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By the time she turned the doorknob, she could hear the whole misshapen gauntlet clucking, whispering, sniggering, mock-sympathizing…
“This really rounds it out,” Charlotte said to herself amid the tears. The wreck of Charlotte Simmons was their Friday night.
11. Onstage, a Star
Well past ten o’clock the next morning, Charlotte was still in bed, lying flat on her back, eyes shut…eyes open…long enough to gaze idly at the brilliant lines of light where the shades didn’t quite meet the windowsill…eyes shut…listening for sounds of Beverly, who occasionally sighed or moaned faintly in her sleep…eyes open, eyes shut, ru
Well, she couldn’t lie here like this forever…but she dreaded waking Beverly up…Even on weekdays, when Charlotte got out of bed and got dressed, no matter how quiet she tried to be, Beverly would thrash about under her covers and huff great groans , as if she were still asleep but just barely, because Charlotte’s hayseed habit of getting up early was about to destroy all chance of rest and, for that matter, her entire day. One way or another, Beverly always made her feel like some rural throwback. When Beverly came in, much more noisily, in the middle of the night, Charlotte felt like giving her the thrash-and-groan treatment, but she didn’t have the nerve. Somehow, perhaps through sheer aloofness, Beverly had established the notion that she was the eminence in this room. She was a rich boarding school girl. Who would be so foolish as to deprive her of even thirty seconds of her heedless Saturday morning sleep?
Without a creak, without a rustle, holding her breath, Charlotte slipped out from under the covers, eyes pi
Thank God there was hardly anybody in the bathroom. A pale girl with practically no waist, emerging—naked!—from a shower stall in a fog of steam…some guy in a cubicle making the usual rude bowel noises…So gross…She studied her face in the mirror to see what the night had done to it. Slightly ashen, wasn’t it, its vitality leached away by guilt and shame…Hurriedly she washed her face and brushed her teeth, returned to the room, and opened the door as carefully as could be…
Sunshine! The shades were up. Beverly was looking out of one of the windows, leaning forward, arms propped on the sill, wearing the panties and short T-shirt she slept in. From behind like this—the bones of her pelvis saddle stood out. She was a pale version of one of those starving Ethiopians you see on TV with bugs flying around their eyes. Beverly straightened up and turned about. With no makeup to help, her eyes seemed abnormally big and bulging, like an anorexic’s. She stared at Charlotte with a crooked little smile on her face. Charlotte braced for a reprimand, oozing with sarcasm, for waking her up “this early” on a Saturday morning.
“Well!” said Beverly. An arch and ironic Well. She paused and looked Charlotte up and down, still smiling with one corner of her mouth up higher than the other. “Did you have a good time last night?”
Startled, Charlotte paused, too, then managed to say timidly, “I guess so—it was all right.” Last night!
“I see you made a new friend.”
Charlotte’s heart palpitated for several seconds before snapping back into a normal—albeit speeding—rhythm. It had already spread everywhere! Ten-thirty in the morning, and everybody already knew! In a wavering voice:
“What do you mean?”
“Hoyt Thorpe,” said Beverly.
Her smile was the smug one that says, “I know more than you think I do.” Charlotte felt as if the lining of her skull were on fire. She was speechless. She wondered if her expression looked frightened or merely wary.
Beverly said, “So? What do you think? You think he’s hot?”
Charlotte was swept by an overwhelming need to dissociate herself utterly from Hoyt and everything that had happened.
“I don’t know what he was,” said Charlotte, “except drunk and…and…and…rude.” The word she had started to use was “deceitful,” but she didn’t want to give Beverly that strong a word to pry with. “How did you know I met him?”
“I saw you. I was there, too.”
“You were? At the Saint Ray house, at that party? You know, I thought I saw you”—she started to mention the BOOTING ROOM but thought better of it—“for a fraction of a second, but then you weren’t there.”
“Same with me. It was a mob scene, totally. Besides, you seemed like…otherwise occupied.”
A bit too emphatically: “I wasn’t occupied with him!”
“You weren’t?”
Unconvincingly: “No.”
“Maybe a little bit?”
“How did you know his name?” said Charlotte. “I never even heard his last name until you just said it, and now I can’t even remember what you said. Hoyt what?”
“Thorpe. You really had no idea who he was?”
“No.”
“Nobody said anything about how he caught some girl, some junior, giving head to this governor—from California?—what’s his name?—out in the Grove last spring?”
“No.”
Beverly proceeded to tell her the story, which had swollen in the five months since the incident. Hers had Hoyt knocking two of the governor’s bodyguards unconscious with his bare fists.
Charlotte got hung up on the phrase “giving head.” It took her a moment to figure out what it meant, and when she did, she found it trashy that Beverly had used such an expression. She didn’t absorb anything after that until Beverly said, “Do you want to see him again?”
“No.”
“Oh, come on, Charlotte. It didn’t look like that last night.”
It occurred to Charlotte that this was only the second time since the day they met that Beverly had addressed her by name.
Charlotte didn’t want to be at a campus crossroads like Mr. Rayon on this particular morning, but Abbotsford Hall (the Abbey), the great, gloomy Gothic dining hall she had to use in order to take advantage of the food allotment of her scholarship, stopped serving breakfast at nine a.m. That left Mr. Rayon, which was already a swarming, buzzing hive by the time Charlotte walked in carrying a text for her Introduction to Neuroscience course called Descartes, Darwin, and the Mind-Brain Problem, which she intended to read over breakfast. There were long lines at all six cafeteria counters. Elsewhere, students were weaving among one another in droves, raggedy to near perfection, wearing children’s clothes of every sort (so long as they weren’t wool or silk), especially ersatz sports and military gear: baseball caps on backward, hooded jerseys, Streptolon warm-up pants with bold stripes down the sides, te