getting a cup of coffee. Fleetingly, since it wasn't really an important thing, it occurred to her that she had never drunk coffee until coming to Dupont. Momma didn't think children should drink coffee. Until she left for Dupont, she had been Momma's good, good girl. That ran through her mind without irony or cynicism or regret. It was the way things had always been.
Â
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No sooner had she gotten in the coffee line at Mr. Rayon than she noticed, sitting way out in the cafeteria's mob of tables, a senior named Lucy Page Tucker, who seemed to beâshe was pretty far away, but she
seemed
to be staring at her. She was sitting with three other girls. “Everybody,” meaning a lot of girls from the sorority set, “knew” Lucy Pageâwho was from Boston but went by this Southern-style double first nameâbecause she was president of one of the two hot sororities, Psi Phi, the Douche being the other. The Psi Phi girls were known as the Trekkies, after the old sci-fi TV series,
Star Trek
. Lucy Page was hard to miss, even from a distance like this. She was a big girl, with broad cheekbones, wide jaws, a curiously pointed chin, and a prodigious mane of blond hair that she combed straight back, which made her look like the lion in
The Wizard of Oz.
Charlotte looked away for a few seconds, then stealthily cut a glance at her. Lucy Page Tucker still seemed to be staring at herâeven though she was now bent way over the table, as were the other three girls, their heads barely eighteen inches apart. Charlotte felt her heart revving up. She looked away and inched forward in the coffee line a yard or two before stealing another look. Thank God! Lucy Page was no longer staring her way. At that moment a brunette whose back was to Charlotte, sitting across from Lucy Page, waved to someone off to the side, and Charlotte caught her profile. Lightning struck Charlotte's solar plexus.
Gloria!
Even at this distance Charlotte knew that face! How could I be such a fool! she thought. Showing up at Mr. Rayon's like this! The very crossroads of the campus!
She abandoned the coffee line and hurried into the women's bathroom and went into a cubicle. She locked the door and sat down on the toilet lid,
breathing too hard ⦠so stricken with fear that she had to lock herself in hereâinhaling ammonia fumes that were battling it out with the egestive funk of the place. Ohmygodâ
Gloria!
For the rest of the day, Charlotte went from class to class in fear. She desperately wanted to know what Gloria had told Lucy Page and if Lucy Page would tell Erica and if Erica would tell Beverly. Every time she passed someone vaguely familiar on the campus, she wondered if they
knew â¦
and then the dimensions of
what
they might know would grow and grow into something even more vast. She wasn't the first girl at Dupont to be summarily dumped, she assumed. But no girl in the history of Dupont or any other college had ever been dumped under circumstances like these. She had been dumped by a member of the hottest fraternity at Dupontâand not just “a member” but a demi-celebrity, hero of the Night of the Skull Fuck, the lionhearted boy who would stand up to any manâeven an ox like Mac Bolkaâthe frat boy who was every frat boy's definition of Cool, as handsome a boy as ever existedâO Hoyt! How could you!
She kept her head down, in hiding and in shame, as she walked across the Great Yard. Stealthily she scanned that tableau, the vast lawn, the majestic tower at one end, that vista known all overâthe world?âas the very portrait of higher education's highest aspirations in America, and she saw bobbing ponytails and swishing manes, and bottoms going this way and that way within jeans tight as skin and worn through to perfection, the better to reveal every cleft and declivity ⦠Had any of them ever done what she had done? Had Hoyt maneuvered them to bed, too? But they had probably lost their virginity in private, not in front of an audience of meat-show strangers, long before it was her turn. Why him? Why did an utterly callous, affect-less male possessed by the Casanova syndrome have to be the one? Had she mocked God? Momma's God? Had she called His wrath down upon herself? Life and the Soul had departed her body. She was a pillar of salt that hadn't blown away yet.
When classes were over, at two-thirty, Charlotte hid in the DeLierre Museum of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Chinese and Japanese art over on the other side of Laphamânot much risk of running into anybody she knew in the DeLierreâuntil after darkâa little after four-thirty, now that it was Decemberâbefore chancing a return to Little Yard to pick up books and notebooks and hide out in the library, become Miss Charlotte Library Stacks again. Beverly ⦠she couldn't face Beverly. Beverly
would either let loose another barrage of questionsâor she wouldn't, meaning she had already heard about it all ⦠as it blew from Gloria to Lucy Page to Erica ⦠to the world. She could count on Beverly to add a few Sarc 3 or even Sarc 2 or 1 comments, just to let Charlotte know she knew.
She entered Edgerton with consummate stealth, removing the sandals once again lest they slap on the floor. She peeked into the lounge to see if Bettina or Mimi was in there. The coast was clear. There was the elevator. The door was open, and no one was on it. So she got on and took a chance instead of resorting to the stairway. She made it to the fifth floor without anyone seeing her. She walked down the hallway once more, toting her sandals, silent as an Indian. She slowed down to practically a tiptoe when she got near Bettina's room ⦠just in case Bettina was ⦠lying in wait. As she padded past on the balls of her feetâ“Charlotte.” Someone inside was using her name in conversation. She paused, opened her mouth to take a deep breathâand heard her own rasping heart again.
They would hear her!
It seemed so loud, she closed her lips and forced herself to breathe only through her nose.
“I mean, this is
Charlotte
we're talking about.” It was Bettina's voice.
“Who'd a thunk it!” A merry schadenfreudish voice, followed by giggles. That was Mimi.
“I can't believe she slept with him!” said Bettina.
“Yeah,” said Mimi. “She's always like such a goody-goody. All those little like ⦠homilies, she gives us ⦠That the right word?”
“She gives us shit, is what she gives us,” said Bettina. “She makes you feel like shit if you hook up with a guyâand we don't even do
that
.”
