While Mr. Dean talked on about Dupont and national championships, in the peculiarly male compulsion to display knowledge, Charlotte cut another quick glance at her mother. Momma’s face had strong, regular features, and she should have been beautiful, but her expression had narrowed and hardened within the tight limits represented by this tiny little place out on County Road 1709. Moreover, she was intelligent and shrewd enough to know most of that. She had found two means of release from her bind. One was her fervent religious faith; the other was her daughter, whose phenomenal intelligence she had recognized by the time Charlotte was two. Throughout her elementary and junior high school days, she and Momma were about as close as a mother and daughter could get. Charlotte kept nothing from her, nothing. Her mother led her by the hand through every crisis of growing up. But Charlotte reached puberty shortly after entering Alleghany High, and a curtain closed between them. Perhaps in any age, but certainly in an age like this, there was nothing more critical in a girl’s life than her sexuality and the complicated question of what boys expected from it. From the very first time she brought it up to the very last, her mother’s religious convictions, her absolute moral certainty, ended discussions as soon as they began. In Elizabeth Simmons’s judgment, there were no dilemmas and ambiguities in this area, and she had no patience for sentences that began But, Momma, these days or But, Momma, everybody else. Charlotte could talk to Momma about menstruation, hygiene, deodorants, breasts, bras, and shaving her legs or armpits, but that was the limit. When it came to matters such as whether or not she should hook up in even a minimal way with a Channing or a Brian and whether or not girls who kept it until they got married were becoming rare, Momma closed any such line of inquiry as soon as Charlotte tried to open it up, no matter how indirectly, since there was nothing to discuss. Momma’s will was stronger than hers, and she wasn’t about to experiment in this area in willful repudiation of Momma’s dictates. Instead, she worked it out in her mind that she was going her own way and wasn’t about to sink to the level of Channing Reeves and Regina Cox; and if they called her uncool, then she was going to wear Uncool as a badge of honor and be as different from them morally as she was in intelligence. The terrible moment had come, however, when even someone as nice as Brian gave up on her.
The less Charlotte talked to Momma, the more she talked to Miss Pennington, and Momma was aware of that, too, which gave Charlotte something else to feel guilty about. She talked to Miss Pennington about schoolwork, writing, and literature, and Miss Pennington assigned her books to read, including books in history, philosophy, and French, that she would never encounter in the regular curriculum at Alleghany High. Miss Pennington persuaded the biology teacher, Mrs. Buttrick, and the mathematics teacher, Mr. Laurans, to recommend advanced textbooks in their fields and to go over her answers to the questions and solutions to the problems that appeared at the end of each section. But most of all, Miss Pennington talked to her about her future and why she should aim for Harvard, Dupont, Yale, or Princeton—and for the limitless triumphs that waited beyond such universities. But Miss Pennington was a spinster and, despite her unlovely appearance, a dignified woman with perfect manners, and her interests were in things higher than the question of how far a girl should or shouldn’t go with Brian Crouse if they happened to be alone in a car or someplace after dark. The only person Charlotte could talk to about all that was Laurie, and Laurie was as confused and innocent as she was.
She was still gazing at Miss Pennington when she heard, or thought she heard—above the general burble of voices and Mr. Dean’s discourse on Dupont’s current basketball stars—the throaty revving roars of a car somewhere out front of the house, the kind of car that boys used for drag racing. Then the noise stopped, and she once again set about keeping track of what Mr. Dean was saying, in case she had to respond.
It wasn’t long, however, before she heard a boy’s loud mocking voice. “Hey, Charlotte, you never told me you were having a party!”
Coming around the side of the house, by the septic tank, were four boys, Channing Reeves, Matt Woodson, and two of their buddies, Randall Hoggart and Dave Cosgrove, both of them great big football players. A couple of hours ago all four had been wearing the kelly-green robes and mortarboards, but now Channing and Matt had on T-shirts, ripped jeans, sneakers, and baseball caps on backward, and Randall Hoggart and Dave Cosgrove wore shorts, flip-flops, and “beaters,” which were white strap-style undershirts—an ensemble calculated to display their huge calves, arms, and chests to maximum effect. Channing, Matt, and Randall had big lumps of chewing tobacco in their cheeks and were expertly spurting great brown streams of tobacco juice on the ground as they came swaggering toward Charlotte.
“Yeah, Charlotte, but we know you’d a invited us if you’d a thought of it!” said Matt Woodson in the same sort of loud, arch voice as Channing’s, whereupon he looked to Channing for approval.
All four of them began flicking glances at one another and laughing in tribute to their mutual fearlessness and the finesse of their sarcasm. Dave Cosgrove had a twenty-ounce “tall boy” can of beer in his hand, but the voices, the smirks, the laughs, and the swaggers were quite enough to make it obvious that they had been drinking ever since commencement and perhaps before.
Charlotte was stunned, and in the next instant—before she could possibly explain to herself why—she was humiliated and shamed. The party grew silent. You could hear the sound of a hot dog sizzling on the grill. And then she felt fear. Smirking, the drunken band of intruders headed straight toward her with huge strides, as if oblivious to the adults and any respect that might conceivably be due them. She felt rooted, as in a dream, to the spot where she stood. In the next moment, Channing was right in front of her. She was frightened by the insolent way the flesh of his forehead showed through the sizing gap in the back of the baseball cap even more than by the noxious lump in his cheek.
Leering, he said, “I just come for a little graduation hug.” With that, he reached out and tried to take hold of her upper arm. She jerked it away, he reached out to try again, and she screamed, “STOP IT, CHANNING!”
Suddenly a huge arm was between Charlotte and the boy. Sheriff Pike—and now the entire mass of his body separated them.
“Boys,” said the Sheriff, “you’re gonna turn right around and go home. You don’t git two chances, you git one.”
Channing was clearly startled to see the sheriff, whose arms were so big they stretched the sleeves of his polo shirt. He hesitated and then evidently decided he dare not lose face in front of his comrades.
“Aw, come on, Sheriff,” he said, mustering a big grin, “we been working hard for four years to graduate. You know that! What’s wrong with a little celebrating and coming by to see Charlotte? She was our valedictorian, Sheriff!”
“You’re drunk, is what’s wrong,” said the Sheriff. “You’re either going home right now or you’re going in right now. What’s it gonna be?”
Still looking at Channing, Sheriff Pike reached over and took hold of the can of beer in Dave Cosgrove’s hand. Dave took such a deep breath he seemed to swell up. He stared at the Sheriff, then stared at someone behind the Sheriff, and surrendered the big can without a peep. It was only then that Charlotte realized that three men had come up beside her, just a step back from Sheriff Pike—Daddy, big Otha Hutt, and Cousin Doogie. Daddy still had the big long fork from the grill in his hand. Doogie was about half the size of Sheriff Pike, and Randy and Dave, for that matter, but the way he narrowed his eyes and curled his lips back in a hideous smile, revealing the big gap in his front teeth, made the teeth that remained look like fangs. Everybody in the county knew how much Doogie Wade loved to go brawling. Slugging, kicking, biting, elbows to the Adam’s apple, or plain-long old-fashioned Saturday-night rock fights, it was all the same to Doogie Wade.