Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

So absorbed was she that she was only faintly aware of how the noise level was rising out in the hall. Even though the door was closed, every now and then she could hear a girl shriek, and sometimes two or more girls shriek, and these were not the shrieks of girls happy to see each other after a long time, but girls expressing their hilarity, genuine or otherwise, over something stupid and juvenile some boy was doing. But these were considerations merely drifting along the margins of Ethan Frome.

Soon she felt terribly tired, however, overwhelmingly tired. She got up, pulled the shades down, turned the lights off, took off her bathrobe, and slipped under the covers. She thought she would go to sleep immediately, but the noise—the activity—in the hallway kept intensifying. Well…everybody was no doubt as wound up and excited as she was, and not everybody bottled it up the way she did. She thought she heard a boy cry out, “Not her—you’ll get awfuck’s disease!” But it couldn’t have been that, because it wasn’t followed by any shrieks or juvenile laughs. Then things quieted down a bit. She heard a little scampering, some sort of scraping on a wall somewhere, but by and by, as she lay there with her eyes shut, the sounds began to float beyond the reach of analysis. For a moment she could see Beverly’s peach fingernails framed by the tan of her fingers, but it meant…nothing. It dissolved into an eyelid movie, and she fell asleep.

She woke up with a start. A shaft of light shot across the counterpane on her bed. Heavy, syncopated thumps on a bass drum, a grunting voice—rap? What time was it? She propped herself up on one elbow and looked toward the door. As soon as she did—

“Whaaazzup, dude?”

Silhouetted in the doorway was the gangling frame of a boy in a floppy T-shirt and baggy pants. He had a long neck and a mass of curly hair that popped out above his ears. In his hand, up near his head, was the unmistakable silhouette of a bottle of beer.

“Wake you up?”

“Yes—” She was so shocked and disoriented that it came out like a dying sigh.

“Courtesy call, dude. Time to chill.” He tilted the bottle up and took a long swallow. “Ah, ah, ah.”

Groggily, “I’m—trying to sleep.”

“ ’S all right,” said the boy. “Needn’pologize. Zits happen.” He smiled goofily and said, “Oohoooo, oohoooo.”

Charlotte remained on one elbow, staring. What’s he doing! The heavy bass thuds—it was rap. Someone down the hall was playing a CD, very loudly. She could barely find her voice. Imploringly, “What—time is it?”

The boy lifted his other wrist up near his face. It was all so eerie, because he was in silhouette, with just a highlight here and there. “It says here…lemme see…it says…time to chill.”

Down the hall, a tremendous crash, followed by a boy yelling, “Well, you sure fucked that, dawg!” Raucous laughs. The rap music pounded on.

The boy’s curly head turned to look, then turned back. “Barbarians,” he said. “Exterminate the brutes. Look—uhhhh, needn’t stand on ceremony—”

With a burst of anger Charlotte pushed herself upward in bed with both arms. “I told you! I’m trying to sleep!”

“Okay!” said the boy, pulling his head back and holding his palms out in front of his chest in a gesture of mock defensiveness. “Whoa! Skooz!” He walked backward with a mock stagger. “I wasn’t even here! That wasn’t me!” He disappeared down the hall, going, “Oohoooo…oohoooo…”

Charlotte got up and shut the door. Her heart was pounding away inside her rib cage. Could she lock the door some way? But even if she could, Beverly hadn’t come in yet. She turned on the light. It was ten minutes after one. She got back into bed and lay on her back with her heart still pounding, listening to the noise. No alcohol in Little Yard. That boy was absolutely drunk! The third drunk boy she had seen with her own eyes since the R.A.’s solemn pronouncement, and it sounded like there were many more. She had the terrible fear that she wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep at all.

An hour or more must have gone by. The ruckus finally began to subside. Where on earth was Beverly? Charlotte stared at the ceiling, she stared at the windows, she lay on this side, she lay on that side. Dupont. She thought of Miss Pennington. She thought of Channing and Regina…Channing and his strong, even features. Regina was Channing’s girlfriend. Laurie said they had gone all the way. Oh, Channing, Channing, Channing. How much more time passed, she didn’t know, because she fell asleep at last, thinking of Channing Reeves’s strong, even features.

Most of them hadn’t seen each other all summer, and classes had just begun this morning, but by evening the boys at the Saint Ray house had already sunk into a state of aimless lassitude. First day or not, it was still that nadir in the weekly cycle of Dupont social life, Monday night.

From the front parlor came the sound of “quarters,” a drinking game in which the boys gathered around a table in a circle, more or less, each with a jumbo translucent plastic cup of beer before him. They bounced quarters on their edges and tried to make them hop into the other players’ cups. If you were successful, your opponent had to tilt his head back and the container up and chugalug all twenty ounces. There was also a cup out in the middle. If you bounced a quarter into that one, all your opponents had to drink up. Much manly whooping when a quarter bounced home or just missed. Needless to say, the tables, magnificent old pieces that had been here ever since this huge Palladian mansion was built before the First World War, were by now riddled with dents. It was hard to believe there were once Saint Rays rich enough and religious enough about the great fraternal chain of being to build such a place and buy such furniture, not merely for themselves—after all, their own Dupont days would be few—but for generations of Saint Rays to come.

From the terrace room came the music of a Swarm CD banging out of a pair of speakers that were fixed in place for parties. Everybody was beginning to get tired of Swarm’s so-called bang beat; nevertheless, Swarm was banging away tonight in the terrace room. Terrace room, front parlor, back parlor, dining room, entry gallery (cavernous), billiard room (ancient pool table, felt chewed up and stained because one evil night a bunch of blitzed brothers used it to play quarters), card bay, bar—the variety of rooms for entertaining on this one floor would probably never be built in a house again.

Here in the library a dozen or so of the boys were sprawled back on couches, easy chairs, armchairs, side chairs, window seats—most of them wearing khaki shorts and flip-flops, watching ESPN SportsCenter on a forty-inch flat-screen television set, drinking beer, needling each other, making wisecracks, and occasionally directing sentiments of awe or admiration toward the screen. About ten years ago a flood from a bathroom up above had ruined the library’s aged and random accumulation of books, and the once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and empty pizza delivery boxes funky with the odor of cheese. The library’s one trove of mankind’s accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set.

“Ungghh!” went two or three boys simultaneously. Up on the screen a huge football linebacker named Bobo Bolker had just sacked a quarterback so hard that his body crumpled on the ground beneath Bobo like a football uniform full of bones. Bobo got up and pumped his enormous arms and shimmied his hips in a dance of domination.

“You know how much that fucking guy weighs?” said a boy with tousled blond hair, Vance by name, who was sitting back in an armchair on the base of his spine, holding a can of beer. “Three hundred and ten fucking pounds. And he can fucking move.”