She didn’t know what time it was when she halfway woke up and could hear something on the other bed…unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh… and could make out—who? Gloria?—on her knees and elbows and somebody mounted on her from behind and going unngghh unngghh unngghh unngghh unngghh—and then she lost consciousness again.
It must have been about five a.m. when she hazily heard people stumbling into the room and some clumping and clunking about and some muttering, male, along the lines of “Aw shit.” Charlotte pretended to be fast asleep and kept her eyes shut tight, since from the position she was now in, she couldn’t see anything anyway without lifting her head or turning over. The odor of vomitus on her own dress was sickening.
A muffled thunk…
“Ow! Fucking—”
Hoyt’s mutter. “Fuck. What died in here?”
He got into bed with Charlotte and never budged from the outer edge of his side of the bed, and neither their skin nor their clothing touched for the rest of the time they spent together in that queen-size bed, which must have been five hours, because it was shortly past ten in the morning when Charlotte woke up to someone banging on the door—smelled like puke in here—and an angry girl shouting, truly shouting,“JULIAN, YOU FUCKING DICK, OPEN THE DOOR! I NEED MY BAG!”
This time Charlotte didn’t bother feigning sleep, and she rolled over and lifted her head to see what was happening. She was alone in the bed, and she could hear the shower running in the bathroom.
Bang bang bang bang. “I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE, YOU LITTLE SHIT! YOU EITHER OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR OR I’M GETTING THE HOTEL TO OPEN IT! I NEED MY BAG!”
Sunlight was pouring into the room through the gap in the curtains. In the other bed—Julian. He rolled himself over halfway and was resting on one shoulder, eyeing the door. Then his head, just his head, keeled over toward the floor.
Slowly he lifted his head and muttered in a hoarse voice, “Aw, fuck.” He closed his eyes and clamped the thumb and middle finger of his free hand on his temples and massaged them. Gloria’s head popped up on the other side of the bed. Her mouth hung open slightly, and her eyes were the very picture of alarm. Julian swung his legs out from under the covers and over the edge of the bed, sat there for a moment with his head hung way down, then stood up, emitting a profound sigh. The sigh set off a phlegmy cough that came dredging up from the deep recesses of his lungs. He trudged toward the door with a conspicuous lack of psychomotor control, squinting against the sunlight.
He opened the door just a crack and said, “Sorry, Nicole, which one’s yours?”
“I can get it myself, thank you very much.”
“No, I’ll get it for you. No problem.”
“YOU MEAN I CAN’T FUCKING COME IN AND GET MY OWN BAG?” Nicole was really screaming now. “YOU ARE SUCH A SCUMBAG, JULIAN! YOU KNOW WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT? OR DO YOU EVEN GIVE A SHIT! I SLEPT ON CRISSY’S FUCKING FLOOR!”
Julian clenched his teeth and stretched his lips out very wide in a grimace. Charlotte could see all sorts of little tendons or whatever they were popping taut on the surface in his neck. Sheer feminine intuition told her what that was all about. Julian wasn’t worried about Nicole’s predicament. He was worried that her shit- and fuck-laced screams would rouse other people in the hotel and thereby Create a Scene.
“Oh, hey, wait a second,” he said.
Stiff-arming the door against invasion with one hand, he reached way down and way over with the other and picked up a sleek navy leather-trimmed nylon bag with chrome zippers. He hoisted it so Nicole could see it through the crack in the doorway.
“Isn’t this it?”
“Yes, but I need my fucking makeup case. It’s in the fucking bathroom!”
Julian froze for what seemed like thirty seconds—but couldn’t have been—while his brain churned, trying to choose between Creating a Scene and the Sordid Truth. The Sordid Truth evidently seemed the less horrible of the two, because his shoulders slumped in resignation and he opened the door all the way and admitted his date. Nicole pushed past him without so much as a glance. She was wearing the same black tube dress. It couldn’t have been more wrinkled if she had balled it up and thrown it on the floor in the back of a closet and forgotten about it for a year. Her perfect blond hair looked like a forkful of hay in a sheep trough. Her face was bleary, puffy, bereft of makeup except for a smear of last night’s mascara that had somehow reached her cheekbone. Her skin was the color of a tombstone.
