“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.”

23. Model on a Runway

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—

Oh dear God, don’t let them be blond and skinny!

Now she could see the Saint Ray house. It looked so much smaller…and shabbier…in daylight, more like just some old house, albeit with columns before the front door—not like the Devil’s nest, in any case. SUVs were parked out front—illegally—on the Walk itself. Guys were going back and forth from the SUVs to the house. Vance was in the front yard. He was making exaggerated gestures to someone on the porch and yelling something Charlotte couldn’t make out. Quite a show he was putting on. She was willing to bet anything it all had to do with a girl.

Charlotte hurriedly unzipped her puffy jacket and thrust it back until it was barely hanging on her shoulders. Godalmighty, this wind! But make sure she doesn’t look seven, make sure they all get an eyeful of her body. That was the main thing…

She wasn’t worried about Vance, Julian, and Hoyt. It was all…the dates. Julian was taking his regular frat-house girl, named Nicole, who had never been there when Charlotte was there. Vance was taking his regular girlfriend, whoever she was. Charlotte had never heard of her hanging around Saint Ray at all. She knew they would both be upperclassmen—and female upperclassmen, she kept being told, resented “fresh meat” in the first place.

Two girls stood next to each other on the porch. Surely, God—not those two! One was blond and the other almost blond, so light was her long brown hair—and both were skinny. The almost-blond one…Charlotte could have sworn she had seen her before. Where…she couldn’t imagine. Two other girls, one blond and the other dark-haired and skinny, were sitting down on the edge of the porch.

Vance was looking straight at the light-brown-haired one and barking, “Come on, Crissy, how about giving me a fucking hand? Where’d you put the thirty-rack? And what the hell’d you do with the handle?”

The girl cocked her hips in a mocking way and said airily, “That’s not my job, Vance. You’re the one who’s going to get sloshed the second we get there.” She turned to the blonde and, not lowering her voice in the slightest, said, “My boyfriend’s a fucking alcoholic, Nicole.”