“She thinks she's so smart, but you have to be a fucking moron to sleep with fucking Hoyt Thorpe at a fucking frat-house formal,” said Mimi in the campus-wise, all-knowing, been-there manner she had.
“I
know
! He may be hot, but I mean, your fucking
first time
, and
he's
the one?”
Mimi, laughing: “And the bedâholy shit, lotsa luck going to another Saint Ray formal.”
“Well, I mean, that wasn't her fault,” said Bettina.
“Yeah, but you don't bleed on the bed! You just don't! And this girl GloriaâGloria Barrone?âyou know who I mean? She's a Psi Phi? She
saw
it.”
“How did she see?”
“Hoyt showed her!”
“Wow, he's an asshole. What a dick. Was it her period?”
“No. What I heard isâI heard that Hoyt told Gloria it was her first time, and he like totally didn't know what to do. He like freaked out after.”
“What do you mean, freaked out?” said Bettina.
“I don't know, I mean like he couldn't deal with it. Why should he? I mean, it wasn't like it was their wedding bed. It's probably a little awkward to be some random girl's fucking first time ⦠at a frat formal!”
“That's so awful. How did you find out?”
“My friend Sarah Rixey told me.”
“Sarah Rixey?âhow did
she
know?”
“I don't know. I think she said this girl Nicole told her. She's a junior. I know they went to the same school in Massachusetts. I met her once.”
“And how did
Nicole
know?”
“She's hooking up with this guy who's a Saint Ray,” said Mimi. “I guess that's how.”
“I still can't believe Hoyt is such an asshole that he'd show Gloria Barrone, though. She's like best friends with Lucy Page Tucker, who's the president of Psi Phi.”
Charlotte had heard enough. She kept on walking ⦠past her room. She couldn't even deal with the remote chance that Beverly was in there. If a couple of freshmen as low down on the grapevine as Bettina and Mimi knew, then certainly Beverly, who seemed to be already wired into the sorority scene, would know. It was Monday evening, not even forty-eight hours ⦠later ⦠and who
didn't
know! Her own friends were having a merry old time trashing her behind her back. Everyone knew! Hoyt had told two people, Gloria and Julianâand no doubt Vance, who no doubt told Crissy, who no doubt told Nicole as soon as they got together to tell war stories about the weekendâand now everybody she could possibly care about knew, and God knows how many others, as well, who might enjoy the incidental schadenfreude of pointing out the little hillbilly freshman from the mountains who “lost her pop-top” at a frat formal in a hotel.
How could he have told Gloria? Julian would have been bad enough, but
Gloria
? Was he utterly heartless, utterly cynical? Did he have a sadistically cruel streak? Was he so completely lacking in empathy for othersânever mind sympathyâthat he thought it was funny? She wanted to strangle him,
kill
him,
obliterate
him from the face of the earth.
Yell
at him ⦠but in person, which meant she would at last
see
him againâlook into his face. His hazel eyes, his smile, his cleft chin, his expression, which was not heartless
at all but capable of such ⦠love, and maybe if she had told him as soon as he invited her that she was a virgin, everything would have turned out differently, and he wouldn't have freaked outâthat must have been all that really happenedâhe just didn't
know
, and the surprise freaked him outâyes, she had told him ⦠just
before
, but by that time he was so arousedâafter a certain point the male can't restrain himselfâand if he saw her, looked into her face again, he would sob an apologyâO Hoyt!â
So caught up was she in this fantasy that she wasn't aware of the Trolls just around the bend in the hallway until she was right on top of their ratty legs sticking out like a row of logs. She could scarcely believe it. Didn't they ever move? Didn't they have
anything
else to do? What were they, buzzards? The vile-looking, scrawny little Maddy turned her eyes up at Charlotte in the eerie way she had. Charlotte felt frustrated, but she steeled herself to the task of maintaining whatever cool she could. She smiled slightly, whispered “Hi,” and kept walking. Scrawny Maddy was already drawing her knees up to let her pass, when she piped up. “Hey, there.” She began giggling. “How you holding up?”
Another shock in the solar plexusânot so much the fact that the girl
knew
, which meant the whole bunch of them knew, as the fact that she dared to be so casually
impudent
about it.
“Fine,” Charlotte said curtly, as if to maintain the fiction that she still existed on a plane far above them. She continued on through the gauntlet, panicked over the possibility of other fish-eyed stares and impudentâ
“You know you're barefoot?” It was the big black girl, Helene. Giggles ran up and down the Trolls.
Charlotte rushed to the fire door and headed down the stairs towardâshe had no idea where. Even the Trolls felt superior to her now! They didn't talk to other freshmen who actually had lives. They only observed them, used them as gossip fodder, envied them, resented them, sought to tear them down like tarantulasâ
tarantulas.
It registered on her that Miss Pennington had introduced her to the term in a moment as unpleasant as this one, although she couldn't recall what it was. Maddyâthat little limp-haired weasel-faced crone-in-embryoâeven Maddy knew she had lost her virginity in the most public wayâeven Maddy was gloating over the fact that Charlotte Simmons and her aloof ego had gotten screwed over and plunged into the depths of campus loserdom.
She stopped at the next landing to put the sandals back onâthey had dared to make fun of her bare feet! She was starting to sweat again. She was
breathing in a rapid shallow fashion. She looked down the four flights of stairwell below. They were lit only by a single 22-watt circular fluorescent bulb at each landing. The walls were old-fashioned plaster, hard as rock, painted institutional green. The stair rail was some sort of molded metal painted black. When she tried to see all the way to the ground level, the stairwell became a narrow shaft full of tight right angles leading to a small terminal gloom.