If only she could call Miss Pennington…or Momma…Hello, Miss Pennington? Momma? You know Dupont, on the other side of the mountains? The Garden of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, where great things are to be done? Well, Miss Pennington, Momma, I plumb forgot to ask: did anybody ever tell you about being sexiled? About being marooned in a public lounge in the middle of the night so that your roommate, so-called, can rut like a pig with some guy she just picked up?

It seemed terribly important to keep the conversation with Bettina going. She ransacked her brain and finally came up with “Who were they?”—nodding toward the corner where the perfect guy had swooped up the perfect girl.

“I don’t know who he is,” said Bettina, “but she’s a freshman. I saw her the other two times I was sexiled, too. She’s always up late and got some guy chasing her. She’s hot, I guess, but she’s terribly, you know, all Oooo Oooo Oooo Oooo Oo.” Bettina cocked her head and opened her eyes wide and fluttered them in the baby coquette fashion. “If she wanted to swap legs, I wouldn’t say no, though.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Charlotte. But she said it in a dull, flat manner, because she was merely being agreeable. Deep down inside she wanted to say, “Then wait’ll you see mine. I used to run cross-country in the mountains.”

That revived her a bit. So gutted, disemboweled, scoured out had she been, by loneliness, she had all but forgotten the Force: I am Charlotte Simmons.

Lost Province Entr’Acte

“Dear Momma and Daddy,

“I’ll admit my eyes blurred with mist when I saw you drive off in the old pickup.”

The old pickup?…my eyes blurred with mist?…She sighed, she groaned, deflated. What on earth did she think she was writing? She lifted her ballpoint from the top sheet of a pad of lined schoolroom paper and slumped back, or as far back as you could slump in an exhausted wooden chair with no arms. She looked out the window at the library tower. It was lit up ever so majestically in the dark. She saw it, and she didn’t see it. Beverly’s cast-off clothes mashed on the floor, Beverly’s web of extension cords plugged into surge-protector strips and knuckle sockets in midair, her rat’s nest of a percale-sloshed unmade bed, her littered CD cases, uncapped skin-care tubes, and spilled contact lens packets, her techie alphabet toys, the PC, the TV, the CD, DVD, DSL, VCR, MP4, all of them currently dormant in the absence of their owner, each asleep rattlesnake-style with a single tiny diode-green eye open—her roommate’s slothful and indulgent habits were all over the place…Charlotte was sort of aware of it and sort of wasn’t really.

She rocked forward with another trill of low-grade guilt to confront her letter home…the old pickup. Daddy is totally dependent on that poor, miserable old truck, and I’m treating it like it’s something quaint. Eyes blurred with mist…Yuk! She could just imagine Momma and Daddy reading that. The “pretty writing”…

She riiiiiiippped the sheet off the pad—then saved it. She could use it for scratch paper. She hunched over the desk and started again:

“Dear Momma and Daddy,

“I hope I didn’t seem too sad when you left that day. Watching you all drive off made me realize”—she starts to write, what a long journey I have set out upon, but the pretty-writing alarm sounds again, and she damps it down to “how much I was going to miss you. But since then I have been so busy studying, meeting new people, and”—she grandly thinks of figuring out Dupont’s tribal idiosyncrasies, already knowing she’s going to settle for “getting used to new ways of doing things, I haven’t had time to be homesick, although I guess I am.

“The classes haven’t been as hard as I was afraid they would be. In fact, my French professor told me I was ‘overqualified’ for his class! Since he had a peculiar way of teaching French literature, in my opinion, I wasn’t unhappy about switching to one a little more advanced. I have a feeling that it is harder to get into a university like this than it is to stay in it. I suppose I shouldn’t even think like that, however”—she starts to write lest I have a rude awakening—and how is lest supposed to sound in Alleghany County?—then downscales it to “because it might be bad luck.”

“The library here is really wonderful. You remember it, I’m sure, the tower, the tallest building on campus? It has nine million books, on every subject you can imagine, sometimes so many you hardly know where to start. It is really busy, too. There are as many students using the library at midnight as there are in the middle of the day. The other night I went there”—changes it to “I had to go there”—“kind of late, to use a computer, and there was only one computer not in use in a cluster of about 25 of them. I made a new acquaintance when we”—starts to write got into an argument, instead writes—“couldn’t figure out which of us was next in line.” So much for that—no name, no gender.

“My best friend so far is a girl from Cincinnati, Ohio, named Bettina, who lives on my floor. We met one night when each of us was having a hard time sleeping and decided to go down to the Common Room on the first floor and read for a while. Bettina is a very cheery and energetic person and not shy at all. If she wants to meet somebody, she just pipes right up and says hello.

“Generally I sleep very well. The only problem is that Beverly goes to bed really late”—starts to write 3, 4, even 5 a.m., instead writes—“2 a.m. sometimes, and it wakes me up when she comes in.”

She slumped back in the chair once more and stared out the window a few light-years into the darkness. This, she figured, was it. Right here was the point where she either cried out or she didn’t cry out. Momma, only you can help me! Who else do I have! Listen to me! Let me tell you the truth! Beverly doesn’t just return in the dead of the night and “go to bed really late”! She brings boys into bed—and they rut-rut-rut do it—barely four feet from my bed! She leads a wanton sex life! The whole place does! Girls sexile each other! Rich girls with fifteen hundred SATs cry out, “I need some ass!” “I’m gonna go out and get laid!” The girls, Momma, the girls, Dupont girls, right in front of you! Momma—what am I to do…

But she stiffened and swallowed it all. Just one little mention of…sex…and Momma the Wrath of God would head east in the pickup, and haul her back to Sparta, and the whole county would hum like a hive: “Charlotte Simmons has dropped out of Dupont. Poor thing thinks it’s immoral there.”

So she writes, “By the same token, when I get up in the morning at my usual time, it wakes Beverly up. We are getting used to each other, however, even though we don’t have many opportunities to spend time together. There seem to be a lot of her prep school friends here, and she also spends a lot of time with”—starts to write her boyfriend(s), instead crosses out the also and writes—“a lot of time with them. I’m not sure she has ever heard a Southern accent before.” She strikes out the previous sentence. Despite what a couple of people have said, she essentially has no regional accent. “Beverly and I get along fine, however.

“You wouldn’t believe how important sports are here! The big football and basketball stars are celebrities. Everybody on campus knows them by sight. There were four basketball players in the French course I started out in, and they were so tall they made everybody else feel like a midget. I met one of them. He was very friendly and complimented me on my performance in the class. The athletes like to pretend they don’t care about academic work, but I think this one really is interested, even though he acts as if he isn’t.” Dying to write He immediately invited me to grab some lunch, which is the prelude to grab some ass—but doesn’t take even one step down that road.