More silence. Then Crissy said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Charl-uuuuunh”—she quickly swallowed the second syllable because, obviously, she knew she had gotten it wrong the first time, or had chosen to get it wrong, but had already forgotten what it actually was…or had chosen, with Sarc 3 finesse, to forget what it was—“where are you from?”

Fury overwhelmed the nervousness of inferiority. I am Charlotte Simmons. Without turning her head, Charlotte sat rigidly, looking straight at the road ahead. Since it had worked once before, she snapped, “Sparta, North Carolina—Blue Ridge Mountains—population nine hundred—you’ve never heard of it—don’t feel bad—nobody has.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized that this exhibition of peevishness and defensiveness had only made things worse. Hoyt began laughing in a vain attempt to turn it all into a little joke. Charlotte looked back at Crissy and forced a grin and a spastic laugh, as if it had been all in fun.

Crissy wasn’t sitting still for that. “I’m not worried at all. I certainly hope you aren’t.”

“Oh, no, Crissy. I was just kidding?”

Waves and waves of humiliation…Even her “Crissy” seemed to hang in the air like an impertinence. You?—presuming to be on a friendly basis with a Douche like Crissy?

She was aware of Hoyt looking at her out of the corner of his eye. A tremor of suppressed sniggers from both rows behind her. She began to feel it—the puncture wound at the base of her skull.

Hoyt said, “Remember that guy Lud Davis? They used to call him Lud the Stud? Played when I was a freshman. He was the only good white running back we’ve ever had, far as I know. He was from the Blue Ridge Mountains, too, someplace called Cumberland Gap. I don’t know why I remember that. Cumberland Gap.” He looked straight at Charlotte and in a voice stuffed full of intense interest, said, “Do you know Cumberland Gap?”

A subdued little voice: “No…I don’t think so…” She tried to think of some amiable way to expound upon the subject.

Silence.

“Well, he was a really cool guy,” said Hoyt. “He practically lived at the I.M.”

Oh, how encouraging. You could be from the mountains and still be cool…and how condescending.

“Then I’m sure you saw him a lot,” said Vance.

“No prob when you’re sobriety personified and you got maturity to burn.”

Julian said, “Well then, if I were you, I’d check the fucking gauge, because you sure burned up a lot of it Monday night.”

“Whattaya talking about, Monday night?”

“Over at that thing at Lapham, that reception. You were there, Crissy. It was eight fucking o’clock, and Hoyt’s so wrecked he’s asking the fucking master’s wife how many men she’s slept with in her life. She’s looking around like ‘Help! Somebody get this…thing off me!’ and Hoyt’s like, ‘Bottom line! Bottom line! How many!’”

Hoyt said, “I don’t know how you can sit back there and lie with a straight face.” He put his hand on Charlotte’s forearm again and said, “Don’t listen to him. What’s that story about the island where nobody tells the truth?”

“It’s not a story, Hoyto,” said Vance, “it’s some kind of math problem.”

“Bullshit,” Julian was already saying. “You must’ve yelled ‘Bottom line’ at that poor woman a hundred fucking times! Tell the truth, Big Dog.”

“Well…they do say she’s hot,” said Hoyt. “Guys at Lapham told me that. I doubt that old Wasserstein can get it up to her standards.”

The frat boys and the sorority girls broke up over that, and everything was back on course again. Nicole was saying, “I know for a fact that…” and she was off on a story about some other master’s wife.

Hoyt leaned over toward Charlotte again, and this time he grabbed her left hand as he bathed her in a smile of warm charm and said, “Wasserstein is the master of Lapham College. You know Lapham, the one with the gargoyles.”

“Oh, yes, I sure do!” said Charlotte with incredibly more joy in her voice than the topic could support. She added a merry little laugh, as if she sure had to admit it was amusing, bringing up those gargoyles. She began laughing at anything that seemed intended as funny—how-drunk-I-was stories, guy’s-such-a-loser stories, can-you-believe-what-a-slut-she-is stories, flaming-

queen stories, vulgarisms delivered with a burlesque Italian accent—“Uppa You Ess” (Julian).

She didn’t realize what a fool she was making of herself until Vance said that I.P. had a date for the formal and that she was very hot, believe it or not, a girl named Gloria.

“Holy shit!” said Julian. “Does that mean he’s cheating on his hand?”