Gloria now had the covers pulled up over her head. Nicole looked at the great lump and spat out the side of her mouth, “You’re such a slut, Gloria!”—and opened the door to the bathroom, magnifying the noise from the shower.
“What the fuck?” That was Hoyt’s voice from behind the shower curtain. “Oh, hey, Nicole babe, it’s you! Whyn’t you jump in here with me? I give a great soap job!”
“Fuck you, Hoyt! Whyn’t you soap up your fist and stick it up your ass.”
Leaving the bathroom with her makeup case, she craned her head into the bedroom and lasered a look at Gloria, who by now had eased her eyes, forehead, and matted mop of dark hair out from under the covers.
“So long—Miss Community Cunt!” said Nicole.
Then she stormed out, slowing down only long enough for a farewell to Julian, who was still standing, stricken, near the door. In a frigidly calm voice she said, “You know, Ju, you really are a puny, pathetic little limp dick.”
On the drive back, everybody was too hung over to say much. Gloria was stretched out on the entire third row of seats, sleeping. Vance, Crissy, and Charlotte were crowded into the second row—Charlotte mashed up against the window, Crissy in the middle, and Vance in the third seat, behind Julian, who was in the passenger-side bucket seat up front. Hoyt drove.
Hoyt and Julian talked to each other, laughing about how drunk they’d gotten and how great Harrison’s after-party had been and how they now felt like a pile of bricks had fallen on top of their eyeballs. Charlotte was sitting directly behind Hoyt, so he could have easily explained to her who So-and-so was or asked her if she wanted to stop for a drink or to go to the bathroom or told her any of the words to the songs, but he didn’t.
Dreadfully hung over, a malady she had never experienced before, Charlotte had a brief coughing spasm in Maryland, and Hoyt said, “You okay?”
She went, “Mmmnh,” just so he would have a response, and she wouldn’t say anything more. A couple of hours later, as he let her out in front of Little Yard, he said, “You okay?”
She didn’t so much as glance at him. She just walked away with her boat bag. He didn’t ask twice.
26. How Was It?
Like a fool—and she knew it—Charlotte glanced back at the Suburban just before she reached the archway tunnel into Little Yard. She knew it wouldn’t happen, but somehow it had to happen—he would be standing beside the driver-seat’s door, looking across the roof of the Suburban, shouting, “Hey! Yo! Char! Come here!” Instead, what she saw was Gloria, risen from the back row, where she had lain motionless and soundless for the entire trip—staring at her. Right at her. Her nose was practically up against the window. Her dark hair was a big, messy wreath around her face. Her eye sockets were a pair of mascara sinkholes. She didn’t smile, wave good-bye, or betray any other sentiment. No, Gloria was…studying little Charlotte Simmons, still clutching her canvas boat bag…a specimen of…what? The Suburban started pulling away just as Charlotte saw Gloria turn her head toward the front seat. She was grinning and saying something…about what?—and then the Suburban was gone…But Charlotte already knew, didn’t she…
By the time Charlotte took her first few steps into the tunnel, she had an ache in her throat, the ache a girl gets after a long period of trying to hold back tears. Rejection and dismay turned into an all-enveloping fear of imminent doom. She who had departed soaring, she thought, in social ascension, she who knew how to handle herself, she who had been so aloof from girls who just lay down and gave it up, she who had announced that she had Hoyt Thorpe trained like a dog—Charlotte Simmons had returned. Oh, yes, she, Charlotte Simmons, the girl of the hour. What was she going to tell everybody? Above all, Beverly—of the boarding school elite she professed to have only contempt for—who had warned her not to go off on an out-of-town fraternity formal with Hoyt Thorpe, of all frat boys on God’s earth…I am not a good liar, thought Charlotte. I am not even a half-decent actress. In our house nobody ever showed you how to deceive. Momma—but I can’t let myself think about you right now, Momma.