Charlotte wanted to cry when she said good-bye to them, but she was parched with a fear of the unknown that went far beyond the nervousness she suffered the first time she set out from the Blue Ridge Mountains for—that place. One thing the trip home had shown her: She could never make Alleghany County home again; nor any other place either—least of all, Du—the college to which she was heading. The bus was home; and let the trip be interminable.

28. The Exquisite Dilemma

Girls at Dupont quickly learned the protocol of the Dupont Memorial Library’s Ryland Reading Room, where on any given night except Saturday the largest concentration of boys on the campus could be found. Long, stout, medievalish study tables filled the vast space from front to back. In the back, Gothic windows rose up God knows how high before exfoliating into ornate stone lobes and filigrees filled in with stained glass. It was perhaps the second grandest study hall in the country, after the main reading room of the Library of Congress.

Practically every boy in the Ryland Reading Room was there to study. Girls came to study and to scout for boys. The boy-scouters sat at the tables in chairs facing the entrance, the nearer an aisle the better. If a girl sat with her back to the entrance, that meant she was there solely to study. If she sat with her back to the entrance at the midpoint of one of the study tables way down there beneath the exfoliated lobes and filigrees—i.e., as far as she could get not only from the entrance but also from the aisles—it meant she would just as soon be invisible. Or so it meant to Charlotte Simmons, who occupied that particular spot at this moment.

At the entire table were only two other souls: a reedy, nerdy boy, also with his back to the entrance, busy hiding the fact that he was mining for gold in his nose with the fingernail of his little finger, and a skanky girl facing front at the far end of the table. “Skanky” had slipped into Charlotte’s vocabulary by social osmosis; and this girl was skanky. She was thin, wan, pimply, with curly black hair bobbed short but scraggly all the same, wearing a meat-gone-bad-green T-shirt that emphasized the flatness of her chest and a mannish green Dupont Windbreaker. Charlotte could tell she was a stone loner.

And Charlotte was so wrong. In no time she heard a concert of stifled giggles and the rustle of plastic bags. She cut her eyes toward the skank—

Pastel cashmere pullovers! Three girls, one of them blond, two of them with light brown hair, had materialized at the skank’s end of the table and were leaning over talking to her in the dreaded cluster whispers. One wore a lemon-meringue-yellow cashmere sweater; another, a hike-in-the-heather blue cashmere sweater; the other, an ancient-madder-pink cashmere sweater. Charlotte recognized none of them, but pastel cashmere sweaters in the Reading Room at night screamed out…sorority girls! So did the little bags they held in their hands. The girls were back from what sorority boy-scouters called a “candy run.”

The hike-in-the-heather-blue blonde whisper-exclaimed to the skank, “Blood-sugar run, be-atch!”

“Ohmygod—do I see Sour Patch Kids?” whisper-exclaimed the skank.

“Fill me in on that Zurbarán shit, and there’s some strawberry gummies in it for you, too.”

Soon all three cashmeres were standing around the skank, and the whisper party had begun. In these Reading Room whisper parties, girls whispered entire conversations, they whispered chuckles, they popped consonants and sighed vowels until everyone within earshot wanted to cry out “Shut the fuck up!” Nothing could be any worse than these whispered conversations, which got under your hide like an unreachable itch. Charlotte put her hand up to her eyes like a blinker, to make sure they didn’t recognize her.

Now the skank and her friends were chewing away on Sour Patch Kids and gummies and making a sound like cows chewing their cuds and whisper-giggling over the sound they were making.

“Why don’t we smack our lips a little…Dover?” (Had someone really named a daughter Dover?) “You sound like you haven’t had a sugar fix in a month.”

“I haven’t—not Sour Patch Kids. You know how everybody says they’re junk? They are junk, but there’s junk and there’s thrilling junk.”

“Woooo—don’t look around, but isn’t that Whatisname Clements, on the lacrosse team?”

“Where?”

“You’re right!”

“I told you not to look around!”

“I had to! He’s the hottie with the body!”

Whisper-laughter, whisper-laughter.

“Maybe he’d like a Sour Patch Kid.”

“Or maybe he’s lost. I never saw a lacrosse player in the library before. Somebody better go see if he knows where he is.”

Whisper-laughter, whisper-laughter.

Charlotte was dying to lift the hand that hid her face and look around and see if she had ever seen him before. After all, she knew her way around the lacrosse players—

And all at once she was back at the formal, down in the court during the drinks, and Harrison was making a fuss over her and calling her “our Charlotte,” and Hoyt was beaming because she was such a hit with Harrison, and she had never been so happy in her life, because she felt so pretty and cute and witty and popular, and Hoyt gave her a loving look—

O Hoyt! That look was sincere! You’re not a good enough actor to have merely pretended to—to love me—

Before she knew it, the terrible flash flood had returned, her eyelids were spilling with tears, and the sting of it filled her rhinal and laryngeal cavities. She couldn’t let anyone see her crying, especially not in this huge public room, and most especially not the skank and the three cashmere pullovers who were almost certainly sorority girls—

Gulping air and trying to stem the tide, she lifted her hand—just to spread the fingers in the hand beside her face—and peeked through her fingers. All four girls, the three cashmeres and the skank, were now facing the entrance. As she looked at their faces, she saw four…raccoons…black rings around their eyes…four raccoons foraging at night, not for food, but for boys—and now one of them was looking her right in the face! In her curiosity, her hand had slipped entirely from her face—and they could see her!

Just that. She didn’t dare look again. The flood was raging. Any moment—

If she left the library now, she didn’t have a prayer of doing well on the neuroscience exam, and if she didn’t do well, an already bad situation could become a disaster. She had so much reading to do in books she could only find here—

It was only by contracting her abdominals as hard as she could that she was able to stem the wave of convulsions that were coming to take over her lungs, trachea, chin, all of her body from the solar plexus upward, in point of fact. That could not occur in this very public place…She stood up and shoved—just so, shoved—her books and papers into her backpack, pushed her chair back with a jolting noise she didn’t mean to make—it echoed throughout the great room—and quickly walked down the aisle to the door. If they had had ray guns, those four pairs of raccoon eyes could not have bored into her back more painfully; and if she had eyes and ears in the back of her head, she couldn’t have seen the sheen on those Stila-glossed lower lips more clearly, or been scalded any worse by the rising steam of their whispers.

Blind with the tears that were about to rage, Charlotte burst through the swinging doors at the entrance—jolted—padded, collided—

“Aw, man!”—a male voice on the other side—

Gingerly, Charlotte eased one of the two doors open—and found the way blocked by a boy on his hands and knees, facing away from the doors. Books—on the floor—all over the place. Two of them had landed wide open, facedown; on one the spine had torn loose from the hard backing of the covers. Others had landed this way and that. The boy looked back over his shoulder, his face the very picture of anger—