That broke everybody up, Crissy and Nicole included. But when Charlotte, who hadn’t the faintest notion what I.P.’s “cheating on his hand” meant, joined in with her own wail of laughter—the others abruptly went silent. She turned about, and they were all casting significant glances at one another. Obviously, the “hilarious” phrase was some sort of inside joke. An outsider pretending to understand it was merely revealing how frantically, how fawningly, she wanted to be one of the gang.

It was all too shaming. By now all of them thought of her as a wretched little misfit. To make it worse, Hoyt felt like he had to lean over and pay attention to her periodically, to reassure her that she actually still existed in their Cool company, and then he’d rejoin the fun. So many idiotic stories…so much idiotic gossip…so much enthusiasm for such smutty humor and vulgar language…from rich girls who obviously spent hundreds of dollars on a jeans outfit, and rich boys, pampered boys, wearing black ghetto do-rags because the incongruity, the irony of it is so…smart and delicious—

—but how could she possibly quit! She had been so visibly proud of this “triumph”—being invited by a senior, an indisputably cool senior, to his fraternity formal. Mimi and Bettina had been impressed to a degree that was well beyond envy, because it was in a realm they couldn’t begin to qualify for. They could only wonder. And of course they had made her promise to tell them everything afterward…

The rest of the trip fell into a regular pattern. The frat boys and the sorority girls sang songs—all of them seemed to know all the words to everything—they shared gossip—the two bitches were superb at filleting people’s reputations while seeming to be merely adding little details—they turned whatever they could into sexual innuendo—they indulged their predilection for Shit Patois. Charlotte had been aware of Fuck Patois from the day she arrived at Dupont, but it was not until spending hour after hour after hour cooped up in this SUV that she realized how cool it apparently was to use shit in every way possible: to mean possessions (“Where’s your shit?”), lies or misleading explanations (“Are you shitting me?” “We need a shit detector”), drunk (“shit-faced”), trouble (“in deep shit”), ineptitude (“couldn’t play point guard for shit”), care about (“give a shit”), rude, thoughtless, disloyal (“really shitty thing to do”), not kidding (“no shit?”), obnoxiously unpleasant (“he’s a real shit”), mindless conversation (“talking shit,” “shooting the shit”), confusing story (“or some such shit”), drugs (“you bring the shit?”), to egest (“take a shit”), to fart in such a way that it becomes partly egestion (“shart”), a trivial matter (“a piece a shit”), unpleasantly surprised (“he about shit a brick”), ignorance (“he don’t know shit”), pompous man (“the big shit,” “that shitcake”), hopeless situation (“up Shit Creek”), disappointment (“oh, shit!”), startling (“holy shit!”), unacceptable, inedible (“shit on a shingle”), strategy (“oh, that shit again”), feces, literally (“shit”), slum (“some shithook neighborhood”), meaningless (“that don’t mean shit”), et cetera (“and massages and shit”), self-important (“he thinks he’s some shit”), predictably (“sure as shit”), very (“mean as shit”), verbal abuse (“gave me shit”), violence (“before the shit came down” or “hit the fan,” “don’t start no shit,” “won’t be no shit”). Still, they didn’t neglect Fuck Patois, and they talked some more about how many shots they had at the after-party after the party at the Deke House (Delta Kappa Epsilon), and they philosophized about how you shouldn’t party much past four a.m. because you risked getting the dread afternoon hangover. Hoyt was as absorbed in all this as the rest of them. He’d be looking straight ahead to keep his eyes on the road, but Charlotte could practically see his brain rotating 180 degrees so he could be in back with them. Periodically he would turn toward her and put his right hand on her left forearm and smile and look oh so deeply into her eyes, as if there were something…profound…going on between them. All of this took ten seconds at most. She tried to work it out in her mind that this was his way of saying that no matter whatever else might be claiming his attention, he was always thinking of her. Sometimes he would lean toward her and sing a line or two of a song in her ear, a song he and the other four were having such a merry time singing, which she obviously didn’t know. A couple of times he put his arm around her and leaned over so far that their heads touched, and a couple of times he placed his hand gently on the midpoint of her inner left thigh. Ordinarily she would have pushed it away, since Vance, Julian, and the two Douche girls might be able to see it, but Hoyt’s affection was the only thing that included her in the trip at all, any chance of social redemption for her Sparta rat-tat-tat at Crissy. That gaffe hung in the foul air of the Suburban like an odor. Hoyt’s attentions were like maintenance. He had to feed the pet periodically to keep it calm until they got to Washington.