He stood up abruptly, and the globs of fat on his body oozed this way and that beneath the sweater, and he glowered at Buster Roth and the President, both. “Nice chatting with you…about pediatrics.” With that, he turned his back on them and walked out of the room.

Speechless, the President and Buster Roth looked at one another. The President wondered idly why so many Jews of a certain age used the expression “Jesus Christ.” You never heard it from undergraduates anymore, Christian or Jewish.

Only Adam and Greg and the usual Jolt stains, empty pizza boxes, crumpled straw sleeves, and abandoned white plastic forks and spoons were to be seen in the office of the Wave. Adam was excited enough for a whole office-full.

“Now Thorpe calls me and says he’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want to run the Skull Fuck story after all. As if he’s running it.”

“What did you tell him?” said Greg.

“I said I’d tell you that. So I’ve told you—and fuck him. I didn’t say we wouldn’t run it. Don’t you see, Greg? Something’s up, and he’s scared all of a sudden, and the story’s hotter than ever.”

“Well…I don’t know,” said Greg. “This is still something that happended last spring…”

You don’t know? thought Adam. Or you’re still as scared shitless as he is?

Beverly had already left, and even with the door closed Charlotte could hear others on the floor yodeling cheery good-byes and rolling their wheelie suitcases down the hall as the great Thanksgiving exodus began. Thank God! Solitude! No one around to look cockeyed at Charlotte Simmons. Thank God she and Momma and Daddy had long ago agreed that the Thanksgiving break and the Christmas break were so close to each other this year—barely two weeks apart—that she shouldn’t take two trips and spend all that money.

It turned out there were quite a few other freshmen who had made the same decision. And thank God she didn’t know them. They all smiled at each other in a same-boat fashion as they ate their three meals a day in the gloomy Abbey. The Abbey drummed up a roast turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day for all the holiday orphans. For the next four days, all she had to worry about was Christmas. There was no way around that one.

27. In the Dead of the Night

The last six miles up Route 21 are what makes a person realize just how high up in the mountains Sparta is. The old two-lane road winds and winds and remains so unremittingly steep the whole way, it makes even a passenger feel, in her gizzard, the car or the truck struggling struggling struggling to make it—any car, any truck. In a bus, particularly a full bus, it used to make Charlotte feel as if at any moment the clutch would snap and they would go careening backward down the mountain; but buses no longer go to Sparta, not because of the steep grade—although 21 can become impassable pretty quickly when it snows—but because of a grim slide in demand. Ever since the factories moved to Mexico, and the movie theater, the only one in all of Alleghany County, shut down, Sparta hadn’t been what one would call a prime destination, except for vacationers and tourists who loved the county’s beauty, which was pristine, undefiled by the hand of man.

On those last six miles up Route 21, on this particular December night, all was pristine. The first real snow of the season had just begun to fall, and the way the wind blew it—in a darkness made yet darker by the towering woods that came right up to the edge of the road and obscured most of the sky—the two-lane hand of man would suddenly vanish before the driver’s eyes as great skiffs of snow came rolling across it; and then it would reappear, and Daddy would keep hunching forward, squinting and muttering imprecations, since he knew the road would only disappear again. The old pickup was struggling struggling struggling, and once or twice it had skidded slightly on a curve. Daddy had become so single-minded he was no longer asking Charlotte, who was squeezed in next to him in the front seat, all sorts of questions about Dupont. Momma, who sat on her other side, had stopped talking, too. Momma was looking ahead as intently as Daddy, and she had begun shadow-braking the car with her right foot an instant before Daddy did it for real and then twisting her torso an instant before Daddy turned the wheel to navigate the next curve; and as Daddy switched from low beam to high beam and high beam to low beam to see if there was any angle of light that would help him define the road amid the skiffs and swirls of snow, she would hunch over and lean forward the same way he did, as if moving their heads closer to the road’s surface was actually going to help them see it better.

Only Buddy and Sam, jackknifed into the little excuse for a backseat, remained oblivious enough of the driving conditions to continue the ebullient family fusillade of questions about the awesome college their own sister had come back from on her Christmas break.

“Charlotte,” said Buddy, eleven years old last week, “What’s Treyshawn Diggs like?”

“I don’t know him,” said Charlotte. She said it flatly, tonelessly, even though she knew the least she should do was say, “I’m afraid I never have met him, Buddy,” and say it with a congenial lilt. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t manufacture any lilt.

“You don’t?” Both surprise and disappointment were in Buddy’s voice. “But you’ve met him.”

“No,” said Charlotte in the same dead voice, “I never have.”

“But you’ve seen him, I bet. What’s it look like, him being seven feet tall?”

Charlotte paused. She knew this performance was inexcusable, but she was so depressed that Self-destruction couldn’t come down off her pedestal, so enamored was she of Grief.

“I’ve never seen him, Buddy.”

“You’ve seen him play.” It was spoken like a plea.

“I’ve never seen him at all. It’s almost impossible to get a ticket for a game, and it costs a lot of money. I haven’t even seen him on television.”

Sam said, “How about André Walker? He’s really cool.” Sam was only eight, and he knew who André Walker was. It seemed so odd and sad somehow. “I’ve never seen him, either,” she said. She couldn’t have said it more lifelessly.

“How about Vernon Congers?” said Sam.

“Nope.”

A groan of disappointment in the backseat—Buddy’s. A slightly whining sigh, Sam’s.

After all other emotions have died, guilt survives. To her own surprise, Charlotte found herself saying, “I do know one of the players. Jojo Johanssen.”

“Who’s he?” said Sam.

“I think I heard of him,” said Buddy. “Which one is he?”

“He’s a forward, I think,” said Charlotte. “He’s white.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Buddy. “Dupont’s got this white guy. They were playing Cincinnati. Is he any good?”

“I guess,” said Charlotte.

“Is he big?” said Sam.

“Yeah, he’s very big,” said Charlotte. Poor Jojo, she thought. Even my little brothers know about Vernon Congers, and nobody knows about you. It was merely that, however, a thought. There was no emotion attached to it. It all seemed so pointless.

“How big?” said Sam, persevering.

“I don’t know.” She started to leave it at that, but guilt intervened. “When I stand next to him, he might as well be ten feet tall. That’s how big he is.”

“Wow,” said Sam.

More guilt. Jojo’s height was the only “colorful” detail about Dupont she had volunteered since she got off the bus in Galax. Galax was just over the state line, in Virginia. Eleven-thirty p.m. the bus had arrived, and all four of them, Momma, Daddy, Buddy, and Sam, had been there waiting for her, beaming smiles of joy—no, more than that, excitement!—that lit up the night. Our daughter—our sister—is home for the first time in four months from the legendary Dupont. Just imagine! Our little girl—our big sister—goes to Dupont! And here she is!

Charlotte had forced herself to smile, but she was aware that the smile didn’t involve the rest of her face. And God knows how her face must have looked. She hadn’t been able to sleep for two nights now. Maybe she should have gone to the Health Center. Maybe they would have put her in the hospital…Maybe God would have come to take her away in the night. She couldn’t imagine a better solution.