Charlotte closed the magazine and studied the cover again. Was this some sort of pornographic parody of Cosmopolitan? She opened it to the contents pages…a list a mile long of directors, managers, assistant managers, associate publishers, and then: “Published by Hearst Communications, Inc., President and Chief Executive Officer: Victor F. Ganzi.” It was all quite unbelievable. She put the magazine in her lap and looked straight ahead at nothing. The chunky girl glanced up at her but, as before, immediately returned to her book.

Charlotte’s face was blazing red. Suppose somebody—anybody—even one of these three strangers—saw her reading this…blatant pornography! It would be mortifying—terminally!

As nonchalantly as she could, which is to say, with her hands shaking only a little, she got up, knelt on the couch again, reached over, and put the magazine back on the table, then turned it over so that the cover would be face-down. Oh my God! She didn’t try to get back to her chair. Instead, she sank as deeply as she could into the couch, there being no available crack in the earth into which she could disappear.

She kept very still. Her heart was drumming away. Now she was directly across the table from the couple, the boy and girl in blue jeans. She had no interest in eavesdropping, but all at once the boy’s voice rose just enough for her to overhear.

“What? I don’t get it. You want me…to do…that for you?”

The girl’s whisper reached an audible level, too. “Please, Stuart…don’t you see? I’m a freshman. I don’t know any of these guys—and for you it wouldn’t be such a big thing. You’re a senior. And I trust you.”

“Yeah, but what’s in it for me?” said the boy.

“Don’t you think I’m attractive?”

“You’re gorgeous, in case you don’t already know it, which I’m sure you do, but what’s that got to do with it?”

“I’d think it would have a little…something to do with it.”

“No it wouldn’t. You’d just be using me.”

“Well, I’ll bet there’ve been plenty of times—”

“Brittany! I’ve known you since you were nine and I was thirteen. I always felt like your uncle. My God, it would be like incest or something.”

“I’ll bet you’ve—”

“I’m not sure I could even…you know, do it.”

“Unnhh. Then what am I gonna do?”

At that point their voices fell again, and Charlotte could no longer hear what they were saying, other than that the girl, Brittany, was using a lot of unnhs and ohhhhs and other sighs.

Charlotte’s chin sank down to her collarbone as what she had just heard began to register.

“Sexiled?”

Charlotte’s head jerked about. It was the girl in the boxer shorts at the other end of the couch. She was looking straight at Charlotte and smiling in a perfectly friendly manner. Charlotte must have looked dumbstruck, because the girl said it again.

“Sexiled?”

By now Charlotte had taken the term apart and put it back together again, and she said, “Yeah…I guess I am.”

“Me, too.”

“You are? That’s what it’s called, sexiled?”

“Unh hunh.” The girl shrugged, as if resigned to her fate. “This is the third time in two weeks. What about you?”

Charlotte was appalled to realize that any such abomination was so common, it had a name. “It never happened to me before. I just can’t—my roommate promised she’d never do it again.”

“Hah hah,” said the girl. She seemed rather jolly about it. “That’s what mine said. I can tell you, all she means is, she won’t do it again tonight. Maybe. If you’re lucky.”

Charlotte pursed her lips grimly. The whole thing was overwhelming. “Well—I’m not gonna put up with it.”

Dismissively: “Ahhhch…It’s like totally—it’s the way it works. You’ve just done her a favor, so she can’t very well say no when it’s your turn. Who’s your roommate?”

“Her name’s Beverly.” She said it in a distracted fashion. What was on her mind was, Good Lord! When it’s my turn?

“Mmmm, don’t know her. You have a boyfriend yet?”

Stunned. “No.”

“Me, neither. Oh, well. Guys come up to me, and I think they’re interested, and then they ask me to introduce them to some girlfriend of mine, or whatever.” She smiled and lifted her eyebrows in a self-deprecatory fashion.

The girl had a pretty face, in a rubicund country girl sort of way—Charlotte had seen that face plenty of times around Sparta—but she was buttery, stubby, and chubby. The chances of her ever achieving the twenty-first-century female ideal of a lean, hard, slim-hipped, well-defined body were remote, if not nil. She just wasn’t made for it. Yet here she was, sitting in her boxer shorts in a public lounge in the middle of the night, looking forward to boyfriends and having her turn at sexiling her roommate. A nice, cheery normal-looking girl—who assumed all this was the natural order of things!

“I’m Bettina,” said the girl.

“Charlotte.”

They were members of the first generation to go through life with no last names.

The girl looked at Charlotte with a slightly amused expression and said, “Where are you from?”

“Sparta, North Carolina.”

“Don’t know Sparta. I thought I detected a little bit of the South, though. Where’d you go to school?”

Charlotte stiffened. She had regarded herself as the cosmopolitan of the Alleghany High student body, and she fancied her speech was nearly accent-free. But all she said was, “In Sparta, at Alleghany High School.” Then, to shift the subject away from Sparta, Alleghany High, and Southern accents, “What about you?”

“I’m from Cincinnati. I went to Seven Hills School,” said Bettina. “You always wear pajamas?”

The very same once-over Beverly’s snobbish friend had given her! And the boys and girls in the hallway! What was wrong with pajamas, for God’s sake? They were certainly better than a pair of plaid boxer shorts with an open fly! But before she could work up a good head of resentment—

—a shriek. A girl came running from the entry hall into the Common Room. She shrieked again. She was slim and blond and wore shorts that showed off her perfect legs, and the shrieks were ones that any girl on earth could have interpreted. They were the cries of the female of the species feigning physical fright at the antics, probably physical, of the male. Sure enough, running in after her came a tall, lean boy with short brown hair and little bangs. Moving like an athlete, he cornered her against the back of a couch and threw his arms around her as if to drag her back into the hall. As she squirmed, she cried, “No! No! Put me down, Chris! You can’t make me! I’m not going to!”

The boy said, “You have to! That was the deal, dude!”

He dragged her out of the room. It was almost…choreographic, this gorgeous, lissome girl and this gorgeous, tall, lean, athletic boy and their charade of a struggle. The two departed Edgerton House in melodious combat.

Charlotte and Bettina sat there without saying a word, but Charlotte knew they were both thinking the same thing. The perfect her intertwined with the perfect him—while they sat marooned in this lugubrious desert of dried-out leather upholstery, the two sexiles.

Part of Charlotte wanted to get out of the place immediately, even if it meant walking around aimlessly until dawn. She refused to be lumped with this…well…homely girl.

Then she faced up to it: leaving was the last thing in the world she was about to do. She could live with the business about the accent. She could forgive the implied insult regarding pajamas. She could roll with those punches and a dozen more like them. She was dislodged, rooted out of her own bed, thrown out of her own room, discarded, adrift, helpless, deracinated practically, but at least she was not alone. At least, for however brief an interval, she had a sunny, friendly face to look into. She was eye to eye with a human being whose fate she shared—and never mind how demeaning or miserable the fate—someone she could talk to…even open up to, assuming she could find the courage—