Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

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.

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 be—she 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 Page—who was from Boston but went by this Southern-style double first name—because 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 her—even 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 here—inhaling ammonia fumes that were battling it out with the egestive funk of the place. Ohmygod—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…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 Dupont—and 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 man—even an ox like Mac Bolka—the frat boy who was every frat boy’s definition of Cool, as handsome a boy as ever existed—O 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 over—the world?—as 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 Lapham—not much risk of running into anybody she knew in the DeLierre—until after dark—a little after four-thirty, now that it was December—before 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 questions—or 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 feet—“Charlotte.” Someone inside was using her name in conversation. She paused, opened her mouth to take a deep breath—and 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 guy—and 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 bed—holy 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 Gloria—Gloria Barrone?—you know who I mean? She’s a Psi Phi? She saw it.”

“How did she see?”