Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte gathered up some books and notes and hurried down the five flights of fire stairs to avoid having to deal with her. Halfway down, she began to relax. But the French class! She panicked all over again. Never before in her whole life had she ever just plain-long missed a class.

“Why is it your fault? I’ll show you why the fuck why,” said Jojo. He could feel the muscles in the front of his neck contracting tight as wires, he hit the why so hard. He was genuinely angry, but he wanted to look insanely angry, just to see Adam cower and squirm with fear, see him surrender his very ass in submission.

He stabbed the offending word on the offending page with his forefinger. “See that? Ma lly-dro-it. I mean shit, Adam, first he gets sarcastic because I can’t pronounce it, and then he’s straight-out making me because I don’t know exactly what it means. I know what it means, but when some asshole’s got a gun at your head saying ‘define the motherfucker’—whattaya trying to do to me? I’d never use a fucking word like that! Ma lly-dro-it…I can’t even pronounce it. Shit! He made me pronounce the fucker. How do I know how to pronounce the fucking word!”

“Maladroit,” said Adam. “It’s not that unusual a word.”

Jojo eyed him with loathing. The little nerd had a way of sounding mousy and know-it-all at the same time. “Okay, what’s it mean? Lemme hear you define it. The bastard was always telling me to ‘define it.’”

“It means like ‘clumsy’ or ‘awkward.’”

“Then why the fuck didn’t you write ‘clumsy’? I mean, shit, Adam.”

The mouse said in its little voice, “I thought it went well with meddling. ‘Maladroit meddling.’”

“Yeah, you think. But you know damned well that fancy shit’s not me. I don’t think that way.” Sardonically: “Subtle strategy and mal—that’s another thing. He’d take a word I know, a word I know how to use, like subtle, and then he’d like put a gun at my head and say, ‘Define it!’ I know the fucking word, but if somebody tells you like point-blank define it—what would you say? Lemme hear you just straight-out define it.”

“It means like ‘cunning’ or ‘crafty’ or ‘with a nice touch.’” A mousy voice and then an infuriating shrug, as if to say you have to be pretty stupid not to know that. Jojo could have strangled him.

“Well, I don’t care. You fucked me over, Adam, you fucked me over big time. Did you get some sick satisfaction out of getting me in trouble? This guy’s a prick! If I’m lucky, I just get an F and fail the course, and I can’t play next semester, which means the whole season, and if I’m unlucky, the prick tries to get me thrown out of school. Great fucking options. You…totally screwed me, dipshit!”

Pleading—Jojo took a morbid, useless satisfaction in the plea in his little tutor’s voice—Adam said, “Jojo, come on—you gotta back up. I mean, do you remember what time it was when you called me to write that paper? It was almost midnight! And you had a ten-page paper to hand in at ten o’clock! And that wasn’t a paper where you could just go to a textbook or go online or get some Cliffs Notes!” He went on—pleading, pleading, to describe his grueling all-nighter in Jojo’s behalf. “I was lucky to get the words down at all, Jojo! There was no way I could go back and—you know”—the little bastard was obviously ransacking his brain for a euphemism—“go back over it and translate it into like another…idiom.”

For an instant Jojo wondered if “idiom” had anything to do with “idiot,” but he had to admit, although he didn’t feel like doing so out loud, that Adam had a point. That had been pretty bad…He’d been embarrassed to even call the poor sonofabitch so late. His anger began to diminish.

More pleading, whining: “You didn’t even come over to the library with me, Jojo. You stayed here with Mike and played video games.”

The anger spiked back up. “What the fuck did it matter what I did!”

“I don’t know why you’re so angry, Jojo. I mean, come on, didn’t you at least read it over before you handed it in?”

“Who had the fucking time to do that?”

“Jojo, I slipped it under your door about eight-thirty. How could you not have time?”

Jojo felt his whole frame go slack. He clasped his hands in front of him and lowered his head. He looked away from Adam. “Aw, shit…” Then he turned back toward him. “Okay, I’m sorry, Adam. It wasn’t your fault…But I’m still fucked. Quat is one of those pricks who’s so anti-athlete—I don’t know how the fuck I even got steered into that fucking course. Nothing would give him more pleasure than kicking my student-athlete ass out of the fucking school.” Jojo looked away again and now, feeling a bit guilty about how he had been yelling at his tutor, suddenly realized something. “You know, this guy’s vicious. He’s the kind that would come looking for you, too.”

Adam practically flinched with shock. The blood drained out of his face.

“Me?”

“He’s the type, that’s all I can tell you. He knows I didn’t write it. So he’s gonna say ‘Who?’ you know? Don’t worry, I’m not admitting any body did. But if he decides to get really shitty and start asking around and all that shit…”

“Well, I didn’t actually write it for you, Jojo…”

“Hah. In fact, that’s what you actually did do.” He smiled, but it was a smile of fellow feeling. “Don’t worry, you didn’t even help me, okay? I wrote it all myself, I got those words out of some book, all right?”

Adam was biting his lower lip. “If worse comes to worst—maybe I helped you smooth out some rough edges. What about that?”

“Awww, don’t get worked up. If worse comes to worse, Coach’ll take care of it.” Everything had gotten turned around. Now he felt like he had to be Adam’s therapist or camp counselor.

“You think he can?”

Or mommy. The poor little omega male was looking at him in the most frightened way.

“Well, sure he can. But I shouldn’t have even mentioned it. It’s not gonna come to that. I’m gonna hang tough. The guy can’t prove a god-damned thing. At least it wasn’t downloaded from the Internet. They can check that shit with computers now. Treyshawn got in trouble last year…or sort of…” He laughed. “Treyshawn can’t get in trouble around here. If it comes to that, the fucking president goes first, not Treyshawn the Tower Fucking Diggs.” Big grin.

Adam tried to smile, too, but he was too shaken up. “Okay. Okay.” He looked away with his eyebrows contorted, obviously thinking, thinking, thinking. Then he turned back with an urgent expression. “Look. Here’s what we have to do in the meantime. In fact, why don’t we do it right now. We go over the paper together, word by word. The thing to do is, you get to know every word, every idea, every bit of history in the damned thing. Then, if anybody asks you anything—you were just rattled when Quat first brought it up. I say let’s get started.”

Adam’s expression was so nerve-wracked, Jojo couldn’t help saying, “I can’t do that now.”

“Why not?”

“I got to make a booty call.”

“Jojo!”

“I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding.” His eyes wandered. He was stricken with remorse. “There’s no reason something like this shoulda ever happened. Shit…I can do better than this. I’m not a fucking moron…”

Less than fifteen minutes left, and Charlotte was still leaning forward in her seat high up in the amphitheater, spellbound. The slender and surprisingly debonair figure down there on the stage, Mr. Starling, who must have been close to fifty, walked from one side to the other, not lecturing, but using the Socratic approach, asking his students questions and commenting on their answers, as if he were talking to twelve or thirteen souls gathered around a seminar table rather than the 110 who now sat before him in steep tiers, filling a small but grandiose amphitheater with a dome and a ceiling mural by Annigoni of Daedalus and the flight of Icarus from the labyrinth of Minos.