Facing the assembly was a young woman in jeans and a man’s-style button-down shirt. Charlotte was fascinated by her. She stood there in front of two hundred strangers with such an easy confidence. She was beautiful but casual, with an athletic figure—and such amazing blond hair! It was very curly but very long, wild, yet combed just so. She seemed the very essence of collegiate glamour. She identified herself as a senior and the R.A., the resident assistant, of Edgerton House. She was there to help them with any problems that came up. They should feel free to ring her up, e-mail her, or knock on her door at any time. Her name was Ashley Downes.

“The university no longer plays the role of parent,” she was saying, “and certainly I don’t. You’re on your own. But there are some rules—not a lot, but some, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I wasn’t frank about that. First of all, alcohol is prohibited in Edgerton and every other house on Little Yard. That doesn’t just mean no drinking in public, but no alcohol in the building, period. It may not surprise you to learn that there is alcohol on the Dupont campus.” She smiled, and many of the freshmen laughed knowingly. “But it’s not gonna be here. Okay?” She smiled again. “In case you’re worried, you’re gonna discover this won’t put an end to your social life.”

Charlotte came close to letting her breath out audibly. What a relief! In Sparta she had been able to avoid the sodden, drunken milieu of the Channing Reeveses and the Regina Coxes simply by going home in the evenings and studying and ignoring the upside-down contempt she felt from them and their crowd. But here? It was well known that there was a lot of drinking in colleges, probably even at Dupont. At least she wouldn’t have to deal with it in this building where she lived, thank God. If the R.A. could just reassure her about one other thing—

But in no time, it seemed, the meeting was over, and the freshmen departed the Common Room far more animated and vocal than when they arrived. They were already getting to know one another. Charlotte started to hang back, in hopes of having a word with Ashley Downes privately. But eight or ten freshmen were clustered about her, and Charlotte didn’t want to ask her question in front of other people. She dawdled…and dawdled…for five minutes, ten minutes, before she finally gave up.

When she returned to the room, Beverly was there, standing in front of her bureau looking into a prop-up vanity mirror with tiny bulbs ablaze along the edges. She turned around. She was wearing black pants and a lavender silk shirt, sleeveless and open three or four buttonholes’ worth in front. It showed off her suntan—but also her arms, which looked almost emaciated. She made Charlotte think of an all-dressed-up stork. Her makeup did nothing for her nose and chin. They seemed even bigger somehow. She had put a peach-colored polish on her nails; it looked great on the tips of her perfectly tanned fingers.

“I’m meeting some friends at a restaurant,” she explained, “and I’m late. I’ll put away all that stuff when I come back.” She gestured toward a mountain of bags and boxes piled this way and that.

Charlotte was astonished. The very first day wasn’t even over, and Beverly was going out to a restaurant. Charlotte couldn’t imagine such a thing. For a start, she didn’t know a soul. And what if she did? She had a grand total of five hundred dollars to cover all outside expenses to the end of the first semester, four and a half months from now. She was going to have to eat every meal, seven days a week, in the university dining hall. That was provided for by her scholarship. Unless somebody took her to one, the Sizzlin’ Skillet was the last restaurant she was going to eat in for a long time.

Beverly left. Charlotte sat on the edge of her bed, hunched over, hands clasped, thinking and thinking, glancing at Beverly’s edifice of cartons, looking out the window at the dusk. She could hear people talking and occasionally laughing in the hall outside. Finally she worked up her nerve. Ashley, the R.A., had said they could knock on her door anytime. This would be pushing it perhaps, approaching her barely an hour after the meeting, but…She stood up. Now was the time to do it, if she was going to do it at all.

The R.A.’s room was on the second floor. As Charlotte walked down the hall, she was startled to see a boy in cargo shorts, no shirt, emerge from a doorway and come dashing toward her. He was holding a small spiral notebook in one hand and glancing back over his shoulder and laughing in breathless bursts. As he hurtled past Charlotte, he said, “Sorry!”—scarcely even looking at her. Now running toward Charlotte was a girl in a T-shirt and shorts, yelling, “Gimme that back, you little shit!” She wasn’t laughing. Charlotte noticed that she was barefoot. She didn’t say a thing as she ran by.

Charlotte hesitated in front of the R.A.’s door. Then she knocked. After a few seconds the door opened, and there was Ashley Downes, with her amazing mane of curly blond hair. She had changed into pants and a rather low-cut tank top. “Hi,” she said in a puzzled fashion.

“Hi,” said Charlotte. “I’m really sorry, Miz Downes—”

“Oh, come on, please. Ashley.”

“I’m really sorry. I was just at the meeting, and I tried to get to talk to you afterward, but there were so many people.” Blushing and lowering her chin: “You said come by anytime, but I know you didn’t think this soon. I’m really sorry.”

“Well—come on in,” said the R.A. She smiled at Charlotte the way you might smile at a lost child. “What’s your name?”

Charlotte told her and, once inside the room, stood there and began expounding, in an embarrassed way, upon how valuable the meeting had been and how much she thought she had gotten out of it, all the while noticing that this was a single room and a surprisingly messy one…bed unmade, clothes strewn on the floor, including a pair of dirty thong underpants. “But there was one thing…” Now that she had come to the point, she didn’t know how to put it.

“Why don’t you sit down,” said the R.A. So Charlotte sat in a plain wooden chair, and Ashley Downes sat on the edge of her messy bed.

Charlotte struggled some more with her phrasing, finally saying, “But you didn’t really talk about the coed dorm part. I mean you did, you certainly did talk about it, but there’s one thing…” Words failed her again.

The R.A. now looked at her as if she were about six. She leaned forward and said quietly, “You mean…sex?”

Charlotte could feel herself nodding like a six-year-old. “Yes.”

Ashley Downes leaned forward still further, resting her forearms on her knees and intertwining her fingers. “Where are you from?”

“Sparta, North Carolina.”

“Sparta, North Carolina. How big is Sparta?”

“About nine hundred people,” said Charlotte. “It’s up in the mountains.” Just why she had added this bit of geographical intelligence, she couldn’t have explained, not even to herself.

Ashley Downes averted her eyes and thought for a moment, then said, “Let me put your mind at ease. Yes, this is a coed dorm, and yes, there is sexual activity in coed dorms here at Dupont. What floor are you on?”

“Five.”

“Okay. This is a coed dorm, but that doesn’t mean boys are going to be running back and forth across the hall and jumping into bed with girls. Or for that matter, boys from any other part of Edgerton. In fact, if anything, it means they won’t. There’s no actual rule against it, but it’s looked down upon. It’s considered pathetic and dorky to be reduced to hooking up with someone from your own house. It’s called dormcest.”

“Dormcest?”

“Dormcest. You know, like incest. As a matter of fact, Edgerton always has a T-shirt for everybody at the end of the year listing all sorts of funny or stupid things that have happened in the house. Last year’s had a line that said DORMCEST: THREE. That’s three cases out of two hundred students. That’s how dorky it is.”