“I’m sorry. I truly am. But it will be over quickly, now that you’ve been forthright and told me everything. You won’t have to go through an investigation or any judicial process. I know how you must feel at this moment. But trust me. This will be a catharsis, for you as well as for the undergraduate program and the hopelessly, needlessly corrupted young men we refer to euphemistically—without any regard for their true situation—as student-athletes. Without your confession we might not have gotten anywhere. Under the university code, we can’t prove plagiarism without finding the specific source.”

“Please! I’m begging you, Mr. Quat! I’m begging you! Please don’t do this to me! You mustn’t do this to me! I trusted you completely! I put my whole…I put my life in your hands! I’m begging you! I’m begging you!”

“Mr. Gellin!” Mr. Quat said sharply. “All this begging is not becoming! The ultraright already enjoys portraying us as whiners, handwringers, cry-babies. They portray our concern for the oppressed as something unrealistic, irrational, maternal, softheaded, feminine. Furthermore, they honestly believe that. So for the sake of yourself and all of us—be a man.”

32. The Hair from Lenin’s Goatee

What’s wrong?” said Beverly, seeing Charlotte sitting at her desk in front of her “new” computer and staring into space. “You look like a statue. You haven’t moved for the past fifteen minutes. You haven’t even blinked. Are you all right?”

So that’s the way it works, thought Charlotte. It was precisely because she had stood up to Beverly this morning for the first time, and been abrupt and sarcastic, dismissed her as a prurient schadenfreude-driven gossip, that Beverly was now asking an idle question, one roommate to another, about nothing special. Which is to say, open contempt had jarred the Groton snob who shared her room into treating her as an equal. Charlotte took a rueful satisfaction in this discovery about human nature, but it was no more than that, rueful and beside the point.

And brief. Nothing was likely to dislodge Charlotte from the foreboding that, as of half an hour ago, had metamorphosed from the larval stage into a catastrophe, official, documented, beyond fixing.

“I’m fine,” said Charlotte without turning her head so much as an inch toward Beverly, who was at her computer in the depths of her jungle of wires, knuckle sockets, and techie toys. “I’m just thinking.”

Beverly returned to her instant-message e-mail conversation with Hillary, who was all of three feet away, on the other side of the wall, in Room 514, amid a happy music of electronic-alert pings on the screen and Beverly’s giggles. The silliness of yakking away with your next-door neighbor via the World Wide Web seemed to be what made it fun.

Charlotte scarcely noticed, so deeply imprinted in her brain was the very image of what she had seen on her screen:

B

B-

C-

D

Plain B, not B+, in French; B- in medieval history; C- in modern drama; D in neuroscience…D in neuroscience…D in neuroscience…Like many another student before her, Charlotte had thought that if she was pessimistic enough ahead of time, if she steeped herself deeply enough in foreboding, the result couldn’t possibly be as bad as she had feared. Somehow the very act of thinking about it with such despair beforehand would be a form of magic that would ward off any truly ill fate. But there her grades had been on the screen, barely half an hour ago, flat out and explanation-proof. She hadn’t printed them out. She hadn’t clicked on KEEP AS NEW. She had immediately deleted it—which helped what? Nothing. It was just another exercise in magic—not that she had the remotest hope it might work.

B, B-, C-, D…So many things had been killed in her academic collapse, Charlotte had been sitting there paralyzed for at least thirty minutes, not just the fifteen Beverly had detected. D and C-minus—in fact any grade less than B-minus was tantamount to an F at Dupont these days, except that you wouldn’t be kicked out for having failed two courses and barely scraping by in the others. As it was, she would be on academic probation for the second semester, and her parents would be apprised of that fact. Fortunately, Momma and Daddy had no computer, and it would probably take two days for the news to reach them by mail. What was she to do? Why hadn’t she mustered up the courage to tell them over Christmas? They would have been ready for what they were about to learn. So now she had to call them—within the next twenty-four hours—to be sure the notification didn’t reach them by mail first. She should make that call right now! But she would have to recite those grades to them herself, in all their stony definitiveness. Right now…but right now she was still in a state of shock, and so she would make that call…but later. And Miss Pennington…Once Momma had the bad news, maybe she could revive her plan to ask Momma not to mention them to Miss Pennington. But what if Miss Pennington happened to call Momma? The thought of asking Momma to come up with a little white lie on the subject…it was beyond even imagining. D in neuroscience—and to think it wasn’t many more than ninety days ago that she had been in Mr. Starling’s office and he had offered her the keys to the kingdom, to the very laboratory wherein the human animals’ new conception of themselves was being created a full generation before they would realize it had happened. She could hear—she seemed to actually be hearing—the change in Mr. Starling’s tone of voice that day as he began to speak to her as something more than a student, as a young colleague in this, the greatest adventure in the life of the mind since the rise of rationalism in the seventeenth century—

The telephone rang, and out of sheer reflex she answered.

“Charlotte…this is Adam”—spoken with a note of breathless agony. “Something horrible has happened. You’ve got to help me. Please come over here…please! I need you! I need you right now—”

“Adam! Hold—”

“I’m having a—Charlotte! Please! It’s all so horrible!”

“What’s happened?”

“Please, Charlotte! I haven’t got the strength—I’ll tell you everything—just come—as soon as you can! Please! Do this one thing for me, before I—” He broke off the sentence.

“You want a doctor?”

“Hah.” A sharp, dry, bitter laugh, it was. “Skip to step three—get a coroner. Step four—organize a celebration-of-his-life committee.”

“I’m calling a doctor.”

“No! There’s nothing—the only person who can help is you! How soon can you be here?”

“You’re in your apartment?”

“Yeah.” Bitterly: “My little slot, my little hole.”

“Well—I’ll leave right now. I’ll be there—however long it takes to walk over there.”

“Please hurry. I love you. I love you more than life itself.”

They hung up. Charlotte sat still in her rickety wooden straight-back chair and gave the world another vacant stare. It’s all so horrible? She had her own catastrophe to worry about. The last thing in the world she wanted to have to deal with was Adam in an “I love you more than life itself” state of mind. But how could she say no?…after everything.

She put on her puffed-up hand-grenade jacket and left without a word to Beverly, who was still busy pinging and giggling and bouncing and blinging her instant messages to a relay station two thousand miles away in Austin, Texas.

Charlotte had barely reached the landing when Adam’s door swung open. He had obviously been waiting at the very peephole. He stood in the doorway with one of his synthetic green blankets wrapped around him like a cape. His cheeks were gaunt and ashen, and his eyes were a perfect picture of fear. Before she knew what was happening, his arms shot out from beneath the blanket. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt in unfortunate shades of hallway green, Rust-Oleum brown, and book-mailer-stuffing gray. He embraced her, causing the blanket to fall to the floor. It wasn’t the embrace a boy gives a girl. It was the one Studs Lonigan gave his mother in the doorway when he came home to die, as best Charlotte could remember the book.