Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Buster Roth smiled, which Adam took to be a good sign.

“Well, let’s talk about our mutual friend, Jojo. Jojo’s got a serious issue on his hands here. Whattaya think he ought to do?”

Adam had never thought of it from that point of view. It confused him. “Well…I don’t know…”

“If I were you, Adam, I’d give it some thought. If Jojo is penalized over…whatever has happened…you could run the risk of the same penalty.”

The idea stunned Adam. His brain churned, finally settling on a single consideration. If that was true, if any such thing happened, he could say good-bye to the Rhodes scholarship, to any and all scholarships, to any and all consulting jobs, and to the pretension of being a Millennial Mutant.

He croaked out, “I don’t understand.”

“Let’s suppose,” said Buster Roth, “that you wrote the entire paper for Jojo, and all he did was hand it in. I’m just saying what if.” He paused and squinted at Adam. “I’m not saying that’s what happened. Jojo doesn’t say that’s what happened. But if the panel decided that’s what happened, then Jojo would be suspended for the next semester, which happens to be the basketball season. And so would you.”

Adam felt an adrenal flash flood. “The panel?”

“Oh yes. If things got pushed far enough, there would be a panel of four students and two faculty members, and there would be what amounts to a trial, and if the panel found Jojo guilty of any such thing, then anybody who knowingly aided and abetted him would be considered just as guilty.”

Adam didn’t know what to say. He had the terrifying feeling that the brute behind the desk—with his arms as big as Adam’s thigh, with his look of domination over…the other breed—was ready to swat him like a fly. “I—” He didn’t know how to word what he wanted to say. “But—the Athletic Department hires the tutors and makes it clear that we’re supposed to give the athletes all the help they need. That’s what we’re told—all the help they need.”

“Oh? Did anyone in the athletic department ever tell you to write an entire paper for an athlete and all he had to do was hand it in? If so, I want to know that individual’s name. Not that I’m saying that’s what happened. All I’m saying is that’s what Jojo’s teacher thinks. The actual truth could be something else entirely. Only you and Jojo know.”

Adam could feel his pulse galloping in the carotid artery in his neck. The next question would be, “So what did happen?” and he hadn’t a clue as to how to answer it. He waffled as best he could: “It’s hard to give like a…yes-no—”

Buster Roth held up his right palm in the halt mode. “I’m not asking you to go through the whole thing right now. What I want you to do is take a day or two and try to remember everything you can about what happened…or didn’t happen. You understand what I’m saying? Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.”

Adam’s mind was spinning. He immediately feared the worst. He was being set up—although exactly how, he couldn’t imagine. He was being tested—but for what? Loyalty? Coolness at conniving? He was being made to look as if he were lying—by accepting the suggestion that he take a few days to “remember.” He was being toyed with—because the warrior breed, eating spareribs, bones and all, loved to torment the other breed. On the other hand, suppose he just blurted it all out, as he could right now, without forgetting one speck of detail—could it be that Buster Roth was offering him a way out by “remembering” what happened…in a certain way…

And then he couldn’t resist: “What does Jojo say happened?”

As soon as he asked, his heart fell. A question like that—he was as much as admitting his willingness to cook up some kind of story in order to wriggle out of the jam he was in.

Buster Roth looked him in the eye and said in a level, almost monotonous voice, “Jojo says he wrote it himself. At the last minute he realized there was some important material he needed, so he called you up and you showed him the books where he might be able to find it. So he used those books, and by now it was the last minute and he’d run out of time, and he didn’t know exactly what all the terms meant, but he used them anyway. That’s what Jojo says happened.”

Buster Roth stopped talking but continued to look Adam right in the eye. The atmosphere was now humid with the matter of whether Adam remembered it that way or not. But Roth never asked.

Adam wouldn’t have known what to say if he had.

As soon as Vance came into the library, Hoyt jumped up and steered him into the billiard room. “You wanna hear something incredible, Vance-man?” With great gusto, he told him about Rachel and Pierce & Pierce.

“Shit, Hoyt,” said Vance, “that’s fucking awesome!” He looked toward the doorway. There was I.P., saying, “Anybody got—”

“Nobody got,” said Hoyt. “Saint Rays only fuck around for real.”

I know they’ll be older than I am, I know they’ll be better dressed than I am, cooler cooler cooler oh so much cooler than I am, but please, God, don’t let them be blond and skinny, don’t let them be cute and bitchy, don’t—please, God!—don’t let them be the sort of boarding school Sarc 3 girls like Beverly or Hillary or Erica, who can cut you open before you even know the knife has gone in—

Oh, please, God!

By now, three-thirty p.m., the sun was already low in the sky, and the rays came slanting through the trees here on Ladding Walk, breaking everything—the old buildings, the antique lampposts, the cobblestones—into dancing flecks of shadow and flickers of light so bright they made Charlotte avert her eyes. She didn’t expect there to be many students on Ladding Walk on a Saturday afternoon, but the ones she saw were walking toward her, toward the bosom of the campus, which all knew by heart, sounding so carefree and happy, chattering away on their cell phones…as they, too, broke up into dappled dancing shadows and lights before her averted eyes. It struck her as…ominous. They were heading toward the bosom of Dupont. She was the only one heading away, toward the edge, destined for someplace shady—namely, the Saint Ray house. If Marsden Hall, the main classroom building on the Walk, weren’t in the way, she could see the house from here. It occurred to her that she had never seen it in daylight. The Saint Ray house had always been that dangerous, that tempting Devil’s nest of the night.

Beverly—Beverly, who knew about such things!—had warned her not to go off with Hoyt or any other Saint Ray to another city for a formal. But how could she pass up a chance at such eminence, a freshman invited to a formal all the way down in Washington, D.C., by a senior, the coolest guy in the coolest fraternity at Dupont? I am Charlotte Simmons! Besides, that was two weeks ago, when the formal wouldn’t be until “two Saturdays from now,” and two Saturdays was a long way off, wasn’t it? But this…is that Saturday. A frightening look at herself as if from above, in astral projection: nothing but a little girl, all alone, just recently come down from the mountains, clad in a red T-shirt, a pair of tight jeans, and an ugly, puffy khaki-colored synthetic-down-filled jacket from Robinson’s in Sparta, which made her look about seven when it was zipped up like this—a round, puffy bundled-up seven, carrying a canvas boat bag containing everything she was taking for the dinner and the dance in a fancy hotel. That was her luggage! A boat bag Bettina had lent her, which, she now realized, only made it worse! She could just imagine what Vance’s and Julian’s dates, whom she had never met or laid eyes on before, were going to think about a canvas boat bag, the warm and toasty little girl’s coat—