22. Shaking Hands with Fortune

Such excitement! The Lounge Committee had never before convened in Charlotte’s room, where the boarding-school-cool and aloof Beverly ruled. But these were special circumstances. A senior, a member of the coolest fraternity of all, Saint Ray, had invited Charlotte, a freshman, to be his date for a Saint Ray overnight “formal” in Washington, D.C. The questions before the committee were two: should she or shouldn’t she go—and what was a “formal,” anyway?

Bettina and Mimi gawked at this side…and the other side…and this side again, where Beverly’s galaxy of electronic wonders rose up from a jungle of cords plugged into big cream-colored junction knuckles…a plasma TV that turned on a stainless-steel base, a recharger stand on the desk, a refrigerator, a fax machine, a makeup mirror framed in LED lights—there was no end to it all—compared to what the other side of the room looked like…well, abandoned…plain wooden Dupont dorm-issue desk, straight-backed chair, the bureau, and a single electrical device, an old, rusting gooseneck lamp on the desk.

“Which side is yours?” said Mimi.

“Take a wild guess,” said Charlotte.

Beverly’s clothes and towels were strewn across her unmade bed and its twists and tangles of sheets and covers, and down on the floor in a field of dust balls were vast numbers of shoes, not always matched up, littered this way and that.

“Where’s Beverly?” said Mimi.

“I don’t know where she goes,” said Charlotte, pulling the straight-backed chair over a few feet, facing the beds. “She never comes back until two or three in the morning, if she comes back at all.”

Thus assured, Mimi sat in the techie-looking swivel chair at Beverly’s desk, gave it a spin, and came rolling over beside Charlotte, who was sitting on her wooden chair. Bettina sat on Charlotte’s bed.

Charlotte was beginning to regret that she had told Bettina or Mimi about the formal. But how could she not? They were her closest friends; and the unspoken, taboo function of the Lounge Committee was to boost one another’s morale until they figured out a way to ascend from loser status. Besides, one thing she really wanted to hear them all say was that there was nothing wrong with going off on a fraternity party like this…and if it showed everybody that she was already on the ascent…that was all right, too.

“I’ve heard of formals,” said Bettina, who was sitting on the foot of Beverly’s bed, “but I don’t really know what they are. What are they?”

Charlotte said, “I don’t really—”

“Wait a minute. Back up. Rewind,” said Bettina. “I want to know how this all happened. The last thing I remember was that brawl at the tailgate. And so now he invites you to his fraternity’s formal? You must have seen him since then—or something.”

“Oh, sure,” said Charlotte, as if it were both obvious and insignificant. She kept looking at Mimi—to avoid looking at Bettina, who was her very closest friend. She hadn’t told them…anything about seeing Hoyt after that. “Afterward, I went over to the Saint Ray house to thank him. I mean, he could’ve like…gotten himself killed.”

“You went over there that night?” said Bettina.

Now Charlotte was forced to look at her. Oh God, the consternation on her face! Charlotte read it as not merely a look of surprise, but rather, the surprise of one who has been betrayed. “We brought you back here and stayed with you for two hours while you lay down on that bed and cried.”

“I don’t mean that night,” said Charlotte. “It was a couple of days later.”

“So that was before he hit on that blond girl at the I.M.?” said Bettina.

“I guess—I don’t know.”

“Funny, you didn’t get around to telling us that.”

Charlotte felt so guilty, she knew her face was crimson. “I was just being polite. I felt like I just owed him—I mean, if it hadn’t been for him…” She didn’t try to complete the sentence. The more words she uttered, the more guilt oozed out.

“Wow,” said Bettina, “that was a nice thing to do. You neglected to tell us what good manners you have.”

That made Charlotte feel so small she couldn’t even muster the strength to combat the sarcasm. “It didn’t seem like a big thing at the time.” Her voice sounded worse than defensive. It sounded fugitive.

“And so then he invited you to the formal,” said Mimi. Her face wore an expressionless mouth below a pair of big, guileless eyes, the classic attitude of Sarc 3.

“Noooooo,” said Charlotte, just as fugitively as before. All the while her brain was crunching prevarication equations. “I’ve like…hung out with him a few times since then.”

Bettina and Mimi must have said it at once: “What does that mean!”

“We sort of—you know—hung out.”

“Oh, you hung out,” said Mimi. A pause. “Where?”

“Mostly at the Saint Ray house, I guess. But nothing happened. I swear! There were always a lot of people around. Everybody was just hanging out. I never went upstairs in that building. I pledge you my word.”

“I don’t care if you went upstairs,” said Mimi.

Oh God, thought Charlotte. I’ve betrayed them. Why didn’t I tell them anything, any little thing, about seeing Hoyt? Aloud: “Well, anyway, I didn’t. All these girls—they’re fools, the way they just go hook up with guys. It’s so…so demeaning. I’ve straightened Hoyt out on that point.”

“Are you saying you’ve never hooked up with him?” said Mimi.

“Noooooo…” As soon as she said it, she realized it was about as indefinite a no as anybody ever came up with. “I was never alone with him in the Saint Ray house.” She emphasized the alone to draw attention from the rhetorical flexibility of the rest of the sentence. Already her amygdala—or was it the caudate nucleus?—was aflame with the memory of the explorations of the hand in the Little Yard parking lot.

“And he never tried?” said Mimi.

“I guess he sort of tried,” said Charlotte. “I guess they all do. But I was very clear about that?” She could see Bettina flicking a Sarc 3 glance at Mimi. “I don’t think you believe me, but he’s been a gentleman ever since that first night at the Saint Ray house?” Why was she reverting to statements accented like questions? Part of her knew she was beseeching them to accept all this at face value and say that going off on this fraternity formal sounded like fun. “He already knows how I feel. But does it look terrible to go off to Washington with him like that?”

“Hah,” said Bettina without mirth. “What does look terrible around this place anymore?”

That wasn’t the answer Charlotte wanted.

“But what exactly’s involved in a formal?” said Bettina.

“Oh, the fraternities and sororities have them,” said Mimi, who prided herself on being knowledgeable in such areas. “The idea is, the guys wear tuxedos, and the girls wear party dresses, and they have a party away from the campus at some place like the Inn at Chester. Or they go out of town overnight, and that’s supposed to like make it really special.”

“Yeah,” said Bettina, “but what do they do at a formal?”

“I don’t know,” said Mimi. “I’ve never been to one. But I bet they do what they do at every party. The guys get drunk and yell a lot, and the girls get drunk and throw up a lot, and the guys try to get a little somethin’ somethin’, and the next day the girls claim they can’t remember what happened and the guys remember all kinds of shit, regardless of whether it happened or not—except that the clothes and the food are better.”

All three of them laughed, but even amid the trilling merriment, Charlotte knew she heard a voice—talking on a cell phone—outside in the hall, which could only be—

The door opened, and in came Beverly, her head leaning into the cell phone she held up to her ear, and right behind her was Erica. Beverly stopped in her tracks, the cell phone still at her ear, glowering, especially at Mimi—in her room—in her chair. Mimi sat up very straight on the edge of the chair—Beverly’s chair—as if ready at any moment to depart the nest, like a barn swallow.