—which left Hillary, next door, whom she didn’t even know. She took a deep breath and approached the door of 514. She took another breath, hesitated, and then knocked. Nothing. She knocked harder. From within, a boy’s voice said, apparently to somebody else in there, “Who the fuck is that?”
Dismay—but she didn’t know what else to do. She put her mouth close to the door. Softly: “Hillary, Hillary.” Nothing. Whispery but much louder: “Hillary! Hillary!” Nothing. “It’s Charlotte! From next door! Beverly’s roommate! I need—”
“Go away!”
That was Hillary. There was no mistaking that voice. She didn’t sound like the awesome person Beverly had described, the one who would do anything for anybody, but what alternative was there? “Hillary—please, can I—”
“I said GO AWAY!”
The boy was saying, “Who the fuck is that?”
Charlotte couldn’t believe it. She was stranded out in the hall, and she had a medieval history test in the morning. Crone was a very exacting professor. She had to get some sleep, but where?
“Yo, take my johnson…Knock it on some fox’s box, my cock, sucker, I’m the fucker you forgot…” The CD rapper droned on.
She abandoned 514 and stood in front of 512. Wait a minute. Two guys lived in 512. She moved on to 510. Two girls lived in there. She didn’t even know their names. But what else was there to do? She knocked on the door. Nothing. Please, God! She knocked louder. She knocked still louder. Nothing. She turned the doorknob and pushed gently. The door wasn’t locked. She pushed it open far enough to stick her head in. A slice of light entered the room. A girl groaned and turned over. There was a girl asleep on each bed, and there was one on a futon on the floor. Charlotte recognized her. It was Joanne, Hillary’s roommate. Obviously Hillary had forced Joanne out the same way Beverly had forced her out. Charlotte was conscious of her heart rattling away in her rib cage. She was beside herself. She had a test in the morning—and no place to go, no place to sleep. She was stranded out in a hallway in her nightclothes at two-thirty a.m., all because somehow another girl’s desire to bring a boy up to the room in the middle of the night took precedence over everything else.
Where could she go to even get off her feet? The R.A., Ashley…It was two-thirty, but that was what R.A.’s existed for, wasn’t it—to help?
In the elevator on the way down, she tried to think of how she might put it, and the truth of the matter hit her. She could see Ashley’s wild hair and the thong panties lying on the floor. What a naïve little child Ashley must have thought her to be! With the straightest of faces Ashley had led her to believe that there would be no alcohol in Edgerton, because that was the regulation. Sex? No problem, since “dormcest” was looked down upon. She had sent her on her way relieved and even more clueless than when she arrived. She could see Ashley holding forth with such aplomb that first day in the Common Room on the ground floor…smiling so reassuringly at all her anxious young charges. She could see all the freshmen of Edgerton House, eager for the lowdown on life at Dupont, huddled together on the leather couches and chairs that had been shoved together in a great semicircle. Barely three weeks ago it was, and already that little show seemed so cynical. To ask Ashley about anything at this point would be a humiliation.
Well, Charlotte thought as the elevator reached the ground floor, at least there’s the Common Room. She would have someplace to lie down while she despised herself for her innocence and her weakness in giving in to Beverly’s sudden, besotted, utterly phony posture of friendship and intimacy.
In the Common Room, the couches and easy chairs were back at their appointed posts beneath the glum light of three big medieval-type wooden chandeliers, along with an array of dark wooden tables and straight-backed chairs.
Charlotte scanned the room. In the middle, amid this sea of furniture, a pair of enormous old couches upholstered in chestnut-brown leather were backed up, one on this side, one on the other, against a long, heavy old dark wooden library table, lit by a pair of tall but dim old Arts and Crafts lamps. In this gloomy, elephantine cluster of furniture sat the only three souls Charlotte could spy. At the far end of one couch sat a girl with her chunky legs crossed, reading a paperback book. On the other couch, a slender girl, her back to Charlotte, sat on the edge of a seat cushion, leaning forward, talking in a low voice to a slender boy who was leaning toward her from the edge of the armchair. Both wore T-shirts and blue jeans.
The girl reading the book—what on earth was she wearing? Apparently nothing but a floppy T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxer shorts, the kind boys wore. Not only that, the fly was popped open from the way her legs were crossed. Charlotte couldn’t imagine a girl just sitting like that in a public place, not even at two-thirty in the morning. It was bad enough having to be here in pajamas and a bathrobe.
She decided to sit far from all three, somewhere deep in the Middle Gothic recesses of the Common Room. She started walking that way—but her body wouldn’t obey. It was as if something independent of rational motor control was taking command. The new commander had had enough of isolation, enough scouring loneliness, and refused to venture beyond the settlement before her, with its plush leather, its ancient hand-carved wood, the snug light of its olden lamps, and its human beings.
But not even the commander could make her actually approach a human and strike up a conversation, and so she sat in a chair at the other end of the couch from the chunky girl with the open fly. True, this put her opposite the couple in the blue jeans, but there was the depth of both huge couches plus the width of the table plus the fact that both were leaning forward from the edges of their seats seemingly engrossed in each other…to make her feel properly distanced from them.
The chunky girl with the open fly glanced up at her from the depths of the couch as Charlotte sat down in the chair, but she immediately returned to her book. Her book…reading her book—Charlotte felt an overwhelming need to not appear to be some hopeless refugee adrift in the dead of the night, not even to these three young strangers. Now it was essential to be busy at something, which is to say, anything.
She looked about…At the end of the table, near her, was a magazine. Blushing—actually feeling the rush of blood to her face—for fear one of them would notice that she was so desperate as to start reading anything she could lay hands on, she got up, put one knee on the seat of the couch, reached way over and picked up the magazine, and hurried back to her chair.
Only then did she notice the title: Cosmopolitan. Charlotte had heard of the magazine, and had the impression it had been around a long time, but she had never read it. It wasn’t in the Alleghany High library, and she had certainly never bought it. The price on the cover was $3.99, and that wasn’t for a year’s subscription. That was for this one issue. She had never seen any slick magazine in their house at home. Who was going to go out and pay four dollars for a magazine? On the cover a blond girl with big eyes was smiling at her in a friendly way. There were headlines all over the cover. The biggest one said, “99 SEXY WAYS TO TOUCH HIM. These Fresh, Frisky Tips Will Thrill Every Inch of Your Guy (Our Favorite Requires a Glazed Doughnut).” Couldn’t possibly mean what it suggested. She riffled through the magazine, which was very thick, until she found it…“You want to be his best ever. And that’s a goal we can definitely get behind. So get ready to step up and assume your rightful title of sex deity. After consulting some eager experts (gorgeous guys with loose lips and tons of sex-rated secrets to spill), we have 99 of the most erotic and ingenious ways for a girl to tantalize, tease, and thrill every inch of him.” The first one said, “Help me button my shirt or adjust my tie in the mirror. When you dress me, I just want to get undressed again.” The second one said, “Tugging on my earlobe just a bit with your teeth makes me lose all sense of the English language”…Sort of naughty overtones, Charlotte reckoned, but otherwise—then she hit “When we’re having sex and you’re on top, cup my balls and tug on them lightly. It’s an unexpected, awesome feeling.” And “Put the condom on me. It’s such a turn-on to see you prep me that way” and “Swirl your tongue around the tip of my penis, and then, without warning, take all of me in your mouth” and “Take your panties off, throw them in the freezer, then caress my bod with them. Don’t laugh. It’s actually awesome” and “My girlfriend gets a glazed doughnut and sticks my penis through the hole. She nibbles around it, stopping to suck me once in a while. The sugar beads from her mouth tingle on my tip”—